CARLOS EIRE: OBAMA’S INGLORIOUS SPEECH

"The second context is the location where the speech was delivered, the so-called Great Theater of Havana, a building stolen from its proper owners and renamed to hide that fact. The Orwellian sleight-of-hand reified by the building’s new name mirrored in many ways what was most significant about the speech: its contrived avoidance of historical facts and present-day realities."

 

Power Line
("NOTE: Interested readers will also want to check out Professor Eire’s “Theater of the absurd in Havana: Dissidents meet with the Great Visitor.' ”)

"Carlos Eire is professor of history at Yale and author of the National Book Award-winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. At Babalú Blog Professor Eire wrote a proposed speech for President Obama in Havana that was posted as“The speech never given, the op-ed never published”.  . . ."Seeking the opinion of Professor Eire on the speech Obama actually gave, I invited him to comment on it for Power Line readers. Professor Eire has graciously responded with the essay below; we are grateful to Professor Eire for the opportunity to publish his thoughts on the speech. Professor Eire writes:"

. . . "In Obama’s thinly disguised Marxist narrative there is a constant dialectic between an imperialist power (the United States) and an unjustly exploited subaltern (Cuba), and in this poisoned relationship, the United States is responsible for most of Cuba’s ills.

"The exploitation, said Obama, began with the Spanish-American War: “The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island — to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba.”

"After that, with “control” over Cuba, the United States could not help but behave very badly. “Before 1959,” said Obma, “ some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption.”

"This is pure Castroite propaganda, which all Cubans born after 1959 have had force-fed to them as “history.” And in this false “history,” of course, it is always assumed that the Castro are the heroes who rescued Cubans from all of the exploitation.

"That an American president should parrot such lies tells us a lot about the character of such a president, and the real-world value of his speech to the enslaved Cuban people." . . .