The urn holding the ashes of Fidel Castro is seen covered by a Cuban flag on a military jeep on Nov. 30, at the start of an 800-km funeral procession that will reach a cemetery in Santiago de Cuba on Dec. 4. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 1 2016 (IPS)

Among the many leaders who left their mark on history in the 20th century, Fidel Castro – who died Nov. 25 at the age of 90 – stood out for propelling Cuba into a global role that was unexpectedly prominent for a small country, in an era when arms were frequently taken up to settle national and international disputes.

The Cold War imposed certain political choices as well as the consequences in terms of hostilities. By choosing Communism as its path in 1961, two years after the triumph of the revolution, Cuba became a pawn that infiltrated the enemy chessboard, facing the risks posed by such a vulnerable and threatening position.

In Latin America, the “Western, Christian” side mainly degenerated into military dictatorships, nearly all of them anti-Communist and with direct links to the United States, with a few exceptions like the progressive government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1968-1975).

On the other side, guerrilla movements supported or stimulated by Cuba, like the 1966-1967 incursion led by Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia, mushroomed. The military defeat of these movements was a general, but not absolute, rule.

For example, there was the Sandinista triumph in Nicaragua in 1979, and in Colombia the half-decade conflict raged until this year, when a peace deal was finally signed by the government and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebels.

The armed conflicts were not limited to the countries of Latin America. The Vietnam war shook the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Communist victory over U.S. forces prevented another country from being split in two, like Korea or Germany.

In Africa, the decolonisation of some countries cost rivers of blood. Algeria, for example, won its independence from France in 1962 after a war that left a death toll of 1.5 million, according to the Algerians, or just over one-third of that number, according to the French.

Against this backdrop, Castro led an incredible set of accomplishments that earned Cuba a projection and influence far out of proportion to the size of a country of fewer than 10 million people up to 1980 and 11.2 million today.

He fomented and trained guerrilla movements that challenged governments and armed forces in several countries of Latin America. Many felt Cuba offered an alternative, more authentic, brand of Communism that contrasted with the Soviet Union’s, which was seen as bureaucratic, based on repression, even of other peoples, and by then bereft of revolutionary zeal.

The defence of social equality, the top priority put on children, advances in education and health, and solidarity with oppressed peoples or nations hit by tragedies around the world are attractive components of Cuba’s style of Communism, despite its dictatorial nature.

Hundreds of thousands of Cubans took part in the mammoth rally held Nov. 29 to pay homage to the late Fidel Castro in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, attended by leaders from every continent. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños

It was not democracy – a value not highly respected decades ago, not even by the propagandists of freedom in the Western world, who also disseminated, or were linked to, dictatorships.

Cuban troops and doctors spread in large numbers throughout Africa and Latin America, in campaigns providing support and assistance, on some occasions playing a central role.

The action abroad that had the greatest impact was in Angola, where Cuba’s military aid was decisive in the country’s successful bid for independence, by cutting off the advance of South African troops that almost reached Luanda in the attempt to prevent the birth of the new nation, which occurred on Nov. 11, 1975.

For decades, Cuban troops were in Angola training the military and strengthening national defence, along with the Cuban doctors and teachers who helped care for and teach a new generation of Angolans.

The operation in Angola showed that Cuba was more than a mere pawn of the former Soviet Union. On May 27, 1977 there was an attempted coup d’etat by a faction of the governing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), led by Nito Alves.

Loyal to then President Agostinho Neto, the Cubans helped block the coup. They retook the main radio station in Luanda, which had been occupied by rebels, and returned it to government control. It was a Cuban voice fheard over the radio announcing the success of the operation.

The Soviets were on the side of the coup plotters, according to Angola’s leaders of the time. Diplomats from Moscow were expelled from the country, as were members of the Communist Party of Portugal.

A worse fate was suffered by the followers of Nito Alves accused of participating in the uprising: thousands of them were shot and killed. The number of victims has never been confirmed.

More recently, tens of thousands of Cuban doctors have spread a humane image of Cuba throughout Latin America, after they did so in many African countries. Thousands of them have worked in Venezuela since late president Hugo Chavez first took power in 1999. In Brazil, more than 11,000 Cuban doctors have been providing healthcare in poor and remote areas since 2013.

The Cuban revolution and its achievements are inextricably intertwined with the figure of Fidel Castro, whose leadership was so dominating that he probably would not have needed the rules of his political regime to constantly assert his power and authority over all activities in Cuba.

“Why hold elections?” many Cubans used to argue, in response to the frequent criticism of how long the Castro administration remained in power, without submitting itself to a real vote.

The impression is that his leadership was excessive, that it went far beyond the limits of the Caribbean island nation. His capacity for action was reflected in working meetings held in the wee hours of the morning, as well as in his meetings with visiting leaders.

His hours-long speeches were also delivered abroad, when he visited countries governed by friends, such as Chile in 1971 – governed at the time by socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) – and Angola in 1977, under President Agostinho Neto.

“They don’t have a Fidel,” said Cubans in Angola, to criticise and explain errors committed by the government there, lamenting the lack of such an infallible leader as theirs, in a country whose development they were trying to support.

A product and subject of an era marked by the Cold War, Castro seemed destined to cause controversy, as a historic figure praised by some and condemned as a despot by others. But his political legacy will wane if Communism does not find a way to reconcile with democracy.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara delivers his famous speech on Aug. 8, 1961 at the Inter-American Economic and Social Council in the Uruguayan city of Punta del Este. This was the last continental forum Cuba attended before being excluded until the Seventh Summit of the Americas, to be held Apr. 10-11 in Panama City. Credit: Public domain

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama was only four days old when Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara publicly castigated the United States’ policy of hostility toward Cuba at an inter-American summit, reiterated then Prime Minister Fidel Castro’s willingness to resolve differences through dialogue on an equal footing, and held secret conversations with a Washington envoy.

More than half a century later, the U.S. president accepted the challenge of pursuing rapprochement with the Caribbean island country, overcoming conflicts, mutual resentment and tensions, and initiating the still precarious process of normalising bilateral relations.

On Apr. 10 and 11 he will come face to face with Cuban President Raúl Castro at the Seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama City.

Guevara addressed the meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council of the Organisation of American States (OAS) on Aug. 8, 1961, on behalf of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, his leader and comrade-in-arms in the guerrilla revolt that deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista on Jan. 1, 1959.

The summit meeting, held in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este, was the last time Cuba participated in an inter-American forum, as the island nation was suspended from the OAS in January 1962, a measure that was officially lifted in June 2009.

At the Punta del Este conference the United States formally established the Alliance for Progress, launched by U.S. President John Kennedy (1961-1963) months earlier to counteract the influence of the Cuban Revolution in the region, after his government’s frustrated attempt to invade the island in April 1961.

Behind the scenes of that conference the Argentine-born Guevara held a confidential meeting in Montevideo on Aug. 17 with Richard Goodwin, Kennedy’s special counsel for Latin American affairs, regarded by Cuban media as the first high level contact between authorities of both countries since bilateral relations had been broken off in January 1961.

Five days later the White House issued a statement describing the meeting as “a casual cocktail party conversation in which Goodwin restricted himself to listening.”

Since then there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to secure closer ties, until after Fidel Castro’s retirement in 2006, his brother and successor Raúl together with Obama surprised the world on Dec. 17, 2014 with their announcement of the joint decision to restore diplomatic relations.

Hence a lot of attention in the run-up to the Seventh Summit of the Americas is being focused on the two heads of state. It will be Obama’s third attendance at a Summit of the Americas, while Cuba has been excluded until now. Cuba’s presence at this Summit is the result of a diplomatic strategy that led to unanimous support from countries of the region for its reinstatement, and that brought about the thaw with the United States.

