Leonardo Padura

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Jan 21 2015 (IPS)

All Cubans, on either side of the Florida Straits, but in places like Spain, France or Greenland – where there must be a couple of Cubans – as well felt it was a historic moment that included each and every one of us, when U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Dec. 17 the normalisation of relations after half a century of hostility.

Those of us who are in Cuba felt that way precisely because we live here; and those who live abroad felt it because of the various motives that prompted them, at different times and for a range of reasons, to move away and rewrite their lives.

The great majority met the news with joy and hope; a smaller percentage felt a sensation of defeat and even betrayal; and another small group perhaps felt little about what the decision might mean for their futures.

But what is indisputable is that each one of us was shocked by the announcement, which some media outlets even dubbed “the news of the year” – extraordinary, really (even if you consider it an exaggeration), given that we’re just talking about the normalisation of ties between the United States and a small Caribbean island nation that is not even decisive in the economy of the region and supposedly does not influence the world’s big political developments.

But for years Cuba’s small size, in terms of both its geography and economy, has been far out of proportion to its international stature and influence, and the “news of the year” really was (or may have been) such due to several reasons, besides the emotional ones that affected us Cubans.We Cubans who live on the island have already felt a noticeable initial benefit from the announced accords: we have felt how a political tension that we have lived in for too many years has begun to ease, and we can already feel it is possible to rebuild our relationship with a neighbour that is too powerful and too close, and relate to each other if not in a friendly way, then at least in a cordial, civilised manner.

This was because of its symbolic nature as a major step towards détente and as a final stop to the long-drawn-out epilogue to the Cold War, as acknowledgement of a political error sustained by the United States for far too long, because of its weight in inter-American relations, and because of its humanistic character thanks to the fact that the first concrete measure was a prisoners swap, which is always a moving, humanitarian move.

And it also was so because in a world where bad news abounds, the fact that two countries that were at a political standoff for over half a century decided to overcome their differences and opt for dialogue is somewhat comforting.

Three weeks later, the machinery that will put that new relationship in motion has begun to move. On the eve of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson’s visit to Havana to start high-level “face-to-face” talks with the Cuban government, President Obama announced the introduction of his government’s first measures towards change.

The policies will make it easier for people from the U.S. to travel to Cuba, expand the remittances people can send to Cuba, open up banking relations, increase bilateral trade in different areas, and help strengthen civil society by different means, including improved information and communications and economic support for entrepreneurs.

Cuba, meanwhile, released prisoners with regard to whom Washington had expressed concern.

The measures recently implemented by Obama could be extremely significant for Cuba. Above all because they have punched holes in the straitjacket of the half-century embargo and have practically made its removal a question of time, and since they eliminate many of the fears that investors from other countries had with regard to possibly investing here.

Cuba, in the meantime, is waiting to be removed from the U.S. government’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, which it has been on for years.

And on both sides of the Straits, Cubans have an understandable sense of uncertainty about the future of the Cuban Adjustment Act, which guaranteed U.S. residency to any Cuban who set foot on U.S. soil – an issue that will surely be discussed during Jacobson’s visit.

But while the political agreements are moving along at a surprising pace, we Cubans insist on asking ourselves how this new situation created since Dec. 17 will play out on the island.

Because while Obama’s intention is to bring about a change in policy that will lead to a transformation of the system in Cuba, at the same time there are decisions that the Cuban government will be adopting internally to take advantage of the useful aspects of the new relationship and eliminate potential dangers.

The possible massive arrival of U.S. citizens to Cuba could be the first visible effect.

Today the island receives three million visitors a year. That number could double with the new regulations announced by Obama. Everyone is asking themselves whether the country is prepared for this – and the answers are not overly encouraging in general.

After a lengthy crisis triggered by the disappearance of the Soviet Union and its generous subsidies, and the stiffening of the U.S. embargo with the Torricelli Act [of 1992] and the Helms-Burton Act [of 1996, which included extra-territorial effects], Cuba today is a country with serious problems of infrastructure in communications, roads, transportation, buildings and other areas.

The lack of resources to make the necessary investments also affects the purchase of products that the presumed visitors would demand and will create difficulties for domestic consumption, where there are already problems of high prices and occasional shortages.

Perhaps the first to benefit from the massive arrival of U.S. citizens to Cuban shores will be the small businesses that offer accommodation (and the thousands of other people connected to them).

Currently in a city like Havana there aren’t enough rooms in the hotels (which belong to the state or are joint ventures with foreign companies), let alone quality service in the state-owned restaurants that would make them competitive.

That means a significant part of the money that will circulate will pass through the hands of those involved in private enterprise (the so-called “cuentapropistas” or self-employed) – a sector that even though they must pay high taxes to the state and extremely high prices for inputs purchased in the retail market (because the wholesale market that they are demanding does not yet exist), will make major profits in the scenario that will take shape in the near future.

And this phenomenon will contribute to further stretching the less and less homogeneous social fabric of this Caribbean island nation.

Another of the major expectations in Cuba is for the chance to travel to the United States because, even though this has become much more of a possibility in recent years, obtaining a visa is still a major hurdle.

And there are new questions among those who hoped to settle down in the United States under the Cuban Adjustment Act, and who now have the added possibility of not losing their citizenship rights on the island under the protection of the migration laws approved two years ago by the government of Raúl Castro, which eliminated the rule that if a Cuban stayed overseas for a certain amount of time, their departure was automatically seen as permanent, and they lost their rights and assets on the island.

And then there is the less tangible but no less real aspect of discourse and rhetoric. Half a century of hostility on many planes, including verbal, should begin to wane in the light of the new circumstances.

The “imperialist enemy” and “communist menace” are sitting down at the same table to seek negotiated solutions, and the language will have to adapt to that new reality to achieve the necessary comprehension and the hoped-for political accords.

In the meantime, we Cubans who live on the island have already felt a noticeable initial benefit from the announced accords: we have felt how a political tension that we have lived in for too many years has begun to ease, and we can already feel it is possible to rebuild our relationship with a neighbour that is too powerful and too close, and relate to each other if not in a friendly way, then at least in a cordial, civilised manner.

For that reason many of us – I include myself – have felt since Dec. 17 something similar to waking up from a nightmare from which almost none of us believed we could escape. And with our eyes wide open, we can catch a glimpse of the future, trying to see shapes more clearly through the haze.

Edited and translated by Stephanie Wildes

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. 

Several Cuban dissidents released at the start of the year, standing in front of other opponents of the Cuban government, including Bertha Soler (second to the right, in the second row), the leader of the organisation Ladies in White. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Jan 19 2015 (IPS)

Cuba has decided to move ahead in its talks with the European Union towards an agreement on cooperation parallel to the negotiations aimed at normalising relations with the United States after more than half a century of hostility.

As everyone’s attention is focused on the start of talks this week to restore diplomatic ties between Cuba and the United States, Brussels and Havana scheduled for Mar. 4-5 the third round of negotiations launched in late April 2014 in the Cuban capital.

“We first thought we had slipped down a bit on the list of priorities; now the message is that no, the Cuban state wants to keep a balance between the two processes, which is good news for us,” the EU ambassador in Havana, Herman Portocarero, told IPS.

Delegations from Cuba and the United States will meet Jan. 21-22 in Havana, in the first meeting since the two governments announced Dec. 17 that diplomatic relations would be reestablished, and since sweeping new measures to ease trade and travel between the two countries were presented by Washington on Jan. 15.

In a process that got underway in 2008, Cuba and the EU finally held their first round of talks Apr. 29-30 for a future bilateral accord on political dialogue and cooperation which, according to Portocarero, should define aspects like the role of civil society and the main issues involving long-term cooperation.

Cuba is the only Latin American country that lacks a cooperation agreement with the EU.

A second meeting was held in August in Brussels, and on Jan. 8-9 the Cuban and EU delegations were to sit down together for the third time. But in early December the meeting was postponed by the Cuban authorities, with no new date scheduled, apparently solely due to a busy agenda.

After a year during which Cuba strengthened its relations with the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean and with traditional allies like China and Russia, and which ended with the historic announcement of a thaw with Washington, Havana will now be in a different position in its negotiations with Brussels.

The main aim of Cuban diplomacy in this case is to push for more trade, but above all for an increase in capital inflows under the new law on foreign investment.

The European bloc is currently Cuba’s second trading partner after Venezuela, whose economic difficulties raise doubts about what will happen to its wide-ranging trade ties with this Caribbean island nation. In 2013, according to the latest available figures, Cuba’s imports from Europe totalled 2.12 billion dollars and exports amounted to 971 million dollars.

According to analysts, the government of Raúl Castro hopes that a stable relationship under a framework accord like the one sought with the 28-member European bloc will lead to increased trade, but also to the diversification of economic and trade ties given the possibility that the normalisation of relations with the United States will lead to the lifting of the half-century U.S. embargo.

Portocarero believes Cuba’s new relationship with its northern neighbour will accelerate all of the processes. “If the Cuban authorities want to maintain a balance so that not everything is monopolised through the United States, then they have to give us the attention we deserve,” he said.

Brussels is observing with concern that some of the measures announced by the United States favour its financial sector, while Europe’s remains subject to enormous fines because of the extra-territorial reach of the Helms Burton Act, which in 2006 codified Washington’s sanctions against Cuba, and can only be repealed by the U.S. Congress.

“It is an imbalance that we have to put on the table with our friends in the United States,” Portocarero said in an interview with IPS. “It is not acceptable for us to continue to be subject to sanctions and huge fines against Europe’s financial sector, while restrictions are removed in the case of the U.S.”

The EU, for its part, hopes for faster changes in Cuba. “My message has always been: move faster while you are in control, so as to better defend the good things that should be preserved,” the ambassador said. In his view, moves should also be made to make Cuba’s foreign investment law more attractive.

The EU delegation building in Havana. The Cuban government will restart talks towards a bilateral agreement on cooperation in March. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños

“Foreign investment is competitive and special zones [like Cuba’s Mariel special economic development zone] are everywhere. At this point, 30 percent of the foreign capital invested in Cuba comes from the European Union,” he said.

Cuba has indicated that to ensure the normal growth of its economy, it needs some 2.5 billion dollars a year in investment.

The Mariel special economic development zone, which covers 465 square km 45 km west of Havana, has a modern port terminal built with investment from Brazil, and areas for a broad range of productive activities open to foreign investment.

The questions of foreign trade and cooperation made up the working agenda in the first and second round of talks, although no final documents have yet been produced. Human rights, civil society and good governance are to be discussed in the third round in March, although they are also crosscutting issues that arise in other areas.

These are touchy subjects for the Cuban government, which does not accept being internationally judged regarding them, while they are concerns raised by both Brussels and Washington.

Castro has stated that he is willing to engage in respectful, reciprocal dialogue on the discrepancies, including “any issue” regarding Cuba, but also the United States.

Over 50 inmates considered political prisoners by the U.S. government were released in Cuba in the first few days of January. Spokespersons for the Obama administration clarified that human rights would continue to be a focus of discussion in the talks on migration and the normalisation of ties with Havana.

The Cuban delegation in the talks will be headed by the director general of the foreign ministry’s United States division, Josefina Vidal. On Wednesday Jan. 21 a meeting is to be held to assess the progress of the migration accords and the measures taken by both sides to tackle undocumented migration and smuggling of migrants, among other issues.

In the two-day meeting, the U.S. delegation will be led by U.S acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Edward Alex Lee. The 1994 and 1995 migration accords are reviewed every six months, in meetings that rotate between Cuba and the United States.

Steps towards opening embassies in the two countries will be discussed at the first meeting on reestablishing diplomatic ties between the two countries, on Jan. 22.

