The Hypocrisy of Joe Biden

Since he took office nearly half a year ago, Joe Biden has not acted on any of his campaign promises to seek détente with Cuba.

Changing policy with respect to Cuba was one of Joe Biden’s campaign promises.

If Donald Trump went down as the most ill-educated, disruptive, eccentric and trouble-making president in the history of the U.S., Biden is accumulating enough demerits as he approaches a half year in office on July 20 to be considered the prototype par excellence of a hypocrite and opportunist lacking in political will in the annals of the great northern nation.

These are not empty words, since there are more than enough examples and solid evidence to support them. Let it be noted that we are talking about Cuba, because in a recent press conference, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, when asked about the issue of relations with the island, shielded himself with a long explanation about the changes made by the current administration in foreign policy, while unsuccessfully trying to justify the evident stagnation toward Cuba.

Stagnation might not be the right word, since not only has Biden refused to lift a single suffocating measure imposed by his predecessor, Trump, in his obsession to subdue the Antillean pearl, but has adopted Trump’s decision for another six months to keep Cuba on the list of nations supporting terrorism or not doing enough to combat it, and in addition, has supported and encouraged the accusation against our country of alleged human trafficking.

A few months ago, Biden accused Vladimir Putin of being a murderer, without showing a single piece of evidence to substantiate such a serious charge, thus engaging in slander and malicious lies, in addition to committing a crime against diplomacy, since he is the leader of a foreign power.

That alone would be enough to maintain that the near-octogenarian president can be classified as a liar, even more so in relation to Cuba, since everyone remembers that a change of policy toward Cuba was one of his campaign promises, and that once in the White House, he went on to say that “Cuba is not a top priority” for his government.

An unstable Joe is even lying obliquely, not only because of his stumbling on airplane ramps, but also because of his opportunistic changes in foreign policy, since as life has more than reliably shown, in the United States the Cuba issue has long been a domestic policy matter due to the influence of the extremist anti-Cuban lobby.

There is plenty of evidence concerning the anti-Cuban lobby. Take the case of Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, a furious enemy of the Cuban regime, who in each Senate election gets enthusiastic support from ultra-reactionary Anglo Saxons and Cuban Americans living in that state. Well, Menendez, who has faced multiple criminal fraud charges, is now the chairman of the Democratic Party’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and, as has been noted repeatedly, this fellow has had influence on Biden’s Cuba policy, and he certainly behaves as the most conservative Republican would.

Today many in the U.S. wonder what Menendez is doing in a political party symbolized by an ass if he thinks and speaks as if he belongs to a party represented by an elephant. Already in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration, and in the midst of Trump’s pitched fight to stay in office, some observers described Biden’s position as extremely balanced or reserved in the face of attempts to wrest power from him by trying to invalidate the election results and perpetuating the idea that Democrats had committed fraud.

Some certainly described Biden’s response as lukewarm or lacking in political courage for a man who had won the election by no fewer than 7 million votes.

Then, when the assault on the U.S. Capitol by an angry mob spurred on by Trump himself took place, Joe was viewed as timid in the face of what unquestionably constituted a crime against democracy.

Biden is well aware that one of the key points of the Republican agenda with Trump at the helm was to exert maximum pressure on Cuba to try, once and for all, to break its resistance and return it to the imperial fold from which it emerged in January 1959. Biden knows that Trump and his people expended a great deal of political capital and money to pursue that course of action, and that they had to make many promises to very powerful people in Miami.

If we have the precedent-setting televised debate in which the New York real estate magnate was disrespectful and offensive to Biden, why does Biden have to “save the coffee,” as we Cubans say, for a man who despises and possibly hates him? The answer is political cowardice.

Biden also knows — and this is a plain and simple political calculation — that if he keeps Trump’s policy toward Cuba unchanged, it will lessen the motivation for Trump and the Republicans to mount fierce opposition in Congress, which could scuttle some of his domestic foreign policy projects, and this, my dear readers, is nothing more than opportunism and political cowardice.

We know that the United States is a great imperial nation in decline with very serious structural and functional problems, where all kinds of contradictions are evident at the federal level and between the central government and the states. The Latino and Black communities and the trending toward an “American socialism” that would put an end to or reduce great inequality as well as the murder of Black and Latino communities, a movement that would give equal opportunities to all, is growing.

Today there are growing centrifugal forces in the American union that are demanding, as in 1860, the secession of some southern states, and we have been warned about the danger of another civil war. Biden knows this, and he has come to the conclusion that maintaining tension in international relations makes it easier for him to adopt measures that help preserve the domestic stability of the empire. This foolish calculation is also synonymous with opportunism.