Cuban political scientist and essayist Carlos Alzugaray regards the growing autonomy of the region as a factor in the process. “It could be said that the United States has lost the initiative and its room for manoeuvre” south of the Rio Bravo or Rio Grande, he told IPS.

After the first Summit of the Americas which took place in 1994 in the U.S. city of Miami, successive meetings revealed that Latin America was increasingly unwilling to accept U.S. dominance. This came to a head with the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a star concept at early summits but which fell out of favour in just over a decade.

It was at the Fourth Summit, in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata in 2005, that the host country and other South American nations rejected attempts by the United States and Canada to impose the FTAA. Leftwing or centre-left leaders had come to power in the south of the hemisphere, like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (1999-2013), who called on the Mar del Plata meeting “to be the tomb of FTAA.”

As a regional counter-proposal, in December 2004 Chávez and Fidel Castro launched what is now known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), made up of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Grenada and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Three years later, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was founded in order to encourage integration, social and human development, equity and inclusion in the region. Its members are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

All the countries of the Americas except the United States and Canada came together in 2011 to form the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This forum reinstated Cuba as a full member of the regional concert of nations, in the absence of Canada and the United States.

While Cuba basks in this new international context, Alzugaray itemised internal changes put in motion by the government of Raúl Castro since 2008 to modernise the socialist development model, as well as “overall changes arising from the growing presence in the region of China, above all, and also of Russia.”

But the Panama Summit, convened formally to satisfy the region’s demand to end Cuba’s ostracism from the bloc of the 35 independent states in the Americas, and to take a significant step toward normalisation of relations between Havana and Washington, may need to shift its attention to the crisis between the United States and Venezuela.

Obama issued an executive order on Mar. 9 declaring that the situation in Venezuela, governed by socialist President Nicolás Maduro, is a “threat to the national security of the United States,” and he imposed several of the country’s senior officials. The measure met with the disapproval of the majority of Latin American countries.

“No country has the right to judge the conduct of another and even less to impose sanctions and penalties on their own,” said UNASUR Secretary General Ernesto Samper, a former president of Colombia. In his view, unilateralism will prevent Washington from maintaining good relations with Latin America.

“Under these circumstances, it will be very difficult for the United States to develop a strategy in the region that takes into account Latin American and Caribbean interests and allows for natural adaptation to change,” said Alzugaray.

In his opinion, Obama has made “a serious mistake” in the run-up to a meeting that was supposed to celebrate hemispheric reunion. “The region will overwhelmingly support Cuba and Venezuela,” Alzugaray predicted.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

By Joaquín Roy
MADRID, Mar 31 2015 (IPS)

The visit to Cuba of Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on Mar. 23-24, and the forthcoming visit in May planned by French President François Hollande, have fast-tracked the agenda of relations between the European Union and Cuba.

The sudden announcement of normalisation of diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba in December last year set the context for the rapprochement between Brussels and Havana.

Joaquín Roy

At the time, negotiations were already under way on a bilateral ‘Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement’; after years of confrontation, the European Union was prepared to abandon the “common position” imposed by Brussels on the Fidel Castro regime in 1996.

While Washington’s stance was that the persistence of a strictly Marxist regime deserved the imposition of conditions for ending its embargo, the European Union and a consensus of its governments held to the policy of so-called “constructive engagement”. EU member states continued to relate to Cuba on an individual basis according to their special historical links, economic interests and a range of views on human rights.

After a number of tensions were overcome, in 2014 Brussels decided to adopt a pragmatic programme that would lead to a cooperation agreement similar to those signed between the European Union and every other country and bloc in Latin America and the Caribbean.

For many years E.U. relations with Cuba were mainly represented by initiatives led by Spain, which veered from spearheading the imposition of demands on Havana, especially at critical times during right-wing People’s Party (PP) governments, to pursuing an incentives strategy under the left-wing Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).“While Washington’s stance was that the persistence of a strictly Marxist regime deserved the imposition of conditions for ending its embargo, the European Union and a consensus of its governments held to the policy of so-called ‘constructive engagement’ [with Cuba]”

The process even came to be sarcastically called a “Hispanic-Spanish issue”.  In this context, a number of European states behaved according to their own convenience, with no essential change in the overall scenario.

Cuba avoided dealing with the broader European community, opting instead a for country-by-country approach. But the world was changing, and the real value of Europe’s stock in Cuba fell.

Then it was the right time for Brussels to seize the day and take advantage of the circumstances to negotiate with Cuba, with an open agenda that would include dismantling the “common position”.

After discrete exchanges, both sides decided to sit down for talks. Surprisingly, Cuba was open to a process without which the common position would be eliminated, as had been its strong traditional demand.

Spain itself was facing a delicate internal situation and needed to seek stability on other fronts. Consolidation of its relations with Latin America depended on juggling the claims and expectations of different domestic ideological groupings. Moreover, the vote of the Latin American bloc was vitally important for Spain’s candidature to the U.N. Security Council, a consideration that counselled extreme caution on the part of Madrid.

In the new era, it is hard to predict what role Spain will play in the Cuban transition, but in principle it has remarkable potential, and not just because of the weight of history and the contemporary importance of the “special relationship” between the two countries.

It is relevant to note that U.S. influence on Cuba’s own national identity has not been limited to imposing its hegemonic power. A hefty dose of the “American way of life” has become an essential part of the Cuban being.

The “enemy” was never the United States per se, but its concrete policies of harassment. The ease with which Cuban exiles of different epochs and different social backgrounds fit into U.S. society shows the naturalness of this curious relationship. Normalisation of relations will help reinforce the link.

European interests would do well to take note because the rebirth of the natural relationship between the United States and Cuba will provide strong competition to the relative advantage that European interests have so far achieved, and could significantly reduce it.

The outcome of competition from U.S. economic and political power in Cuba vis-á-vis renewed European operations will depend to a large extent on the nature and intensity of Washington’s renewed involvement with the island. Europe could maintain its relative advantage if the Cuban authorities themselves, or the surviving embargo restrictions, however moderated, set limits to U.S. activity.

It is worth emphasising that European activities in Cuba will continue to be limited, within E.U. institutional structures as well as on the pragmatic agendas of its member countries, as long as the U.S. embargo lasts. Restrictions on trade and investments continue to affect full freedom of movement by European companies in Cuba itself, as well as their transnational alliances in the rest of the world where U.S. interests are dominant.

As a result, even in a relatively open relationship, the real possibilities for a European advantage remain largely speculative, and may even decline, especially in the area of trade and investments.

The key factor in this uncertainty is a legacy of more than half a century of the absence of relations, which have not been ”normal” during this period yet which aspire to become so in the future. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Translated by Valerie Dee – Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* Joaquin Roy can be contacted at jroy@miami.edu

Excerpt:

Fidel Castro arrives at MATS Terminal, Washington, D.C., Apr. 15, 1959. Scores of attempts were later made by U.S. intelligence services to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, including by hired Sicilian Mafia hitmen. Credit: public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 7 2015 (IPS)

The controversial low-brow Hollywood comedy, ‘The Interview’, portrays the story of two U.S. talk-show journalists on assignment to interview Kim Jong-un – and midway down the road are recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to poison the North Korean leader.

