Ten years after Barack Obama’s surprise reopening of diplomatic relations with Cuba, rolled back by Donald Trump in 2017, some are now opining on President Biden's legacy by calling for a return to Obama's failed policy. But they are leaving out key facts to advance their claim that the 2014 thaw was successful.   The late Democratic senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, observed that "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." This also holds true in the conversation over U.S.-Cuba policy. President Obama’s claim that the U.S. "changing its relationship with the people of Cuba" was among “the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years” ignored the past actions of the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations to do the same.   The repeated good-faith unilateral concessions by Washington, under these four prior presidencies, were responded to by Havana with actions that negatively impacted U.S. national interests in Latin America, Africa and in the United States. This included facilitating the entry of narcotics into the United States, giving terrorists safe harbor, resources and training that resulted in the deaths of Americans on American soil in 1975 and 1977, and directly participating in state terrorism in international airspace that resulted in the deaths of Americans in 1996.   In 2015, the Obama State Department removed Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism in response to a public demand by Raul Castro that the full restoration of diplomatic relations be contingent upon Cuba being removed from the list.  During Obama's thaw with Havana, violence increased against Cuban dissidents, the Cuban government weaponized migration, with over 120,000 Cubans entering the United States through Central America, and U.S. diplomats in Havana began suffering brain damage in 2016 in what the Biden administration would call "anomalous health incidents but became better known as the Havana Syndrome.   Furthermore, defenders of Obama's Cuba policy make no mention of diplomatic slights against Obama by Havana, including Raul Castro presiding over a military parade on Jan. 2, 2017, where Cuban soldiers chanted they'd shoot Obama so many times in the head that they'd make him a hat of lead.  Despite this, on his way out of office, Obama provided two additional concessions responding positively to two long-standing demands by the Cuban dictatorship: ending the Wet-Foot Dry-Foot policy, which allowed Cuban legal status if they touched U.S. soil, and the Cuban Professional Medical Parole program, which provided trafficked Cuban doctors with asylum. These policy changes hurt ordinary Cubans, but helped the dictatorship.  The Trump administration did not end all of the Obama thaw, but did pursue a policy of not providing resources to the Cuban military, and providing victims of the dictatorship a new avenue for redress.  After normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations, Obama's secretary of State, John Kerry said in an interview on Sept. 9, 2020, "It's fair to say that everybody shares a little bit of disappointment about the direction that the government in Cuba chose to go." Kerry continued, "Cuba seemed to harden down after the initial steps were taken."   Candidate Joe Biden on the campaign trail in 2020 said he wanted to return to the Obama opening, but facts on the ground forced him to change course. The images coming out of Cuba of regime agents beating and gunning down nonviolent protesters during nationwide protests of July 2021, then following up with draconian prison sentences against many of the demonstrators, made rapprochement with the dictatorship politically untenable.  Nevertheless, President Biden, 10 months after the July 2021 protests and crackdown, provided unilateral concessions to Havana in what was euphemistically described as “new measures to support the Cuban people” but contained specific actions that empowered the dictatorship. For example, the expansion of educational exchanges ignored FBI concerns about Havana using these openings to recruit spies and undermine U.S. national security. This policy also loosened travel restrictions.  The Cuban military through its conglomerate, the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., and its sub-entity Gaviota, the military’s tourism arm, profited from the expansion of authorized travel by the Obama and Biden administrations, but the Castro regime could not fully exploit it due to poor decisions taken by Havana.   Moscow offered Havana $1.36 billion in 2015 to repair and build new generators, but Cuban officials did not take them up on it, due to other priorities. While Cuba’s infrastructure collapses due to lack of maintenance, the dictatorship continues to build luxury hotels across the country with their own generators for tourists, as millions of Cubans are kept in the dark. It did not have to be that way, but it is Havana's — not Washington's — fault.  The European Union and Canada continue to send millions of Euros and Canadian dollars to the Cuban dictatorship. The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, stated in Havana on May 25, 2023, that the 27-member bloc remained Cuba’s biggest trading partner and one devoted to “mutual respect.” He said that the EU accounted for about one-third of the island’s foreign trade, “versus 8% by China or 8% by Russia,” reported Euractiv on May 26, 2023.   This economic engagement has not prevented Cuban soldiers from donning Russian uniforms and fighting for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, Havana openly supporting Moscow's invasion of its European neighbor ,or Cuban agents assisting Nicolas Maduro in undermining democracy in Venezuela and torturing Venezuelan dissidents.  The advocates for returning to the Obama Cuba policy would have the United States join in the complicity of the European Union and Canada in subsidizing with tax dollars a 65-year-old dictatorship, helping to enrich a corrupt ruling class while everyday Cubans continue to suffer under their oppressive rule, and providing Havana resources to help create more Nicaraguas and Venezuelas in Latin America and sponsor international terrorism.   John Suarez is the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, and a former program officer for Latin America programs at Freedom House.