Amidst all the coverage of the handshake between President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, including the hue and cry raised by conservatives outraged by the unseemliness of it, the real significance of the act, fraught with supreme irony, appears to have gone unnoticed.

Contrary to the giddy reporting of the Left-leaning mainstream media, the handshake hardly represents the spirit of Nelson Mandela reaching out from the grave to promote "reconciliation" between the U.S. and Cuba. As some conservative commentators have observed, two Commies shaking hands is hardly a news story.

But what about the supreme irony that, at the funeral of a man celebrated and eulogized for dedicating his entire life to combating racism against blacks, the "first black president of the United States" shakes hands with one of the leaders of a regime that is probably the worst practitioner of institutionalized racism against blacks in the entire world? In fact, the institutionalized racism in Cuba has been described as "Stalinist Apartheid"!

That irony is compounded by the fact that, while the "official" Mandela narrative would have us believe that he was held for 27 years as a "prisoner of conscience", solely because he dared to oppose apartheid, in reality that opposition was expressed through terrorism, and he was imprisoned for being a terrorist. And all through his imprisonment, he could have regained his freedom by publicly repudiating his terrorist activities, but he stubbornly refused to do so. Although Mandela did eventually renounce terrorism, for many years the phrase "unrepentant terrorist" was as apt a description of Mandela as it still is for Bill Ayers.

In contrast, Cuba's KGB-designed dungeons and torture chambers have held (and still hold!) scores of black Cubans who peacefully protested the institutionalized racism that has permeated that "island paradise" ever since the Castro regime seized power in 1959. Some of those prisoners' "crimes" consisted of publicly quoting Dr. Martin Luther King!

As prolific Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova (author of, among others, "Fidel, Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant" and "Exposing the Real Ché Guevara") says in this April 2013 Townhall.com column:

Many Cuban blacks suffered longer incarceration in Castro and Che's torture chambers than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa's. In fact, Castro's victims qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history.

Fontova wrote that column as commentary on the lavish wedding anniversary trip to Cuba by Beyoncé and Jay-Z, black American entertainers who had previously been vociferous in condemnation of apartheid in South Africa, but who turned a blind eye to what Black Cubans endure on a daily basis (including being routinely harassed for what U.S. activists would call "walking while black").

But why should Beyoncé and Jay-Z be any different from the Congressional Black Caucus? That group, whose members see everything else through a racial prism, were, on their 2009 junket to Cuba, far too busy fawning over the Castro brothers' "hospitality" and trying to cut cellphone deals to notice that Black Cubans are systematically denied opportunities in, for example, Cuba's enormous tourist industry, private enterprise or, for that matter, government positions. (See my own Sept. 2012 AT piece, "Rep. Cleaver loves the Castro brothers"

And so, why should President Obama be concerned with something that neither his CBC buddies nor some of his favorite entertainers took notice of?

And why should he see the ironic light that casts on his handshake with Raul Castro at the Mandela memorial?

The irony is as lost on all of them as it is on the Obama-sycophant media and the low-information public. But here's hoping it won't be lost on American Thinkers!

Stu Tarlowe has penned more than 65 pieces for American Thinker.