Hillary and Barack’s tussle over the Cuba question

By Weekly Archive On Sep 4, 2007

US-Cuba
relations are not high on the roster of priorities for many
Americans, and yet small moves in the terms of that relationship
could have enormous political consequences.

Recently,
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did battle over what their policies
would be towards Cuba if elected President. That’s right — this was
not a discussion of Israel/Palestine, or withdrawing from Iraq, or
bombing Iran, or whether to talk to dictators without preconditions.
This was about Cuba.

Chris
Dodd started things off with an eloquent
statement about US-Cuba relations
released through my blog, The
Washington Note
as well as my perch at The
Huffington Post.
Dodd set the gold standard in my view in articulating a policy that
wasn’t all warm and fuzzy about Castro but that spoke to America’s
21st century economic and national security interests with Cuba in
contrast to those who want to keep US-Cuba relations cocooned in an
anachronistic Cold War era framework that has little relevancy today.

Dodd
wants to end the many decades old embargo. He wants to remove all
travel restrictions — and he wants to see commerce and trade begin
to flow. He wants American people to meet Cubans and wants to trigger
an arbitrage between the norms of our society and theirs. That is the
American way. That’s what we did with China.

Now
Hillary Clinton — who has visited China and who supports relations
with Vietnam and who has praised Assistant Secretary of State Chris
Hill and Under Secretary of State R.
Nicholas Burns
on what seems so far to be fairly successful nuclear deal-making with
North Korea — has spoken out against change in America’s stance
towards Cuba and in favor of George W. Bush’s position.

Clinton
doesn’t support changing course in U.S.-Cuba relations despite
decades of failed results and seems to have no problem with something
that Jeff Flake (R-AZ-6), the charismatic Republican Congressman from
Arizona, does. Flake has said:

If
my travel which I think is my human right is going to be restricted,
then it seems to me that a Communist government ought to be the one
doing the restricting — not my own government of the United States
of America.

Hillary
Clinton has stated
quite clearly that she is content to stick with past policies
— those of President Bush — when it comes to Cuba.

But
Barack Obama has a completely different view. While not quite up to
the robustness of Chris Dodd’s proposal, Obama wrote an oped for the
Miami
Herald,
"Our
Main Goal: Freedom in Cuba,"
calling for restrictions on family-related travel to end and
increasing financial amounts that families could remit to loved ones
inside Cuba. After he wrote the piece, Miami-Dade Democratic Party
Chairman Joe Garcia — who is also the former Executive Director of
the Jorge Mas Canosa-run Cuban-American National Foundation,
organized a large gathering of Miami citizens, an overwhelming number
of whom were Cuban Americans, to meet with Obama. Most
report
that it was a super success. There were some protests — but trivial
compared to what one might have expected in Miami on this subject
matter just a few years ago.

How
could this be? Hillary Clinton and those who want to keep U.S.-Cuba
relations in a cocooned, freeze-dried state have not looked at the
recent
polling data
that show clearly that the Cuban-American voters in Florida are
becoming divided over not only the family travel issue, but about the
efficacy of the embargo itself.

Again
to quote Republican Congressman Jeff Flake:

President
Bush’s tightened restrictions on Cuban-American family travel is now
forcing people to choose whether they are going to attend their
father’s funeral or their mother’s.

Cuban-Americans
from Miami have told me that the powerful triumvirate of
Cuban-Americans from Miami — Ileana-Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln
Diaz-Balart, and Mario Diaz-Balart (the brothers are coincidentally
the nephews by a failed marriage of their aunt to Fidel Castro) —
are facing their most serious electoral challenges yet, as younger
Cuban-Americans as well as older are shifting in their policy
preferences when it comes to the Cuba travel ban and embargo.

Recently,
I went to Havana along with former State Department Chief of Staff
Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson is a blunt guy — a military guy — and
doesn’t suffer fools. He was Colin Powell’s aide for sixteen years
and served as his aide when Powell was Commander of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff and also when Powell served as Secretary of the State.

Wilkerson
has published two sets of "reflections" on Cuba and
U.S.-Cuba relations at the newly hatched, The
Havana Note. In
the first, he starts with the admission that while Powell’s chief of
staff, he gave an "off the record" interview to GQ
Magazine
in which he said that our "U.S.-Cuba policy was the stupidest
policy on earth."

Wilkerson
writes:

When
I was Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State in 2004, I was exposed
to some criticism within the Bush administration when I was quoted in
GQ
Magazine
as saying that U.S. Cuba policy was the stupidest policy on earth. I
deserved the criticism because my immediate boss, Colin Powell, had
approved that policy. Not only that, he was co-chairman of the
Committee set up to monitor implementation of it. Now I realize that
I deserve far stronger criticism for not resigning my position in
disgust over such policy. Let me tell you one of the most powerful
reasons I feel that way.

There
is a film by Lisandro Perez-Rey called "Those
I Left Behind".
The film documents the lives of several Cuban-American families
against the backdrop of the Bush administration’s tightened rules on
travel to Cuba. It is devastating in its condemnation of those rules.
In the film, you see and hear from people whose lives are in turmoil
because of these inane rules. You don’t need to understand how
damaging the rules are to helping democracy come to Cuba. You don’t
need to understand how dangerous the rules are with respect to U.S.
national security. You don’t need to appreciate that Cuba is the
only country in the world which U.S. citizens are prohibited to visit
— a violation of their constitutional rights. And you don’t need to
comprehend how much business America is losing because of the
policies behind those rules—policies that have failed abjectly now
for some 46 years. All you need to do is witness the devastation in
the lives of these families to know that the rules must be changed
and as swiftly as possible.

