Fidel just biding his time

Posted on Tuesday, 04.28.09
Fidel just biding his time
BY BRIAN LATELL
blatell@aol.com

In two lengthy commentaries disseminated by Cuba's media recently, Fidel
Castro shot down hopes for a better relationship with the United States.
In language both scornful and abusive, he described President Barack
Obama as ''looking conceited'' in Trinidad and quoted extensively from
Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega's 50-minute anti-American jeremiad in
Port-of-Spain. Castro echoed the theme that it is the United States, not
Cuba, that must change. He gave no ground whatever, intimating that, as
far as he is concerned, Cuba can wait another four or eight years until
after President Obama leaves office without progress in alleviating
bilateral tensions.

Castro's intransigence is scarcely any different than it has been since
the first months of his revolutionary regime and repeated with virtually
every president since. First, he rejected overtures from Dwight
Eisenhower, the first president he dealt with. In the fall of 1963 John
Kennedy entered into exploratory diplomatic contacts with Cuba, but
those contacts expired following his assassination.

In 1974, Richard Nixon authorized high-level diplomatic contacts with
Cuba. They were undertaken by his successor Gerald Ford and Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger in 1975. Soon after his inauguration in 1977,
Jimmy Carter launched a similar effort. The three presidents and their
advisors believed erroneously that Castro would see critical advantages
in reducing bilateral tensions and that he would be willing to make
important concessions toward that end.

U.S. a valuable enemy

Those efforts foundered, however, when it became clear that Castro
placed a higher priority on supporting revolutionary internationalism in
Africa and on retaining the American enemy to berate.

Bill Clinton's White House tried yet again, exploring means of improving
relations behind the scenes and through intermediaries. He was deterred,
too, when in February 1996 Cuban MiG fighters shot down civilian
aircraft over international waters, killing American civilians.

The latest effort by President Obama with considerable fanfare and the
best of intentions is possibly the most ambitious of all these
presidential efforts to reduce or end the deadlock. But it appears that
it is already suffering the same fate.

This time, however, Castro has new and compelling reasons for rejecting
virtually all compromise with Washington. He is in a triumphant,
unyielding mood. Believing that the correlation of international forces
-- a term revived from classic Marxist lexicon -- is working
overwhelmingly in Cuba's favor, he feels no need to compromise. With
just a little more patience, perhaps even in his lifetime, Cuba, he
believes, can win most of its goals in the stand-off with Washington
through unilateral concessions.

And as usual, his calculus is derived from convincing evidence. Cuba's
legitimacy with governments in this hemisphere has never been higher.
Soon every country except the United States will have full diplomatic
relations with Havana. A rump group of presidents led and fueled by
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has raised the volume and intensity of
pro-Castro and anti-American rhetoric to unprecedented levels. President
Obama endured insulting public doses in Trinidad from Chávez and Ortega.

No need to compromise

Regional demands for the end of the U.S. economic embargo, readmission
of Cuba to the OAS and an end to the years of hostility have become
deafening. Innumerable calls have also been heard from leading members
of Congress, influential Washington think tanks and commentators of many
stripes who argue that the time finally has come for the impasse with
Cuba to end. From Castro's perspective at least, unilateral concessions
by Washington, such as lifting the travel ban or all of the embargo, now
seem within the realm of the possible. With so much now converging in
Cuba's and his favor, Fidel sees no need to make compromises.

But his rejection of the most promising American overtures ever offered
is likely to be unsettling to the many Cuban civilian and military
leaders who genuinely had hoped for a better relationship with
Washington. Most had come to believe that Raúl Castro, Cuba's president
after all, was intent on moving in that direction.

But Fidel's snide commentary published on April 21 chastens and
humiliates his brother. Now issuing almost one of these reflections
daily, there can be no doubt that it is the infirm, cosseted,
all-but-invisible Fidel, angry but triumphant, who is again the ultimate
arbiter of Cuban foreign policy.

Brian Latell is a senior research associate in Cuba studies at the
University of Miami and author of After Fidel: Raúl Castro and the
Future of Cuba's Revolution.

Fidel just biding his time - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com (30 April 2009)

http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1021079.html