The handshake heard around the world
For 10 whole seconds, President Obama stopped and shared a handshake with Cuban President Raul Castro last week. Both men flew to South Africa to honor the life of Nelson Mandela at a memorial service attended by the heads of state from around the world.
You’d have to wonder, what would Mandela have thought about those 10 seconds? To many right-wingers in this country, it was yet another example of Obama’s adherence to the teachings of Karl Marx.
What a childish way to look at two men who were only joined that day by a brief clasp of their hands and their sincere appreciation of the life of one of the most important figures of the 20th Century.
“If the president was going to shake his hand, he should have asked him about those basic freedoms Mandela was associated with that are denied in Cuba,” said Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.
Yep! Obama, according to Rubio, should have fouled the celebratory air with a hastily called mini-summit that would have done nothing to settle the long-standing impasse between the United States and Cuba.
“Let’s stop the proceedings,” Obama might have said, “I have a bone to pick with you.”
Of course, Rubio is a Republican in Congress. He knows a thing or two about stopping things, except, of course, Obamacare.
Then there’s that impetuous junior U.S. Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. When Castro stepped up to the podium to offer his kind words for Mandela, Cruz took a hasty retreat.
There were more than a hundred world leaders at South Africa’s FNB Stadium that day, but one man, Cruz, who’d love to stand among them someday, walked out in a show of pre-presidential campaign bluster.
Both Cruz and Rubio are the sons of Cuban immigrants. Some of their fury might be understandable but only if Obama had stopped when he shook Castro’s hand and offered to open up diplomatic relations with Cuba.
That didn’t happen. So you’d have to wonder what got into John McCain after he’d heard about the Obama/Castro handshake.
“It just gives Raul some propaganda to continue to prop up his dictatorial brutal regime,” McCain told Public Radio International. And he concluded with some fightin’ words (but only for WWII buffs), “Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler.”
For starters, it’s been widely reported that no Cuban newspaper even bothered to mention the “Handshake Heard ‘Round The World.” Instead, they focused on Castro’s speech.
Beyond that, it’s a head scratcher that McCain issued such a sharp criticism, since there are lots of pictures of him shaking Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi’s hand during a diplomatic mission in 2009. McCain even referred to the now-defunct Gadhafi as an “interesting man.”
But all of this outrage over a handshake has also brought out the examples of other U.S. leaders who’ve had occasions to shake the hands of despots over the years.
There was John F. Kennedy’s handshake with Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. Vice President Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro shared a handshake at the United Nations in 1959 — just months after Castro rose to power.
And later, none of Mao Zedong’s Communism rubbed off on then President Nixon when they warmly shook each other’s hands in China in 1972. When Ronald Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin in 1988, nobody called it “nauseating,” the way Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.,did after Obama and Castro briefly met and shared a few words.
Most people remember the Reagan/Gorachev meeting as an achievement that led to a thaw in the long-standing conflict between two world powers.
Bill Clinton famously shook hands with Fidel Castro when they were standing in a lunch line at the United Nations in 2000. It was reported that they’d even had a two-minute conversation that Castro initiated. What do you think about that, comrade?
These kinds of momentary meetings only seem to be elevated to something seamy when Obama is involved. A handshake is just a handshake unless Republicans can call it something else.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
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