Bilateral issues will be addressed later that day, including cooperation in areas of mutual interest. The U.S. representatives in these two meetings will be led by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

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:

U.S. and Cuban Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro greet each other at the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, as Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff looks on. A lengthier, more formal greeting is expected at the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. Credit: Government of Brazil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO , Dec 23 2014 (IPS)

With the decision to reestablish diplomatic ties, Cuba and the United States, polar opposites that have long inspired or fomented extremism of different kinds in the Americas, have now become factors of moderation and pragmatism.

The continued isolation of Cuba 25 years after the end of the Cold War was so widely rejected that the U.S. embargo, which dates to October 1960, has completely lost relevance. But it can only be abolished by the U.S. Congress. It is politics that reigns in this case.

Moreover, the measures announced by U.S. President Barack Obama on Dec. 17 undermine the embargo. Raising the quarterly limit of cash remittances to Cuba from 500 to 2,000 dollars and freeing up transactions between banks in the two countries are just two examples.

Another initiative, the removal of Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, opens doors to external financing that were closed up to now.Obama’s gesture, although late in coming, and Cuba’s acceptance will reduce tensions at a regional level that continue to exist largely due to the confrontation between the two countries. The new situation will save the Organisation of American States (OAS) from the corrosion caused by the exclusion of Cuba, which is rejected by Latin American and Caribbean nations.

Obama’s gesture, although late in coming, and Cuba’s acceptance will reduce tensions at a regional level that continue to exist largely due to the confrontation between the two countries. The new situation will save the Organisation of American States (OAS) from the corrosion caused by the exclusion of Cuba, which is rejected by Latin American and Caribbean nations.

The impatience with Cuba’s isolation was manifested by the invitation extended by the host government of the seventh Summit of the Americas, scheduled for April 2015 in Panama, to Cuban President Raúl Castro. Significantly, Castro and Obama were the first to confirm their attendance.

At the last summit, in 2012, Canada and the United States vetoed Cuba’s participation, blocking the consensus needed for Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to invite the Cuban leader to the summit in Cartagena de Indias. But the controversy contaminated the debates, standing in the way of meaningful in-depth discussions.

The dialogue launched by Obama and Castro is aimed at strengthening the OAS, which in 2009 repealed its 47-year suspension of Cuba. The Cuban government refused to return to an organisation where, it said, “the United States continues to exercise oppressive control.” But it is likely to change its stance given the new situation.

The OAS, however, will have to step up its role as a continental forum for debate on differences and conflicts, even human rights – another issue that has stood in the way of Cuba’s reinsertion, because of complaints of abuses.

The regional organisation will also provide an important space for Washington to rebuild its ties to Latin America, a region that has lost priority for the United States in recent decades.

That could reduce the weight of regional associations like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), created to bring together countries in the region with cultural affinity and similar levels of development, but also as a counterpoint to the Inter-American system where the U.S. plays a hegemonic role.

With the easing of the confrontation between Havana and Washington, one of the reference points for radicalism of all stripes will disappear in the Americas.

The world could even be surprised by a congressional vote on lifting the embargo, where Obama’s position is expected to suffer a defeat at the hands of the Republican majority.

The anti-Castro lobbying groups have won elections in the state of Florida, but they are ageing and the opening up to Cuba stimulates economic interests against trade barriers.

The easing of tension between Cuba and the United States should also boost the effort to put an end to Colombia’s armed conflict, which has dragged on for over five decades. For the last two years, the government and the guerrillas have been involved in peace talks in Havana, which is hosting the negotiations.

Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable to consider Cuba sufficiently neutral ground for talks between the Colombian government and the insurgents.

Along with the embargo against Cuba, Colombia represents the persistence of conflicts that have outlived the context that gave rise to them, confirming that history is anything but linear.

Colombia’s internal conflict has claimed at least 220,000 lives since 1958 – 81.5 percent of them civilians. In addition 4.7 million people have been displaced, at least 27,000 have been “disappeared” and a similar number have been kidnapped, according to the report “Basta Ya” by the National Centre for the Historical Memory, a public institution created in 2011.

It also gave rise to the phenomenon of the far-right paramilitaries who are responsible for most of the estimated 150,000 people killed between 1981 and 2012 – far more than the victims of the government forces or the left-wing guerrillas.

U.S. support for the government had a lot do with the death toll. The repression against the insurgents was intensified by Plan Colombia, a strategy of U.S. financial and military aid put into effect in 1999, to combat leftist armed groups as well as drug trafficking.

But it was in the 1960s and 1970s that Cuba and the United States were protagonists in the most violent clashes, often by means of indirect involvement.

While the socialist island nation fomented armed revolutionary movements in Latin America and backed anti-colonialist struggles in Africa, even sending its own soldiers, Washington helped spread military dictatorships throughout the world and intervened directly where it believed its interests were threatened, such as in the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Direct battles, such as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by anti-Castro forces trained by the United States, espionage operations and attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro fueled the longstanding enmity that is to now be overcome by pragmatism in the face of new challenges.

Cuba’s economic decline, aggravated by the crisis in Venezuela, its primary source of oil on generous terms, has encouraged new understandings with “imperialism.”

Also needed in Cuba is self-criticism, the recognition of mistakes that have been made.

Cuban history is plagued with half-baked measures only explained by centralised decisions reached without prior consultation or advice, such as the planting of coffee, basically a high-altitude crop, on land close to sea level on the outskirts of Havana. Very little was grown and the important vegetable-producing belt around the capital was lost in the 1960s.

If the revolution that inspired left-wing movements around the region – and the world – adopts a pragmatic stance and engages in dialogue with the “enemy”, it could have a moderating effect on anti-imperialist governments and parties in Latin America.

Brazil could benefit from the new thaw, because of the dialogue with all political currents, and its presence in strategic projects in Cuba, such as the Mariel special economic development zone, whose port was expanded by a Brazilian construction company, with financing from Brazil.

And the sugar industry, once the pillar of the Cuban economy, could recover thanks to technology from Brazil, which replaced Cuba as the world’s biggest sugarcane producer.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Minister of Industries of Cuba, addresses the General Assembly on Dec. 11, 1964. UN Photo/TC

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 19 2014 (IPS)

When the politically-charismatic Ernesto Che Guevera, once second-in-command to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was at the United Nations to address the General Assembly sessions back in 1964, the U.N. headquarters came under attack – literally.

The speech by the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary was momentarily drowned by the sound of an explosion.

The anti-Castro forces in the United States, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had mounted an insidious campaign to stop Che Guevera from speaking.

A 3.5-inch bazooka was fired at the 39-storeyed glass house by the East River while a CIA-inspired anti-Castro, anti-Che Guevara vociferous demonstration was taking place outside the U.N. building on New York’s First Avenue and 42nd street.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Minister of Industries of Cuba, addresses the General Assembly on Dec. 11, 1964. UN Photo/TC

But the rocket launcher – which was apparently not as sophisticated as today’s shoulder-fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades – missed its target, rattled windows, and fell into the river about 200 yards from the building.

One newspaper report described it as “one of the wildest episodes since the United Nations moved into its East River headquarters in 1952.”

With the United States resuming full diplomatic relations with Cuba on Wednesday – after a 53-year hiatus – will there be a significant change in its attitude towards the politically-ostracised Caribbean nation in the world body?

The United States has routinely led or co-sponsored scores of U.N. resolutions critical of human rights violations in Cuba and consistently voted against every single General Assembly resolution calling on Washington to lift the economic embargo on Havana imposed in 1960.

At the last General Assembly vote in October 2014, an overwhelming majority – 188 out of 193 members – voted to end the embargo, for the 23rd consecutive year.

As in most previous years, the only two countries to vote against the resolution were the United States and Israel.

And three other countries that have traditionally voted with the United States – Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands – abstained on the vote this year.

After the vote, and as if anticipating a change in the political horizon, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez invited the United States to establish “mutually respectful relations.”

“We can try to find a solution to our differences through respectful diplomacy. We can live and deal with each other in a civilised way despite our difference,” he added.

Asked about the historic U.S.-Cuba agreement, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he had been informed in advance of the announcement by the U.S. government.

“This news is very positive. And I’d like to thank President Barack Obama of the United States and Cuban President Raul Castro for taking this very important step towards normalising relations,” Ban said.

“As much of the membership of the United Nations has repeatedly emphasised, through General Assembly resolutions during the last many, many years, it is time Cuba and the United States normalise their bilateral relations,” Ban told reporters Wednesday.

“The United Nations stands ready to help both countries to cultivate their good neighbourly relations,” he declared.

As longtime U.N. staffers would recall, the failed 1964 attack on the U.N. building took place when Che Guevera launched a blistering attack on U.S. foreign policy and denounced a proposed de-nuclearisation pact for the Western hemisphere, as he addressed delegates.

It was one of the first known politically motivated terrorist attacks on the United Nations.

After his Assembly speech, Che Guevera was asked about the attack aimed at him. “The explosion has given the whole thing more flavour,” he joked, as he chomped on his Cuban cigar.

When he was told by a reporter that the New York City police had nabbed a woman, described as an anti-Castro Cuban exile, who had pulled out a hunting knife and jumped over the wall, intending to kill him, Che Guevera said: “It is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The U.S. and Cuban flags adorn a bicycle-taxi in Havana, a few hours after the announcement of the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which were broken off in 1961. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Dec 18 2014 (IPS)

The announcement that the United States and Cuba would reestablish diplomatic relations took most Cubans by surprise. Over half of the population was born after the severing of ties in 1961 and the start of the embargo that has marked their lives.

“I wasn’t expecting it; it’s the news of the century and a step that will put in gear many changes,” a journalist who has followed the question for years told IPS.

Groups of university students took to the streets on Wednesday to celebrate the return of the three Cuban agents serving out lengthy sentences in U.S. prisons on charges of spying.

A U.S. contractor serving time in a Cuban prison, Alan Gross, was also released. His arrest and sentencing to 15 years in prison on charges of involvement in subversive plans in Cuba was seen by Washington as a major hurdle to the normalisation of relations with Havana.

Nor was the Cuban government willing to move in that direction unless the Cuban agents were freed.

Antonio Guerrero, whose sentence ended in 2017; Ramón Labañino, sentenced to 30 years; and Gerardo Hernández, who had been given two life sentences, arrived in Havana on Wednesday.

The other two members of the group known as “the Cuban five”, René González and Fernando González (no relation), had served out their sentences and have been back in Cuba since 2013 and February of this year, respectively.

In a televised speech – broadcast simultaneously with U.S. President Barack Obama’s address in Washington – President Raúl Castro said that his openness to dialogue with the U.S. gave continuity to his brother Fidel’s (president from 1959 to 2008) willingness to negotiate.

Observers see that statement as targeting segments of society and even within the government who could be opposed to the normalisation of relations. “The conflict with the United States, and especially the embargo, has served for decades to justify our shortcomings,” a researcher who wished to remain anonymous told IPS.

The reestablishment of diplomatic ties does not include the lifting of the trade and economic embargo against Cuba, a decision that is up to the U.S. Congress. But Castro urged Obama to “modify its application by use of his executive powers.”

More than seven million people in this country of 11.2 million were born under the embargo.

But the move towards normal relations with Cuba’s powerful neighbor only 90 miles away will pose enormous challenges to this country’s socialist development model, which Castro says he will not abandon.

Luis Emilio Aybar, a sociologist, says Cuba should follow a pragmatic policy of economic and political ties like the ones it has with many other countries, while maintaining its “alternative anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist policies” – but without forgetting that the U.S. will continue to be the main enemy of this form of government.

Vulnerability to different kinds of foreign influences “will now be multiplied manyfold, and will be added to the loss of hegemony that socialist values are suffering in our country. The U.S. government understands the situation clearly; that’s why it took this step,” said Aybar, who believes the solution to the dilemma “lies in understanding that you can be pragmatic and radical at the same time.”

