OPINION:
The Obama administration has a dubious record of negotiating with America’s adversaries. The United States invariably draws the short end of the stick, typically giving far more than it gets in return for generous concessions.
There was the famous “reset” of relations with Russia, the failure to reach a status of forces agreement with Iraq before the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the deal securing the release from captivity of suspected Army deserter Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan in exchange for freeing five top Taliban militants, and the nuclear weapons talks with Iran, which have thrown a lifeline to the oppressive Islamic theocracy in the form of greatly relaxed economic sanctions.
President Obama’s normalization of relations with communist Cuba shapes up as no better than previous sucker deals with assorted adversaries. The president is the dream customer of used-car salesmen everywhere.
Cuban President Raul Castro couldn’t resist gloating in a speech to the Cuban National Assembly. From his point of view, why not? “We must not expect that in order for relations with the United States to improve [that] Cuba will abandon the ideas that it has struggled for,” he said. The island will remain a prison, and anyone who tries to leave will do so at his own peril.
Only the most naive could have expected anything else, but one small gesture of good faith Havana could make is to extradite to New Jersey the fugitive cop-killer Assata Shakur. A onetime member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, with a long rap sheet of violent incidents, she was arrested and convicted for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973.
While serving a life sentence, the onetime JoAnne Chesimard escaped from prison in 1979 and eventually fled to Cuba. Fidel Castro, perhaps to give the United States a poke in the eye with a dirty stick, granted her political asylum in 1984.
Last year, the FBI placed her on its most-wanted terrorist list. The FBI and the New Jersey State Police are jointly offering a $2 million reward for information leading to her capture. Now 67, she has lived in the open and her name is even listed in the telephone book. She’s a bit of a celebrity in Havana.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey asked President Obama to demand her repatriation “before any further consideration of restoration of diplomatic relations with the Cuban government.” The governor rightly calls Cuba’s granting of asylum to her “an affront to every resident of our state, our country, and in particular, to the men and women of the New Jersey State Police, who have tried to bring this killer back to justice.”
Signals from Havana have not been encouraging. Josefina Vidal, in charge of Cuba’s North American affairs, said last week that “every nation has sovereign and legitimate rights to grant political asylum to people it considers to have been persecuted. That’s a legitimate right.” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, answered with the bland and meaningless “reassurance” that the White House would “continue to press for justice for the victims of their crimes.”
If the Obama administration won’t insist on repatriation as a bare-minimum prerequisite from Havana for an American bailout of the Cuban economy, the Republicans of the 114th Congress should withhold the funding required for normalization of diplomatic relations, and the Senate should decline to confirm Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Cuba, whoever he or she turns out to be. Werner Foerster deserves no less.
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