The plot, which has enraged North Korea, accused of retaliating by hacking into the computers of Sony Pictures distributing the movie, is patently fictitious and involves a ricin-laced strip meant to poison Kim while shaking hands with the journalists."It's fine to make comedies about assassinations of the leaders of small countries the U.S. has demonised. But imagine if Russia or China made a film about assassinating the U.S. president." -- Michael Ratner

But, as art imitates life from a bygone era, the plan to kill the North Korean leader harkens back to the days in the late 1960s and 1970s when scores of attempts were made by U.S. intelligence services to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, including by hired Sicilian Mafia hitmen.

The hilarious plots included an attempt to smuggle poisoned cigars into Castro’s household and also plant soluble thallium sulphate inside Castro’s shoes so that his beard will fall off and make him “the laughing stock of the socialist world.”

Some of the unsuccessful attempts were detailed in a scathing 1975 report by an 11-member investigative body appointed by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from the state of Idaho.

The failed assassination plots are likely to be the subject of renewed discussion, particularly in the context of last month’s announcement of the resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two longstanding sworn enemies: the United States and Cuba.

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS, “Sadly, and especially to the North Koreans and Kim Jong-un, the movie was not a comedy they could ignore.”

The CIA has a long history of often successful plots to assassinate leaders of countries who choose to act independently of U.S. wishes, he pointed out.

Numerous such plots were exposed in the 1975 U.S. Senate Church Committee report, including attempts against Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, and others, said Ratner, president of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights.

The supposed ban on such assassination since those revelations is meaningless; the U.S. now calls it targeted killing, he added.

“Think about Colonel Qaddafi [of Libya] and others killed by drones or Joint Special Operations Command.”

Seen in this context, said Ratner, a North Korean reaction would be expected – even though there has not been substantiated evidence that it was behind the Sony hack.

“Think about this another way: it’s fine to make comedies about assassinations of the leaders of small countries the U.S. has demonised. But imagine if Russia or China made a film about assassinating the U.S. president,” he said.

The United States would not simply laugh it off as a comedy.

“There is no problem as long as the target is small country that can be kicked around; let another country make such a comedy about our president, and I assure you, it will pay dearly,” Ratner added.

Dr. James E. Jennings, president, Conscience International and executive director at U.S. Academics for Peace, told IPS new information from cyber security firms calls into question the doctrinaire assertion by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was behind the Sony hack attack.

“The FBI’s rush to judgment – from which the agency may be forced to retreat – has raised protests from internet security experts and suspicions by conspiracy theorists of possible U.S. involvement in a bizarre plot to further isolate the Korean regime.”

They point out, said Dr. Jennings, that stranger things have happened before.

It would not be the first time that the CIA has used dirty tricks to cripple a foreign regime or try to assassinate a foreign leader.

He said folks are therefore entitled to be sceptical about FBI claims and to raise questions about possible CIA involvement in the fuss over the film “The Interview.”

“We only have to remember Iran in 1953, when the elected leader [Mohamed] Mosaddegh was overthrown; Chile in 1973 when President Salvador Allende was assassinated, and the Keystone Cops hi-jinks that the CIA pulled in trying to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro between 1960-75.”

The CIA’s own Inspector General as well as the 1975-76 Church Committee reported that a large number of crazy tricks were attempted in trying to get rid of Castro, including poisoned cigars and exploding seashells.

“One wonders what the top CIA officers were drinking when they came up with such silly notions–more like Kabuki theater than responsible policies of a great nation,” said Jennings. “And we all know by now about Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, and the black sites.

“If it does turn out that the CIA is implicated in any way in this newest Sony vs. North Korea farce, as some are alleging, it’s high time for a new congressional investigation like that of the Church Committee to whack the agency hard and send some of its current leaders back to the basement of horrors where they belong,” said Dr. Jennings.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

I grew up in Hickory Hill, my family’s home in Virginia which was often filled with veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. 

My father Robert F. Kennedy, who admired the courage of these veterans and felt overwhelming guilt for having put the Cubans in harm’s way during the ill-planned invasion,  took personal responsibility for finding each of them jobs and homes, organising integration of many of them into the U.S. Armed Forces.

Robert F Kennedy Jr

But as the process of détente unfolded, suspicion and anger were so widespread that even those Cubans who loved my father and were always present at my home when I was a boy, stopped visiting Hickory Hill.

To the CIA, détente was perfidious sedition.  Adlai Stevenson [at the time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations] had warned President John F. Kennedy that “unfortunately the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.”  The agency, he said, would never allow normalisation of relations.

JFK was involved in secret negotiations with Fidel Castro designed to outflank Foggy Bottom [Washington] and the agents at Langley [CIA], but the CIA knew of JFK’s back-channel contacts with Castro and endeavoured to sabotage the peace efforts with cloak and dagger mischief.

In April 1963, CIA officials secretly sprinkled deadly poison in a wetsuit intended as a gift for Castro from JFK’s emissaries James Donovan and John Nolan, hoping to murder Castro, blame JFK for the murder, and thoroughly discredit him and his peace efforts.

The agency also delivered a poison pen to hit man Rolendo Cubelo in Paris, with instructions that he use it to murder Fidel. William Attwood [a former journalist and U.S. diplomat attached to the United Nations asked by JFK to open up secret negotiations with Castro] later said that the CIA’s attitude was: “To hell with the President it was pledged to serve.”“There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination, we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalisation of relations with Cuba” – William Attwood, U.S. diplomat asked by John F. Kennedy to open secret negotiations with Castro, speaking of JFK’s assassination

Many exile leaders openly expressed their disgust with the White House “treachery”, accusing JFK of engaging in “co-existence” with Fidel Castro.  Some Cubans remained loyal to my father, but a small number of hard, bitter homicidal Castro haters now directed their fury toward JFK and there is credible evidence that these men and their CIA handlers may have been involved in plots to assassinate him.

On April 18, 1963, Don Jose Miro Cardona, Chair of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, resigned in a fusillade of furious denouncements aimed at JFK and my father, saying that “the struggle for Cuba is in the process of being sabotaged by the U.S. government.”

Cardona promised: “There is only one route left to follow and we will follow it:  violence.”

Hundreds of Cuban exiles in Miami neighbourhoods expressed their discontent with the White House by hanging black crepe from their homes.  In November 1963, Cuban exiles passed around a pamphlet extolling JFK’s assassination. “Only one development,” the broadside declared, would lead to Castro’s demise and the return to their beloved country – “If an inspired act of God should place in the White House within weeks in the hands of a Texan known to be a friend of all Latin America.”

Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss and Havana casino czar who had worked closely with the CIA in various anti-Castro assassination plots, told his Cuban associates that JFK was to be hit.

On the day JFK was shot, Castro was meeting with French journalist Jean Daniel, editor of the socialist newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur and one of JFK’s secret channels to Castro, at his summer presidential palace in Varadero Beach.  At 1.00 p.m. they received a phone call with news that Jack had been shot.  “Voila, there is the end to your mission of peace,” Castro told Daniel.

After JFK’s death, Castro persistently pushed Lisa Howard [ABC newswoman who served as an informal emissary between JFK and Fidel], Adlai Stevenson and William Attwood and others to ask Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson to resume the dialogue.  Johnson ignored the requests and Castro eventually gave up.

Immediately following JFK’s assassination, many clues appeared – later discredited – suggesting that Castro may have orchestrated President Kennedy’s assassination.

Johnson and others in his administration were aware of these whispers and apparently accepted their implication. Johnson decided not to pursue rapprochement with Castro after being told by his intelligence apparatus, including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) boss J. Edgar Hoover, that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been an agent of the Cuban government.  This despite Oswald’s well-established anti-Castro bona fides.

After JFK’s death, my father continued to press Lyndon Johnson’s State Department to analyse “whether it is possible for the United States to live with Castro.”

