An Obama-Moment for Black History Month

1,862 words

That’s the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.
-Barack Obama

Is it a coincidence or by design that black history month is also the shortest month? Have I stumbled across a micro-aggression?

But onward to one of my most “cherished” moments in black history.

In the eight years of his rock star style presidency, Barack Hussein Obama made his way to Havana to pay homage to Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz, a sort of Muhammed-coming-to-the-mountain moment. In anticipation, Raúl had ordered his people to spruce up a bit the slum of his long making, and it was likely that any of those unruly types who had dared to occasionally complain about life in the Socialist Workers Paradise were rounded up and dropped into the deep freeze during the President Obama’s Potemkin tour. Just to show who was boss, Raúl snubbed the American president, sending one of his flunkies to greet him upon his arrival on the Havana tarmac. Hermano mayor for decades enjoyed waving his middle finger at Uncle Sam. This occasion was, however, unique: Obama was the first American President to fly down and willingly get himself dissed in person.  I must confess, this sort of put a tiny soft spot in my heart for Raúl.

Obama did not even catch a glimpse of the Damas Blancas (the Ladies in White), those brave women who Raúl’s goons regularly beat up for publicly daring to ask about the fate of their husbands, brothers and sons rotting as political prisoners in Castro’s dungeons. As reported in USA Today: “Just hours before President Obama landed Sunday in Cuba for his historic visit to the communist island, Cuban authorities arrested more than 50 dissidents who were marching to demand improved human rights.”

From the Washington Post:

A group of dissidents known as the Ladies in White was met outside Havana’s Santa Rita church by an organized crowd of Castro loyalists shouting insults and revolutionary slogans. Then, Castro’s secret police pounced on the women and half-dragged, half-carried them to waiting buses, while men marching with the women were chased, thrown to the curb and handcuffed.

As they were arrested, the crowd chanted “This is Fidel’s street!”

Yes, those Fidelistas had it exactly right: Cuba belonged exclusively to Fidel and Raúl, not the peons who were supposed to respond, “how high?” when the Castros yelled “Jump!” It was their personal fiefdom and the clowns who had some notion of their “rights” and wanted to know the fate of their prisoner-relatives deserved whatever abuse came their way from the guardians of the revolution.

But that was probably just fine with Obama who apparently was willing to bear whatever indignities the regime cared to dispense, and who cares about the dissidents, anyway? They had universal health care, didn’t they? What else did they want? Obama was likely wearing his Che tee-shirt from his college days beneath his suit jacket. Fidel, Raúl and Che, after all, were the young Hope and Change hombres of the Caribbean when BHO was, as they say, just a twinkle in the eye of Barack Sr. or Frank Marshal Davis.[1] Like President Obama during his 2008 Presidential campaign, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” the Castros promised a complete transformation of the island with the usual palaver about “free elections and democracy” after floating into Cuba from Mexico on the Good Ship Lollipop and rescuing it from the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. And “transformation” is a handy euphemism for exactly what they did, namely make the island into a hell hole (gulags, summary executions and all) that Cubans have for decades been (literally) dying to leave. It became a vast slum which notwithstanding the 60-year iron fisted rule of Fidel and Raúl was entirely, they claimed, the fault of the U.S.

It is safe to conclude Obama felt much more at home in Havana, yukking it up with a decrepit dictator than in those red states in the U.S and had a much higher regard for Raúl than for any of those Republicans back home whom he liked to speak of as his “enemies” while attempting his own transformation of America that had a lot to do with the comeuppance that was coming for the sin of its “whiteness.” Obama’s comfort with Raúl, one also suspects has its origins in a deeply shared conviction that the U.S. is a country, as his wife Michelle, so eloquently put it in 2008 that is “just downright mean.”

Beyond that, for some striking evidence of the President’s affinity for the Castro brothers’ version of Hope and Change we have Obama’s very own testimonial in his autobiography, Dreams from my Father. Did any of the millions of American voters smitten with him back in 2008 bother to read his book?

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets[…] At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.[2]

Granted, this was how Obama represented his Marxist bona fides as a youth at the university. That was then, and now is, well ….  Looking back, one remains hard pressed to discover much of a difference in conviction and attitude between the twenty-something university student and the man who took office as the forty-fourth U.S. President. Since his university days Obama continued to choose friends and associates strikingly similar to his university pals – Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Van Jones. And, let’s not forget the race-baiting, riot-fomenting Al Sharpton, who after Obama was safely reelected in 2012 became his unofficial advisor on race relations. We will never know if Barack ground out his cigarettes in the Oval Office carpet to express his alienation.

