What do you call this?

President Bush said the following in the dedication of the monument to the victims of Communism, in Capitol Hill, yesterday:

"They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot's Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; Ethiopians slaughtered in the Red Terror; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua's Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny."

Great, he used the world balseros. He didn't mention that his government still have in the books the dry foot wet foot ordinance that Clinton penned and penised into reality. He didn't mention that many of the Cubans who don't drown, are sent back to Cuba by his very own government and his very own Coast Guard. He didn't hint a word on the elimination of such policy or on what's been done to eliminate that tyranny, which evidently is zilch.

Nice try, Mr. Bush. Now get that pen and eliminate the dry foot wet foot.

As a reminder, this is what I wrote on December 13, 2005 about this monument:

(the image above was in the original article)

The Monument to the Victims of Communism is going to be finally built in Washington D.C. I've been looking for the input of the Cuban American politicians in this monument, and till now, I have no positive news. I don't have any indication either that amongst the imaginery of the monument a Cuban rafter or a raft is included. Maybe we need to start pressuring those politicians at the same time that we remind them, and ourselves, that freedom is not free, as it's written very clearly in the Korean War Memorial, also in D.C.
Maybe we should use the momentum, and the fact that President Bush is the Honorary Chairman of the Foundation responsible for the monument to remind him of the criminality of the wet-foot dry-foot regulation, and who we are sending back to the communist gulag the very same victims of communism that we are honoring.
Also, we need to say here that there's an effort in the Senate to eliminate the "birthright citizenship", the tragic thing is that the anti-immigration effort is likely to include political refugees as well, because the proponents mix anti-immigration and anti-embargo in the same breath. Again, no visible oposition from our politicians in the Senate and the House. That would do away, if approved, with one of the most important ammendments of the U.S. Constitution. I hope a few voices raise and that other monstruosity goes to the drains. Of course, the politicians are not willing to recognize the real dangers of the illegal immigration versus the legitimate search of asylum, from part of people who flee communism.


Statue by Thomas Marsh, based on the efigy of Liberty erected by Chinese students in Tian An Men square.