Rita María García Morris, executive director of the independent Christian Centre for Reflection and Dialogue, said it was important for civil society institutions to keep their doors open to a conciliatory dialogue, even if it is difficult and painful. “It has never been easy to acknowledge differences,” she said.

The reforms undertaken by the government of Raúl Castro, such as an expansion of private enterprise and a new foreign investment law, enabled the government to optimise relations with the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean and with traditional allies like China and Russia, and to renew negotiations with the European Union.

Havana and Brussels are involved in talks towards a political and cooperation agreement that would further diversify the diplomatic ties of the Cuban government, which is keen on drawing larger flows of investment to ensure growth, particularly in the Mariel special economic development zone.

Against that backdrop, the United States appeared to be increasingly isolated in its stance towards Cuba, which was officially invited to take part in the next Summit of the Americas, in Panama in April, despite Washington’s resistance. Now that things have changed, Castro and Obama will be able to use that occasion to strengthen the direct dialogue that they began with a phone conversation on Tuesday Dec. 16.

Pope Francis’s mediation in the process that led to the new relations between the U.S. and Cuba did not come as a surprise, given the dialogue in recent years between Castro and the Catholic Church leadership in Cuba, which helped bring about the release of several dozen political prisoners.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Obama speaks on video about changes in Washington's Cuba policy.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 18 2014 (IPS)

In perhaps his boldest foreign-policy move during his presidency, Barack Obama Wednesday announced that he intends to establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba.

While the president noted that he lacked the authority to lift the 54-year-old trade embargo against Havana, he issued directives that will permit more U.S. citizens to travel there and third-country subsidiaries of U.S. companies to engage in commerce, among other measures, including launching a review of whether Havana should remain on the U.S. list of “state sponsors of terrorism”."The Cuba issue has sharply divided Washington from the rest of the hemsiphere for decades, and this move, long overdue, goes a long way towards removing a major source of irritation in US-Latin American relations." -- Michael Shifter

He also said he looked forward to engaging Congress in “an honest and serious debate about lifting the embargo.”

“In the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalise relations between our two countries,” he said in a nationally televised announcement.

“Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.”

The announcement, which was preceded by a secret, 45-minute telephone conversation Tuesday morning between Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, drew both praise from those who have long argued that Washington’s pursuit of Cuba’s isolation has been a total failure and bitter denunciations from right-wing Republicans.

Some of the latter had vowed, among other things, to oppose any effort to lift the embargo, open U.S. embassy in Havana, or confirm a U.S. ambassador to serve there. (Washington has had an Interest Section in the Cuban capital since 1977.)

“Today’s announcement initiating a dramatic change in U.S. policy is just the latest in a long line of failed attempts by President Obama to appease rogue regimes at all costs,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of a number of fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American lawmakers and a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

“I intend to use my role as incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee to make every effort to block this dangerous and desperate attempt by the President to burnish his legacy at the Cuba people’s expense,” he said in a statement.

The outgoing Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, also decried Obama’s announcement.

“The United States has just thrown the Cuban regime an economic lifeline. With the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, Cuba is losing its main benefactor, but will now receive the support of the United States, the greatest democracy in the world,” said Menendez, who is also Cuban American.

But other lawmakers hailed the announcement.

“Today President Obama and President Raul Castro made history,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat and one of three lawmakers, including a Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, who escorted a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, Alan Gross, from Havana Wednesday morning as part of a larger prisoner and spy swap that precipitated the announcement.

Part of that deal included the release of 53 prisoners in Cuba, including Gross, who the U.S. considers to be political prisoners.

“Those who cling to a failed policy [and] …may oppose the President’s actions have nothing to offer but more of the same. That would serve neither the interests of the United States and its people, nor of the Cuban people,” Leahy said. “It is time for a change.”

Other analysts also lauded Obama’s Wednesday’s developments, comparing them to historic breakthroughs with major foreign-policy consequences.

“Obama has chosen to change the entire framework of the relationship, as [former President Richard] Nixon did when he travelled to China,” said William LeoGrande, a veteran Cuba scholar at American University, in an email from Havana.

“Many issues remain to be resolved, but the new direction of U.S. policy is clear.”

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based hemispheric think tank that has long urged Washington to normalise ties with Havana, told IPS the regional implications would likely be very positive.

“Obama’s decision will be cheered and applauded throughout Latin America. The Cuba issue has sharply divided Washington from the rest of the hemsiphere for decades, and this move, long overdue, goes a long way towards removing a major source of irritation in US-Latin American relations,” Shifter said.

“Since his sensible and lofty rhetoric at the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Latin Americans wondered where Obama has been in recent years.”

Indeed, Obama also announced Wednesday that he will attend the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. Because Castro was officially invited, over the objections of both the U.S. and Canada, at the last Summit in Cartagena in 2012, there had been some speculation that Obama might boycott the proceedings.

Harvard international relations expert Stephen Walt said he hoped that Wednesday’s announcement portends additional bold moves by Obama on the world stage in his last two years as president despite the control of both houses of Congress by Republicans, like Rubio, who have opposed Obama’s efforts to reach out to perceived adversaries.

“One may hope that this decision will be followed by renewed efforts to restore full diplomatic relations with even more important countries, most notably Iran,” he told IPS in an email.

“Recognition does not imply endorsing a foreign government’s policies; it simply acknowledges that U.S. interests are almost always well-served by regular contact with allies and adversaries alike.”

Administration officials told reporters that Wednesday’s developments were made possible by 18 months of secret talks between senior official from both sides – not unlike those carried out in Oman between the U.S. and Iran prior to their November 2013 agreement with five other world powers on Tehran’s nuclear programme — hosted primarily by Canada and the Vatican, although the Interests Sections of both countries were also involved.

Officials credited Pope Francis, an Argentine, with a key role in prodding both parties toward an accord.

“The Holy Father wishes to express his warm congratulations for the historic decision taken by the Governments of the United States of America and Cuba to establish diplomatic relations, with the aim of overcoming, in the interest of the citizens of both countries, the difficulties which have marked their recent history,” the Vatican said in a statement Wednesday.

The Vatican’s strong endorsement could mute some of the Republican and Cuban-American criticism of normalisation and make it more difficult for Rubio and his colleagues to prevent the establishment of an embassy and appointment of an ambassador, according to some Capitol Hill staff.

Similarly, major U.S. corporations, some of whom, particularly in the agribusiness and consumer-goods sectors, have seen major market potential in Cuba, are likely to lobby their allies on the Republican side.

“We deeply believe that an open dialogue and commercial exchange between the U.S. and Cuban private sectors will bring shared benefits, and the steps announced today will go a long way in allowing opportunities for free enterprise to flourish,” said Thomas Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a statement.

Donohue headed what he called an unprecedented “exploratory” trip to Cuba earlier this year.

“Congress now has a decision to make,” said Jake Colvin, the vice president for global trade issues at the National Foreign Trade Council, an association of many of the world’s biggest multi-national corporations. “It can either show that politics stops at the water’s edge, or insist that the walls of the Cold War still exist.”

Wednesday’s announcement came in the wake of an extraordinary series of editorials by the New York Times through this autumn in favour of normalisation and the lifting of the trade embargo.

In another sign of a fundamental shift here, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill took some steps to ease the embargo during his tenure as president, disclosed in her book published last summer that she had urged Obama to “take another look at our embargo. It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”

That stance, of course, could alienate some Cuban-American opinion, especially in the critical “swing state” of Florida if Clinton runs in the 2016 election.

But recent polls of Cuban Americans have suggested an important generational change in attitudes toward Cuba and normalisation within the Cuban-American community, with the younger generation favouring broader ties with their homeland.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jul 7 2014 (IPS)

In ‘Hard Choices’, her new book about her experiences as Secretary of State during U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term (2008-2012), Hillary Clinton writes something of prime importance about Cuba – she says that late in her term in office she urged Obama to reconsider the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
“It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”

Ignacio Ramonet

For the first time a U.S. presidential hopeful has publicly stated that the blockade imposed by Washington on the Caribbean island – for over fifty years! – is “not achieving its goals”.

In other words, the embargo has not subdued this small country in spite of the amount of unjust suffering it has caused for its population.

The essence of Hillary Clinton’s declaration is two-fold: first, it breaks the taboo on saying out loud what everyone in Washington has known for some time: that the blockade is useless.

And second, and more importantly, her statement comes at the moment when her campaign is being launched for the Democratic Party nomination to the White House; that is, she is not afraid that her affirmation – in opposition to all of Washington policies towards Cuba over the past half century – could be a handicap in the electoral battle she faces up until the elections of November 8, 2016.

If Hillary Clinton takes such an unorthodox position, it is because she is aware that public opinion on this topic in the United States has changed, and that the majority today is in favour of ending the blockade.

Indeed, a nationwide poll in February 2014 by the Atlantic Council research institute, found that 56 percent of U.S. respondents favour changing Washington’s policy towards Cuba.

Contrary to hopes that arose after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected in November 2008, Washington’s relations with Cuba have remained on ice. Just after taking office in April 2009, Obama announced at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago that the United States was seeking a “new beginning” in its relationship with Havana.

“Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments”
But he made only limited, largely symbolic, gestures, permitting Cuban Americans to visit the island and send small amounts of money to their families. Later, in 2011, he adopted further measures but these were still of limited scope: he allowed religious groups and students to travel to Cuba, authorised U.S. airports to handle charter flights to Cuba, and increased the limit on remittances Cuban Americans could send to their relatives. Not much in comparison with the huge disputes that divide the two countries.

One of their differences – the case of ‘the Cuban Five’ – has caused an international commotion. Five Cuban intelligence agents, engaged in the prevention of anti-Cuban terrorism, were detained in Florida in September 1998. They were convicted in a Cold War style political trial – a real courtroom lynching – and sentenced to long prison terms. The injustice of their treatment is clear from the fact that they had committed no acts of violence, nor spied on U.S. security secrets, but had risked their lives to prevent attacks and save human lives.

Washington is inconsistent when it claims to combat “international terrorism” yet continues to back anti-Cuban terrorist groups on its own soil. For instance, in April 2014 the Cuban authorities arrested another group of four people arriving from Florida with intent to commit attacks.

Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments.

For example, all Latin American and Caribbean states, whatever their political orientations, have recently improved relations with Cuba and denounced the blockade. This was proved in January at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) held in Havana.

Washington was snubbed again in May at the general assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when Latin American countries, in a fresh show of solidarity with Havana, threatened to boycott the next Summit of the Americas scheduled for 2015 in Panama if Cuba is not invited.

For its part, the European Union decided in February to abandon its so-called “common position” on relations with Cuba, imposed in 1996 by José María Aznar, the then Spanish prime minister, to “punish” Cuba by rejecting all dialogue with the island’s authorities. But the policy proved fruitless and it failed. Brussels has recognised this and has reinstated negotiations with Havana to reach agreement on political and economic cooperation.

The European Union is Cuba’s biggest foreign investor and its second most important trading partner. Reflecting this new spirit, several European ministers have already visited the island.

In contrast with Washington’s immobility, many European foreign ministries are observing with interest the changes President Raúl Castro is promoting in Cuba in the framework of “updating the economic model” and the line taken at the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in 2011, which are highly significant transformations of the economy and society. The recent creation of a special development zone around the port of Mariel, and the approval in March of a new foreign investment law, in particular, have excited great international interest.

The Cuban authorities see no contradiction between socialism and private enterprise. According to some estimates, private enterprise, including foreign investment, could expand to take up 40 percent of the country’s economy, while 60 percent would remain in the hands of the state and the public sector.

The goal is for the Cuban economy to be increasingly compatible with those of its major partners in the region (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) where public and private sectors, the state and markets coexist.