“The present travel restrictions are inconsistent with traditional American liberties,” my father, then-U.S. Attorney General, argued in a behind-the-scenes debate over the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba.

In December 1963, the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute four members of the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba who had led a group of 59 college-age Americans on a trip to Havana. My father opposed those prosecutions, as well as the travel ban itself.

In a December 12, 1963 confidential memorandum to then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, he wrote that he favoured “withdraw[ing] the existing regulation prohibiting trips by U.S. citizens to Cuba.”

My father argued that restricting Americans’ right to travel went against the freedoms that he had sworn to protect as Attorney General. Lifting the ban, he argued, would be “more consistent with our views as a free society and would contrast with such things as the Berlin Wall and Communist controls on such travel.”

Secretary of State Dean Rusk thereafter excluded my father from foreign affairs discussions.  He was still Johnston’s Attorney General but the roaming portfolio that had previously empowered him to steer U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy administration years was now revoked.

The CIA would continue its efforts to try to assassinate Castro during the first two years of the LBJ administration.  Johnson never knew it.  Castro provided Senator George McGovern with evidence of at least ten assassination plots during this period.

In 1978, Castro told visiting Congressmen, “I can tell you that in the period in which Kennedy’s assassination took place, Kennedy was changing his policy toward Cuba.  To a certain extent we were honoured in having such a rival.  He was an outstanding man.”

William Attwood later said: “There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination, we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalisation of relations with Cuba.”

When I first met Castro in 1999, he acknowledged the recklessness of his brash gambit of inviting Soviet nuclear arms into Cuba.  “It was a mistake to risk such grave dangers for the world.”  At the time, I was lobbying the Cuban leader against Havana’s plans to open a Chernobyl-style nuclear plant in Juragua.

During another meeting with the Cuban leader in August 2014, Fidel expressed his admiration for John Kennedy’s leadership and observed that a nuclear exchange at the time of the Cuban missile crisis could have obliterated all of civilisation.

Today, five decades later and two decades after the Soviets left Cuba, we are finally ending a misguided policy that at times has done little to further America’s international leadership or its foreign policy interests. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

*             Robert F. Kennedy Jr serves as Senior Attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio. Earlier in his career, he served as Assistant Attorney General in New York City.

Excerpt:

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Jan 5 2015 (IPS)

On the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, one of his emissaries was secretly meeting with Fidel Castro at Varadero Beach in Cuba to discuss terms for ending the U.S. embargo against the island and beginning the process of détente between the two countries.

That was more than 50 years ago and now, finally, President Barack Obama is resuming the process of turning JFK’s dream into reality by re-establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Robert F Kennedy Jr

Those clandestine discussions at Castro’s summer presidential palace in Varadero Beach had been proceeding for several months, having evolved along with the improved relations with the Soviet Union following the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

During that crisis, JFK and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, both at odds with their own military hardliners, had developed a mutual respect, even warmth, towards each other.  A secret bargain between them had paved the way for removing the Soviet missiles from Cuba – and U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey – with each side saving face.

Fidel, on the other hand, was furious at the Russians for ordering the withdrawal of the missiles without consulting him.  After the missile crisis, Khrushchev invited an embittered Fidel to Russia to smooth over the Cuban leader’s anger at the unilateral withdrawal of Soviet missiles.

Castro and Khrushchev spent six weeks together, with the Russian leader badgering Fidel to seek détente and pursue peace with President Kennedy.  Khrushchev’s son Sergei would later write that “my father and Fidel developed a teacher-student relationship.”  Khrushchev wanted to convince Castro that JFK was trustworthy.

Castro himself recalled how “for hours [Khrushchev] read many messages to me, messages from President Kennedy, messages sometimes delivered through Robert Kennedy [JFK’s brother]…”.  Castro returned to Cuba determined to seek a path toward rapprochement.“I cannot help hoping that a leader will come to the fore in North America (why not Kennedy, there are things in his favour!), who will be willing to brave unpopularity, fight the corporations, tell the truth and, most important, let the various nations act as they see fit. Kennedy could still be this man” – Fidel Castro in an interview with French journalist Jean Daniel, one of JFK’s secret channels to Castro

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was spying on all parties.  In a top secret January 5, 1963 memo to his fellow agents, Richard Helms (later to become Director of the CIA in 1966) warned that “at the request of Khrushchev, Castro was returning to Cuba with the intention of adopting with Fidel a conciliatory policy toward the Kennedy administration for the time being.”

JFK was open to such advances.  In the autumn of 1962, he and his brother Robert had dispatched James Donovan, a New York attorney, and John Dolan, a friend and advisor to my father Robert Kennedy, to negotiate the release of Castro’s 1500 Cuban prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Donovan and Nolan developed an amiable friendship with Castro.  They travelled the country together.  Fidel gave them a tour of the Bay of Pigs battlefield and then took them as his guests to so many baseball games that, Nolan told me, he vowed to never watch the sport again.

After he released the last 1200 prisoners on Christmas Day 1962, Castro asked Donovan how to go about normalising relations with the United States.  Donovan replied: “The way porcupines make love, very carefully.”

My father Robert and JFK were intensely curious about Castro and demanded detailed, highly personal, descriptions of the Cuban leader from both Donovan and Nolan.

The U.S. press had variously caricatured Fidel as drunken, filthy, mercurial, violent and undisciplined. However, Nolan told them: “Our impression would not square with the commonly accepted image. Castro was never irritable, never drunk, never dirty.”  He and Donovan described the Cuban leader as worldly, witty, curious, well informed, impeccably groomed, and an engaging conversationalist.

From their extensive travel with Castro and having witnessed the spontaneous ovations when he entered baseball stadiums with his small but professional security team, they confirmed the CIA’s internal reports of Castro’s overwhelming popularity with the Cuban people.

JFK was intuitively sympathetic towards the Cuban revolution.  His special assistant and biographer Arthur Schlesinger wrote that “President Kennedy had a natural sympathy for Latin American underdogs and understood the source of the widespread resentment against the United States.”

He said that “the long history of abuse and exploitation had turned Fidel against the United States and toward the Soviets at a time when he might have turned toward the West.  JFK’s objection was to Cuba’s role as a Soviet patsy and platform for expanding the Soviet sphere of influence and fomenting revolution and Soviet expansion throughout Latin America.”

Castro had his own nationalistic reasons to bridle at Soviet dependency, particularly after the missile crisis.  He made his desire for rapprochement clear during private talks with ABC newswoman Lisa Howard, who served as another informal emissary between JFK and Fidel.

Howard reported back to the White House that, “in our conversations [Fidel] made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss the Soviet personnel and military hardware on Cuban soil, compensation for expropriated American lands and investments, the question of Cuba as a base for communist subversion throughout the hemisphere.

Once the Cuban prisoners were free, JFK began seriously looking at rebooting relations with Castro.  That impulse took him sailing into perilous waters.  The very mention of détente with Fidel was political dynamite as the 1964 U.S. presidential elections approached.

Barry Goldwater [the Republican Party’s nominee for president in the 1964 election], Richard Nixon [Vice-President under Eisenhower and JFK’s rival for the presidency in 1960] and Nelson Rockefeller [Goldwater’s competitor for nomination as Republican presidential candidate] all regarded Cuba as the Republican Party’s greatest asset.

Certain murderous and violent Cuban exiles and their CIA handlers saw talk of co-existence as hell bound treachery.

In September 1963, JFK secretly asked William Attwood, a former journalist and U.S. diplomat attached to the United Nations, to open secret negotiations with Castro.

