Con: Cuba’s price of admission to democratic ranks: Fully restore political and economic freedoms
WASHINGTON — EDITOR’S NOTE: The writer is addressing the question, Should the U.S. remove all trade and travel restrictions on Cuba?
Even before his inauguration, President Barack Obama promised to improve relations with Cuba. He has since taken steps to let Cuban-Americans travel freely to the island and send more remittances. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has authorized talks with Cuban officials and opened the door for Cuba’s possible return to the Organization of American States.
Yet many in Congress, the academic and business communities want to go further, faster. They’ve called on Obama to lift the ban on travel by all American citizens and end trade restrictions altogether.
Officials of the administration are wary of yielding to this pressure. Why? Two reasons. For one, no president, as leader of the Free World, wants to embrace the Cuba of the Castros without some tangible proof that the 50-year, anti-American dictatorship is loosening its repression of the Cuban people.
Obama has made future steps contingent on something positive occurring in Cuba: release of political prisoners, freedom of travel or freedom of speech—signs of an opening toward democratic change.
The Castro regime’s human rights record is bad. With 200 prisoners of conscience and regular police surveillance and repression, the Castro system routinely denies freedom of speech, association, information and travel.
The very grass-roots foundations of freedom—civil society, trade unions and individual enterprise—are routinely squashed by the juggernaut of the Cuban state. The communist regime deadens the lives of millions of Cubans, leaving them apathetic, isolated and devoid of hope.
Second, no president would feel comfortable taking steps that would help fill the coffers of Castro Brothers Inc.
Cuba’s regressive government controls 90 percent of all economic activity. It writes every contract and enforces labor discipline. It directs the judicial and bureaucratic machinery and doles out wages and profits as it chooses. The cupola of the communist regime, not the people or the market, calls every shot and reaps the lion’s share of benefits.
The 1962 embargo has been substantially modified over time. The U.S. now sells hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food on a cash-and-carry basis. Remittances from the United States add hundreds of millions more and are certain to grow. Lifting of restrictions on telecommunications will allow freer communications, if the Cubans so desire.
Two million foreign tourists bask annually in Cuba’s sun while the majority of Cubans subsist on less than $20 a month. The United States doesn’t impede Cuba’s ability to barter, borrow or trade with the rest of the world. Venezuela’s anti-American president Hugo Chavez props up the Castro regime with an estimated $2 billion annually. Nevertheless, Fidel Castro calls U.S. policy “genocidal.” More than a billion dollars in trade and remittances has thus far bought a goose egg’s worth of liberalization and human rights changes. Would additional billions accomplish anymore without a profound structural, democratic transition in Cuba? In 2009, the partial embargo serves two purposes. It’s still a leveraging point for bargained change in U.S.-Cuba relations. Second, it represents the moral divide between liberty and repression, between dictatorship and democracy.
Contemporary realists argue that in a world of radically diverse sovereign states such political distinctions are irrelevant, but most Americans aren’t buying this.
So far, the Cuban leadership has been unresponsive to Obama’s overtures. Cuba continues to insist it’s the victim rather than the aggressor. Only a unilateral removal of all U.S. restrictions will impress Havana’s aged hardliners.
For Fidel Castro, venomous as ever, serious dialogue on human rights and democracy is tantamount to the U.S. accepting “the whip and yoke” of slavery. The same old mindset, the familiar intransigence threatens to stymie hopes for improved relations.
The Cuba embargo is like a wall, starkly demarcating two opposed ways of thinking. It should have fallen in 1989 or in the 1990s as the rest of Latin America and much of the world moved to democracy.
It can still quickly disappear once a dissenter like Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet walks out of prison, when blogger Yoani Sanchez is free to write and travel without hindrance, and when a humble Afro-Cuban cane-cutter like Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez is able to speak his mind without fear of retribution and imprisonment.
In the end, Cuba’s hope for change centers on Havana, not Washington.
Ray Walser is a senior analyst for Latin American policy at the Heritage Foundation. Readers may write to the author in care of The Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Ave. NE, Washington, D.C. 20002; Web site: www.heritage.org.
Jun 1, 2009 at 7:42 a.m.
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"Exactly, what banks and car companies were nationalized...I believe they were given loans and shareholder control"
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Share holder control is nationalization.
May 31, 2009 at 9:48 p.m.
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My brother visited Cuba about ten years ago and the poverty and repression was beyond anything imagined. They went to the movies to see E.T. and it was only about 15 minutes long. Any footage showing possessions or wealth had been cut out...just headshots of the actors remained. Before leaving, they gave their guide a couple T-shirts and he started to cry. They had just doubled his wardrobe.
