The US President Barack Obama is to visit Cuba in a week, he promised
dissidents he would directly discuss human rights issues with their
president, Raul Castro. AFP reports that:
Obama told the Ladies in White, a group of wives
and children of political prisoners, that he understood their struggle, in the
letter dated March 10 but published online by the dissident organization three
days later.
“I fully understand the obstacles that ordinary
Cubans face in exercising their rights,” Obama wrote in English. “The United
States believes that no one in Cuba or anywhere else should face harassment,
arrest, or physical assault just because they are exercising a universal right
to have their voices heard.”
“As I have in the past, I will raise these issues
directly with President Castro,” Obama stressed. The White House confirmed to AFP that the letter
was authentic.
When Obama sets foot in Havana on March 20, the
White House imagines a “Berlin Wall moment” — a singular legacy-gilding event
like Ronald Reagan’s 1987 address before the Brandenburg Gate.
While Reagan sought to end the Cold War division of
Europe, Obama hopes to symbolically “tear down” decades of Cold War antagonism
across the narrow Florida Straits.
Obama will visit the island March 20 to 22 — the
first visit by a US president since Calvin Coolidge in 1928, and a symbolically
charged capstone to the rapprochement that he and Castro announced in December
2014.
Obama’s Republican foes accuse him of betraying the
cause of human rights in Cuba by engaging with the Castro regime, the Americas’
only one-party Communist state.
In a bid to fend off such criticism, the White
House has announced Obama will meet with anti-regime dissidents in Havana,
although it has not given any details beyond insisting that the Cuban
government will not be allowed to hand-pick them.
-AFP
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