Center’s Menges Hemispheric Security Symposium Flays Obama’s Rapprochement With Cuba And His Support For Venezuelan Dictator

The Center for Security Policy’s Menges Hemispheric Security Project yesterday convened its fourth annual Latin America Symposium on Capitol Hill. The half-day program focused on two issues: 1) the domestic repression and foreign adventurism of Cuba’s Castro regime in the wake of President Obama’s normalization of relations with Havana and 2) the rapidly deteriorating political, economic and security situation with regard to the one-time patron, now client of Cuba: Venezuela.

The Symposium featured remarks by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Chairman Emeritus, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and two panels of former senior U.S. government officials, national security experts, human rights activists, prominent academics and a top international journalist. The participants persuasively argued that the Obama opening to Cuba is providing legitimacy and life-support to one of the world’s most odious dictatorships and that Venezuela’s conduct warrants its listing as a state-sponsor of terrorism.

In addition to Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, the following made remarks in the course of the program:

Menges Hemispheric Security Project Director Nancy Menges
Dr. Jose Azel, Director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies
Frank Calzon, Director of the Center for a Free Cuba
Jose Cardenas, former Acting Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean
Venezuelan expatriate human rights activist Adriana Vigilanza
Emili Blasco, correspondent with Spain’s ABC Network and the author of Bumeran Chavez
Amb. Otto Reich, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and former US Ambassador to Venezuela
Counterterrorism expert Joseph Humire, the Executive Director of the Center for a Secure Free Society AND
Dr. Luis Fleishman, the Menges Project’s Senior Fellow and editor of its Americas Report

Videotaped highlights of their remarks will be available shortly at the Center’s YouTube channel.

Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., who served as the program’s moderator, said at the conclusion of the Latin America Symposium:

“The powerful, fact-based and analytically rigorous interventions by these world-class authorities underscore a reality lost on most Americans: The stakes regarding developments in Cuba and Venezuela – and, indeed, in much of the Western Hemisphere – could not be higher for the United States. The Castro brothers’ regime is a metastasizing cancer in our region, as is its client in Venezuela. President Obama’s much-ballyhooed rapprochement with the former is national security fraud. His administration’s ongoing efforts to achieve a similar outcome with the latter would greatly compound that act of malfeasance.”