Beautiful Horizons

Kerry on Cuba - The Reaction

The right has been quick to jump on the Kerry-bashing bandwagon regarding the Senator's lukewarm support for the Varela Project as I wrote about here. I was referred to as being "curiously soft" on Kerry by Tacitus in this post never mind the fact that I said that Kerry was "rightfully being taken to task" for his lukewarm support of the Varela Project, a tone which was similar to the writer of the article, Andrés Oppenheimer.

Inexplicable

I'm still wondering how the case for freedom in Cuba is helped by incidents like this:

More Fallout From Bush's New Cuba Policy

Not everyone in Miami's Cuban exile community is happy with the recent policy outlined by the Bush administration towards Cuba:

Four days after President Bush's announcement, leaders of five organizations said at a press conference they will encourage exiles to work against the president's reelection -- putting them at odds with other exiles who support Bush's new policy.

''Some 140,000 Cuban exiles visited the island last year; 100,000 of those lived in South Florida,'' said Andres Gomez, head of the Antonio Maceo Brigade. ``This will mean many of those who can't travel to the island will vote against Bush -- and for a candidate who allows travel to Cuba.''

Obviously only time will tell. This should give the president (whose plan calls for limiting exiles visits to once every three years as opposed to once a year now) pause, especially if he still hangs on to the claim that he's a "compassionate conservative":

Felix Ramirez, 51, who arrived in the United States in 1969 and says he visits the island three times a year and sends cash to relatives regularly, said he has a terminally ill sister in Matanzas. He fears he won't see her again.

''She's dying,'' he said. ``In three years, she'll be dead and buried and I can visit her bones in some cemetery.''

I'm still wondering how that will get rid of Castro and bring democracy to Cuba.

"New" Cuba Policy Guidance

From today's Miami Herald:

A 500-page report on U.S. policy toward Cuba due at the White House on Monday recommends limiting Cuban-Americans' visits to the island, significantly cutting remittances and drastically reducing the money that U.S. visitors can spend there, activists familiar with the document said.

The recommendations by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba are the result of a six-month review ordered by President Bush to hasten and prepare for a democratic transition in communist-ruled Cuba.

[...]

Washington and Miami activists familiar with the document said it recommends putting ''more teeth'' into U.S. sanctions on Cuba but doesn't present any major new initiatives.

''Is there anything out of the box, that will blow people away? Not really,'' said a Washington official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

''I think a lot of people in Miami are going to jump up and down and applaud, but then the issue becomes: Are they really going to follow through?'' the official said of the administration.

The frustrating aspect of all this is that continuing to let the US be the dominant figure in ending Castro's totalitarian reign has only served to alienate many other Latin American countries from joining in on condemning Castro. There has been some success in the past couple of years with Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle and former Mexican Foreign Minister, Jorge Castañeda, but these have been few and far between.

The issue needs a different approach, but I don't see any fresh ideas coming from either party, just more of the status quo

Is Raúl a Threat to Fidel?

Interesting column today by Andrés Oppenheimer:

Here's the latest theory about the power struggle taking place inside Cuba: It's not between President Fidel Castro and the dissidents, nor between modernizers and conservatives within the ruling Communist Party. It's between Fidel and his brother Raúl.

That's one of the most interesting conclusions of Ricardo Pascoe Pierce, a leftist politician who served as Mexico's ambassador to Cuba for two years until late 2002, in his book En el filo (On the Brink). The 500-page book is scheduled to appear in Mexican bookstores (in Spanish only) starting next week.

I read the book as soon as I got it. Pascoe is one of the smartest thinkers of Mexico's old-guard nationalist left, and I wanted to see if living on the island had changed his generous view of the Castro dictatorship.

For a long time the belief has been that Raúl is Fidel's successor, but Oppenheimer is not sure that Castro will have any influence on who follows him:

It's very interesting, but I wonder whether it will matter. If Latin American history taught us any lesson, it's that after many decades of totalitarian rule, the pendulum always swings to the other side. Both Raúl Castro and Lage may end up as an asterisk in Cuba's post-Castro era, as the last vestiges of an old regime everybody will want to forget.

As the Cuban government's official poet Roberto Fernández Retamar reportedly told Pascoe in a private conversation revealed in the book, Castro's recent decision to change the Constitution and declare socialism irreversible was ''absurd,'' because ''everything we have seen in recent years is that everything is reversible in this world.'' I couldn't have said it better.

One can only hope they're right.

The Republicans Do Not Speak With One Voice On Cuba

Let me state first of all, that I certainly have no problem with that fact. In fact, I applaud diversity of opinion on this issue. Why do I make such a claim about the republicans? Because on the same day that the Bush Administration promised to get even tougher on Castro's Cuba, this took place:

Sen. Larry Craig and U.S. Rep. Butch Otter, both of Idaho, "are pushing very hard to lift the travel restrictions," said Craig spokesman Mike Tracy, who attended the encounter with Castro at the Palace of the Revolution. The 22 other members of the trade and cultural delegation were also present, Tracy said.

Their meeting with Castro took place as the Bush administration announced it would freeze the bank accounts of companies controlled by the Cuban government or Cuban nationals that sell Americans illegal travel packages to the communist island.

Craig told reporters Saturday he thought the travel ban would be lifted by next year. He spoke after Idaho delegation members signed trade and cultural agreements with the Cuban government in front of Ernest Hemingway's former estate outside Havana.