May 31, 2009 at 5:26 p.m.
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Well if the Russian media says its true then it must be 100% true.
May 31, 2009 at 4:17 p.m.
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Exactly, what banks and car companies were nationalized and how exactly were they nationalized SuperDave? I believe they were given loans and shareholder control but this is nothing like what mr chavez has done. It would be more akin to the exporting countries of Europe.
May 31, 2009 at 11:52 a.m.
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You guys are still reading the comments of "darwin1"? You are wasting precious time LOL. Anyway, it seems to me Obama, instead of wanting Cuba to become more "democratic", is making the US more socialist, for example by nationalizing some of the banks and auto companies. Not to mention "regular police surveillance and repression" - no wait, that's Cuba. (Or is it?).
Thanks to postor1 for all the great info!
May 31, 2009 at 11:41 a.m.
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Neither Washington nor Miami demand that China or Vietnam or Saudi Arabia have political systems modeled on the one we have here in the United States.
Why is Cuba held to such a standard? How will Cubans understand things like the Electoral College and why it's better that the candidate who received LESS VOTES, such as George W. Bush did in 2000, should become President.
What kind of democracy is that?
And, talking about bailouts, how about the billions of dollars of US debt which is being held by China, and no one in the US tells the Chinese they need to change their political system to hold mountains of US debt.
Follow the Cuban story and research it yourself in over 100,000 items available for free with nearly nine-years of postings:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
Thanks,
Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California
May 31, 2009 at 10:45 a.m.
May 31, 2009 at 8:41 a.m.
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"you and the rest don't have advance degrees"
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There you go again saying things that are not true...
May 31, 2009 at 8:33 a.m.
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Well since it seems that none of you can answer even a very simple question, I find your attacks to be the hallmark if simple minded ignorance. The definition of socialism is pretty much anything run by the government such as the military. And since most right wing reactionaries think the government can't do anything right I would say that the comments of DiGriz, RAF, and andre are wonderful evidence of the governments' failures.
andre you and the rest don't have advance degrees because colleges unlike the military actually have standards and not just pretend ones.
May 31, 2009 at 7:17 a.m.
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andre how dare you. It is not politically correct to embarrass or question the beliefs of those among us who are "impaired" in their beliefs no mater how many pieces of paper they payed for to say they are smarter then others.
May 31, 2009 at 1:15 a.m.
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How exactly do you define socialism? Are the democratically elected governments of Northern Europe socialist? Isn't the NFL socialist since it is a collective ownership where profits are shared? I guess how do you differentiate between authoritarianism, military dictatorship and socialism? How is fascism different than socialism since in both cases the state is in control of industry.
We know Castro was brutal and cruel, however, so was Batiste. The people who benefited from Batiste's brutality are upset because they lost the power and privilege they once held under his brutality. The systems may have been different but the brutality was the same. Lives taken by communists/socialist are no less than the lives taken by right wing death squads.
May 30, 2009 at 8:07 p.m.
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Wow, who exactly are you preaching to? Yourself. I understand you don't like repressive regimes but engagement always works better than isolation. Isolation only works when it is followed by invasion and I don't see that happening. Do you? Also, did you realize that Castro didn't just magically appear in charge. Batiste was a petty dictator too or have you forgotten?
May 30, 2009 at 2:29 a.m.
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While Obama calls for talks on migration, everyone looks for a way to get out of Cuba.
Son of Juan Almeida arrested for trying to leave Cuba
May 27 - Juan Juan Almeida, son of Comandante Juan Almeida Bosque, was detained and accused of trying to leave Cuba illegally.
Juan Almeida Bosque is one of the "comandantes históricos" of the Cuban "robolution." His son, Juan Juan Almeida Garcia, is a lawyer who has been trying to leave Cuba to receive medical treatment.
Almeida Garcia had previously traveled to Belgium to receive treatment for a rheumatological condition at the Erasme hospital of Brussels.
But since 2004 he has not been allowed to travel by orders "from the high command."
I have a question:
Why would the son of one of the regime's top comandantes go to get medical care outside the island, when Michael Moore and other useful idiots are always saying that Cuba's health care is so great? I am sure that he would be admitted at those hospitals for foreigners, where regular Cubans cannot go.
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Florida AP
Thursday, 05.07.09
The Associated Press
KEY LARGO, Fla. -- Eight months later, the four bodies found floating in the Florida Keys have been identified as Cuban rafters.
The Monroe County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday it used DNA, a tattoo, an uncle's identification and the process of elimination. Authorities say they also received help from an independent journalist in Cuba and the Cuban Democracy Movement in Miami.
