Time to rethink Cuba policy
By Sarah Stephens
From Politico
President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia this week announced that negotiations will soon begin between Colombia and its principal enemy, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, that could end his country’s bloody, decades-long civil war.
The deal was struck in Havana, with help from Venezuelan, Cuban and Norwegian diplomats. Talks are due to start in Oslo Oct. 5. President Barack Obama, Reuters reported, “is aware of the process and is in agreement.” After the initial round of negotiations in Norway, Colombia’s government and the guerillas are to return to Havana, sit at the negotiating table and not leave until a peace pact is signed.
We can’t know now what this means for Colombia – though we earnestly hope it leads to peace. But one thing we do know is this: Because Cuba made a big contribution to this breakthrough, it undermines arguments by the anti-Cuba hard-liners in Congress. It also poses a direct challenge to Obama’s handling of the U.S.-Cuba relations.
When President Ronald Reagan put Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982, it was a largely political act. It was domestic politics again in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton kept Cuba listed, as anti-terrorism expert Richard Clarke explained, and the weak rationale for it has waned ever since.
As the Council on Foreign Relations has reported, “intelligence experts have been hard-pressed to find evidence that Cuba currently provides weapons or military training to terrorist groups. In 1998, a comprehensive review by the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Cuba does not pose a threat to U.S. national security, which implies that Cuba no longer sponsors terrorism.”
Just a few weeks ago, the Obama administration announced that Cuba would again be kept on the terrorism list for the 30th consecutive year. Among the allegations that the White House used to defend its decision was that Cuba was harboring and providing political assistance to members of the FARC. Cuba, however, has consistently argued it is simply providing a neutral ground for negotiations between Colombia and its armed insurgents. Now, the fact that the Castro government helped midwife a peace process for Colombia is known, this undercuts one remaining rationale for listing Cuba as a state sponsor of terror.
This may have been a blow to the Cold War warriors who still use the list to oppose any relaxation of U.S. policy. When the Republican Party adopted its foreign policy platform in Tampa, it called Cuba’s government “a mummified relic of the age of totalitarianism [and] a state-sponsor of terrorism.” Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) invoked the terror list to oppose increasing travel to Cuba. Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.) used it to justify blocking environmental cooperation with the Castro government as it drills for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) even said the U.S. government should not be talking to Cuba to secure the release of Alan Gross, a U.S. citizen serving a 15-year sentence in a Cuban prison, because “the United States should not be negotiating with a state sponsor of terrorism.”
The politics of the terror list works for those who want to keep our Cuba policy frozen in place.
But Obama has a higher responsibility.
When the White House argues in public that having the FARC in Havana is a reason for keeping Cuba on the terror list, even as Obama privately approves this peace process brokered in Cuba to have the FARC and Colombia sit down together, it damages U.S. credibility.
Sometimes politics must yield to reality. Obama could extricate himself from this predicament by recognizing Cuba’s role in Colombia’s peace process and removing Havana from the list.
Maybe it’s naïve to think the president will rise to this occasion in an election year. But he has the power to do so – and he should use it.
Sarah Stephens is executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas.
For the original version: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80545.html