While I am most assuredly not comfortable with the idea of sitting next to Castro and not making an issue of what has been going on in terms of human rights issues there, I think that there has been a bit of an obsession with orthodoxy in terms of dealing with Cuba. I'm beginning to think that the only way I will ever get to see Cuba (a country, as an Anglo who grew up in Miami I have always wanted to visit) is if I get elected to Congress or the Senate. I do not see the slightest bit of evidence that keeping Americans from traveling to Cuba has harmed the Castro regime. If anything, it has helped perpetuate warped stereotypes about norteamericanos. I also do not see how the world is a better, safer place with Ibrahim Ferrer being denied a visa.

If anyone has any doubts as to how I feel about El Jefe, I suggest that you click here and start scrolling down. I would love nothing more than to see him in dock at the ICC. Simply to go against the grain on this issue and to disagree with the conventional wisdom coming from Castro's most vocal opponents doesn't make you an admirer.

As Will Plasencia, a Cuban-American and a fine blogger wrote in the comments to this post:

I'm Cuban-American, and I always dismayed at how little introspection the community has in public forums though many are [too] quick to point fingers at outsiders when they shine a light on us. [italics in original]

There is no society (and probably no individual) in the world in my opinion that would not benefit from some introspection. Well put, Will.

Venezuela Becomes Cuba's Chief Creditor

According to this article in the Miami Herald (and originally in the Wall Street Journal) Cuba owes Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA some $752 million, comprising 80% of PDVSA's total debt from its clients.

Assuming that the facts in the story are true - and despite my antipathy for the Journal's editorial page I wouldn't be surprised that this is true - this can't be good for Venezuela, especially given, as the article points out, how difficult it will be for Cuba to meet its obligations. I'm certain that Chávez could care less.

Cuba and Bioweapons

Obviously not having learned from questionable claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration is recycling the charge uttered by the very definition of a loose cannon, John Bolton earlier this year that Cuba was developing dual use bioweapons technology and selling it to rogue states.

Here's what a Bush administration official said last year to the Washington Post on this subject:

A Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Cuba has "a number of projects that are what could be dual-use things, but they're probably not. . . . It's a question more of them exciting suspicions by not being open. I don't know of any tangible stuff that shows yes, they are making anthrax [or anything else]. There is stuff we don't know about."

Here's what Assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday:

Noriega was responding to a question from Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, who asked why Washington continued to enforce a four-decade sanctions regime against Havana.

Dodd quoted Secretary of State Colin Powell as having said Cuba did not constitute a military threat to the United States and asked: "If it is no longer a threat, why would we maintain those restrictions?"

"We continue ... to believe that Cuba has at least a limited, developmental, offensive biological weapons research and development effort and is providing dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states," said Noriega, the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America.

"There are various aspects of the sort of threat that Cuba might represent," he said, adding that this position was not inconsistent with Powell's statement.

If you read this blog regularly, you'll agree that my position regarding Cuba is clear and unambiguous: pro-democracy, pro-human rights, anti-Castro.

That being said, this really strikes me as silly. While I certainly wouldn't have put it past them when Cuba was a Soviet client state, it's worth noting the last paragraph in this story published today:

Washington, which lists Cuba along with North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan as states that sponsor terrorism, twice accused Castro's government last year of running a biological weapons program. Bush officials making the charges failed to produce any evidence. [my emphasis]

God, don't they ever learn?

Some Pathways to the Future

I believe two things about the future of Cuba:

1.) If Castro dies or is rendered incapacitated in some way, shape or form today, Cuba will not become a democracy tomorrow. I have no doubt that there are mechanisms in place to perpetuate the same type of repressive government that exists there now with or without Castro

2.) Change in Cuba will come from within Cuba.

More Thoughts on Cuba

My previous post regarding my thoughts on the Cuban embargo generated a few trackbacks to other blogs. Some were neutral, some were praiseworthy and one referred to me as "daft", when it appears that they obviously either misread or misunderstood my position. This individual also made the following comment in the comments section of this Heretical Ideas post:

If either you propose Castro's assasination [sic] or an invasion, I would be prone to support you.

I will be doing neither, so unless your mind is open to other courses I would suggest that you stop reading now. Assassinating Castro would be illegal, has been attempted before (remember the exploding cigar and beard poisoning studies) and from a purely cold-blooded practical standpoint would make him a martyr. It also plays upon a myth many in the extreme right have about removing Castro from power: that once that is accomplished, Cuba will quickly revert to a tranquil democracy. This sentiment ignores the structure and bureaucracy that exists in the Cuban government. It also ignores Cuba's history. While he's a strong symbol and figure, simply getting rid of Castro will not liberate Cuba, and making him a martyr would only fuel resentment toward the US.

It's worth noting, by the way, that Judicial Watch recently managed to get a favorable ruling from the Belgian Supreme Court to proceed with a murder case against Castro in Belgium. Given that the Belgian government recently changed the law providing for universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity under pressure from the Bush adminstration, it's doubtful that this prosecution will proceed. There went the baby with the bath water.

As far as an invasion goes, the US agreed not to invade Cuba again as part of the agreement to remove the missiles from Cuba, secondly, let me point out that Cuba is not a threat to the US despite the monomania of John Bolton, and while the blogger who wrote the above statement might be prepared to accept civilian casualties in Cuba, I would imagine most Cubans regardless of how they feel about Castro are not, and I'm certain that most Americans would not support such an invasion. I see no reason to turn the US into a pariah by invading a significantly weaker nation that holds no threat to us.

So let me take this opportunity to make a few key points - clearly and unequivocally - so that I am not misunderstood: