What a great, myth-destroying statement from Marco Rubio, on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday afternoon, on the facts about Cuba and their connection to events in Venezuela.
We have pressed in these parts for American political figures to speak clearly and with moral confidence about American sympathies in various international disputes. Rubio’s speech is honest political indignation successfully deployed.
Late last month Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa came back from a week-long trip to Cuba full of the wonders he’d seen. In a meeting with reporters he spouted inanities that were clichés a quarter-century ago: Cuba has fabulous health services, everyone can read. Yesterday Harkin decided to haul his inanities onto the floor of the Senate. Rubio heard what he’d said and followed him on the floor soon after.
Rubio pointed out Cuba has fabulous health services only if you believe a totalitarian government’s health statistics, its people can read only what that government allows them to read. They are an abused people in an oppressed culture.
What Rubio was speaking of is the moral meaning of things and the need for America to recognize and address the moral meaning of things. America should not stand mute when presented with political dramas in other nations, particularly when they occur in our own hemisphere. We have a voice. We should use it. If we don’t show our sympathies, who will? If we do not articulate our values and beliefs, who will?
What to do in the future about Cuba—what relations to have with it and policies to adopt toward it—is the subject of legitimate debate. How to approach and respond to what is happening in Venezuela is a matter of debate. But you can’t begin that debate with fan fiction. You begin it with facts and go from there.
If you don’t get the facts right, you’ll never get the policy right. And it does the world no good to see a great power fallen into relentless, mealy-mouthed obfuscation. That only adds to the slump-shouldered, depressed feeling that a lack of clarity always brings.
Rubio’s statement may make a bigger impression on the Republican base than he perhaps expected, and the pundit class may start to see him again as a 2016 force. An observation: Everyone in national politics worries about getting the right speech text, the right words. But Rubio got the words and meaning right through notes and pictures, not a prepared text. Cesar Conda, Rubio’s chief of staff, said the senator had intended to speak that day on Venezuela, but included Cuba because he wanted “to set the record straight.”