Atwood had known Castro since 1959 when he covered the Cuban Revolution for Look magazine before Castro turned against the United States.

Later that month, my father told Attwood to find a secure location to conduct a secret parlay with Fidel.

In October, Castro began arranging for Atwood to fly surreptitiously to a remote airstrip in Cuba to begin negotiations on détente.  On November 18, 1963, four days before JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Castro listened to his aide, Rene Vallejo, talk by phone with Attwood and agreed to an agenda for the meeting.

That same day, JFK prepared the path for rapprochement with a clear public message.  Speaking to the Inter American Press Association in the heart of Cuba’s exile community in Miami, he declared that U.S. policy was not to “dictate to any nation how to organise its economic life.  Every nation is free to shape its own economic institution in accordance with its own national needs and will.”

A month earlier, JFK had opened another secret channel to Castro through French journalist Jean Daniel, editor of the socialist newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur.  On his way to interview Fidel in Cuba on October 24, 1963, Daniel visited the White House where JFK talked to him about U.S.-Cuba relations.

In a message meant for Castro’s ears, JFK criticised Castro sharply for precipitating the missile crisis.  He then changed tone, expressing the same empathy toward Cuba that he had evinced for the Russian people in his June 10, 1963 American University speech announcing the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets.

Kennedy launched into a recitation of the long history of U.S. relations with the corrupt and tyrannical regime of Fulgencio Batista. JFK told Daniel that he had supported that Castro’s Sierra Maestra Manifesto at the outset of the Cuban revolution.

Between November 19 and 22, 1963, Castro conducted his own series of interviews with Daniel.  Castro carefully and meticulously debriefed the Frenchman about every nuance of his meeting with JFK, particularly JFK’s strong endorsement of the Cuban Revolution.

Then Castro sat in thoughtful silence, composing a careful reply that he knew JFK was awaiting.  Finally he spoke carefully, measuring every word.  “I believe Kennedy is sincere,” he began.  “I also believe that today the expression of this sincerity could have political significance.”

He followed with a detailed critique of the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations which had attacked his Cuban Revolution “long before there was the pretext and alibi of Communism.”

But, he continued, “I feel that [Kennedy] inherited a difficult situation; I don’t think a President of the United States is every really free, and I believe Kennedy is at present feeling the impact of this lack of freedom.  I also believe he now understands the extent to which he has been misled, especially, for example, on Cuban reaction at the time of the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion.”

He told Daniel: “I cannot help hoping that a leader will come to the fore in North America (why not Kennedy, there are things in his favour!), who will be willing to brave unpopularity, fight the corporations, tell the truth and, most important, let the various nations act as they see fit.  Kennedy could still be this man.”

Castro continued: “He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas.  He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln.” (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

*             Robert F. Kennedy Jr serves as Senior Attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and President of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic and co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio. Earlier in his career, he served as Assistant Attorney General in New York City.

Excerpt:

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Dec 30 2014 (IPS)

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba after more than five decades of a misguided policy which my uncle, John F. Kennedy, and my father, Robert F. Kennedy, had been responsible for enforcing after the U.S. embargo against the country was first implemented in October 1960 by the Eisenhower administration.

The move has raised hopes in many quarters – not only in the United States but around the world – that the embargo itself is now destined to disappear.

Robert F Kennedy Jr

This does not detract from the fact that Cuba is still a dictatorship. The Cuban government restricts basic freedoms like the freedoms of speech and assembly, and it owns the media.

Elections, as in most old-school Communist countries, offer limited options and, during periodic crackdowns, the Cuban government fills Cuban jails with political prisoners.

However, there are real tyrants in the world with whom the United States has become a close ally and many governments with much worse human rights records than Cuba – Azerbaijan, for example, whose president Ilham Aliyev boils his opponents in oil, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, China, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and many others where torture, enforced disappearances, religious intolerance, suppression of speech and assembly, mediaeval oppression of women, sham elections and non-judicial executions are all government practices.

Despite its poverty, Cuba has managed some impressive accomplishments. Cuba’s government boasts the highest literacy rates for its population of any nation in the hemisphere. Cuba claims its citizens enjoy universal access to health care and more doctors per capita than any other nation in the Americas. Cuba’s doctors, reportedly, have high quality medical training.“It seems stupid to pursue a U.S. foreign policy by repeating a strategy that has proved a monumental failure for six decades. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over, and expecting different results. In this sense, the [Cuba] embargo is insane”

Unlike other Caribbean islands where poverty means starvation, all Cubans receive a monthly food ration book that provides for their basic necessities.

Even Cuban government officials admit that the economy is smothered by the inefficiencies of Marxism, although they also argue that the principal cause of the island’s economic woes is the strangling impact of the 60-year-old trade embargo – and it is clear to everyone that the embargo first implemented during the Eisenhower administration in October 1960 unfairly punishes ordinary Cubans.

The embargo impedes economic development by making virtually every commodity and every species of equipment both astronomically expensive and difficult to obtain.

Worst of all, instead of punishing the regime for its human rights restrictions, the embargo has fortified the dictatorship by justifying oppression. It provides every Cuban with visible evidence of the bogeyman that every dictator requires – an outside enemy to justify an authoritarian national security state.

The embargo has also given Cuban leaders a plausible monster on which to blame Cuba’s poverty by lending credence to their argument that the United States, not Marxism, has caused the island’s economic distress.

The embargo has almost certainly helped keep the Castro brothers [Fidel and Raul] in power for the last five decades.

It has justified the Cuban government’s oppressive measures against political dissent in the same way that U.S. national security concerns have been used by some U.S. politicians to justify incursions against our bill of rights, including the constitutional rights to jury trial, habeas corpus, effective counsel and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, eavesdropping, cruel and unusual punishment, torturing of prisoners, extraordinary renditions and the freedom to travel, to name just a few.

It is almost beyond irony that the very same politicians who argued that we should punish Castro for curtailing human rights and mistreating prisoners in Cuban jails elsewhere contend that the United States is justified in mistreating our own prisoners in Cuban jails.

Imagine a U.S. president faced, as Castro was, with over 400 assassination attempts, thousands of episodes of foreign-sponsored sabotage directed at our nation’s people, factories and bridges, a foreign-sponsored invasion and fifty years of economic warfare that has effectively deprived our citizens of basic necessities and strangled our economy.

The Cuban leadership has pointed to the embargo with abundant justification as the reason for economic deprivation in Cuba.

The embargo allows the regime to portray the United States as a bully and itself as the personification of courage, standing up to threats, intimidation and economic warfare by history’s greatest military superpower.

It perpetually reminds the proud Cuban people that our powerful nation, which has staged invasions of their island and plotted for decades to assassinate their leaders and sabotaged their industry, continues an aggressive campaign to ruin their economy.

Perhaps the best argument for lifting the embargo is that it does not work. Our 60-plus year embargo against Cuba is the longest in history and yet the Castro regime has remained in power during its entire duration.

Instead of lifting the embargo, different U.S. administrations, including the Kennedy administration, have strengthened it without result. It seems silly to pursue a U.S. foreign policy by repeating a strategy that has proved a monumental failure for six decades. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over expecting different results. In this sense, the embargo is insane.

The embargo clearly discredits U.S. foreign policy, not only across Latin America, but also with Europe and other regions.

For more than 20 years, the U.N. General Assembly has called for lifting the embargo. Last year the vote was 188 in favour and two against (the United States and Israel). The Inter American Commission on Human Rights (the main human rights bodies of the Americas) has also called for lifting the embargo and the African Union likewise.

