WASHINGTON — The White House refused to say Sunday whether President Obama would be talking to Cuban officials about US fugitives who have found a refuge there, but critics blasted the historic trip Sunday for rewarding Cuba while convicted cop-killer Joanne Chesimard remains free and President Raul Castro’s human-rights abuses have worsened.
The White House declined to go into detail Sunday but said the fugitive issue is one “of long-standing concern to the United States that will be addressed in the broader context of normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba.”
Critics, led by New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, blasted Obama.
“The simple truth is, deals with the devil require the devil to deal,” Menendez said in advance of the visit.
Chesimard, 68, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, has been given asylum in the country since her conviction for the 1973 murder of State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike. Reached Sunday, Foerster’s widow declined to comment on Obama’s visit.
Chesimard, who changed her name to Assata Shakur — and who is the aunt of slain rapper Tupac Shakur — escaped prison in 1979 with the help of other Black nationalists, and has lived in Cuba since 1984, despite a $2 million bounty offered by the FBI and Jersey State cops.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump tweeted out a critique of Obama’s handling of relations with Cuba.
“Wow, President Obama just landed in Cuba, a big deal, and Raul Castro wasn’t even there to greet him. He greeted Pope and others,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “No respect.”
Obama told Yahoo News in December that he’d like to go to Cuba when there’s “progress in the liberty and freedom and possibilities of ordinary Cubans” and he could meet with pro-democracy dissidents.
Critics believe conditions in Cuba are terrible and Obama is too focused on making a legacy-defining trip rather than demanding improvements.
“President Obama promised to extend a hand to dictators if they were willing to un-clench their fists — that has not happened in Cuba,” said Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, the son of a Cuban immigrant who found freedom in America, blasted Obama for forgetting about the “political prisoners languishing in dungeons across the island.”
“This is why it is so sad, and so injurious to our future as well as Cuba’s, that Obama has chosen to legitimize the corrupt and oppressive Castro regime with his presence on the island,” Cruz wrote in a column for Politico.