All these changes highlight by contrast the stubbornness of the U.S. Administration, painted into the corner of an ideological position dating from another era, even if, as we have seen, more voices are raised day by day in Washington to acknowledge the error of this position and the need to abandon international isolation in terms of its Cuban policy. Will President Obama listen to them? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

A rally in Holguín, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 2014 (IPS)

If President Barack Obama wants to move more quickly to normalise ties with Cuba, it appears he has gained the political space to do so, according to analyses of a major new bipartisan public-opinion poll released here Tuesday by the Atlantic Council.

The survey, which was conducted last month, found that 56 percent of U.S. adults nationwide now support normalising ties or engaging more directly with Havana, while just over a third (35 percent) are opposed.“Not too long ago, voicing opposition to the embargo would have been political suicide in Florida.” -- Marc Hanson

Perhaps more important politically, an even greater majority – 63 percent – of respondents from Florida, home to the greatest concentration of Cuban Americans, including several of the fiercest foes of the Castro government in the U.S. Congress, support normalisation and greater engagement. Only 30 percent of Floridians said they were opposed.

Similarly, 62 percent Latino respondents nationwide favoured normalisation, compared to 30 percent who opposed it.

“Profound changes to U.S.-Cuba policy would be well received by the American people, and even more so, by Floridians and Latinos,” according to an analysis of the poll results by Peter Schechter and Jason Marczak, director and deputy director, respectively, of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

“For decades, Florida’s politics trumped national policy. This is no longer true. While those opposing change have much emotion and determination on their side, it is clear that demography and immigration have changed the equation in Florida politics.”

The survey, which was conducted by experienced pollsters from both major parties, comes as a number of high-profile Floridians have called publicly for changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba, noted Marc Hanson, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a think tank that has long supported normalisation.

Two Democratic candidates for governor, including one, Charlie Crist, who served as the state’s Republican governor as recently as 2011,  have recently come out against the nearly 54-year-old trade embargo.

And just last week Alfonso Fanjul, one of two Cuban-American billionaire brothers who control most of the state’s sugar industry, spoke publicly about his recent visits to Cuba and his interest in doing business on the island.

In addition, another prominent Cuban-American business leader, Jorge Perez, called for stepped-up bilateral exchanges between the two nations and voiced hopes to soon feature Cuban artists – even those with ties to the government – at his new art museum in Miami.

“Not too long ago, voicing opposition to the embargo would have been political suicide in Florida,” according to Hanson. “But the [recent] public announcements show that the political calculus has changed and that supporting normalisation of relations is not longer a political liability.”

Indeed, Obama, who took a somewhat more liberal position on Cuba than his Republican foe, Sen. John McCain, nonetheless won Florida – perhaps the most infamous of “swing” states as a result of the 2000 election – in 2008.

After repealing several measures decreed by President George W. Bush restricting the ability of Cuban Americans to travel to the island and send money to their families there early in his first term, Obama won the state again in 2012, in important part by increasing his percentage of the Cuban-American vote there by 10 points.

Since those early steps were taken, however, Obama has been much more cautious, due primarily to the continued detention of a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, Alan Gross, who was arrested in late 2009 and subsequently sentenced to 15 years for distributing communications and computer equipment to members of Cuba’s Jewish community without a permit.

Most analysts believe that Havana hopes to exchange Gross for  the so-called “Cuban Five” – Cuban intelligence agents convicted of spying and other offences in the late 1990’s – one of whom was released in 2011 and another expected to be released this month.

Nonetheless, Obama has taken some small steps over the last several years, including making travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens for educational, cultural and similar programmes easier and authorising low-level bilateral talks on a range of issues, such as migration, that had been suspended under Bush.

“They’re doing things on the margin of the policy but nothing fundamental,” noted Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a hemispheric think tank here which has urged the administration to take a more forthcoming position on Cuba, in part because normalisation would improve relations with Latin America as a whole.

The survey itself interviewed some 2,000 respondents. In addition to a sample of over 1,000 randomly selected adults, it included additional oversamples from 617 Florida residents and 525 Latinos.

Among other conclusions, the survey found that men were significantly more likely (61-51 percent) to favour engagement with Cuba than women; that more-educated respondents were significantly more likely to support normalisation; and that a 52-percent majority of self-identified Republicans – the party that has historically been most resistant to lifting the embargo – now favour change.

Nationwide, 62 percent favour allowing U.S. companies to do business in Cuba, and 61 percent favour lifting all travel restrictions on U.S. citizens who want to visit the island. For Floridians, the comparable percentages were 63 percent and 67 percent, respectively.

Given the partisan polarisation in the U.S. Congress, few analysts believe that legislation easing the embargo is likely during this election year. But some insisted that the survey results should encourage Obama – whose handshake with Cuban President Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in December evoked little criticism here – to take additional steps through his executive authority.

These include removing Cuba from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism and making it easier bureaucratically for Cuban-Americans and other eligible citizens to travel to Cuba.

“The importance of the poll is that it will hopefully feed into the policy discussion over the next year,” Jake Colvin, vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), a heavyweight business lobby group that opposes the embargo, told IPS. “It was really surprising to me that Floridians were more in favour of changing policy than the rest of the country.”

A particular surprise for some were the results in Miami-DadeCounty, long considered a stronghold of pro-embargo sentiment and represented in Congress by perhaps its two most outspoken foes of the Castros’ rule – Republicans Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart. Sixty-four percent of respondents in the country said they supported normalising ties or engaging Cuba more directly.

In response, Ros-Lehtinen denounced the poll, charging that it had been “conducted with a political agenda to help justify the disastrous policies toward Cuba by President Obama,” and denouncing the participation in the survey’s release of Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, “Castro’s cheerleader in the Senate who obsessively lobbies to lift sanctions on the dictatorship.”

Flake, who appeared alongside Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy at the survey’s release, noted that on Monday he had attended a reception marking the 20^th anniversary of the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam and noted that it was now one of the nations with which Washington hoped to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade accord. “Why can’t we move forward with Cuba?” he asked.

For his part, Leahy, a senior Democrat who has visited Gross twice in Havana, called the poll a “major, major step forward” and urged Obama to remove Cuba from the terrorism list. He said Gross’ continued detention was a “stumbling block, but let us go forward.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Experts here are stepping up calls for the U.S. government to remove Cuba from an official list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, arguing that the country’s presence on the list is anachronistic and makes neither legal nor political sense.

The calls come just weeks after the U.S. State Department, which oversees the “state sponsors” list, released an annual report on terrorism. Its section regarding Cuba varied only slightly from that of the previous year, disappointing those who had hoped for a step in the direction of normalisation of U.S.-Cuba relations.

“At a time when the U.S. is best positioned to help facilitate change in the island and to take advantage of the changes inside the country, this continued inclusion is actually an obstacle to taking advantage of that window of opportunity,” Tomas Bilbao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, said Tuesday at a panel discussion at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank here.

Bilbao noted the continued influence of a “shrinking minority” of anti-Cuba hardliners in the United States who fervently oppose Cuba’s removal from the list, as well as a lack of political will on the part of U.S. policymakers to square off with that minority."[Delisting Cuba] would help Cubans lead more prosperous and independent lives."
-- Sarah Stephens

Nonetheless, he asserted that the time is ripe for the United States to take Cuba off the list and prioritise helping the Cuban people over harming the Cuban regime.

President Barack Obama’s administration has overseen some notable policy shifts, such as a relaxation of laws restricting travel by U.S. citizens with family in Cuba. Certain realities have also been changing within Cuba, including the abdication of Fidel Castro from power, which make friendlier policies toward the island nation more feasible.

Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Centre for Democracy in the Americas, a U.S. organisation that promotes reconciliation with Cuba, told IPS that delisting Cuba now would “enable the U.S. to support Cuba’s drive to update its economic model, make it easier to facilitate trade and easier for Cuba to access high technology items”.

“Doing so,” she said, “would in turn help Cubans lead more prosperous and independent lives.”

Debating Cuba’s qualifications

Cuba has been on the State Department list since 1982, but some analysts maintain that the country did not fit the definition of a state sponsor of terror even then. In order to fit that legal definition, a country must have “repeatedly provided support for international terrorism”.

According to Robert L. Muse, a specialist on the legality of U.S. policy toward Cuba, there are currently three ostensible reasons for Cuba’s inclusion in the most recent list: that it has allowed Basque separatists to reside within its borders, that it has dealings with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and that it harbours fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the United States.

Muse, who spoke Tuesday at CSIS, claimed the first two reasons were void because the countries concerned actually condone Cuba’s relationship with their adversaries. Cuba is currently host to negotiations between FARC and the Colombian government, and Spanish leaders prefer that Basque rebels remain in Cuba – and out of Spain.

These interactions with rebel groups, in Muse’s opinion, “can hardly be a basis even for criticism”. It is only the third justification, that Cuba harbours U.S. fugitives, which he said “could fairly bear description as a reason” for keeping Cuba on the list.

Cuba has harboured a number of fugitives seeking refuge from the U.S. justice system. The most prominent is Assata Shakur, an African-American poet and participant in 1970s black liberation movements who was allegedly involved in the killing of a police officer. She was convicted for the murder but escaped and in 1984 gained political asylum in Cuba, where she has remained ever since.

Early last month, Shakur became the first woman to be added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Most Wanted Terrorist list. But Muse notes that this designation was “arbitrary and capricious”, as neither she nor any other fugitive residing in Cuba has been accused, let alone convicted, of international terrorism.

Politics as usual

Both Muse and Bilbao concluded that Cuba’s continued presence on the State Department’s terrorism list arises less from these shaky legal justifications than from political calculations.

Others have arrived at similar conclusions for years. In 2002, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton suggested that maintaining Cuba on the list keeps happy a certain part of the voting public in Florida – a politically important state with a large Cuban exile population – and “it doesn’t cost anything”.

Muse disagreed with the latter part of that statement, however. He noted that by behaving arbitrarily in what should be a strictly legal matter, the United States was damaging its “credibility on the issue of international terrorism” and diminishing its “seriousness of purpose” in using the term “terrorism” in a meaningful manner.

Proponents of the status quo argue the opposite, saying that by removing Cuba the United States would damage its credibility by effectively making a concession. Bilbao explained to IPS that those such views focus on the “spin” of the Cuban government rather than on the actual consequences of taking Cuba off the list, a move he believes would ultimately benefit the United States.

“I think the priority of the U.S. government should be to determine what’s in its best interests,” he told IPS.

Muse went a step further, saying the list itself is a problem. He noted that even while the list includes countries that don’t deserve to be on it, proven sponsors, such as Pakistan, of international terrorism – albeit those with friendly relations with the U.S. – are absent from it.

His recommendation to solve the problem was simple: “Just scrap the list.”

By Tressia Boukhors
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 20 2011 (IPS)

Cuba is urging the U.N. General Assembly to again condemn the U.S. embargo during its 66th session this week, in an annual ritual that has been a political and moral victory for the socialist nation but with little real impact.

Daniel Griswold Credit: Courtesy of Daniel Griswold

The election of U.S. President Barack Obama gave critics of the embargo hope for a policy of change toward the island. Obama lifted several restrictions by executive order, including the travel ban for U.S. students and religious organisations and the sending of money under certain conditions.

Nevertheless, changes have been modest and the embargo has been extended for its 50th year.

Even if the U.N. General Assembly does schedule a vote on the “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba” – this year would make the 20th time it has done so, with a vote overwhelmingly in support of Cuba – it will likely have “a very limited effect”, Daniel Griswold told IPS.

In his book “Economic Casualties: How U.S. Foreign Policy Undermines Trade, Growth and Liberty”, the director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies argues that economic sanctions are not effective instruments of foreign policy.

IPS correspondent Tressia Boukhors talked him about the evolution of U.S-Cuba relations since Obama’s election and what the future holds.

