Jimmy: “We greeted each other as old friends."
Fidel: “In 2002, we received him warmly. Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem."
Raul: “Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presidents."
Ready for an Alka-Seltzer? Wait. There's more.
Jimmy Carter earned all this warmth and joviality from Cuba’s Stalinist rulers by doing everything within his power to dismantle the so-called embargo against them. “The embargo of Cuba is the stupidest law ever passed in the U.S.”, he remarked in 2002. And yet President Jimmy Carter imposed more economic sanctions against more nations than any American president in modern history. These sanctions were against, Chile, Iran, Rhodesia, Nicaragua, South Africa, Paraguay and Uruguay. President Carter was extremely selective in imposing his sanctions, let's give him that. He was careful to punish only U.S. allies.
In Cuba, Carter also took time to visit and console some bereaved Cuban families. According to the Black Book of Communism (no outpost of the vast-right wing conspiracy much less of the “Miami Mafia”) Carter’s Cuban hosts murdered 12-14,000 Cubans by firing squad. According to Freedom House over half a million Cubans have suffered in Castro’s various Gulags, dungeons and torture chambers, an incarceration rate higher than Stalin’s. According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll -- from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.-- approaches 100,000.
So President Carter would seem to have little trouble in finding bereaved Cuban families to meet. And he did meet the grieving families of some Cuban-born prisoners. But these prisoners were serving time in U.S. prisons, after conviction by U.S. juries for espionage against the nation that elected Jimmy Carter President and for conspiracy to murder his fellow citizens. These Cubans, you see, are the ones who tugged at Carter’s heartstrings.