One reason that it diminishes our global prestige and moral authority is that the entire embargo enterprise only emphasises our distorted relationship with Cuba. That relationship is historically freighted with powerful ironies that make the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

Most recently, while we fault Cuba for jailing and mistreating political prisoners, we have simultaneously been subjecting prisoners, many of them innocent by the Pentagon’s own admission, to torture – including waterboarding and illegal detention and imprisonment without trial in Cuban prison cells in Guantanamo Bay.

While we blame Cuba for not allowing its citizens to travel freely to the United States, we restrict our own citizens from traveling freely to Cuba. In that sense, the embargo seems particularly anti-American. Why does my passport say that I can’t visit Cuba? Why can’t I go where I want to go?

I have been a fortunate American. I have been able to visit Cuba and that was a wonderful education because it gave me the opportunity to see Communism with all its warts and faults up close. Why doesn’t our government trust Americans to see for themselves the ravages of dictatorship?

Had President Kennedy survived to a second administration, the embargo would have been lifted half a century ago.

President Kennedy told Castro, through intermediaries, that the United States would end the embargo when Cuba stopped exporting violent revolutionists to Latin America’s Alliance for Progress nations – a policy that mainly ended with Che Guevara’s death in 1967 and when Castro stopped allowing the Soviets to use the island as a base for the expansion of Soviet power in the hemisphere.

Well, the Soviets have been gone since 1991 – more than 20 years ago – but the U.S.-led embargo continues to choke Cuba’s economy. If the objective of our foreign policy in Cuba is to promote freedom for its subdued citizens, we should be opening ourselves up to them, not shutting them out.

We have so much to learn from Cuba – from its successes in some areas and failures in others.

As I walked through the streets of Havana, Model-Ts chugged by, Che’s soaring effigy hung in wrought iron above the street, and a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln stood in a garden on a tree-lined avenue.

I could feel the weight of sixty years of Cuban history, a history so deeply intertwined with that of my own country. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

In a new book cataloguing the recent history of clandestine exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba, the reliance on secret intermediaries belies the common perception that the two governments rarely communicated during the decades that followed the Cuban revolution in 1959.

Documents detail how Jimmy Carter acted as a secret intermediary for the Clinton administration during the 1994 Balseros immigration crisis and how Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ordered contingency plans drawn up to “clobber” Havana in 1976 in response to Cuba’s military intervention in defence of the Angola’s MPLA government.One of the book’s novel revelations is the role of Jimmy Carter in acting as a secret intermediary between Washington and Havana during the 1994 Balseros crisis.

The new book, “Back Channel to Cuba”, was launched Wednesday at New York’s Pierre Hotel by co-authors Peter Kornbluh, a Cuba expert at the non-governmental National Security Archive, and William LeoGrande, a veteran Cuba foreign-policy specialist at American University in Washington, DC.

“It’s an odd place to hold a press conference, but for a historic reason,” said co-author Peter Kornbluh. “It’s the place where the first secret talks to normalise relations with Cuba were held, during a three-hour meeting here almost 40 years ago.”

The book is filled with a cast of secret intermediaries who have shuttled back and forth between the two countries even during times of intense hostility.

Despite Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 followed by the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. relations with Havana, which has been subject to a U.S. trade embargo since 1960, have remained antagonistic.

Most Cubans who fled to the U.S. in the decade after the 1959 Revolution – the majority of whom settled in the Florida – have long opposed all attempts by U.S. administrations to engage Havana in any way that, in their view, would serve to legitimise the Communist government there.

One of the book’s novel revelations is the role of Jimmy Carter in acting as a secret intermediary between Washington and Havana during the 1994 Balseros crisis. The crisis saw a flood of so-called Cuban “rafters” traverse the dangerous route to Florida in what the U.S. administration saw as a politically fraught replay of the 1980 Mariel boatlift that helped defeat Carter’s re-election bid.

The former president, writing to Fidel Castro, talked of his “hope of finding common ground on which to resolve the crisis, and to prepare for a future resolution of long-term differences.”

With his support, an agreement was forged between the Clinton and Castro administrations of a “wet feet, dry feet” policy whereby Cubans who fled to the United States would be allowed to pursue residency if they reached shore. Through the Cuban mission at the United Nations, Carter negotiated the numbers of immigrants who would legally be allowed to remain in the U.S..

As president, Carter himself tried hard to normalise the U.S.-Cuban relationship. It was during his tenure that the U.S. and Cuba established Interest Sections in their respective capitals. But the intensification of Cold War tensions during the latter half of his term – in addition to the growing political clout of Cuban Americans opposed to any improvement in ties – significantly reduced his room for manoeuvre.

Even before Carter, Kissinger had himself tried to promote a détente with Havana, sending representatives Frank Mankiewicz and Lawrence Eagleburger to a meeting at LaGuardia airport in January 1975, to “explore the possibilities for a more normal relationship between our two countries,” and “determine whether there exists an equal determination on both sides to settle the differences that exist between us.”

That, in turn, set the stage for the meeting at the Pierre Hotel six months later. Eagleburger was again present, alongside Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs William D. Rogers.

But Cuba’s intervention in Angola as various foreign-backed factions jostled for power in the run-up to that country’s independence from Portugal in November 1975 put paid to that effort. According to the new book, the former national security adviser and secretary of state was infuriated by Castro’s move, which proved decisive in the MPLA’s victory over rival factions backed variously by South Africa, Zaire, the U.S., and China, as well as South African mercenaries.

During a White House conversation with President Gerald Ford, Kissinger argued that Havana’s intervention raised the prospect of a “race war.”

Cuba had intervened in Angola on the eve of the new country’s independence from Portugal in 1975 in support of the MPLA against South African, U.S., and Chinese-backed factions, as well as South African and Zairean mercenary forces.

In the document, Kissinger says “I think we are going to have to smash Castro. We probably can’t do it before the [November 1976 U.S. presidential] elections.”

Kissinger and Ford were concerned that Cuba would repeat “Angola-style” military action in other African nations amidst intensified rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union across the continent in an African version of the “domino theory” that was used to justify Washington’s ultimately disastrous intervention in Indochina beginning in the late 1950s.

“If they move into Namibia or Rhodesia, I would be in favour of clobbering them,” Kissinger said, according to the transcripts published in the new book. “That would create a furor … but I think we might have to demand they get out of Africa.”

Having won in Angola, Kissinger believed that Cuban forces could play a similar role in South-West Africa (now Namibia), Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and ultimately South Africa itself within five years. He thought it would be “easier to bring pressure on Cuba, as the closer and weaker partner in a tightly interwoven relationship, than on the Soviet Union” which supported both Cuba and the MPLA.

Wide discrepancies between public and private relations between Cuba and the United States have long characterised bilateral ties, LeoGrande told IPS.

“At the tail end of the Kennedy administration, there were secret initiatives to open up a dialogue with Cuba and a hope that in the aftermath of the [October 1962] missile crisis, the Cubans were so angry with the Soviets [for promising to never deploy nuclear weapons to the island] that they would be enticed back into the orbit of the United States. The initiative was taken through the Cuban representative at the United Nations to reopen relations.

“At the same time, if you read some of President Kennedy’s speeches on Cuba, it’s as hard-line Cold War as ever. Just the president and a handful of people knew about [the secret initiative], so you didn’t see any reflection of it in the public dialogue.”

A key theme of the book is the common use of these back channels. Cutting through bureaucratic red tape has been attractive to both countries. “Presidents will always use some kind of channel,” LeoGrande told IPS. “Using diplomatic channels but keeping it secret is probably necessary for solving complex diplomatic issues.”

