Vice President Joe’s Biden’s recent comment on the Cuban embargo was disappointing. His answer to a media question about whether the U.S. had plans to abrogate the 47-year-old, Cold War relic was: “No.”
The venue was significant. Biden was in Vina Del Mar, Chile. He was attending the ironically dubbed Progressive Governance Summit and meeting with leaders from Latin America and Europe.
His beguiling rhetoric came right out of the playbook of the George W. Bush Administration – and its eight predecessors. Biden said that he and President Obama “think that Cuban people should determine their own fate, and they should be able to live in freedom.” As if that laudable goal were somehow incompatible with lifting the counterproductive embargo.
But let’s accord Biden the political benefit of the doubt.
President Obama has enough spoilers in the GOP over his administration’s stimulus plans, toxic-asset strategy and education-energy-health care hat trick. He doesn’t need to hand Rush Limbaugh and the “party of no” more ammo right now about “caving in to a dictatorship.”
It makes pragmatic, political sense.
But it’s not “change” we can believe in yet on Cuba.