Diaz-Balart aims to maintain fight for a free Cuba
By MYRIAM MARQUEZ
mmarquez@MiamiHerald.com
Lincoln Diaz-Balart will leave the U.S. House with no regrets and on a
mission. No, not to become Cuba's next president, he says, but to help
Cubans chart a new destiny.
Diaz-Balart's strategic prowess on Capitol Hill in the 1990s stopped any
presidential move to end the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
Led by Diaz-Balart -- probably the man Fidel Castro hates the most --
Congress codified the embargo into U.S. law so it's no longer simply a
White House policy. Now Congress has to change the law to end the
embargo. Or Cuba has to free all political prisoners; allow political
parties, labor unions and a free press; and set a date for multiparty
elections for a U.S. president to lift the embargo.
When Cuba freezes over! After 51 years of dictatorship, Fidel and Raúl
Castro aren't about to give in.
AT AN IMPASSE
So here we are, still at an impasse, waiting for old Fidel to die and
old Raúl to -- what? -- move to Venezuela?
It no longer matters. A new generation of Cubans -- the bloggers, the
rappers, the workers in the black market that feeds them because
communism certainly won't -- are pushing for open space wherever they
can find it. The embargo has become mostly irrelevant to them.
But don't discount Lincoln, who gets the rap that he was all Cuba all
the time. In fact, he pushed through various immigration laws that
helped Central Americans, sought support for Haitians and pressed to
extend the Voting Rights Act. Plus, he brought home the bacon to
universities, hospitals, Miami's airport and SouthCom.
He also won the battle of ideas on Cuba. The embargo can no longer be
defined by straight party-line support. It's not a liberal or
conservative idea. It's a bipartisan democracy initiative.
You can blame it on political contributions from pro-embargo forces, but
there's more to it than that. There's a sense of, ``Why bother now? Why
reward a dictatorship when the clock is ticking in democracy's favor?''
Diaz-Balart plans to start his own group to help opposition groups in
Cuba. It's fashioned after ``The White Rose,'' a group his father
started just days after Castro's triumph in 1959 and named after a
famous poem by Jose Martí.
Before Rafael Diaz-Balart died in 2005, he had set to pen and paper a
framework for a democratic Cuba -- for a civil society, for property
rights (without dislodging anyone or making them pay a penny to
pre-revolutionary owners), for labor unions, for the presidency (one
five-year term, period, be gone).
MINISTER TO BATISTA
Rafael was a minister in the Batista dictatorship, but he had parted
ways with Fulgencio's strongman rule. It's documented by 1950s press
reports and U.S. congressional testimony in 1960.
``No one should be vetted because your father was a batistiano or a
fidelista,'' Lincoln told me Friday. ``The importance is not where you
come from but where you evolve to.''
And so it was for Rafael, who after three decades in exile finally was
embraced by some of Batista's biggest enemies, like journalist Agustín
Tamargo and former Cuban Sen. Emilio Ochoa, one of the signers of Cuba's
1940 constitution (quite lefty even by most standards today).
Those 18 years on the Hill taught Lincoln a thing or two about
negotiation, accepting others' ideas to reach a compromise even as you
fiercely defend your side: ``It's extraordinarily difficult, but my
father's lesson was clear. We can't sink this ship. You can take this
ship to the left and to the right, but not sink it. The passions and the
hatreds have to end.''
Diaz-Balart aims to maintain fight for a free Cuba - 5-Minute Herald -
MiamiHerald.com (14 February 2010)
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/5min/story/1479509.html
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