TWO THOMAS FRIEDMANS IN ONE! Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

When asked this past Sunday by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria why Obama should visit Cuba, the far left Timesman replied:

“It’s a great idea. Go down there, engage with the people, show them the best of America, our economic model, our political openness. Whoever out there in your audience is afraid of Cuba, Fareed, please have them raise their hand. I’m not afraid of Cuba, OK? It’s time — well past time that we ended our isolation of Cuba. It’s a lab test that utterly failed. I think the more we engage them, the more we will enhance their own move to a more open political system. I think it’s a great idea.”

Perhaps not too open;  as Friedman infamously wrote in 2009, “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

And there’s no doubt that Friedman himself has never been afraid of Cuba; in late April of 2000, he chillingly began one of his columns, “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart.”

In the 1960s, National Review famously ran a cartoon of Castro titled, “I got my job through the New York Times,” thanks to the efforts of one of Friedman’s predecessors, Herbert Matthews, who did for Castro’s PR rep among New York limousine lefties what Walter Duranty did for Stalin. So perhaps Friedman merely wanted to send Castro a potential cub reporter to show the ropes.