The bodies were identified as Jorge Gonzalez, Osmani Segura, Rolando Alberna, and Ivan Pelaez.
Their decomposed bodies chewed by sharks were found after last summer's Tropical Storm Fay swept through the area. Family members said the men were from a group who fled Cuba on a homemade raft to avoid being jailed for their human rights activism. The raft and the others on board were never found.
May 30, 2009 at 1:52 a.m.
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America's stance
You cannot appease nor negotiate with EVIL! The only ones who will benefit from these actions are the Castros.
100,000 cubans murdered....more than 300,000 have suffered prison...almost one third of population in exile...and thousands drowning in the ocean every year escaping from hell....and they only think of Cuba as a "vacation" spot.
I remember well during the "apartheid" years in South Africa, how all these anti-embago voices (for Cuba) demanded from the United States a total economic blockade. Now they happily advocate for total "engagement" with a 50 years old totalitarian regime.
Here is a famous quote by Dr. Martin Luther King:
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. ... So in order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system." From Dr King's book "Stride Toward Freedom," Page 51.
For some insensitives, the Castro brothers are more important than the stifled freedom voices languishing in Castros' jails....but most American citizens do not dismiss history as lightly as you seem to do. Intelligent people are not fooled by your rantings. America has always stood alone when it comes to moral issues. The fact that others in this imperfect world recognize Cuba and its regime has absolutely NO bearing on America's stance
May 30, 2009 at 1:48 a.m.
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Cuba's Bailout!
Fidel Castro decided since 1959 to confiscate American properties . He executed and jailed Americans and didn't want us there. During the October Missile Crisis of 1962, Castro wrote a personal letter to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushev, begging him to "nuke" the United States. Castro supported all anti-American efforts in Latin America: Tupamaros, Montoneros, FMLN guerrillas; and now is the political adviser of Hugo Chavez and other anti- American crusaders. Now he wants the U.S. taxpayers to recue his failed oppressive regime.
Castro will pocket 5 billion dollars if American tourists go there. Some will go for cuban cigars, rum and child prostitution (jineteras) promoted by the authorities. Others in the extreme left, will go to reaffirm their ideological convictions and to bring back home fresh anti- American slogans from "el Comandante". It will be much worst if the U.S. decides to favor no scruples mercantilsts and open lines of cedit to a regime that will never pay its debts. We, the American taxpayers will end up paying Fidel Castro's bills. After 50 years of communism, Cubans see the United States and the "American Way of Life " as the raw model for their future. This policy will destroy our present moral stature in the eyes of the oppressed people in Cuba. They need freedom.....but have no use for insensitive profiteers, abusive adventurers, communist fellow travelers or Castro siypathizers. It would be wise if this money stay home to help aliviate our economic situation
May 30, 2009 at 1:44 a.m.
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U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, D-N.J. on realities in Cuba
I urge everyone to look at the speech by Senator Menendez D-NJ on youtube (a link posted here). He details the truth about life in Cuba, and the abuses of the Castro dictatorship. It should be required watching for those which have apparently abandoned their moral duty to freedom, and to the oath we all have taken to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Shame! pro-Castro elements for participating in such a sham, and for espousing admiration for the Castro brothers and their totalitarian regime. I expect such excesses from radicals, but not from anyone who thinks clearly, or from anyone who values freedom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vbpJ6Ish...
May 30, 2009 at 1:41 a.m.
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Cuban embargo imbroglio
Some argue American tourists in Cuba would promote democracy and freedom. They are wrong; they misunderstand the lessons of Eastern Europe.
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/us-c...
May 30, 2009 at 1:36 a.m.
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The team of real Cuba experts at the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, published a report showing the results experienced by all those countries that "eagerly" took advantage of that "great opportunity" and traded with Castro and his brother on credit.
Venezuela, Cuba's #1 trading partner, is owed $11.4 BILLION DOLLARS!
Spain, in 2nd. place, is owed $3.2 billion; followed by China $3.17; Japan $2.77; Argentina $1.96 and France $1.85.
The total foreign debt of the Castro brothers is $31.681 BILLION DOLLARS!
And that doesn't take into consideration the non-convertible debt owed to Russia and some of its former satellites, which amounts to another $21 billion.
The US sold $750 million to Cuba last year and is owed $0.0 because we require cash in advance, the only way that you can trade with crooks who never pay their bills.
So you know what we can expect if Mr. Donohue and the others who want to sell Castro on credit, succeed.
The Castros will get billions of dollars, US corporations will make millions and the US taxpayers will get stuck with the bill.
Here is the link to read the entire ICCAS report
http://ctp.iccas.miami.edu/FACTS_Web/Cub...
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