"They are selling a virtual reality as if it was real change, and that is fraud. It is outrageous." - Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Cuban opposition leader interviewed on October 3, 2011
The New York Times has published an Editorial titled "
Undoing All the Good Work on Cuba" that rehashes Obama Administration talking points that advance a specific policy agenda, although ignoring the current situation, changing policies over the past half century, security concerns, and how sanctions on the Castro regime
have protected US taxpayers.
During the eight years of the Obama Administration the situation for Cuban opposition leaders became more precarious and this was demonstrated
with the deaths of high profile figures that could have over seen a democratic transition such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Laura Inés Pollán Toledo.
The current situation
Levels of violence against dissidents worsened while the old totalitarian patterns of repression still endure. Rising violent repression
against political dissidents in Cuba, including crippling and disfiguring machete
attacks, became a high profile regime tactic starting in 2013. The case of
Sirley Avila Leon in May of 2015 is well documented, even if it is not widely well known because The New York Times did not find it "fit to print" but thankfully others have.
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| Machete attack victims 2013 - 2015 |
There is no right to education in Cuba if you dissent from the official line. Fếlix Yuniel Llerena López, a 20 year-old religious freedom
defender, was expelled
from the Enrique José Varona Pedagogical
University in Havana on May 8, 2017 following a visit to the United
States. 18-year-old journalism student, Karla Pérez González, was
expelled from Marta Abreu University of Santa Clara for “political
reasons” on April 12, 2017 and her expulsion ratified three days later on April 15th. 24 year old David Mauri Cardoso was expelled from the University of Cienfuegos in February of 2017 after he honestly answered politically loaded
questions in what was supposed to be a Spanish literature exam.
If you have a relative who is a dissident, although you are not, you can still be fired from your job. Professor Dalila Rodriguez from the University of Las Villas was expelled from her job on May 9, 2017 because her father, Leonardo Rodriguez is a dissident.
Dissidents have been jailed and mistreated in psychiatric facilities in Cuba. The practice continues today with Daniel Llorente Miranda, the dissident who on May Day ran out in front of the parade with an American flag shouting out for a free Cuba, held in Mazorra.
There is no right to travel for Cuban nationals and dissenters are regularly denied exit and entry. Ivan Hernandez Carrillo, and Sayli Navarro were denied the right to travel by the Castro regime on June 4, 2017.
Amnesty International has recognized Eduardo Cardet as a new Cuban prisoner of conscience and has an urgent action underway for his release.
What is taking place in Cuba is fake change. The regime is working to achieve regime succession and prevent a democratic transition in Cuba.
Policy changes over the past half century
The argument made by the Obama Administration and
repeated by The New York Times that "hard-line sanctions-based approach was in place for more than 50 years
after the 1959 revolution and never produced what anti-Castro activists
hoped would be the result" is both a straw man argument and untrue.
The Castro regime
beginning in 1959 sent armed expeditions to Panama,
Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic to overthrow their governments. The regime's destabilization policy led
two thirds of the 21 states of Latin America voting to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States on February 14, 1963.
A cache of three tons of weapons was found on a Venezuelan beach in November
1963 that was to be used to disrupt the democratic elections there.
Due to the 1961
Bay of Pigs debacle that consolidated Castro's rule and the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that ruled out a direct U.S. invasion, economic sanctions were put in place
not to eliminate the Castro regime but limit its ability to expand into the rest of the hemisphere and to force the Soviet Union to
expend large sums in keeping the Castro regime afloat
which may have contributed to the USSR's demise in 1991. The embargo was not designed to overthrow the Castro regime but to
contain its mission to destabilize other governments in the region.
President Carter ended Cuba travel embargo and began normalizing relations in 1977
On April 27, 1977 representatives of the Carter Administration and the
Castro regime sat down and personally negotiated an international
fishery agreement. This was
the first time since 1958
that any officials of the United States government sat down with
representatives of the Castro regime to formally negotiate an
agreement.
President Carter in an
interview with Robert Fulghum on December 19, 1996 quoted on page 310 of the book
Conversations with Carter said: "When I had only been in office two months in 1977, I opened up all travel for American citizens to go to Cuba and vice versa.
And we opened up an entry section, which is just one step short of a
full embassy in both Havana and Washington. And those offices, by the
way, are still open."
Outcomes of Carter normalization with Castro regime
Robert A. Pastor,
of The Carter Center in July 1992 in the report "The Carter
Administration and Latin America: A Test of Principle" summed the
outcome of the Carter policy on Cuba: "In November 1977 there were 400 Cuban military advisers in Ethiopia; by
April 1978 there were 17,000 Cuban troops there serving under a Soviet
general.
The Castro regime also played a crucial role in the Sandinista victory
in Nicaragua while the Carter Administration imposed sanctions on the
Somoza regime when it refused to pursue democratic reforms. According to
Robert Pastor: "Somoza pretended the sanctions had no effect on him. He doubled the size
of the National Guard and evidently believed he was secure. However, by
May 1979, with Cuban President Fidel Castro's help, the three
Sandinista factions had united and established a secure and ample arms
flow from Cuba through Panama and Costa Rica."
During the Mariel crisis of 1980, when over 125,000 Cubans sought to
flee the island, the Cuban dictator sought to save face by
selectively releasing approximately 12,000 violent criminals or individuals who were mentally ill into the exodus.