While in office, Obama demonized policemen (bourgeois society’s armed enforcers) and gave tacit support to rioters, as in Ferguson, who burned the place down. In 2011 Obama celebrated American poetry and prose with a gathering of poets, musicians and artists at the White House. According to the Associated Press he invited Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. aka “Common,” a notorious hip-hop artist famous for celebrating the killing of police officers and one notorious cop killer in general. So, Obama, the alienated, Marxist university student, and Obama, the racial polarizing, Castro-enthusiast President seem to be separated only by years, not by any change in conviction, ideology or the kinds of people he admired. There is no evidence in word or deed that Barack Obama ever relinquished the resentment and his affinity for the leftist black radicalism that motivated him as a young man: he just became much more sophisticated in managing it.

One should be careful comparing Obama with Raúl Castro, however. To be fair to Raúl, as a Marxist, he was the real McCoy, one tough hombre, enduring in his youth the precarious Granma expedition from Mexico and the harsh rigors of the Sierra Maestra mountains as a guerrilla fighter, taking on Batista’s troops, getting shot at, taking hostages and executing them. In the early days of the Revolution Raúl was even by his older brother’s estimate one brutal fellow.

As the brothers show’ developed, Fidel carefully and deliberately nurtured the myth of ‘good brother, bad brother.’ Whenever he wanted to threaten people with the results of his possible demise, he pointed to Raúl — ‘He will be much worse than I,’ he warned repeatedly. And he may have been right. Sierra fighters like Lucas Morán called Raúl’s front a “small totalitarian state in which discipline was rooted in the terrible drama of death by execution.[3]

Obama would not know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, and it is doubtful that the man has an ounce of physical courage. His Marxism continues to be of the prissy, academic lounge sort with all of its usual hand wringing devotion to the oppressed and its self-righteous, self-congratulatory posturing but is personally squeamish with a preference for softer approaches to coercion and, as he said in 2010 “punish[ing] our enemies and … reward[ing] our friends.” Like his close friend, Al Sharpton, his style (dropping his “g’s” when necessary) was to demonize his critics and keep the rabble on a slow boil with artful demagoguery while working the system for all of its perks – post-Presidency perks as in a net worth of $70 million (2024) and ownership of luxury homes in Hyde Park, Martha’s Vineyard, Washington DC and Hawaii. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it – how does he manage, as he put it in Dreams… “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout…”? Maybe he takes his council from Her Wisdomness, Oprah. Or maybe he’s embraced Hillary Clinton’s deeply principled approach to personal accountability: “What difference at this point does it make?”

Now he is an ex-president. No one talks about him as a deity anymore. Hope and Change is long forgotten, and maybe somewhere there is a new someone coming to halt the “rising of the oceans” and complete “the healing” of the planet.

Instead, the Obamas have settled into just, well … enjoying themselves, and Michelle, like her husband, always in hot pursuit of being admired by the smart people, can sport hairstyles more to her liking as reported in Yahoo News.

Now that they have been relieved of their duties, we see a more relaxed side of Mrs. Obama, including wearing her hair in the ultimate “Black girl magic” hairstyle — braids. And as simple as that may seem, Obama had a different reality for eight years.

Clearly, now relieved from the staggering weight of “their duties,” the Obamas’ life-style gives a new, shall we say, sybaritic definition to “relaxed.” Whether the “more relaxed side of Mrs. Obama” and her “Black girl magic” are preferable to whatever the other side was supposed to be, I leave for that dwindling klatch of the couple’s sycophants with nothing important to do to decide.

The “different reality” Obama had to deal with for eight years was having to pretend that he wasn’t anything more than a slick-talking race-hustler who, with a lot of “help from his friends,” and a giant stroke of luck pulled off one of the biggest cons in American history, a black history moment of enduring infamy.

Someday perhaps, when asked about his years at the top he can with a smirk quote Senator George Washington Plunkett of the old Tammany Hall days, who in his memoirs wrote, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

Notes

[1] CovertAction Magazine, Jeremy Kuzmarov, “A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA.” “There is evidence to suggest that Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, an African American journalist, sexually libertine poet, political radical and alleged target of Grandpa Dunham’s surveillance.”

[2] Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father, Three Rivers Press, New York City, 2004., 100-101.

[3]  Georgie Geyer  (2011-02-01). Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro (Kindle Locations 3285-3288). Garrett County Press. Kindle Edition.