{"id":9743,"date":"2015-05-19T01:55:06","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T01:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=9743"},"modified":"2015-05-19T01:55:06","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T01:55:06","slug":"meeting-raul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/meeting-raul\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Raul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RaulFrancis\"<\/a>Cross-posted on the Corner:<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s Daniel Henninger on Pope Francis\u2019s meeting with Ra\u00fal Castro (and France\u2019s President Hollande\u2019s with Fidel):<\/p>\n

A beaming, star-struck Mr. Hollande on Monday received a one-hour audience (there is no other word) with the 88-year-old Fidel. The French president said, \u201cI had before me a man who made history.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

#EuropeanValues<\/p>\n

Henninger:<\/p>\n

\u201cBienvenido!\u201d said Pope Francis to Ra\u00fal Sunday when they met at the Vatican. \u201cWelcome!\u201d The Vatican press office didn\u2019t release details of the meeting, other than to describe it as \u201cvery friendly.\u201d <\/p>\n

Photographs of the meeting between the president of Cuba\u2019s inhabitants and the leader of the world\u2019s Catholics suggest they hit it off, with both men aglow in smiles. In fact, Ra\u00fal seems to have thought he\u2019d died and gone to heaven. Baptized into Marxism while in college, he announced he might rejoin the Catholic Church. But let Ra\u00fal explain his sudden reconversion:<\/p>\n

\u201cI read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church. I\u2019m not joking.\u201d <\/p>\n

Who could doubt it? <\/p>\n

When he says, \u201cif the pope continues this way,\u201d we assume the Cuban president is referring to Francis\u2019 criticisms of capitalism, as when he wrote in 2013: \u201cSome people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.\u201d Francis described this theory as an \u201copinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile we await the Pope\u2019s encyclical on the environment with interest. That will, of course, only concern itself with facts. <\/p>\n

Henninger: <\/p>\n

Let us assume that instead of being the pope, Francis was just a guy in Cuba named Jorge Mario Bergoglio, living in Havana. If this guy no one had heard of summoned the courage to say something in public as harsh about Castro\u2019s communist system as the pope did about capitalism, Ra\u00fal would do any number of things to Jorge Mario Bergoglio.<\/p>\n

Ra\u00fal would have the Cuban police grab him off the street and drive him far outside Havana, where they would beat him up and abandon him. Or they would dump Jorge in prison, where he\u2019d get beaten some more and better not get sick because medical treatment for political dissidents is hard to come by. Or a mob might show up to scream obscenities at him anytime he showed up in public. <\/p>\n

Shaming, harassment and humiliation is what Ra\u00fal and Fidel have done to, among many others, the Ladies in White, who are wives of jailed dissidents, and who march in Havana to\u2014of all things\u2014Sunday Mass. What they find on the way to Mass is not fellow communicant Ra\u00fal but his mobs or police, which routinely attack them. <\/p>\n

We know this because Ra\u00fal\u2019s brutal modus operandi for critics of Cuba\u2019s system is described at length in reports by the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch. But the Castros\u2019 celebrity status with international elites transcends anything they do, and so Cuba is a member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. <\/p>\n

Sophisticated opinion holds that Barack Obama\u2019s December \u201copening\u201d to Cuba means the market and tourists will change the place\u2014for example, Ra\u00fal\u2019s release of 53 political prisoners. According to Hablemos Press, which operates inside Cuba, some of those 53 have been rearrested. Other post-\u201copening\u201d dissidents have been beaten. How come? They tried to meet with an opposition group, Movement for a New Republic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good to know that the Pope had such a \u201cfriendly\u201d meeting with the dictator. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted on the Corner: The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Daniel Henninger on Pope Francis\u2019s meeting with Ra\u00fal Castro (and France\u2019s President Hollande\u2019s with Fidel): A beaming, star-struck Mr. Hollande on Monday received a one-hour audience (there is no other word) with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15,711],"tags":[900,998,1114,403],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9743"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9749,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9743\/revisions\/9749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}