As a Christmas gift to Fidel Castro, President Obama unilaterally announced that the United States would end its fifty-two year embargo of Cuba and begin taking steps to restore normal relations.

I went to college with a young man named Hector.  He told firsthand of the tyranny that gripped Cuba. He recounted to us the heroic story of how he and his family had escaped after Castro’s revolution transformed that once prosperous island into a hostile Communist fortress just ninety miles from our shores.  It was a risk-everything flight that his parents engineered so that their son might grow up in freedom.

I recall in October 1962, when I was younger, sitting in my parents’ car, pulled to the side of the road, straining to hear President Kennedy’s broadcast to the nation at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The Soviet Union had secretly smuggled nuclear ballistic missiles into Cuba and targeted New York, Washington, Miami and other East Coast American cities.  Nuclear tipped tactical weapons placed Guantanamo Naval base in their cross hairs.  On Saturday, October 27, the world came eyeball to eyeball with nuclear war.  The annihilation of much of America was literally a button push away.  Castro demanded that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev fire his guns.  But fortunately for the world, both Khrushchev and Kennedy backed off.

Anyone born since Castro came to power 65 years ago does not remember what it felt like to fear nuclear war.   In those days we lived in dread.  To this day I can still hear in my mind the eerie sound of air raid warning sirens being tested across our city each Monday morning.  In school we would march to the cloak room, gather our coats, file into the hallways, and lie down along the wall, covering our heads with our coats.  We grew up with a shadowy terror.  And it was realistic terror.

It’s all forgotten now.  President Obama does not remember the threat that Cuba posed.  He did not hear the stories from the suffering Cuban people as they stepped upon our shores. 

One year in the 1990s I attended some church meetings in Mexico.  I was assigned to room with the pastor of a prominent Presbyterian church in Havana.  He was suave and polished and cool.  In answer to my questions he told me that Christians in Cuba really had no problems with the regime.  Only those who made trouble for themselves had something to fear.  He experienced no difficulties, no limitations placed upon him or his church by the Cuban revolutionary government.  He assured me. 

But my roommate was a committed Communist.  He and the Castro government were bedfellows.  He had sold his soul and the soul of the gospel of Christ to the perpetrators of evil.  But I knew the other side of the story.  I knew true believers in Cuba who had been forced underground. I knew of some who were in prison because they insisted on faithfully preaching the hope of Jesus.

President Obama knows none of this.  Or he doesn’t care.  In Michael Dobbs’ spellbinding book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, One Minute to Midnight, the author presents an interesting insight into Fidel Castro.  When Castro was a student at Havana University in the late 1940s, Dobbs says, “He spent much of his time there organizing protests, including a forty-eight hour general strike in 1947 following the killing of a high school student in an antigovernment demonstration.” (p 76)  In other words, Fidel Castro began his career as a community organizer. And he employed the same tactics we have recently seen in Ferguson, Missouri and in other anti-police demonstrations.  In this, he and Barak Obama share much in common.

Fidel Castro is now 89 years old.  He and his brother Raul continue to run a regime that is essentially unchanged from the victory days of 1959.  The Cuban people live in abject poverty.  Their freedom is suppressed by harsh and utterly unrepentant tyranny.  Just at the moment when regime change is days or months away by virtue of human mortality, President Obama has let up the pressure and has given new life to the Cuban oppression.

In the Bible, Ahab, the ninth century BC king of Israel, had defeated Israel’s perennial enemy, Syria.  God sent word through a prophet that Ahab should execute King Benhadad who he had captured.  But Ahab, with victory in his hands, let Benhadad go and instead established an economic treaty with him.  That prompted the prophet’s return, and this is what he said to Ahab: “Thus says the Lord, ‘Because you have let go out of your hand the man whom I had devoted to destruction, therefore your life shall go for his life, and your people for his people.” (I Kings 20:42) It was not long before Syria, led by Benhadad, was again attacking Israel.

I am not suggesting a one-for-one correlation between Israel and the United States or between Ahab and Obama.  I am suggesting that letting your enemy go and enabling him to continue his evil, is extremely foolish policy.

Dr. Rick Perrin is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and Chairman of the Board of World Reformed Fellowship..  He writes a weekly blog called ReTHINK which may be accessed at www.rethinkingnews.wordpress.com. He may be contacted directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..