Cuba: No progress? No relief
BY RAY WALSER
www.heritage.org
Even before his inauguration, President 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.
• 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 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.
• 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. 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 United
States 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. More than $1
billion in U.S. trade and remittances has thus far bought a goose egg's
worth of liberalization and human-rights changes.
Would additional billions accomplish any more 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.
So far, the Cuban leadership has been unresponsive to Obama's overtures.
For Fidel Castro, venomous as ever, serious dialogue on human rights and
democracy is tantamount to the United States 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 Pérez Antúnez 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.
Cuba: No progress? No relief - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com (27 May 2009)
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1066973.html
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