Mauricio Claver-Carone — Executive Director of Cuba Democracy Advocates — told Richard Liu that normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba will “be a very big problem” for the Obama administration on Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Rundown” on MSNBC.
Claver-Carone, ahead of the president’s scheduled announcement on the issue, stated that Obama should be very wary of the message sent by dealing with a totalitarian government that still holds an iron grip over any and all forms of political dissidence:
First and foremost, from a policy perspective, I’m extraordinarily concerned that we are now normalizing diplomatic relations with the only — THE ONLY — government in the Western Hemisphere that was not elected by its citizens, by its people…
But the bigger issue here, that Congress obviously needs to look at and scrutinize, is the concessions that the Castro Regime wanted for these established diplomatic relations… If the Obama administration and the State Department were to acquiesce to those demands, which would be against the Vienna Convention and unprecedented in the Western Hemisphere, then it would be a very big problem. So I think close scrutiny is merited here by Congress…
Over the past six months, we’ve seen repression and political arrests skyrocket on the island, which is extraordinarily concerning. Talking for the sake of talking only serves as a distraction for these types of regimes.