The 2020 election featured a curious chorus from President Donald Trump and his allies: Why won’t Joe Biden condemn the violence at racial-justice protests? The problem: Biden had done so over and over again. He even did so shortly after George Floyd’s murder. But this didn’t stop the charge from being repeated ad nauseam — even sometimes shortly after Biden had offered new condemnations and even after the election.
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The Biden campaign was confronted with an unhappy political choice: Do you keep denouncing something few rational people believe you actually support — and which you’ve already condemned? Or do you play into your foes’ game by rebutting such charges, often providing the additional specificity they demand?
The Biden team, which has often eschewed the day-to-day political and social-media food fights, sought to err in favor of clarity on its position.
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This week it was confronted with a similar dilemma, with comparable political dynamics but somewhat different causes. And again, it chose to be explicit.
Amid GOP criticism that the White House hasn’t been as aggressive in linking protests in Cuba to its communist regime, both Biden and White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday declined to mince words.
“Communism is a failed ideology, and we certainly believe that,” Psaki said. “It has failed the people of Cuba. They deserve freedom. … And instead, this has been a government — an authoritarian, communist regime — that has repressed its people and has failed the people of Cuba. Hence, we’re seeing them in the streets.”
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Biden added hours later: “Communism is a failed system, universally failed system. I don’t see socialism as a very useful substitute. But that’s another story.”
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At the root of this are a couple of things that happened this week. One was that some people and groups on the left, most notably Black Lives Matter, used the occasion of the protests not to link them to Cuba’s communist rule, but to call for the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. The other was that the White House initially played up the role of Cuba’s coronavirus response in the protests.
We’ll take the latter first. It’s valid to ask whether the White House got its emphasis right in its initial response. But even in previous comments that they were asked to clarify by Fox News and others — and did — they cited not just the Cuban regime’s coronavirus response, but also its repression.
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“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” Biden said in a statement Monday.
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Psaki, too, cited repression when probed Wednesday on why the protests are taking place:
Q: Do you think that people are leaving Cuba because they don’t like communism?
PSAKI: I think we’ve been pretty clear that we think people are leaving Cuba — or not — leaving Cuba or protesting in the streets, as well, because they are opposed to the oppression, to the mismanagement of the government in the country. And we certainly support their right to protest. We support their efforts to speak out against their treatment in Cuba.
If there is a fault, apparently, it’s in not citing the specific form of government that is responsible for this form of oppression. The argument seemed to be: Why won’t you just say the word?
But was there any mystery about what was responsible for “decades of repression and economic suffering?” It’s not like Biden has given any indication he likes communism, much less socialism, from which he has repeatedly distanced himself. Was the idea that he opposes authoritarianism, but not necessarily the communist brand of it? It’s understandable the White House might resist attacking socialism too much, given an increasing number of Democrats align with a certain brand of it, but being anti-communist would seem to be a given in all of this.
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Perhaps the bigger reason for the decision to come out forcefully lies not in what the administration’s foes say, but what some more closely aligned with its party have said — comments which played directly into the hands of those accusing the left of being too friendly with Cuba’s communist regime.
The Black Lives Matter statement calling for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba epitomized this. It focused more blame on the embargo than the Cuban government, saying that “the people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination.” It added that the “United States leaders have tried to crush this revolution for decades.”
The idea that the Cuban people have “self-determination” is certainly a viewpoint — as is the implication that the protests are somehow more a result of U.S. rather than Cuban policy.
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As with the racial-justice protests, the Biden team was left with a decision about whether to more forcefully distance itself from something with which it was never truly aligned. And it did so, recognizing that allowing this kind of thing to take hold in certain corners of the left without carving out its own path could be counterproductive.
Whether its denunciations of communism will suffice for its critics or stop the claims that it’s too soft on Cuba, is another matter entirely. It’s popular to argue that clarifications such as Biden’s and Psaki’s are pointless because the other side will simply keep attacking, as it did last year with protest violence. (Some conservatives did give Biden credit Thursday, while re-upping attacks claiming its policies were not necessarily communist, but socialist.)
But just because they keep saying so doesn’t mean there’s no value in carving out an explicit position. There is clearly an element on the left that would prefer to focus the narrative around the protests in Cuba on something other than its repressive, communist regime. And it assisted Biden’s foes in applying pressure. This is not exactly a “Sister Souljah” moment for Biden — saying “communism is bad” is a pretty low bar in this country — but it’s certainly a commentary on our time that such a clarification was called for and provided.