Obama’s baseball outing with Castro reignites fury after Trump DOJ drops hammer on Cuban leader
Former Cuban President Raúl Castro was indicted Wednesday in connection with the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft that killed four people — reviving scrutiny of former President Barack Obama’s...
By Fox News · Fox News
Former Cuban President Raúl Castro was indicted Wednesday in connection with the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft that killed four people — reviving scrutiny of former President Barack Obama ’s highly publicized 2016 trip to Havana. "President Obama’s approach to Cuba was not merely a policy mistake. It was a diplomatic disaster — naive at best, incompetent at worst, and deeply disrespectful to the dissidents, political prisoners and victims who suffered under the Castro regime," former Miami mayor Francis Suarez, who is Cuban-American, told Fox News Digital. "Obama treated normalization as enlightened diplomacy. It handed legitimacy to a brutal dictatorship while asking little in return," said the Fox News contributor. "The administration reopened relations, relaxed restrictions and gave Havana a public-relations victory, yet the Cuban people remained trapped under the same repressive system and the United States gained no meaningful security concessions." The Justice Department on Wednesday unsealed a superseding indictment charging Castro and five co-defendants over the deaths of four U.S. nationals aboard two unarmed civilian aircraft operated by the Miami-based exile group. Cuban-American critics said the charges underscore longstanding objections to Obama’s normalization push, which they argue gave legitimacy to the Castro regime. US MOVING TO INDICT FORMER CUBAN LEADER RAÚL CASTRO: SOURCE Obama traveled to Cuba in 2016 as part of his administration’s push to normalize U.S.-Cuba relations after decades of hostility, arguing that engagement on diplomacy, the economy and human rights would be more effective than isolation. The visit also included Obama and Castro attending a baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team in Havana. "I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas," Obama said from Havana that year. "I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people." Photos of Obama and…