Bush addressed the Organization of American States yesterday and suggested, indeed he predicted, that Fidel Castro’s regime will eventually fall and democracy would come to Cuba.
“In the new Americas of the 21st century, democracy is now the rule, rather than the exception. Think of the dramatic changes we have seen in our lifetime. In 1974, the last time the OAS General Assembly met in the United States, fewer than half its members had democratically elected governments. Today, all 34 countries participating in this General Assembly have democratic, constitutional governments. Only one country in this hemisphere sits outside this society of democratic nations — and one day the tide of freedom will reach Cuba’s shores, as well. The great Cuban patriot Jose Marti said it best: ‘La libertad no es negociable.'”
But if freedom for Cuba is really non-negotiable to Bush, he has a funny way of showing it when it comes to crafting a coherent policy.
Slate’s Jacob Weisberg visited the island recently and saw, first hand, how Bush’s foreign policy is actually counter-productive in improving the freedom of Cubans and completely meaningless in ending the regime of the longest-serving political leader on the planet.
Weisberg recommends a two-pronged approach: expand trade and supporting the island’s human-rights movement. Bush strongly opposes both.
First, trade. The United States has maintained a 45-year embargo that was supposed to drive Castro from power … a couple of decades ago. Weisberg argues, persuasively, that commerce brings a flow of ideas in addition to commodities, which in turn can help fuel change. Bush’s policy is to keep the embargo that Castro uses to his advantage, while simultaneously undercutting the American approach to trade with Cuba.
Bush’s Cuba policy, which is based on the philosophy of interest-group conservatism, moves in both directions at once, thereby obviating any possible gain from either. At the behest of right-wing Cuban exiles who are central to Florida politics, the administration has tightened the screws of the embargo, making it much more difficult for Americans to obtain licenses to visit Cuba and reducing the frequency of permitted family visits by Cuban-Americans to once every three years. Americans who go illegally are now sometimes prosecuted, and a refrain in Havana is that the Department of Homeland Security is routinely denying visitor visas to Cuban artists, academics, and officials who wish to travel to the United States. But at the same time, Bush has overseen the expansion of trade under a huge loophole for the export of American agricultural commodities. One of the “Ladies in White,” the wife of an imprisoned independent journalist I visited in Havana, told me that the rice she gets on her official ration card comes from a bag with a Texas stamp.
So, Bush strongly opposes U.S. commercial contact with Cuba, except for the commercial contact he supports with Cuba. (One might say he was against the trade before he was for it…)
What’s more, there is a political counterweight to Castro, but Bush is ignoring it.
When they were in the White House, both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan lent crucial moral support to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Corazon Aquino, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, and Václav Havel, whose voices were essential to the political transformation of their countries. Cuba’s leading dissident is Oswaldo Payá, who spearheaded the Varela Project, the most important act of defiance toward Castro to date. Varela supporters collected 40,000 signatures on a petition calling for a referendum on political and economic reform. The majority of the 75 dissidents and independent journalists thrown into jail by Castro in 2003 were Payá-niks. The Varela Project has indeed been mentioned prominently by an American president—but it was by Jimmy Carter, who visited Cuba in 2002 and gave a speech calling for expanded human rights that was carried live on Cuban television. So far as I can find, Bush has never referred to Payá in public.
And why does Bush pretend this initiative doesn’t exist? Because Paya and the Varela Project oppose the American embargo and embraces increased dialog across the straits — and as far as the president is concerned, you’re either with him or you’re against him.
Bush’s approach to Cuba can be summed up with eight words: Ignore it and wait for Castro to die. That’s not a policy; that’s the absence of a policy.