Q: What changes do you see in U.S.-Cuba relations since Barack Obama’s presidency and the new travel edict? A: Any changes in U.S policy towards Cuba have been incremental. The president has relaxed some restrictions on travel, on remittances and this is taking U.S. policy in a more positive direction. But the changes have not been dramatic.

He really had an opportunity his first two years when Democrats dominated Congress to change the law. But the president has done virtually nothing in terms of leadership in changing U.S. law. He has just modified, through executive order, some of the restrictions.

I don’t expect the travel changes to have a major impact on the number of Americans visiting Cuba. The changes so far only affect students and religious organisations.

Q: President Obama extended the embargo through Sep. 14, 2012, determining that it is “in the national interest of the United States”. Does this policy have a future in a globalised world? A: Our embargo against Cuba made some strategic sense during the Cold War but, of course, even that rationale disappeared 20 years ago with the end of the Soviet Union. So now, it is really just a political statement that we don’t approve of the government in Cuba.

But after 50 years, the embargo has failed to change the nature or the practices of the Cuban regime. It has isolated the United States from other countries and reduced U.S. influence within Cuba. It has cost the United States billions of dollars in potential exports and restricted the freedom of American to travel in Cuba and do business there. It is just a failure by any measure and completely out of step with global trends towards more trade and foreign investment and economic integration.

Q: Denouncing U.S. policy towards Cuba has become an annual ritual during the General Assembly during the last two decades. Can we expect stronger international pressure this year and does the denunciation have any real meaning at this point? A: Any declaration from U.N members will have a very limited effect on U.S. policy in Cuba. That policy is really driven by domestic U.S. politics, by a perception of a U.S. national interest, even though the embargo has long ceased to serve that interest.

Change will come when the domestic politics change here in the United States, when a new generation of Cuban-Americans assume leadership, when economic interests make their voices heard in Washington that we’re losing business and when the cumulative record of failure becomes more clear. I don’t think a U.N. declaration will be a deciding factor.

Q: Do you foresee any further opening of U.S. policy toward Cuba in the near future? A: It is kind of hard to figure out the international politics of this issue, but the deciding factor again will be domestic politics and perception of U.S. national interest. I don’t think global pressure is going to play a decisive role here.

The embargo does hurt the Cuban people, no question about it, although they’re hurt far more by the failed policies of the Castro government. But it really is an internal policy decision of the United States. The U.S. government needs to decide how long it will continue paying an economic and political price for a policy that has no measurable benefit.

Q: Do you think the communist system in Cuba would survive the absence of Fidel Castro? A: It is hard to predict the path of Cuba in a post-Fidel Castro world. The communist system can have its own inertia – people entrenched in power. But I do think if reform continues in Cuba or if they make significant moves towards liberalising their economy and their political system, that may create an opening for the United States to change its policy.

Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba has been a tragedy for the Cuban people. The sooner it ends the better. Hopefully, if Cuba turns toward free- market democracy, the United States will be able to respond by lifting the embargo. Let’s hope that day comes soon.

Q: Why have economic sanctions become the main weapon in the U.S. foreign policy? Does the embargo against Cuba represent an isolated case? A: U.S. foreign policy has relied too heavily on economic sanctions as a tool to influence other governments. Sanctions seemed to reach a high water mark in the late 1990s, but since then the U.S. government has not been quite so quick to pull the trigger.

Thanks in part to an active business community, lawmakers became more sensitive to the economic cost of sanctions in terms of lost export and investment opportunities. It has also become increasingly clear that sanctions rarely achieve their stated objective. The Cuban embargo is one of the more obvious examples of that failure.

Excerpt:

The Cuban government welcomed the latest U.S. measures to ease restrictions on travel and remittances to this country, but said they had a “limited reach.”

Meanwhile, academics who spoke to IPS said the easing of the rules by an executive order issued last Friday by U.S. President Barack Obama would boost this country’s nascent private sector.

In a statement published Monday by Cuba’s government media, the Foreign Ministry said “the measures confirm that there is no willingness to change the policy of blockade and destabilisation against Cuba,” and they will be used “to strengthen the instruments of subversion and interference in the internal affairs of Cuba.”

Nevertheless, the communiqué says the measures were the result of broad sectors of U.S. society that for years have sought the end of the embargo against Cuba and the elimination of the ban on travel to this Caribbean island nation by U.S. citizens.

The changes announced by the White House on Friday authorise visits to Cuba by U.S. citizens for academic, educational, cultural and religious purposes; allow anyone in the U.S. to send money to non-family members in Cuba to support private economic activity; and permits U.S. airports to apply to provide services to licensed charters.

“Resources are going to come in, but via private property and civil society,” Cuban researcher Esteban Morales told IPS.

At the same time, he warned that while the new flows of money will bring benefits, they will also pose “risks, because they will compound pressure on the government from the blockade, which is still intact.”

From the United States, Arturo López- Levy, a Cuban-born lecturer at the University of Denver, Colorado, commented to IPS that the measures would contribute to exchanges between the academic communities of the two countries, “at a strategic time in which economic reforms in Havana are picking up momentum.”

Student and religious contacts will be facilitated by the decision to reinstate policies towards Cuba implemented by the government of Democrat Bill Clinton (1993-2001), which were eliminated in 2003 by the Republican administration of George W. Bush (2001-2009).

According to the Foreign Ministry statement, Cuba has always favoured such exchanges. “All of the obstacles standing in the way of visits by U.S. citizens to Cuba have been, and still are, thrown up by the U.S. government.”

In April 2009 Obama had already allowed unlimited travel and money transfers by Cubans in the U.S. to their families in Cuba.

Now, any U.S. citizen can send up to 2,000 dollars a year to people in Cuba, except to government officials or active members of the ruling Communist Party.

“This easing of restrictions could be an important palliative for Cubans trying to open new businesses, given the recent dismissals (of government employees) and the new openness to small and medium enterprises,” said López-Levy, who also stressed that the increase in travel “could be substantial.”

In his view, Washington’s new rules will give a boost to Cuba’s recent economic opening, with charter flights and more U.S. visitors from cities distant from the few places where flights are currently authorised, especially if San Juan, Puerto Rico and cities in northern Florida are allowed to provide services to charters.

In accordance with Obama’s executive order, any international airport in the United States could potentially offer flights to Cuba, as long as it has appropriate customs and immigration services and the planes are operated by licensed charter companies.

Currently, Havana only receives U.S. flights from Miami, New York and Los Angeles.

The White House statement said the measures “increase people-to-people contact; support civil society in Cuba; enhance the free flow of information to, from, and among the Cuban people; and help promote their independence from Cuban authorities.”

Morales pointed out that among the changes to straighten out the Cuban economy adopted by the government of Raúl Castro are plans to put an end to state paternalism, and continued mass layoffs of government workers aimed at pushing a large part of the workforce into private enterprise.

“It is clear that no political process along the lines of Cuba’s collapses from the outside, and apparently Obama has decided that his policies should focus on winning over broader and broader segments of civil society and turning them against the government, as far as possible,” Morales said.

For his part, López-Levy said it is a “fact” that greater contacts with Cuban academics could open up important doors to debate in Cuba and influence the Castro government’s decision-making mechanisms.

“This opening is potentially the start of a thaw in bilateral relations,” and its significance will be gauged not by the number of exchanges that occur, “but by the capacity of the Cuban and U.S. governments to sustain a process of communications and dialogue that constructively manages these new relations,” he said in an email interview.

“Obama has taken a difficult step: he kept the conservative Cuban-Americans, who are opposed to the president’s preference for dialogue and exchanges, from dictating the bilateral agenda. The exile community won’t forgive, no matter how significant the opening” in Cuba, the academic added.

This step also generates better conditions for discussion of the arrest in Cuba of Alan Gross, a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, in a less tense atmosphere than the one created by the Cuban-American right, which wants to turn the issue into a barrier that is insurmountable by any constructive gesture, he added.

The measures were announced in Washington just 24 hours after Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson visited Gross, who has been in prison in Cuba without charges since December 2009.

Cuban authorities say Gross is a spy who was distributing “sophisticated” communications systems to dissidents on the island. But Washington says he travelled to Cuba as a contractor, to deliver cell-phones and computers to the Jewish community.

Jacobson headed the U.S. delegation in last Wednesday’s immigration talks with officials in Cuba.

Periodic talks were to be held every six months to review the 1994 and 1995 migration accords signed after the so-called rafters’ crisis of August 1994, when at least 30,000 Cubans set out for the United States in makeshift rafts, inner tubes and old boats.

Last week’s was the fourth round of talks since the meetings, which had been interrupted in 2003, were resumed under Obama.

On her visit to Cuba, Jacobson met with dissidents, which the Cuban Foreign Ministry described as a “provocation.”

While the Cuban government has intensified its protests against the U.S. embargo, typically hostile signals between the two nations have been mixed with hints of a more relaxed tone since U.S. President Barack Obama took office.

According to Havana, in spite of the less hostile climate, Washington is still strictly implementing the nearly half-century old embargo and has not taken any action whatsoever to dismantle its complex web of laws and regulations.

But at the same time, the government of Cuban President Raúl Castro has described the conversations held in New York in July on migration issues, and on Sept. 17 in the Cuban capital on the eventual reinstatement of direct postal services, as respectful and useful.

The meeting in Havana was attended by U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Bisa Williams, who then stayed on for several days, met with Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Dagoberto Rodríguez and went to the Sept. 20 Peace Without Borders concert organised by Colombian pop star Juanes.

Williams, the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Cuba in decades, also toured an area of Pinar del Río province, 160 km west of Havana, which was heavily damaged by the 2008 hurricanes, and met with several Cuban dissidents.

On the same day that the U.S. State Department broke its silence about the scope of Williams’ visit, the U.S. Interests Section in Havana hosted a reception to introduce the new head of the public affairs section at the diplomatic mission, Gloria Berbena, and her deputy, Molly Koscina.

Cuba and the United States do not have formal diplomatic relations or embassies in each other’s country, but maintain interests sections in their respective capitals for the purposes of diplomatic representation.

At the reception there were crowds of cultural figures on good terms with the Cuban government, but dissidents were notably absent – an unprecedented situation in recent times. The U.S. Interests Section has often been accused by Havana of promoting “subversion” because of its support for dissidents, who have consistently been invited to its events over the past decade.

According to some analysts, this was another sign of the Obama administration feeling its way toward easing tensions. The administration has also expanded financial and travel facilities for Cubans resident in the United States who want to keep in regular touch with their relatives on the island.

But other experts on bilateral relations reacted with scepticism and an absence of enthusiasm. “I would say that there is more form, or style, than content in all this. Besides, I don’t think the political and economic conditions Obama is facing will let him go any further,” a source who wished to remain anonymous told IPS.

For instance, restrictions on academic exchanges are still in place, with constant denials of travel visas for scientists in both directions. “The refusals are based on U.S. law – in other words, the embargo,” the source said.

In the field of culture, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra was forced to suspend a visit to Cuba planned for the end of October, because the U.S. Treasury Department refused travel permits for some 150 sponsors who wanted to accompany the tour, orchestra spokesman Eric Latzky said in a communiqué.

The Cuban authorities estimate the direct and indirect costs of the U.S. blockade in effect since 1962 at a total of 96 billion dollars.

Havana has once again brought a motion before the United Nations General Assembly demanding that the sanctions be lifted. Last year the Cuban motion was supported by 185 states, with only three countries voting against it. To secure a vote equal to or better than this on Oct. 28, Cuban diplomacy is going all out to denounce the costs of the embargo, as well as its negative effects on third countries.

Not even sports are safe from its impact. According to the report presented to the U.N., the embargo has prevented U.S. companies and their subsidiaries in other countries from selling Cuba equipment and materials needed for its anti-doping laboratory. Losses due to equipment being out of service because of the lack of spare parts amount to 781,000 dollars.

