On the occasion of Communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s eightieth birthday, I will take a few moments to reflect on the significance of Maine Governor John Baldacci’s meeting with Castro and trade agreement deal from late last year. The Cuban “President-for-Life” is recovering from intestinal surgery and meeting with the Venezuelan socialist (and fellow dictator) Hugo Chavez. With Castro back in the news, I cannot help but recall the time last winter when our Governor met with this tyrant, shook his hand, and warmly praised him. For those of us with short memories, please review the photos that the Christian Civic League of Maine helped make public here, here, and here.
I agree with outgoing Maine Senate Republican Leader Paul Davis’s comments from that time. He said that it was “improper for the Governor of Maine to be providing a brutal dictator with good publicity.” It is well documented by many human rights groups that Castro’s regime is responsible for murdering and imprisoning tens of thousands of its own people. And Americans still have the images of the 1980 Mariel Boat lift seared in their minds, when Castro opened his prisons and asylums and 125,000 largely mentally ill and criminal Cuban refugees sailed to America on anything that would float.
How can anyone disagree with the Senator’s measured sentiments? If anything, they minimize the audacity of the governor’s trade agreement. They hide the shame that Maine suffered nationally and internationally, as the governor from our state overrode decades-old United States foreign policy in return for money from a communist tyrant. It is mind-boggling that this administration holds this agreement with a murdering communist dictator as one of its greater achievements. It defies logic that it even went beyond the discussion stage, much less occurred.
And yet it did happen. In order to turn a quick buck, our governor looked to the Communist Cuban dictatorship for financial gain. This was seen by many Americans of Cuban descent as nothing short of the acceptance of ‘blood money.’ And despite it making international news headlines, the local media was largely silent on the matter. The photos in our online RECORD archive tell the tale that our own Maine newspapers and television stations refused to report.
Our governor's visit to Communist Cuba was news apparently everywhere else but here. The national and international media outlets meanwhile questioned last year whether the trade pact signaled a warming of relations between the United States and Cuba. It did not. Maine remains only the sixth state since the Cold War started to have a trade agreement with the communist country.
How will these images of the Governor shaking hands with Castro affect his re-election chances? Will they continue to add to the perception that this administration is out of touch with the traditional people of Maine? Remember, many of Maine’s own ‘Baby Boomer’ generation fought and bled in Korea and Vietnam to stop the red tide of communism. Many of them remember the early 1960s and how close we came to nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. How should we react?
Surely the residents of Maine do not find it endearing that this administration gave such a warm embrace to a despotic Cold War relic. At the voting booth this November, I suspect there will be more Mainers who question the foreign policy of our governor (who is on the ballot) than those who question the foreign policy of our country’s president (who will not be on the ballot).
Let us then resolve not to have memories so short as to forget the many years we feared global nuclear destruction at the hands of the Communists. Nor should we forget last December, and the shame that Maine suffered at the hands of this governor’s administration.
The money-changers at the Temple would be proud of this governor’s trade agreement with Castro, the Communist dictator. Mainers should use Jesus as an example, and expel this Governor from the Blaine House, just as He expelled the money-changers from the Temple.
