McCain criticizes Obama on Cuba
Posted: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 4:53 PM by Mark Murray
From NBC/NJ's Carrie Dann
MIAMI, FL -- In the city that nearly half of the nation's Cuban Americans call home, McCain again today criticized Obama, saying that his rival's willingness to meet with Raul Castro would send "the worst possible signal to Cuba's dictators."
McCain also hit Obama on what he characterizes as an inconsistency in the Illinois senator's position on the existing embargo restrictions placed on the island nation.
"Senator Obama filled out a questionnaire a few years ago basically advocating lifting the embargo on Cuba," McCain said today. "Now he is saying that it has to be conditional. What those conditions are is very nonspecific."
When running for Senate in 2003, Obama said that normalized relations with Cuba would "help the oppressed and poverty-stricken Cuban people while setting the stage for a more democratic government once Castro inevitably leaves the scene." He has since advocated that normalization should be contingent upon concessions from the Cuban government.
McCain painted Obama's stance towards the Cuban regime as a soft undermining of real progress in repairing the relationship of the two countries. "These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba's dictators -- [that] there is no need to undertake fundamental reforms, they can simply wait for a unilateral change in US policy," he said. "That's what they think."
The Arizona senator's remarks were enthusiastically received by the group of mainly Cuban-Americans who attended the speech; they gleefully booed the notion of face-to-face unconditional meetings between Cuba's leader and an American president, and they rewarded McCain's call for free elections with a standing ovation.
But Democrats charge that McCain's bright line against negotiations with Cuba has hardened since he ran against George Bush here in the 2000 primary. Then, as now, McCain laid out conditions under which he would consider meeting with Cuba's leaders, but his tone -- these critics say -- was one with less stringent requirements for some of those concessions, particularly his call that free elections in Cuba be a prerequisite to normalized relations between the two countries.
Florida State Rep. Luis Garcia, a Cuban-born Democrat who endorsed Clinton last year, says that McCain has done "a 180 degree turnaround" on the issue in the last eight years. By aligning himself more closely with Bush policies towards Cuba than he did when sparring with Bush for the nomination in 2000, Garcia says that McCain is, "trying to get on the good side of the Republican right wing."
McCain told reporters aboard his campaign bus today that his philosophy towards Cuba remains unchanged. "I have always supported the position that before any normalization of relations can take place, free elections, emptying political prison and human rights organizations functioning had to take place," he said. "That has been my position for 24 years and remains my position."
The Obama campaign, meanwhile, released statements from supporters Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson, who criticized McCain's Cuba policy. Said Dodd, "John McCain needs to explain why continuing to do exactly what George Bush has done will somehow produce a different result. he Senator McCain I used to know was open to negotiations with Cuba to lift the embargo, but now he’s taking a hard line position, embracing a policy that has failed the Cuban people and the American people alike for fifty years."
Richardson added, "John McCain doesn't understand as well as Senator Obama and I do how the Castro regime works. John McCain -- like George Bush -- is afraid to talk to bad guys. He feels safer pretending to talk tough by hiding from them. Unfortunately ordinary people will pay for his lack of diplomatic skill. This is the Bush-McCain foreign policy that has failed all over the world, and it has failed to promote change in Cuba. I have successfully negotiated with Castro and many like him, and I know that Barack has the judgment and experience to nudge the Cubans toward a better future."