In early October, agriculture, transport, science, technology, environment and sugar industry authorities reported separately to the foreign press on their losses owing to lack of access to the U.S. market, financial limitations and various kinds of prohibitions.

The farming sector experienced losses of 149 million dollars between April 2008 and March 2009, according to deputy agriculture minister Alcides López. The worst-hit sectors are tobacco, with losses of 93 million dollars, pig farming, which lost 28 million dollars, and poultry farming, with 24 million dollars in losses.

Legislation adopted in Washington in 2000 allowed U.S. producers to sell food to Cuba, but the Cuban authorities complain in their report to the U.N. that regulations and red tape on these transactions drove up costs by nearly 155 million dollars in 2008. Cash-strapped Cuba could have used those funds to buy, in the U.S. market itself, 339,000 tonnes of wheat, 615,000 tonnes of maize, or 126,760 tonnes of chicken, says the report.

The sugar industry, for its part, estimates that during the same period it lost more than 127 million dollars. The reasons include being forced to buy inputs in much more distant markets, and the extra cost arising from not being able to use U.S. dollars for its transactions, nor any banks or firms associated with the United States.

The lifting of the embargo will be the first item on Cuba’s agenda for eventual talks aimed at improving relations with the United States, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez told the U.N. on Sept. 28. In the meanwhile, diplomats are working for another condemnation of the embargo at the General Assembly.

It will be the 18th time that the government of this Caribbean island nation submits a draft resolution to the U.N. on the need to end the blockade, which Rodríguez described as “a failed and obsolete policy” and “ethically unacceptable.”

U.S. citizens of Cuban descent are once again free to travel to Cuba and send an unlimited amount of money to their relatives on the island, but for the most part U.S. policy toward the communist nation hasn’t changed under President Barack Obama.

Since taking office, Obama – who called the nearly half-century U.S. embargo on Cuba a “miserable failure” as a candidate for Senate – has largely followed the lead of his predecessors, extending just this month a near total prohibition on trade and travel with Cuba for most U.S. citizens, declaring the embargo “in the national interest of the United States”.

The U.S. State Department continues to list Cuba as one of its four officially designated state sponsors of terrorism, and the Obama administration insists on serious democratic reforms and the freeing of political prisoners as a precondition to restoring diplomatic relations.

Imposed in 1962 soon after Fidel Castro took power, the U.S. embargo has failed to achieve its ostensible aim of promoting serious democratic reform in Cuba – and the return of property nationalised by Castro’s regime to U.S. corporations. But as detailed in Daniel Erikson’s engaging history of recent affairs between Washington and Havana, “The Cuba Wars”, U.S. policy toward Cuba has not always been judged on the basis of effectiveness.

“It’s not like I delude myself that the embargo works or that it’s brought about tremendous reform on the island,” Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a member of the congressional leadership, tells Erikson.

Maintaining that “the plight of Cuban exiles was similar to what Jews went through in the Holocaust,” Wasserman Shultz says her support for the embargo is based on principle. “A relationship with the United States is a privilege,” she says, “and an economic relationship is especially a privilege. And it has to be earned.”

Wasserman Schultz’s remarks are one of the more revealing anecdotes Erikson, an expert on U.S. policy toward Latin America with the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank, intersperses between detail after detail in his book highlighting the disconnect between the hyperbolic Cold War-era rhetoric often heard on Capitol Hill and the reality of a U.S. Cuba policy that has by all accounts failed miserably.

Based on a mix of his own interviews, travels to places such as Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military prison based in Cuba, and news accounts, Erikson paints a picture of a policy pursued not because it works at improving the lives of average Cubans, but because it helps politicians win support from hard-line elements among the politically influential Cuban exile community.

But attitudes are changing. Polls show Cuban-Americans, particularly younger generations, favour engagement with Cuba over confrontation. And even “Castro foes outside of Cuba who dreamed of bringing the regime crashing down have become increasingly aware that time is no longer on their side,” Erikson writes.

Indeed, thanks to reforms enacted by Congress in 2000 allowing U.S. agricultural exports, sold on a for-cash basis to Cuba – corn, poultry, wheat – trade between the two official enemies has grown dramatically, rising to 700 million dollars in 2008.

The Obama administration is also now permitting U.S. telecommunication firms to sell satellite and cellular services to their Cuban counterparts, and the U.S. and Cuban governments are meeting this month to discuss restoring direct mail service for the first time in decades.

There was a time, though, when it looked as if a U.S. government, buoyed by its perceived successes in Afghanistan, was looking to engage in some more regime change, this time in its own hemisphere.

In May 2002, John Bolton, the Bush administration’s top arms control official at the time, warned in a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation that the “United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort.”

Meanwhile, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was dutifully regurgitating claims of anonymous administration officials in breathless front-page pieces, writing that “Cuba has been experimenting with anthrax” and “other deadly pathogens”.

And in Congress, Democratic lawmakers were marching in lockstep with a Republican president, as many did in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

“I am happy to see that the administration has finally come forth with an acknowledgement of Cuba’s capabilities,” Erikson quotes New Jersey Congressman Robert Menendez, himself a Cuban-American, commenting after Bolton’s speech.

Ultimately the Iraq war proved too big a distraction for U.S. officials to pay much attention to Cuba, or the rest of Latin America for that matter. Yet fears that an aggressive U.S. administration was bent on invading Cuba – and the cover provided by the Iraq war’s domination of international media coverage – were used by the Cuban government to justify a crackdown on its domestic opposition.

As it had over the previous four decades, U.S. policy toward Cuba – and its vocal support for Cuban dissident groups – proved counterproductive to the U.S. government’s stated goals, aiding Fidel Castro as he ordered “that scores of innocent individuals be rounded up and placed in prison for lengthy sentences”, writes Erikson.

These days there are some signs U.S.-Cuba relations may be thawing, though few believe Obama, given the number of competing domestic and international policy issues, is willing to upend decades of U.S. policy in the face of a diminishing but still influential lobby in favour of the embargo and its potential to sway a national election.

“In the meantime, the Cuba wars will continue to rage in Havana, Miami, and Washington,” Erikson concludes in his highly readable and concise account of U.S.-Cuba relations, the fates of “eleven million diverse and divided people” hanging in the balance.

“One hopes that a moment will come when the forces for peaceful reconciliation gather critical mass, but such a vision still remains on the distant horizon,” he says.

Sunday’s announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Washington will begin talks with Cuba on bilateral migration issues and resume direct postal service between the two countries suggests the new administration of President Barack Obama intends to proceed cautiously toward normalising ties with the Caribbean nation, according to veteran experts here.

The announcement, which Clinton made while visiting El Salvador for Monday’s inauguration of its new president, Mauricio Funes, came on the eve of the annual General Assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Honduras, where Cuba’s proposed re-admission to the hemispheric body is likely to dominate the proceedings.

It also came six weeks after Obama lifted all restrictions on Cuban Americans to visit their homeland and send money to family members in what was regarded as the first major step toward the new president’s campaign promise to engage Havana.

“We’ve made more progress in four months than has been made in a number of years,” Clinton bragged to reporters in San Salvador Sunday. “We need to work together to continue that kind of progress, keeping in mind the legitimate aspirations and human rights of the people in Cuba.”

But analysts here said the resumption of migration talks, which had been suspended under former President George W. Bush in 2003, was the least that Obama could do, particularly after his speech last month at the Summit of the Americas where he cited immigration explicitly as one of the key issues on which he was prepared to engage.

“He should’ve started these talks the day after his inauguration,” said Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana who has long worked to normalise ties between the two nations as a fellow at the Centre for International Policy (CIP) here.

“They still need to remove the restrictions on academic and scientific exchanges and people-to-people programmes and issue visas to Cubans so they can come here for academic conferences and the like; it seems like they haven’t even thought of that yet,” he noted.

Smith added, however, that the resumption of the immigration talks, as well an apparent agreement to also address drug interdiction and hurricane relief efforts on a more formal basis than before, showed that the new administration was “at least moving”.

William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University, echoed Smith’s analysis, noting as well that the decision to restore direct postal service was a “logical follow-on” to Obama’s decision to end restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to their homeland.

But he said the latest announcement showed that Obama wanted to move cautiously on Cuba and suggested that the fact it occurred just before the OAS meeting was not coincidental.

“Just as they relaxed the restrictions on Cuban Americans just before the Summit of the Americas, now they are offering migration talks just before the OAS meeting,” he said. “It seems clear that they’re trying to inoculate themselves from criticism by Latin Americans about Cuba policy and at the same time avoid picking political fights with (anti-Castro) forces at home. It’s calculated.”

How much the new measures will provoke opposition remains to be seen, but they did succeed in gaining the endorsement of one key group, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).

“This is a very positive development and something that our organisation has recommended,” said Francisco Hernandez, CANF’s president.

The latest exchanges between Havana and Washington were initiated May 22, when the State Department delivered a diplomatic note to the Cuban Interests Section here asking to resume migration talks. Washington received a positive reply Saturday, according to a senior State Department official.

In their reply, the Cubans said they were also willing to engage in talks with Washington regarding counter-terrorism, drug trafficking, hurricane relief, and direct postal service. Clinton said Sunday she was “very pleased” with the response.

Clinton was in San Salvador as part of a three-day swing through the region beginning with Funes’s inauguration Monday and culminating in the first day of annual OAS meeting Tuesday in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The re-admission of Cuba into the hemispheric body will almost certainly be the most controversial issue at the OAS meeting. Significantly, as one of his first acts as president, Funes, the leader of the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a former guerrilla group, is expected to announce the normalisation of relations between El Salvador and Cuba, leaving the U.S. as the only nation in the hemisphere without full diplomatic ties with Havana.

Largely at Washington’s behest, the OAS suspended Cuba’s membership in the OAS in 1962, one year after the Central Intelligence Agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and a month before Washington imposed its trade embargo against the island.

Virtually all of Latin America’s leaders, including OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza, have called for Havana to be re-instated as a full member, despite the fact that the government of President Raul Castro has denied any interest in rejoining an organisation that it calls “that decrepit old house of Washington.”

The OAS headquarters, built by Andrew Carnegie, is located just off the Ellipse within shouting distance of the White House.

The Obama administration has said it is willing to end Cuba’s suspension but that its formal re-admission should be conditioned on Havana’s implementing political reforms that meet the requirements of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Last week, the OAS permanent council formed a small working group to come up with a compromise that most observers here believe will result in lifting the suspension and beginning talks with Havana over the terms of its re-admission.

“None of the parties involved oppose ending Cuba’s suspension, and so the issue is, will Cuba want to re-join the OAS and what kind of discussion needs to happen to make that possible,” said Geoff Thale, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Anti-Castro forces here are mobilising against re-admission. “The U.S. position has been firmly rooted in the promotion of freedom and democracy for the Cuban nation,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee whose district includes “Little Havana” in Miami.

“We have clearly said that Cuba should not participate in regional groups until there is a freely elected, fully participatory, democratic government in power in Cuba,” she said.

But Thale said efforts by Washington to insist on major democratic reforms in Cuba risked harming its relations with other, more important Latin American countries.

“This issue is a litmus test for virtually the entire continent,” said Thale. “Everyone else has decided that the way to deal with the issue is to engage in diplomatic relations, and it doesn’t behoove us to threaten the only regional organisation of which we’re a member.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Bolstered by international support for its demand for an end to the embargo, Cuba could sit down with the United States to talk about a number of matters of mutual interest while it awaits the lifting of the web of restrictions that have weighed on its economy for nearly half a century.

In a context in which dialogue is a possibility, Havana has said there are no taboo subjects or conditions for talks with the government of Barack Obama.

“We are willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of the press, or political prisoners… but on equal terms, without casting the smallest shadow on our sovereignty,” Cuban President Raúl Castro said on Apr. 17.

