Miami
Herald, August 12, 2015
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article30959136.html
BY JAMES
CASON
On Friday, Secretary John Kerry
opens up the new U.S. Embassy in Havana. Unfortunately, he shares many of the
misconceptions advanced by former Secretary Hillary Clinton at her recent
speech at Florida International University.
Her incursion into the
debate on U.S. Cuba policy could have been a “teachable moment” had she been
mindful of her academic audience and the danger of ignoring the facts when
trying to justify an abrupt reversal of U.S. foreign policy. Instead she
delivered another polemic on lifting what remains of the U.S. embargo.
Cubans,
Clinton said, “want to buy our goods, read our books.” Yes, they do, and for 10
years now Havana has bought annually hundreds of millions of dollars of
American foodstuffs on a cash-and-carry basis. As a former chief of mission at
the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, I can attest that over the years, we
distributed several hundred thousand copies of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and tens of thousands of books in an effort to break the iron
censorship imposed by Castro’s communist regime.
Promoting freedom just as
we did in Eastern Europe, our efforts included shortwave radio broadcasts and
distributing thousands of radio receivers.
The White House stood
firmly behind American diplomats in Cuba. It did not yield even when the regime
expelled a foreign-service officer for giving away copies of George Orwell’s Animal
Farm. Orwell’s book was published years before Cuba’s Revolution, and is a
quintessential depiction of totalitarianism. Cubans readily grasp the context
and, ironically, it was President Bill Clinton who initiated grants to American
NGOs to buy and distribute books and radios in the island. President George W.
Bush continued the initiative.
What would be “new” in the
21st Century would be for Raúl Castro to repeal his book bans and cease his
censorship, harassment, and imprisonment of writers, broadcasters, readers, and
listeners. Little will change until the regime “normalizes” its relationship
with its own people by respecting human rights and earning their consent to be
governed by holding free elections.
More tourists won’t change
Cuba. Millions of Spanish-speaking tourists have visited Cuba and brought no
change; neither will English-speaking American tourists. In all my years in the
Foreign Service, tourists never became a major source of support for people
struggling to attain freedom. If tourists did have such influence, there would
not have been so many 20th-century Latin American
dictators.
The administration’s “new”
Cuba policy is a reversion to earlier eras — before adoption of the Democratic
Charter by the Organization of American States — when the United States
routinely sided with the region’s dictators.
“Engagement” does not
require acquiescing to dictators, and the issue today is not “engagement” versus “no engagement.” The issue is: What
kind of engagement? Sadly, the administration has made numerous
concessions to Havana with no quid, pro quo in return.
In her speech, Clinton
noted that President Bill Clinton ended his efforts to “normalize” relations
with Cuba when Raúl Castro’s MiGs destroyed two small
Cessnas flying in international airspace. Four men,
who were searching for refugees adrift in the Florida Straits, were killed. At
the time General Castro was Minister of the Armed Forces.
Mrs. Clinton suggested in
her FIU speech that companies doing business in Cuba will push for political
reforms. Companies now doing business in Cuba haven’t and don’t. American
companies doing business in China, Burma, and other totalitarian states
typically become apologists for the regimes — lest helping the victims of
repression negatively impact their businesses.
What is really needed is
for the world’s democracies to condition their economic and political
engagement with Cuba to specific internal reforms. That,
would be a real new policy.
James
Cason is mayor of Coral Gables and former ambassador to Paraguay. From
2002-2005, he served as chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.