“Cuban dissidents, so long the center of U.S. policy toward the island, won’t be invited to Secretary of State John Kerry’s historic flag-raising at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Friday, vividly illustrating how U.S. policy is shifting focus to its single-party government.” So begins an Associated Press report.

Understandably, several people have asked me to comment on this. I’m afraid I can’t. I mean, I’ve been commenting — and interviewing and reporting and analyzing — for many years. I’m afraid I’m about spent.

Do you get the impression that the Obama administration is warmer toward the Castro dictatorship than it is toward its opponents and victims? I do. And if that makes me a McCarthyite, so be it.

Over the weekend, about 90 dissidents were arrested in Cuba. (Read about it here.) This is par for the course — but repression has increased since Obama declared his opening right after the midterm elections in the U.S. (They don’t have elections in Cuba — not democratic ones.) Some of the dissidents were wearing an Obama mask. They did not mean that in a complimentary way.

I damn myself for being tired. I once said to my friend Mauricio Claver-Carone, “How can you get up every day and do battle with these apologists and propagandists and liars?” (He is a Cuban-American democracy activist, who mans the website Capitol Hill Cubans. He is a scourge of the Castros and their defenders.) He responded with the slogan of Leopoldo López, the Venezuelan oppositionist who is a guest in the chavistas’ jails: “El que se cansa, pierde” — “He who tires, loses.”

I’m not tired. I’m just resting for a second in anticipation of future bursts and blasts . . .

P.S. Mauricio has written about the recent arrests here. Not only were these people arrested, they of course had the hell beaten out of them, which is how the Castroites roll.

P.P.S. You know who never tires? Democracy leaders on the island. Through beatings and imprisonment and torture — and betrayal at the hands of people in the Free World — they keep going. It’s almost a miracle.

P.P.P.S. For years, democracy has been in bad odor in America. The Left doesn’t like it, of course — their heart beats for the Castros, the chavistas, the can-do Chinese Communist Party, and others. And significant elements on the right don’t like it, because democracy smacks of George W. Bush and “neocons” and war and general ickiness. But it’s extremely important, democracy. Ask those who don’t have it.