Central
to the film is the testimony of an American citizen — an American
soldier who has served in Iraq — who now finds it difficult if not
impossible to visit his sons in Cuba. Sergeant Carlos Lazo, now
somewhat famous for his advocacy for change, is shown talking to his
two sons, Carlos Manuel and Carlos Raphael, who are in Cuba, via one
of his many television appearances as he works for change. A resident
of Seattle and a member of the Washington National Guard, Sergeant
Lazo served as a combat medic in Iraq. Watching the scenes in the
film of his sons in Cuba and the Sergeant in the United States, is
wrenching. Particularly when Lazo talks of wanting to visit his sons
prior to his departure for a year in Iraq — a year where he easily
could have been wounded or killed — and then not being able to do
so, you get the message he is trying to convey with a directness that
is heartbreaking.

On
another front, well before any of us had heard of Michael Moore’s
Sicko,
we became exposed to the new edge of Cuban power — soft power — in
Latin America and elsewhere: the training and export of
doctors. Say what you want about Castro, who has outlived an
incredible number of U.S. presidents and may be around a bit longer,
but exporting doctors is wildly different than the export of guns and
revolution, which was what Cuba was doing for decades.

Here
is an intro to Wilkerson’s reflections of Cuba’s national health care
and medicine infrastructure and the global public diplomacy that they
connect to it:

With
Steve
Clemons
and others, I recently visited Cuba (March 2007). One of the areas of
Cuban activity on which we focused was what has been described as one
of the world’s best systems for delivering healthcare to impoverished
people — in Cuba, in Venezuela and elsewhere in South and Central
America, and increasingly in sub-Saharan Africa. We visited Cuba’s
medical "contingency brigade", for example, and talked with
doctors and other healthcare personnel about the brigade’s recent,
highly successful tenure in Pakistan following the devastating
earthquakes there in 2006. The passion in the doctors’ eyes as they
related their experiences in delivering basic healthcare in isolated,
freezing regions of Pakistan was truly heartwarming. Some of the
human interest stories the doctors related brought laughter to us all
and served to demonstrate conclusively how deeply these medical
personnel had been touched by their almost year-long experience in
Pakistan. They were proud to announce that as a result of the good
relations thus created, Cuba was asked to open its first-ever embassy
in Islamabad. Talk about effective public diplomacy!

We
also visited the Finlay Institute: Center for Research-Development
and Production of Human Vaccines — incidentally, one of the places
that the jacobin Undersecretary of State for International Security
Affairs, John Bolton, alleged in 2002 was manufacturing biological
weapons. We didn’t find any such activity (and we did discover that
at best the Institute has a rudimentary Bio-Level III capability and
no Bio-Level IV capability—the latter needed if one is to engage in
sophisticated biological agent research and development). After the
visit, we assumed that Bolton’s insights were right up there with the
CIA’s in 2002-2003 with respect to Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological
weapons labs. It’s safe to say we considered the assessment by the
former commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Marine General Charles
Wilhelm, as more definitive: "During my three year tenure, from
September 1997 until September 2000 at Southern Command, I didn’t
receive a single report or a single piece of evidence that would have
led me to the conclusion that Cuba was in fact developing, producing
or weaponizing biological or chemical agents."

Those
interested in the realities of Cuba’s health care progress — and the
many lessons we can learn — can skip the Michael Moore film and
instead see Salud!

In
foreign policy circles, most people consider me to be a "realist".
I consider myself a hybrid of a number of schools. I don’t think that
there are perfectly neat schools of thought any longer but whether
I’m a 21st century evolved realist, an ethical realist, a progressive
realist, or as Michael Lind would call me, a new American
internationalist — when I see U.S.-Cuba realities as a manifestation
of our failure to move forward in ways consistent with global needs
and American interests, then my realist DNA perks up.

Cuba
and the Cuban population remember the fall of the Soviet Union and
survived a devastating, tortuous shrinking of their economy (and
their personal body weight). After the Russians, Venezuela
cuddled up to the Cubans and now they essentially barter doctors and
medical support for oil between each other. China is the second
biggest economic partner of Cuba and has designs on developing the
oil fields in Cuban waters estimated to be about 9-12 billion
barrels. Americans are not there — not involved.

Benetton
has a store in old Havana. British Petroleum — which controls the
Alaskan pipeline — had a party on the roof of my hotel in
Havana. Israeli firms are managing large citrus groves there.
The Germans, Chinese, Australians, Canadians, Dutch, and Japanese are
all visiting Havana and seeing the business opportunities.

But
Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuiliani, Fred Thompson, and John
McCain all want to keep the Bush administration’s restrictions on
trade and travel in place.

Lifting
the travel ban makes the United States a more whole nation — as
travel is a natural right of ours, not to be taken away by our
government. This right should be restored to all Americans in my
view.

But
stepping away from the lofty for a moment, Hugo Chavez is not my
favorite guy in Latin America.

In
my view, Chavez is a serious troublemaker made increasingly wealthy
from high oil prices. He is an increasingly significant constraint on
America’s global options — and to knock him back a respectable bit
would be a good thing. Opening the travel pipe would steal from
Chavez both the dependency and the affections of many Cubans and
might send a very popular pro-American current through Cuba and much
of Latin America.

More
on this later — but Cuba does matter and is already a point of
differentiation between Obama, Clinton, and Dodd. Fidel will not be
around long in my estimation, and we need our political and policy
leaders to begin plotting a policy not riveted in the past and not
dominated by a shrinking cartel in Miami.

Steve
Clemons is Senior
Fellow & Director, American Strategy Program, New
America Foundation
and also serves as Director of the Japan
Policy Research Institute.
He publishes a blog called The
Washington Note.

This
recently appeared in TheAtlantic.com
(http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/09/hillary-and-bar.html)