This was not the first time that Castro has expressed his willingness to talk to the United States, but the explicit mention of topics that Cuba has always considered “sensitive” was a new development. According to some analysts, his words prove that the government is interested in negotiations, so long as they are on an equal footing.

Without contradicting him, former president Fidel Castro added the interpretation that his younger brother Raúl’s statement “shows he is not afraid of addressing any kind of issue.” “It shows courage and confidence in the principles of the Revolution,” he said in one of his latest opinion columns.

On the issue of human rights, the Cuban government has consistently rejected being put in the dock, as was the style of the former United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Under the Human Rights Council (HRC) which replaced the Commission in 2006, all member states are subject to periodic scrutiny.

However, Cuba would accept talks on the issue if they were based on principles of “objectivity, impartiality and non-selectiveness,” a source close to the Foreign Ministry told IPS. Havana holds regular conversations with Spain on this basis, and has proposed an exchange of experiences with the European Union in the light of HRC evaluations.

In 1978, talks with Cuban exiles in Havana led to the release of some 800 prisoners, while the 1998 visit by the late Pope John Paul II led to nearly 300 prisoners being pardoned.

“Repetition of such a gesture is not impossible, but it cannot be a prior condition for convergence or dialogue… The Cuban government has never responded to pressure and impositions,” said a former official who served in a senior post at that time.

From different perspectives, the issue of prisoners is a priority for both Washington and Havana. Raúl Castro has reiterated his proposal of “gesture for gesture,” that is, to exchange imprisoned dissidents for the five Cuban agents who have been serving lengthy prison sentences in the United States for more than 10 years.

Academic researchers agree that a pardon from Obama for “the Cuban Five” would create a situation for the Cuban government to respond with an equivalent gesture.

René González, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino and Fernando González were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage, while Gerardo Hernández was additionally convicted for conspiracy to commit murder.

At an Apr. 19 press conference at the end of the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, President Obama said he would “explore” possible new steps in relation to Cuba, after his recent lifting of restrictions on travel and remittances for Cuban-Americans to the island.

But he said the Cuban government could also take steps, such as reducing “charges on remittances” to contribute to raising the living standards of its citizens, and “releasing political prisoners.”

“Obama views the release of prisoners as a unilateral gesture by Cuba, and there’s no help for it,” an academic warned.

Analysts also agree that dialogue is possible before the embargo is dismantled. Begun under the administration of President John Kennedy (1961-1963), the U.S. embargo was codified in the Helms-Burton Act, which was approved in 1996 during the presidency of Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and vigorously enforced by the government of George W. Bush (2001-2009).

Lifting the embargo is now in the hands of Congress, not the executive, which means there will be more delay. Meanwhile, the Obama administration could move towards convergence on issues of common interest such as illegal migration, terrorism and drug trafficking.

Concrete proposals for bilateral cooperation in these areas were made by Havana in March 2005, but were not taken up by President Bush, who two years later interrupted – unilaterally, according to Cuba – the six-monthly meetings for reviewing migration agreements signed in 1994 and 1995.

These agreements provided for legal and orderly emigration of Cubans to the United States. Delegations from both countries met alternately in their respective capitals to assess fulfilment of the agreements, and for nearly 10 years they were the only platform for dialogue.

Resumption of these talks are assumed to require no more than the willingness of both parties. And progress on the other issues proposed could also be made, as they are of strategic interest to the two countries whose geographical proximity means they share a number of problems, whether they like it or not.

“It will be a slow process, because of the decades of bilateral hostility, but it is worth trying. In Cuba it will mean changes that on the one hand may represent (ideological) dangers, and on the other, excellent opportunities,” said a university professor who requested anonymity.

In his view, the expected “invasion” of tourists from the United States might initially overwhelm the tourism industry, but in the long run it would bring growth to the industry, creating new sources of income that would benefit the country and its 11.2 million people.

As for the ideological risks implied by a wave of U.S. visitors, political scientist Rafael Hernández said that Cuba is not exactly isolated in a bell jar, and essentially all the challenges involved in a more normal relationship with the United States are already present.

“When U.S. citizens can travel legally to Cuba, I don’t think their social and ideological effect will be any worse than that of Italian or Spanish tourists. However, I very much doubt that ‘a more normal relationship’ will be the cure-all, unless the U.S. government renounces all interference in Cuba’s political destiny, which is highly improbable,” even under Obama, Hernández told IPS.

Nevertheless, the Cuban government “has always responded positively to proposals by the United States,” Hernández said. “I think that even hinting that this conflict has not been resolved due to sabotage by Cuba is completely unfounded.

“To put it in the terms some people prefer, I don’t expect the Cuban air force to shoot down any small planes, because I don’t think the U.S. air defence will let any plane leave their airspace to fly over Havana,” he said, referring to the 1996 incident which prompted Clinton to sign the Helms-Burton Act.

Fulfilling a key campaign promise, U.S. President Barack Obama Monday lifted all restrictions on Cuban-Americans to visit their homeland and send money to family members there.

In an executive order, Obama also authorised U.S. telecommunications companies to apply for licenses to do business in Cuba in what the White House described as an effort to increase the flow of information to the Cuban people.

In addition, current limits on the kinds and quantity of humanitarian-related goods that can be sent to Cuba from the U.S. will also be eased, according to the order which marked the first substantive changes in Washington’s policy toward the Caribbean island since Obama became president nearly three months ago.

The moves, coming on the eve of the Fifth Summit of the Americas to be held in Trinidad and Tobago later this week, were welcomed by organisations and activists who have long called for concrete steps to lift the nearly 50-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba., some of whom, however, expressed disappointment that Obama did not go further.

“These are welcome steps, but the right course is to allow all Americans to travel to Cuba, to open up commerce, and to directly engage the Cuban government in diplomacy and solving problems in both countries’ interests,” said Sarah Stephens, director of the Centre for Democracy in the Americas (CDA).

“The president has a historic opportunity, not to be the last president of the Cold War, but the first president to turn the page in U.S.-Cuba relations. I think he will do more, and that this will be the first of many steps toward better relations with Cuba,” she added.

At the same time, hard-line anti-Castro Cuban Americans deplored Obama’s decision. “President Obama has committed a serious mistake by unilaterally increasing Cuban-American travel and remittance dollars for the Cuban dictatorship,” said Florida Republican Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart.

“Unilateral concessions to the dictatorship embolden it to further isolate, imprison and brutalise pro-democracy activists, to continue to dictate which Cubans and Cuban-Americans are able to enter the island, that this unilateral concession provides the dictatorship with critical financial support,” the two brothers said.

Other more moderate Cuban-American lawmakers, including Florida Republican Sen. Mel Martinez, echoed the Diaz-Balarts’ concern that the government of President Raul Castro will benefit financially, especially by the lifting of limits to Cuban-American remittances, but also stressed that Obama’s decision was “good news for Cuban families separated by the lack of freedom in Cuba” and “should provide help to families in need.”

That Obama would ease limits imposed by his predecessor, George W. Bush, on the ability of Cuban-Americans to travel and send money to their families in Cuba had been anticipated since his election, if for no other reason than he had personally promised to do so in a major policy address on U.S.-Latin American relations delivered before one of the most important Cuban-American organisations, the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), in Miami last May. In the same speech, however, he promised to maintain the embargo as “leverage” to prod Havana into adopting democratic reforms.

That he would make the announcement before the Trinidad summit was also widely anticipated, as virtually all the heads of state with whom Obama will be meeting – notably Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who raised the issue in talks with the new president at the White House just last month – have called for Washington to end the embargo and normalise ties with Havana.

But the administration’s hopes – recently expressed by its top sherpa to the summit, former Amb. Jeffrey Davidow – that Monday’s announcement would all but remove Cuba from the agenda are unlikely to be realised, according to William LeoGrande, a Cuba specialist and dean of the School of Government at American University.

“I don’t think most Latin American heads of state are going to be too impressed by this,” he told IPS. “They’ve asked for a new departure by the U.S. toward Cuba, and this is really not a new departure.”

Since his election, majorities in Congress have voted to ease the embargo. In an omnibus appropriations bill approved last month, they prohibited the Treasury Department, which enforces key provisions in the embargo, from spending any money to enforce limits on the travel to Cuba by Cuban Americans. Legislators also authorised the granting of a general license for travel to Cuba for U.S. companies that wish to sell agricultural and medical goods there. Both moves had the effect of repealing restrictions imposed by Bush.

Legislation that was introduced in both houses of Congress last month, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, would extend to all U.S. citizens the right to travel to Cuba and is considered to have a better than even chance of passage by the end of the fiscal year, Sep. 30.

In addition, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Richard Lugar, has for the first time taken a leadership role in calling on the president both to lift all travel restrictions and to fully engage Havana diplomatically both bilaterally, on issues such as drug trafficking, energy, and immigration, and in multilateral forums, such as the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the International Monetary Fund, from which Washington has sought to exclude Cuba for decades.

At the same time, the U.S. business community, including the National Foreign Trade Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have been calling for ending the embargo altogether. In a statement issued Monday, the Chamber said it was “very encouraged” by Obama’s announcement but added that it “is only one step forward. …(U)ltimately, we would like to see an end to the Cuban trade embargo.”

In this context, Obama’s announcement fell short of the hopes of an increasingly broad coalition of groups and institutions that favours normalising ties with Havana across the board. Many groups thought that Obama would couple his announcement on easing restrictions on Cuban Americans with new orders that would facilitate scientific, educational, cultural and other kinds of people-to-people travel and exchanges of the kind that were initiated under former President Bill Clinton but subsequently frozen by Bush. The White House indicated that such a move was still under review.

“It would have been easiest to relax these kinds of travel restrictions as a package along with easing restrictions for Cuban Americans,” said LeoGrande. “I think the reason they didn’t is simply that the foreign policy agenda is so full that having to battle with recalcitrant members of Congress about Cuba is something they felt they just don’t have time for now.”

But LeoGrande stressed that Obama, by eliminating all restrictions on travel and remittances for Cuban Americans, has actually gone beyond what was permitted under Clinton and could have a major impact on Cuba’s economy. Under Bush, Cuban Americans could visit the island only once a year and send a maximum of 75 dollars a month.

“That was a lot less than what immigrants send to the Dominican Republic or El Salvador, and Cuban Americans are much wealthier, so they could send a lot more,” according to LeoGrande, who noted that, before Bush’s restrictions, Cuban Americans were sending about one billion dollars a year to their families on the island.

Still, some normalisation advocates said it was inappropriate for Obama to limit travel and other rights to Cuban Americans, with Stephen Clemons, director of the American Strategy Programme of the New American Foundation (NAF), calling it “cynical and insufficient.”

“That our first African-American president would issue an executive order that created openings for a specific class of ethnic Americans – in this case, Cuban Americans – and not for all is not what this democracy is about,” he said. “This is not how we approached Vietnam; we didn’t tell Vietnamese Americans to lead the way.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has a positive image among most Cubans, who are hopeful regarding his promises of loosening some restrictions towards the island, although the government-controlled media here have refrained from commenting on the future of relations between the two countries.

The Democratic candidate who will become the first African-American president of the United States on Jan. 20 may also become the first to sit down to talks with the Cuban government after nearly half a century of conflict.

During his campaign, Obama pledged to lift travel restrictions so that Cuban-Americans can visit their families in Cuba, and to eliminate caps on the remittances they can send back to their families – measures that were adopted in 2004 by the Republican administration of President George W. Bush.

Obama also said he was willing to pursue direct diplomacy with the Cuban government, without preconditions.

“I hope that with him as president, relations will be eased, and there won’t be so many restrictions,” a 62-year-old woman told IPS, after complaining that in November 2007 she was refused a visa for the second time, on the argument that she posed a risk to U.S. interests.

