On Standby

On Standby
With Castro's condition uncertain, Washington fine-tunes its plans for a
post-Fidel Cuba. Plus, snapshots of Mideast diplomacy.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
Newsweek

Updated: 6:46 p.m. ET Aug. 2, 2006

Aug. 2, 2006 - It was only last month that President Bush’s officials
detailed their plans to help Cuba transition from the Castro regime to a
free society. Little did they know that Fidel Castro would be executing
his own transition this week, handing over power to his brother Raul—at
least, on an ostensibly temporary basis, while the Cuban leader
underwent urgent surgery.

Bush officials concede they still know very little about Castro’s
condition now, including the most basic question of whether the Cuban
leader is alive or dead. Yet they say nothing has changed with the
detailed plan they have drawn up to respond to a new Cuban regime—as
long as that new regime looks nothing like Castro’s.

Under the plan, drafted by the administration’s Commission for
Assistance to a Free Cuba, the United States would offer “prioritized
assistance” to a new, transitional Cuban government that presses ahead
quickly with free elections. Before that happens, the Bush
administration is spending $80 million over the next two years on
opposition groups and “uncensored information” for Cubans, delivered
through broadcast media and the Internet.

Aside from the $80 million, the U.S. assistance depends on one critical
factor: the Cubans need to ask for American help. As Commerce Secretary
Carlos Gutierrez (who was born in Havana) told reporters last month, “We
will do all this and more, provided we are asked by a Cuban transition
government that is committed to dismantling all instruments of state
repression, and implementing internationally respected human rights and
fundamental freedoms.” Above all, that transitional government must be
committed to free elections within 18 months.

White House officials are not holding their breath for Raul Castro to do
any such thing. Moreover, the administration is already wary of any
Cuban government that takes a Chinese-style approach of liberalizing its
economy but not its political system. “U.S. support will not be made
available to a government that adopts economic or other policies [that]
suggest a change but which do not actually achieve the goal of
dismantling the repressive regime and making a full transition to
democracy,” Caleb McCarry, the administration’s Cuba transition
coordinator, said last month.

The mutual loathing between Bush and Castro is nothing new, dating back
to before the 43rd president was inaugurated for the first time.

The GOP presidential primaries in 2000 were dominated by a single
foreign news story—not about terrorism or the Middle East but about a
young Cuban boy whose mother died at sea while trying to enter the
United States. The Elián González story ran through the election year
until his forced return to Cuba in June 2000. That summer, the GOP wrote
its 2000 party platform promising to maintain the trade embargo even as
the Clinton administration and the GOP-controlled House were trying to
ease some sanctions. Sanctions would only be lifted, according to the
party platform, with the release of all political prisoners and a
commitment to free elections.

Castro’s reaction was to blame what he called the “terrorist and
annexationist mafia of Miami.” For good measure, he also called Bush
(and his opponent Al Gore) “boring and insipid.”

Once inside the White House, President Bush translated that GOP platform
into U.S. policy with what he called his “Initiative for a New Cuba” in
May 2002. “Well-intentioned ideas about trade will merely prop up this
dictator, enrich his cronies and enhance the totalitarian regime,” Bush
said at the time. “It will not help the Cuban people.”

Castro’s response the following year was to prop up his own regime by
cracking down on opposition groups by rounding up 75 dissidents,
activists and journalists.

If anything, Bush’s position toward Castro has been hardening since he
entered the Oval Office. In 2004, he tightened travel restrictions to
Cuba by limiting family visits to one trip every three years and cutting
the daily level of authorized spending in Cuba from $164 to $50. Those
moves were controversial with some recent Cuban immigrants to the United
States, and had little obvious impact on the Castro regime.

In effect, the Bush strategy is to help Cuba once a new Cuban government
emerges. With so few channels to help dissidents, all the administration
can do is to sit back and wait for Castro—and his regime—to grow old and
die.

Behind the Curtain
Nothing is quite what it seems with Middle East diplomacy. On Sunday,
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow declined to comment on a
French-drafted United Nations resolution on the Hizbullah-Israeli
conflict. “I’m just not going to fight the French from here,” he told
reporters on board Air Force One. But on Wednesday, Snow, along with
other White House officials, minimized the administration’s differences
with the French as a matter of “sequencing.”

Even the simplistic dispute about a ceasefire isn’t as great as it
seems. For their part, the French are now talking about “a cessation of
hostilities in order to get a sustainable ceasefire,” as Prime Minister
Dominique de Villepin put it this week. That’s not very far away from
the Bush administration, which supported a humanitarian pause this week
but is still insisting on a sustainable ceasefire. Moreover, both the
United States and France support the disarming of Hizbullah, a political
settlement and the deployment of an international force to southern Lebanon.

Yet the conflict is so emotional that all sides find it useful sometimes
to manufacture disputes, or exaggerate them, for their domestic audience
back home.

That was certainly true for Britain’s Tony Blair last week, when his
aides told British reporters that he was going to press President Bush
for a ceasefire. In fact, according to one senior Bush aide, the details
were squared off 24 hours before Blair’s arrival, including their
support for an “urgent ceasefire,” as well as the international
stabilization force.

Bush and Blair coordinated their jokes as much as their foreign policy.
Bush opened his joint press conference with Blair by joking about his
recent encounter with an open microphone in St. Petersburg, Russia—which
the British media have dubbed his “Yo Blair!” moment. “As you know,
we’ve got a close relationship,” Bush deadpanned. “You share with me
your perspective—and you let me know when the microphone is on.” Bush
tapped his White House microphone and Blair chuckled out loud.

In fact, the two leaders rehearsed their moment of levity. Bush had
alerted Blair to the joke before the two left the Oval Office, moments
earlier. One of Blair’s aides suggested that Bush could milk the joke by
tapping the microphone for good measure. “They all thought it was
hilarious,” said the senior Bush aide.

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