LiveWire

Kudos to Juan Williams, who too often defends Obama’s policies, for speaking the truth about the Cuba visit.

Via The Hill:

Let me open a personal wound.

When I was four years old, my mother took me, my brother and sister out of Panama. My parents wanted to escape poverty and open the doors to education and opportunity for their children.

Those doors shut in Panama thanks to a Castro-like populist dictator named Arnulfo Arias. He jailed, tortured and oppressed anyone who did not obey his regime.

He discriminated against dark-skinned people, blacks, Asians and native people – many of whom, like my grandfather, died building the Panama Canal. The repression extended to confiscating property and even trying to take away Panamanian citizenship from people like my father, who had come from Jamaica.

America’s left-wing academics and Hollywood celebrities have long romanticized Latin American strongmen as righteous revolutionaries, opposed to mid-20th century American military and business dominance of the region.

But to people living in those nations, the reality is that the revolutionaries became cruel, oppressive dictators in the case of Arias, the late Venezuela President Hugo Chavez and most of all, Fidel Castro.

Given my scars, President Obama’s trip to Cuba later this month leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

To me, it is painful to see the president of a nation based on individual liberty and protection of rights under law have to keep silent about the thousands of people who have suffered oppression at the hands of the Castro regime….

Related:

NY Post: Critics blast Obama’s trip to Cuba amid human-rights abuses

Free Beacon: White House silent on whether Obama will seek answers from Castro on Cuban torturers in Vietnam

****************************************************