Successive presidents have preferred to use a personal envoy rather than go through the layers of the diplomatic process that increased the risks of press leaks. In fact, every single president has used these intermediaries since the revolution in 1959.

The authors are convinced that there are positive steps that could be taken to open formal channels with the Caribbean island. “If we didn’t have the embargo, and the democracy promotion programmes, we could have a normal and productive relationship with Cuba,” said LeoGrande.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Jim Lobe contributed to this article from Washington.

Chávez and Castro in Havana's Revolution Square in February 2006, when Chávez was presented with the UNESCO José Martí Award. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was the president who made the most visits to Cuba, where flags are flying at half-mast in official mourning for his death Tuesday Mar. 5, and where his friend and political mentor, Fidel Castro, survives him.

The extremely close economic ties between the two countries arose from a comprehensive agreement signed Oct. 30, 2000, which gave Cuba access to the benefits of the Caracas Energy Cooperation Agreement for supplying oil and fuel on preferential terms also enjoyed by other countries in the Caribbean region.

Together with concerns over the possible economic repercussions of Chávez’s death in this Caribbean island nation, there was anxiety in some quarters over Castro’s health. “How sad, I wonder how Fidel is taking it,” said one woman buying the state newspaper Granma, which on Wednesday devoted six of its eight pages to Chávez.

“The first reaction, certainly, is the feeling of grief over the loss of a great Latin American leader and one of Cuba’s best friends in Venezuela,” essayist and researcher Carlos Alzugaray told IPS. “Personal, political and social” links between Cubans and Venezuelans “date from a long time ago,” he added.

Chávez promoted new kinds of participative processes, and “in spite of the aggressiveness that characterises Venezuela’s bourgeoisie, his attitude was always one of dialogue and he strengthened democracy in his country,” said Reina Fleitas, a university professor.

Based on the wishes of both governments to establish, sustain, develop and expand cooperation for their mutual benefit, making the most of the potential and comparative advantages of each country, a new style of political relations was established in the region, some analysts say.

Others hold the view that the Chávez government merely became a substitute for the aid from Moscow that was the backbone of the Cuban economy until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the worst effect of which was, precisely, the loss of oil supplies.
Venezuela is at present a key pillar of the Cuban economy, which receives between 90,000 and 100,000 barrels per day of crude from the South American country.

In exchange for this strategic supply, some 50,000 Cuban experts in education, health, sports and other fields, such as communications, intelligence and the military, are living and working in Venezuela.

Venezuela has thus become Cuba’s main trading partner, and trade has grown to more than three billion dollars a year.

Furthermore, around a hundred cooperation projects in different sectors of the economy are worth over 1.3 billion dollars, according to 2011 figures.

Given the importance of these ties, some segments of the Cuban population may be anxious about the possible economic consequences of Chávez’s death, Alzugaray said.

However, “it is highly probable that the continuers of Chavez’s policies will remain in government in Venezuela, since under his leadership there were strong demands and progressive, popular, left-wing political forces that have combined to form a powerful mass movement,” he said.

People should also understand that economic relations have become increasingly institutionalised and are beneficial to both countries, he said.

“I don’t think the opposition in Venezuela will be able to seize the leadership from Chávez’s followers in the short term, nor that they will be so irresponsible as to destroy Cuban-Venezuelan relations in the unlikely event that they do take power, which is only a possibility in the medium to long term but not in the immediate future,” he said.

Cuban journalist Boris Caro, who lives in Canada, said the impact of Chávez’s death would depend on the result of the forthcoming Venezuelan elections, which must be called within 30 days.

“If Nicolás Maduro – the interim president and Chávez’s anointed successor – defeats (opposition presidential candidate Henrique) Capriles, there will be no major changes to the rate of economic reforms on the island,” he wrote on the interactive section Café 108 on the IPS Cuba web site.

But an electoral victory for the opposition would bring the Cuban government to the verge of another energy crisis, he said. “Without the 90,000 barrels of oil per day subsidised by Caracas, the island’s economy would fall into even deeper recession,” he said.

Caro agreed with other sources in hoping that the Cuban authorities had a “Plan B”, since they were well aware that Chávez was expected to die. “They have had two years in which to prepare. Hopefully this new situation has not taken them by surprise,” he said.

Castro and Chávez met in Havana on Dec. 14, 1994, when Chávez, then leader of the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200, visited the Cuban capital at the invitation of Eusebio Leal, the Havana City historian. He was met and embraced at the airport by then President Fidel Castro.

Eight months earlier, the young paratrooper lieutenant-colonel had been freed after serving two years in prison for leading a failed attempted coup against president Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979 and 1989-1993), who restored diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1974 after they were broken off by Rómulo Betancourt in 1960.

The idea had been to make a discreet exploratory visit, but Castro took the reins and treated Chávez as a head of state. About the same time, Venezuelan president Rafael Caldera was publicly receiving Jorge Más Canosa, the rabidly anti-Castro head of the Cuban American National Foundation.

Eighteen years after their first meeting, Castro described his first conversations with Chávez as lasting for hours. “I was far from imagining that those soldiers branded as coup plotters by the news agencies, who sowed their ideas with so much discretion for years, were a select group of Bolivarian revolutionaries,” he wrote in a letter to Maduro.

Between 2006 and 2011, when word of Chávez’s ailment was made public, the Venezuelan president made a score of private, working and official visits to Cuba, which became opportunities for improvised discussions of bilateral, regional and international issues.

On one of those trips, in 2007, Chávez declared that “deep down, we are one government,” and that the two countries were advancing towards a “confederation of Bolivarian (after South American independence hero Simón Bolívar), Martían (after Cuba’s national hero José Martí), Caribbean and South American republics.”

Chávez chose to be treated in Cuba for the cancerous tumour that he announced had been diagnosed in June 2011 at the CIMEQ Hospital in Havana, where he underwent his fourth operation on Dec. 11, 2012.

During the convalescence of Castro, who became seriously ill in 2006, Chávez officiated as his international spokesman. And Castro, in turn, was attentive to the health of his Venezuelan guest right to the end. Two days of official mourning and a day of national mourning have been declared in Cuba from Wednesday to Friday.

Miguel Díaz Canel (right) is now the No. 2 in the Cuban government. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Feb 26 2013 (IPS)

The new faces in key positions in parliament and other branches of the Cuban state will need to prove their charisma and potential political leadership, possibly in a more participative way, in the context of current economic and social changes, analysts say.

The new leaders “will have to earn their promotion to their new appointments by their performance in putting into practice the ‘updating of the model’ (as the economic and social reforms are called) and by the popularity and prestige they achieve among their fellow citizens”, Carlos Alzugaray, a diplomat and university professor, told IPS.

At the first meeting of the National Assembly of People’s Power, the island’s single-chamber parliament, on Sunday Feb. 24, Raúl Castro was re-elected president of the country and Miguel Díaz Canel, a 52-year-old graduate of military academies with a solid career in the ruling Cuban Communist Party (PCC), became first vice president of the Council of State.

Díaz Canel takes over the second most important government position from José Ramón Machado Ventura, a member of the so-called “historic generation” of the Cuban revolution that was victorious in January 1959, made up then of young people who fought against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973).

The 82-year-old Machado Ventura, and the 73-year-old commander Abelardo Colomé, another historic leader, gave up their posts “in favour of the promotion of the new generation”, said Castro in the closing speech of the day, which had opened the eighth legislative period (2013-2018).

Castro announced that the next five years would see “the gradual and orderly transfer” of the most important posts.

