Does anyone remember what it was that turned America hostile toward the tropical paradise of Cuba? Our president tells us that “we’re caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy, and ‘Yanquis’ and the Cold War.” That is how University of Chicago adjunct law professors talk about American foreign policy. So, what got America so riled up over the Castro brothers and Cuban communists?

As I recall, it was a bipartisan hostility. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, if memory serves, began it. His successor, John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, continued it, and he and his brother Bob actually dragged the nation through the Cuban missile crisis. Then Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican, and literally every president thereafter continued to harass and afflict the Castros until President Obama had the brilliant idea of simply using his executive powers to relax various commercial and travel restrictions against Cuba. Yet why did America’s hostility toward Cuba start in the first place?

America seems to have taken offense when Fidel Castro said some rude things about us. He took the side of the USSR against us in the Cold War and sent troops abroad to foment revolution. He also sent spies. Institutions that America has cherished, such as democracy and the rule of law, were not always respected in Castro’s Cuba, where there existed political prisoners who were treated badly and often killed.

A very persuasive case was made against the Castro brothers by Armando Valladares in the early 1980s, when he published his prison memoirs, “Against All Hope.” In that book he chronicled almost unbelievable cruelty during 22 years of imprisonment for philosophically opposing communism. He was arrested at 23 and suffered through torture, solitary confinement and witnessing friends dragged before firing squads. He ate putrid food, suffered squalid conditions, illness and forced labor until the protests of world leaders such as Franois Mitterrand led to his release.

Mr. Obama’s insouciance toward American sacrifice during the Cold War marks him out as the only American president that does not understand the Cold War. It also marks him as the only president that does not like American history and, in truth, does not like America. While he was visiting with Raul Castro and scratching his head about the inscrutability of America’s long history of opposing the Castro brothers, my guess is that their prisons still hold latter-day Armando Valladareses.