Seduced by Cuba’s Honey Pot of Power

March 5, 2009

Cuba’s Raúl Castro shook up his Cabinet big time this week—the largest change in decades—when he ousted, promoted or shifted around more than 20 officials.

Most prominent—and surprising to many here in the United States—was the dismissal of Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque and Vice President Carlos Lage, known as the brains of recent economic reforms.

The next day, Raúl’s older brother, Fidel, wrote a letter saying he had been consulted about these changes (oh, but of course he was!).

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BABY STEPS ON US Policy in CUBA; COLOMBIA AND THE SUMMIT

February 26, 2009

This week, two small steps for U.S. policy on Cuba.

First up: Sen. Richard Lugar’s new report, “Changing Cuba Policy-In the United States National Interest.” In short, it calls the existing policies ineffective, finding major reform in the United States’ best national (and economic) interests.

The recent leadership changes in Washington and Havana have created an opportunity to “reevaluate a complex relationship marked by misunderstanding, suspicion and open hostility,” Sen. Lugar wrote in his letter to fellow senators.

Several traditional realists, like Pedro Burelli, a former member of the PDVSA—Venezuela’s state oil company—board of directors have applauded this report’s recommendations as pragmatic, rather than “coming from the perspective of the teary-eyed leftist camp.”

And, the report, I’m told, has largely received positive feedback.

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Does the U.S. Embargo on Cuba Protect Human Rights?

February 25, 2009

Frankly, the Cuban embargo has always been a difficult issue for me. Publicly I’ve avoided the issue largely because I’ve always believed it’s been a huge distraction for what is the main issue concerning Cuba: the almost incomprehensible level of repression and control that the Castro regime exercises over its population. So, in my often-failed objective to avoid discussing the embargo, I want now (in the heightened debate over President Barack Obama’s Cuba policy) to try to weigh the pros and cons as I view them in my own humble opinion. Fortunately, as a very thoughtful and balanced recent staff trip report by the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations demonstrates, a number of groups are trying to bridge the divide that has traditionally hamstrung policy toward Cuba.

Cuba defies modern explanation, especially in this hemisphere: constitutional and legal restrictions on the rights of citizens to congregate, denial of citizens to express political views, sham elections in which only one party is allowed to compete, the regular detention and harassment of human rights activists by the police or state-controlled neighborhood committees, and jailing of dissidents through kangaroo courts on trumped up charges of treason and violence. In a 1997 report, Human Rights Watch described it best in the title of its study, Cuba’s Repressive Machinery.

This level of institutional, legal and political control is incomprehensible for many in a hemisphere that experienced (in all but country—Cuba) the third wave of democracy starting in 1978. In part, I think, Cuba's hemispheric anomaly explains the lame and sometimes pathetic response of many regional human rights groups to the abuses on the island. Many quite simply can’t fathom that level of control, having grown up under more bloody but less subtle forms of authoritarianism.

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Stasis Across the Straits

January 8, 2009

On January 1, 2009, the Cuban government celebrated the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara’s triumphant march into Havana that marked the end of the reign of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship and the beginning of the Cuban revolution. The occasion was quite frankly sad, not just for what it said about a revolution that has persisted despite its failures, but also for the persistence of U.S. policy that seems almost designed to prop up the Castro brothers.

The two phenomena—a regime and a policy both frozen in time—co-exist in mutual dependency. The Cuban government and its geriatric leadership (average age over 70) has been able to blame the chronic failures of its failed economic system on U.S. policy, deflecting legitimate popular frustration with food shortages, lack of medicine, lack of opportunities, and economic stagnation.

At the same time, the January 1 celebration came just 20 days before Fidel Castro will see the inaugeration of 11th president of the country that since the early 1960s has sought his removal from power by all means possible. Assasination plots, an invasion by former countrymen, isolation, and an economic embargo established first in 1960 and tightened in 1996 with the passage of the Cuban Liberty and Solidarity Act (otherwise known as the Helms-Burton Law) are among the least surreal.

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