Lázara Mercedes López Acea, the 48-year-old president of the PCC in Havana, and Salvador Valdés Mesa, the 67-year-old secretary of the Workers Central Union (CTC), the only trade union in Cuba, were also elected vice presidents of the 31-member Council of State.

Gladys Bejerano, the Comptroller General of the Republic, and commander Ramiro Valdés, were re-elected vice presidents, and Machado Ventura took up the last of the five vice presidencies.

Half of the 612 seats in the Cuban parliament, which are renewed every five years, are occupied by candidates elected in national elections, while the rest are elected by representatives of social organisations and the different sections of the PCC, the only legal party on the island.

Political dissidents in Cuba denigrate the electoral system and claim that their parties, none of which has legal recognition, should have the opportunity to present candidates.

The National Assembly elected its leaders at its first session after the general elections of Feb. 3, with the presence – for the first time since August 2010 – of Member of Parliament Fidel Castro, the historic leader of the revolution and elder brother to Raúl. Esteban Lazo, a long time leading member of the PCC, is now president of the Cuban parliament.

Ana María Mari Machado remained vice president of parliament, and Miriam Brito stayed on as secretary. The National Assembly held a direct, secret vote for a group of candidates to the Council of State, which is the supreme representation of the Cuban state under the constitution. The Central Committee of the PCC participates in the selection of the candidates.

The average age of members of the new Council of State is 57. Thirty-nine percent are Afro-descendants or of mixed descent, and nearly 42 percent are women. Lazo said the authorities wish to increase the proportion of women in the Council, and in all the country’s institutions.

Raúl Castro declared that this five-year period will be his last term of office as president, “independently of when the constitution is perfected”.

In 2011, the Sixth Congress of the PCC agreed to limit important state and government positions to a maximum of two consecutive periods, and to establish a maximum age for the holders. Making these changes binding, as well as other reforms introduced since 2008, requires constitutional modification by means of a referendum.

“The new leaders will not be able to govern Cuba as Fidel and Raúl Castro have done, because they lack the charismatic legitimacy and the authority they (the Castros) had as leaders of the historic generation,” said Alzugaray.

In some quarters called the “transition” and in others the “successor generation” or the changing of the guard, this phenomenon is “desirable and normal” according to the diplomat. In his view, this group faces the challenge of fomenting “a more collectivist and democratic model of leadership (and) expansion of public spaces for political deliberation” as well as more active citizen participation.

Member of Parliament Lisette Conde noted that young people are keen to be represented in Parliament.

“Our greater participation in the present legislature is an opportunity to express our opinions and experiences,” this 20-year-old lawmaker, the youngest in the National Assembly, told IPS.

Conde, a medical student who was elected by the 10 de Octubre municipality in Havana, said the process of changes in the country is “very important” for youth.

Updating the Cuban economic model, along with social and institutional adjustments, is now “entering questions of wider scope, complexity and profundity,” said Raúl Castro. A decree-law with new regulations, and greater openness to foreign investment, may emerge this year, he said.

The National Assembly is also planning to discuss and design a labour code to deal with the needs of the growing private sector and other forms of non-state activity. The Cuban authorities are preparing a programme for development up to 2030, which will set guidelines for the economic reforms.

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Among millions of people flocking to the polls in Cuba to vote in general elections was the unexpected figure of former president Fidel Castro, making a surprise public appearance in what was interpreted as a reaffirmation of his support for the government of his brother, President Raúl Castro.

Former president Fidel Castro voting in Cuba on Sunday Feb. 3. Credit: Marcelino Vázquez Hernández/AIN

“Nothing is fortuitous: Fidel is (showing) his support for updating the economic model and the transformations that derive from it,” an analyst who asked not to be identified told IPS.

Castro cast his ballot and talked to Cuban media Sunday at his polling station in the municipality of Plaza de la Revolución (Revolution Square) in the capital, Havana.

The former president said, “It is our duty to update the Cuban socialist model, modernise it, but without committing errors.” He also spoke about the health of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez who is convalescing in Havana from a cancer operation, saying he receives daily information about Chávez’s health and adding that he is “much better”.

Fidel, Cuba’s historic leader, became seriously ill in 2006. In 2008, after his resignation, the National Assembly (the single-chamber parliament) elected Raúl Castro to be president of the 31-member Council of State, which according to the constitution “is the highest representative of the Cuban state”.

Since then, Fidel’s chair has remained vacant at parliamentary sessions. Sunday’s elections were called to renew provincial assemblies and the parliament, and the former president was among the candidates. “Fidel is already a member of parliament,” said the source, without further comment.

The unique Cuban electoral system calls for half of the 612 candidates to the same number of seats in the legislature to be selected by municipal assemblies, elected in November of the previous year. The other half are nominated by a candidacy commission made up of mass organisations.

Voting is direct, by secret ballot, and electors can vote for one, several or all the candidates in their electoral circuit, a territorial division of municipalities and the basis of the Cuban electoral system. The only electoral campaign advertising allowed in Cuba is the publication of candidates’ biographies.

Critics of the Cuban political system claim that for elections to be valid, opposition candidates should be allowed so that voters have real options. But the official response is that Cuban elections are more democratic because of the mass participation of citizens and the quality of the candidates.

The slate of 612 candidates represents the renewal of two-thirds of the current parliament. The average age among the candidates is 48; nearly 49 percent are women, 37 percent are Afro-descendants or of mixed ancestry, and around 83 percent have higher education.

The authorities are trying to encourage more active participation by young people in the electoral process and in government institutions. State media highlighted that 53 of the candidates are under 35 years of age, and many of the polling stations were staffed by youth. All the ballot boxes were guarded by school children.

“This shows that the new generations are willing to participate in government,” Alejandro Domínguez, a 20-year-old university student, told IPS. But “the decision to become a legislator can change your life. Many young people do not look at politics as a career path they want to follow. It is not part of young people’s aspirations,” he said.

A notable absence from the candidate slate was Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly since 1993. Roberto Fernández Retamar, president of Casa de las Américas, a cultural organisation founded by the Cuban government in 1959, and Marcia Cobas, deputy health minister, responsible for the export of medical services, were also missing from the list.

Newly nominated candidates, on the other hand, include Ricardo Cabrisas, the vice president of government responsible for foreign trade; Mariela Castro Espín, director of the National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX) and the daughter of President Raúl Castro; and Bruno Rodríguez, the foreign minister.

Rodríguez received another important promotion in December 2012, when he was appointed to the Political Bureau of the governing Cuban Communist Party (PCC), the only legal party in the country.

According to the electoral laws, the new National Assembly must meet within 45 days of the elections and designate the 31 members of the Council of State, including its president, for a five-year term.

Raúl Castro’s re-election is taken for granted.

However, this will be his final term as president, if the provision approved by the PCC’s Sixth Congress in April 2011 — according to which high political positions are to be limited to two consecutive five-year mandates — is ratified by the National Assembly and written into the constitution.

President Castro himself suggested in early 2012 at the close of the PCC National Conference that this, and other, decisions of the Party Congress could gradually begin to be applied without waiting for constitutional reform.

The president also anticipated changes in the statutes and other PCC foundation documents.

Raúl Castro has repeatedly expressed concern over the lack of young people with the ability to take on the complex task of directing the party, the state and the government. It is a task, he has said, that “has strategic importance for the revolution”.

Miguel Díaz-Canel, vice president of the Council of Ministers and head of higher education, stressed that reform of the economic model will this year enter a phase of more complex changes, creating a demand for National Assembly members who are sufficiently prepared to participate actively and responsibly in this process.

* With additional reporting from Ivet González in Havana.

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