“My parents and siblings have lived over there for years, and I never had any problem visiting them before. But for the Bush administration I’m a danger, and I can’t see my mother, who is 92 years old and sick and wants to see me,” she added, asking not to be identified “to avoid further complicating matters.”

A shift in Washington’s policy towards Cuba would have several advantages for Cuban society, in the view of Reverend Raymundo García, director of the Christian Centre for Reflection and Dialogue, one of the few civil society organisations in Cuba that regularly analyses human rights questions.

Obama’s offer “to be open to dialogue with Cuba…is a watershed for his country and his government, because it would require a dismantling of what has been called an embargo based on democracy and human rights questions,” he said.

The protestant minister said he had no doubts that a new attitude on the part of Washington would immediately contribute to bringing about closer ties between families divided between the two countries and would help the Cuban economy as a result of increased travel and remittances. “God willing, this will be the start of an end to the mutual recriminations, accusations and spitefulness that have caused so much harm,” he said.

Academics who spoke to IPS, however, said they do not foresee significant short-term economic benefits, especially because of the financial crisis in the United States, which has already translated into a drop in remittances towards the rest of the Americas, as well as a reduction in travel due to soaring air ticket prices.

“Without a doubt, the situation could improve in the next few months, and that would be a positive signal, but for now, Obama’s priority is to improve the U.S. economy and rebuild the nation’s prestige,” economy Professor Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva told IPS.

He also said, however, that he has no doubts that if the U.S. Congress passes laws favourable to Cuba, Obama will not veto them. “He wouldn’t have any reason to do so, and besides, the hard-line Cuban-Americans are Republicans, to whom Obama is not beholden.”

Luis René Fernández, assistant director of the University of Havana’s Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States (CEHSEU), agrees that Cuba is not “a priority” on Washington’s agenda, but said a new stance towards this Caribbean island nation could “be important for the world’s perception of the United States.”

“That is, small changes in the policy towards Cuba, a degree of flexibility, an openness to diplomatic negotiations, however limited, could help improve something crucial to U.S. politics: the country’s image, which has severely deteriorated after eight years of an administration that has been deeply unpopular at a global level,” said Fernández.

In the analyst’s view, a more pragmatic Cuba policy could provide “collateral benefits” to the government of Obama, who will take office only a few weeks after the Cuban government headed by Raúl Castro celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, on Jan. 1, 2009.

Up to now, only former president Fidel Castro has publicly referred to the two candidates who faced off in Tuesday’s elections. In his most recent column, he described Obama as “more intelligent, educated and level-headed” than his Republican rival, John McCain.

“Obama came to these elections with the backing of the dominant class in the United States,” Ramón Sánchez-Parodi Montoto, international relations analyst and former head of the Cuban Interests Section in the United States wrote in an article Wednesday in Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba’s governing Communist Party.

Opinions varied among dissident groups in Cuba. “I don’t believe in proposals for dialogue with this government,” Berta Soler, a member of the Ladies in White, a group of wives and daughters of imprisoned dissidents who were accused of “conspiring” with the United States, told IPS.

By contrast, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo said that for Cuba, the change that lies ahead in Washington could open up a new horizon of “infinite” possibilities and “would also be an opportunity for enriching dialogue with Latin America.” Menoyo is the head of Cuban Change, which he describes as “an independent opposition organisation.”

If elected, Democratic candidate Barack Obama could become the first United States president to engage in talks with Cuba after almost five decades of severed relations, but it will all depend on his refraining from trying to “control” a process that involves two sides, say academics from this Caribbean island nation.

Even before his official nomination, the U.S. presidential hopeful had talked of the possibility of pursuing “direct diplomacy” with Havana “without preconditions,” and had promised to put an end to the restrictions imposed by Washington in 2004 on the freedom of Cuban-American families to travel and send remittances to their relatives in Cuba.

“Obama was very clever in setting out his alternative policy, as he brought up two issues that are key to the Cuban-American community (economic and travel sanctions) and declared his willingness to sit down and talk with officials in Havana,” Esteban Morales, a Cuban academic and researcher, said in an interview with IPS.

In Morales’s opinion, the proposal marks a step forward, as it “takes the situation to a fresh starting point by eliminating unpopular restrictions set by the George W. Bush administration and raising the possibility of opening official talks, something which until now was unheard of.” However, on this last point, Obama has made a mistake that “puts Cuba on its guard,” according to Morales.

Speaking in Miami, Florida before the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) – traditionally the most hard-line and influential anti-Castro group -, Obama said during the primary campaign in May that “there will be careful preparation” for such negotiations, and that these would be based on “a clear agenda.”

“As president, I would be willing to lead that diplomacy at a time and place of my choosing, but only when we have an opportunity to advance the interests of the United States, and to advance the cause of freedom for the Cuban people,” he added.

Morales finds this approach “rather arrogant.” “He went as far as to say that the groups that represent Cuban emigrés should be included in these talks, and the way he expressed himself was as if he should be the one to determine when the talks would take place, what issues would be on the agenda and who would participate,” he said.

Morales, a researcher at the University of Havana’s Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States (CEHSEU), went on to say that Obama is wrong in wanting to steer the process down the path of U.S.-controlled talks. “This is an issue that must be decided by mutual agreement, and must be negotiated with Cuba,” he said.

He pointed out that Cuban President Raúl Castro has said on more than one occasion that Cuba is willing to negotiate to find a solution to the long-standing bilateral conflict, provided that its “independence” is respected and that discussions be “guided by the principles of equality, reciprocity, non-interference and mutual respect.”

With regard to defining a possible agenda for such talks, Morales said that “the key factor is that the parties cannot come to the negotiating table with preconditions.” “If that is achieved, the rest is just drawing up a smart list of issues mutually agreed on, ranging from the most simple matters to the most complex,” he said.

In Morales’s view, the embargo imposed in the early 1960s, which Obama says he will not lift, is a “political problem” that could be left out of the debate if both countries decide not to discuss it.

In that case, the two nations could begin to regularise economic relations on the basis of the already existing trade flow, which is limited to food imports by Cuba paid up front in cash.

The talks, he says, could then address ways to expand current trade to include other products, the possibility of exporting Cuban goods to the U.S., the negotiation of new terms of trade, and the question of credit, with the aim of facilitating transactions.

In spite of the restrictions in place, since 2001 the U.S. has become a major supplier of foodstuffs to Cuba, which now purchases 35 percent of its food imports from that country.

Morales believes Obama has a firm chance of prevailing over his opponent, Republican Party candidate John McCain, in the Nov. 4 elections. “I’d like to see him win. I think that with Obama in office, the possibilities for change would be richer,” the analyst told IPS.

However, he says it would be “easier” for a Republican to dismantle the current U.S. Cuba policy than for a Democrat.

“Republicans are very pragmatic, more consistent from an ideological point of view. Such decisions would be questioned far less if they came from someone in their ranks than from a Democrat,” he said.

Morales views the nomination of an Afro-American as presidential candidate as an unprecedented decision. “I believe that racism and intolerance have declined in the last 30 or 40 years, but not to the point of disappearing entirely. We still have to see if people in the U.S. are truly prepared to accept a black president. We won’t know until the elections,” he said.

The Cuban government’s opinion of the two U.S. presidential candidates has until now been virtually monopolised by former Cuban President Fidel Castro, for whom Obama “is superior in both intelligence and serenity” to McCain, “one of the worst students in his West Point Academy class.”

In an op ed column published Oct. 12 in the Cuban press, Castro warned that “the United States is marked by profound racism, and millions of whites cannot reconcile their minds with the idea that a black man with his wife and children would move into the White House, which is called just that: White.”

In this sense, “it is by pure miracle that the Democratic candidate has not suffered the same fate as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others who in recent decades dreamt of equality and justice,” Castro said, referring to the assassination of these civil rights activists in the 1960s.

In a previous commentary, Fidel Castro had criticised the Democratic candidate’s foreign policy platform for Cuba, claiming it could be translated into a formula for condemning the country to hunger, with remittances as handouts and visits as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life it is based on.

Cuba policy spokesmen for the two presidential candidates jousted and sniped at a colloquium in Washington last Friday, offering a choice between further hardening of current policies and some hope for a new vision for U.S. Cuba policy.

Dan Restrepo, representing the Barack Obama campaign, and Adolfo Franco, speaking for John McCain, addressed a crowd of long-time Cuba hands at the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a Washington-based think tank focusing on Latin America and U.S.-Latin relations.

“The new U.S. president will be the first in five decades not to face Fidel Castro,” noted moderator Dan Erickson of the IAD, adding that after all this time, the U.S. still faces the burning question: “What will happen in Cuba over the long run?”

Both presidential candidates share the key objective of supporting Cuban steps toward democracy, but they have sharply different strategies for achieving this goal.

Obama, the Democratic nominee, would adjust some of the Cuba policies of the George W. Bush administration, said Restrepo, such as severe restrictions on family visits and remittances to Cuba that have proven quite unpopular among Cuban-Americans.

Obama believes that reversing the Bush policies would give those in Cubans more “space” from the regime, according to Restrepo.

Far more controversial, Obama would then challenge Cuba’s leadership to free all political prisoners, in return for opening official talks with Washington and consideration of an end to U.S. sanctions, Restrepo said. . “We cannot continue to do more of the same and expect a new result,” the Obama spokesman repeated frequently, referring to Washington’s long-held belief that isolation is the best policy toward Cuba – reflected by its 46-year-old unilateral trade embargo.

Speaking for John McCain, who is running on the Republican ticket, Adolfo Franco presented a Cuba policy virtually identical to that of the Bush administration.

Over the years, Franco said, “McCain has held a consistent position on Cuba,” which is that “Cuba is a pariah state that should not be rewarded until it has shown a demonstrable commitment to democracy.”

According to Franco, McCain would increase “material assistance” to Cuban dissidents and “maintain the pressure” on Cuba’s government.

To “reward” Cuba would be a “colossal mistake,” he reiterated, presumably referring to the possibility of opening diplomatic channels.

Kirby Jones, an entrepreneur with extensive contacts on both sides of the U.S.-Cuba divide, bluntly told Franco: “Nothing you say is going to work.”

The Obama plan, Jones warned, is flawed if freeing political prisoners is presented as a precondition for talks. Jones pointed out that the strategy of setting preconditions for diplomatic talks has proven ineffective in other settings.

Former U.S. envoy to Cuba Wayne Smith urged that a new administration place priority on improving relations with Latin America as a whole, and suggested that talking to Cuba would be a good starting point.

He also urged an end to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which provides Cubans who land in Miami with economic assistance and a path to citizenship unavailable to migrants from other nations.

“Why is this legislation still on the books?” Smith asked, since circumstances have changed and its elimination would remove much of the incentive for Cuban migration – a sore point for both Washington and Havana.

Other speakers at the session discussed the challenge to Cuban-American Republican incumbents in Miami, in particular Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, who represent traditional hard-line Cuban-American views on Cuba.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, in particular, is widely believed to have a strong influence on President Bush’s policy towards Cuba.

David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report predicted that the contest for Miami’s 21st district, in the hands of Lincoln Diaz-Balart for the last 16 years but now under challenge from former Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez, will be the “ugliest contest in the country”.

Democrats, he said, are betting that the districts represented by the Diaz-Balart brothers have diversified enough that simply running on an anti-Castro platform will not be enough.

David Rieff, author of a recent New York Times Magazine article entitled “Will Little Havana Go Blue?” and other studies of Cuban exiles, agreed.

The influx of other Latin Americans and the large number of younger Cubans who do not harbour the same levels of hostility toward Cuba as their elders could mean that the election in the two Florida districts will focus on the same social and economic issues as in the rest of the country, rather than on Cuba policy, according to the two panelists.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, another representative of Miami’s Cuban community in Congress, is also facing competition but remains well ahead of her challenger, Democrat Annette Tadeo, in Miami’s 18th District, according to Wasserman and Rieff.