The Castro regime is NOT living up to its end of the bargain it cut in mid-December with the Obama administration to release more than 50 political prisoners, Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady noted in her January 5 column, "Where Are Cuba's Political Prisoners?"
Here's an excerpt:
Who and where are the 53 Cuban political prisoners that President Obama promised would be freed by Havana as part of a deal to liberate three convicted Cuban spies serving lengthy sentences in the U.S.?
I asked the State Department this last week. State referred me to the White House. White House officials declined to provide the list of names citing “concern that publicizing it would make it more difficult to ensure that Cuba follows through, and continues with further steps in the future.”
Bottom line: The U.S. government cannot confirm that they have been released and is not certain they’re going to be released, even though the three Cuban spies have already been returned.
A government official told me that keeping the names of the 53 quiet will give Cuba the opportunity to release them as a sovereign measure, rather than at the behest of the U.S., and that this could allow for additional releases.
In other words, the Castros are sensitive boys who throw despotic tantrums when their absolute power is questioned. Asking them to keep their word is apparently a trigger.
But wait, as they say on bad TV infomercials, there's more. It's quite likely that the turncoat U.S. intelligence asset which the Cubans released to us may have not been all that great an asset after all, meaning he was not a decent trade for a handful of convicted Cuban spies:
If Mr. Obama is serious about selling U.S.-Cuba detente, a little less obfuscation would be nice. The U.S. has not confirmed the identity of the intelligence asset who it says had been in a Cuban prison for nearly 20 years and was also traded for the Cuban spies. Mr. Obama said the Cuban, before his arrest, had supplied key information to the U.S. that led to the nabbing of those spies, as well as three others.
Press reports and intel experts I talked to say the “asset” is Rolando Sarraff. But a debate is raging in the intelligence community about whether Mr. Sarraff, who has not been heard from since his arrival on U.S. soil, is all he’s cracked up to be by Mr. Obama. Another possibility is that his résumé was embellished to cover up for what was essentially a trade of the convicted spies for Alan Gross, the U.S. Agency for International Development contractor who was arrested by Cuban state security in Havana in 2009.
Mr. Obama claimed in his speech that Mr. Gross’s release was a humanitarian gesture on the part of Cuba. That’s not believable. Almost from the day Mr. Gross was arrested, Havana made it clear that he would not be released until the Cuban spies were returned to the island. He was a hostage.
If the Castro brothers renege on their promise to free the 53 it wouldn’t be a surprise. But nothing in their history suggests they would want to keep the release a secret. On the contrary, going back to the days of Jimmy Carter , Fidel has always released dissidents as a propaganda tool to boost his image as a benevolent leader—even while he sends them into exile or only paroles them.
Suffice it to say, the major liberal media fail to pay attention to all this, let alone show any concern that the president may have brokered a bad deal with a despotic diplomatic partner with a history of acting in bad faith.
By contrast, initial liberal media coverage, as you may recall, was quite glowing and effusive, hailing the move to the normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba as a foreign policy coup for the Obama White House.
You can't help but think that Team Obama knew this sort of thing would happen and that, with the exception of a few dogged, determined journalists like Ms. O'Grady, the national news media would completely ignore any developments which cast doubt on the wisdom of the president's policy.
