Jimmy Carter's speech broadcast to the Cuban people

That vision includes a Cuba fully integrated into a democratic hemisphere, participating in a Free Trade Area of the Americas and with our citizens traveling without restraint to visit each other. I want a massive student exchange between our universities. I want the people of the United States and Cuba to share more than a love of baseball and wonderful music. I want us to be friends, and to respect each other.

Oh my God, how horrible. Stone him! Stone the infidel!

I am not using a U.S. definition of ''democracy.'' The term is embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Cuba signed in 1948, and it was defined very precisely by all the other countries of the Americas in the Inter-American Democratic Charter last September. It is based on some simple premises: all citizens are born with the right to choose their own leaders, to define their own destiny, to speak freely, to organize political parties, trade unions and non-governmental groups, and to have fair and open trials.

To everyone who was upset with Jimmy Carter going to Cuba -- and I wasn't too happy about it myself. -- have you been paying attention the last forty years? Isolating Cuba clearly hasn't worked. All it's done is hurt the Cuban people and given Castro someone to blame for any problems. Oh, and made the US look like a bully. I think it's time to try engagement, but that's politically impossible right now. So we're going to go on pretending that Castro is another Saddam. He's a bad man, but he's not in that class.