President Obama said in an interview aired this morning on NBC that he "wasn't familiar" of Jay-Z and Beyoncé's Cuba trip ahead of time:
"Let me ask you about Jay-Z and Beyonce's trip to Cuba," said the NBC host. "Were you aware of it ahead of time and have you seen his open letter which raps about getting White House clearance?"
"I wasn't familiar that they were taking the trip," says Obama. "My understanding is I think they went through a group that organizes these educational trips down to Cuba. This is not something the White House was involved with. We've got better things to do."
The Treasury Department "fully licensed" Beyonce and Jay Z's trip to Cuba, according to Reuters.
"American pop star Beyonce and rapper husband Jay Z visited Havana last week on a cultural trip that was fully licensed by the United States Treasury Department, according to a source familiar with the trip," Reuters reports.
In an interview with Oscar Haza, a Spanish-speaking Miami journalist, President Obama was asked whether he's "worried with that alliance between Iran and Venezuela--and Hugo Chávez."
The Cuban regime has just announced a prisoner release, at the very end of 2011. This is partly an effort to get some positive publicity before the scheduled visit of the Pope, and partly a cold-blooded move by the regime to release older prisoners who are a burden on their prison system.
"In a strong statement this afternoon, Jon Kyl, the Senate's number-two Republican, says President Obama "should personally stand up and publicly condemn the attacks by the Assad regime on the Syrian people."
In a recent series of conversations with Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, Fidel Castro made several eyebrow-raising comments. The one that received the most attention was Castro’s assertion that the Cuban economic model no longer works. (He later tried, disingenuously, to backtrack on this statement.) Surprisingly, his remarks on Iran and anti-Semitism caused less of a splash. But these remarks were equally (if not more) significant, for they were part of a broader, ongoing charm offensive conducted by the Cuban dictatorship at a time of internal distress.
Jeffrey Goldberg is back from Cuba, where he was summoned by Fidel Castro after the former Cuban president read Goldberg’s recent article on the likelihood of an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program. Goldberg promises that his Havana adventure will be the subject of a forthcoming story, but in the meantime, he’s blogging about it, the highlight of which appears to be a dolphin show he watched alongside Fidel himself and the daughter of Che Guevara, whom we are told loved animals. And then there’s the dog-and-pony show, which was conducted solely for the benefit of The Atlantic’s national correspondent.
A few miles up the road from Ground Zero, the Obama administration recently submitted its account of the United States human rights record to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The administration’s report, the first ever submitted by this nation to that body (whose members include Libya and Cuba), was succinctly summarized by identical Washington Post and CBS News headlines: “US admits human rights shortcomings in UN report.”
It’s a familiar trick: When the Castro regime wants something from the international community, it makes a grand show of releasing political prisoners, in hopes of convincing foreign officials that Cuba has liberalized and thus deserves to be rewarded.
It’s a familiar trick: When the Castro regime wants something from the international community, it makes a grand show of releasing political prisoners, in hopes of convincing foreign officials that Cuba has liberalized and thus deserves to be rewarded.
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