Towards the end of the Carter Administration the discovery of a
Soviet ground forces brigade operating on Cuban territory
and the ineptness in handling the Mariel boat lift crisis spelled not
only the end of the policy but was also a contributing factor to the
defeat of President Carter during his 1980 re-election bid.
This first attempt at normalizing relations saw a worsening human rights situation in Cuba, a migration crisis and reversals in US interests in the region.
President Reagan restores Cuba embargo in 1981 and challenges Castro regime on international stage
Carter's policy of détente was rejected by the Reagan administration. Ronald
Reagan entered the White House in 1981 and re-imposed the travel ban,
toughened economic sanctions, in 1982 placed the Castro regime on the
list of state sponsors of terrorism, and started Radio Marti
to break through the communist monopoly with uncensored information for
Cubans on the island.
Ronald Reagan backed the creation of a Radio Free Cuba to break Castro regime's information monopoly over the Cuban people beginning in 1981. When it finally went on the air in 1985 Radio
Marti marked a before and after inside Cuba. At the time President
Reagan hoped that Radio Marti would ''help defuse the war hysteria on
which much of current Cuban Government policy is predicated.''
Outcomes
The
Castro regime's response was to end an immigration agreement and
suspend the visits to Cuba by Cubans living in the United States. The Reagan Administration named former Cuban political
prisoner Armando Valladares
Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and made human
rights in Cuba a priority there. The end result was that for the first
and last time Amnesty International, the International Committee of the
Red Cross and the UN Human Rights Commission were able to visit Cuban
political prisoners inside the island. There was no Cuba migration crisis during the Reagan Administration.
President Clinton seeks rapprochement with Castro regime in 1993
The Clinton Administration in 1994 initiated regular contacts between the U.S. and Cuban military
that included joint military exercises at the Guantanamo Naval base. Despite this improvement of relations the 1990s saw some brutal massacres of Cubans that are rightly remembered such as the July 13, 1994 "13 de Marzo" tugboat massacre and the February 24, 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot down.
The shoot down involved two planes blown to bits over international
airspace by Cuban MiGs killing three American citizens and a Cuban
resident who were engaged in the search and rescue of Cuban rafters. This led to the signing of the Helms - Burton Bill later in 1996, but as soon as he was re-elected President Clinton renewed his drive for normalized relations with the Castro regime.
Outcomes
The worsening human rights situation was a contributing factor in the
August 1994 rafter crisis in which 35,000 Cubans fled the country. Experts have identified that this was a migration crisis engineered by the Castro regime. The Cuban dictatorship did this because it successfully reasoned that it could coerce the Clinton Administration to the negotiating table to obtain concessions which indeed it did and prolonged the life of the dictatorship President Clinton
shook hands with Fidel Castro in 2000 and opened cash and carry trade with the dictatorship loosening economic sanctions. This new period of engagement coincided with the rise of Hugo Chavez
and reversals of the democratic gains made in the 1980s and early 1990s.
President Obama pursues normalization of relations with Castro regime in 2009
The Obama Administration beginning in 2009 loosened sanctions on the
Castro regime. On his watch concluding on December 17, 2014 the Obama
administration freed all five members of the
WASP spy network, including
Gerardo Hernandez
-- who was
serving two life sentences, one of them for conspiracy to
murder four members of
Brothers to the Rescue
murdered during the previous attempt at normalizing relations during
the Clinton Administration. They de-linked the pursuit of full
diplomatic relations from the
rise in human rights violations in Cuba and
in the region by Cuban state security.
The Obama administration
doubled down on concessions ignoring the Castro regime's
continuing sponsorship of terrorism and smuggling of weapons to North Korea in order
to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. President Obama followed through on his pledge made
at the State of the Union to work for
the lifting of economic sanctions on the dictatorship.
The Obama Administration marginalized dissidents and downplayed their importance early on in
2009 refusing to meet with them; the Obama State Department
threatened the daughter of
a martyred dissident in order to protect the sensibilities of the
Castro regime's foreign minister in 2015. Not to mention claiming that
there was
no room for dissidents at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana later that same year.
President Obama
went to Cuba with his family in March of 2016, in the midst of a
human rights crackdown, and legitimized Raul Castro's regime before an international audience. In October of 2016. Less than a year after a fleeing refugee was
shot in the back in the spring of 2015 by a Cuban state security agent. Mr. Obama issued a
Presidential Policy Directive ordering U.S. intelligence agencies to share information with the Castro regime's secret police. In January of 2017, in one of his final acts, President Obama further gutted
the Cuban Adjustment Act ushering in the wholesale deportation of Cubans fleeing to the United States.
Outcomes
President Obama on December 17, 2014 claimed to have charted a "new" course on Cuba but in reality it was a very old and discredited policy applied in Cuba of marginalizing democrats and embracing dictators for perceived gain.
Human rights
have deteriorated in Cuba with rising levels of violence against nonviolent activists. including machete attacks, and the suspicious deaths of human rights defenders such as Orlando Zapata Tamayo (2010), Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia (2011), Laura Inés Pollán Toledo (2011), Wilman Villar Mendoza (2012), Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas (2012), and Harold Cepero Escalante (2012).
There were
9,940 politically motivated arbitrary detentions
over the course of 2016. In 2009, the first year of the Obama Administration, there were just
869 arbitrary detentions
documented. During the eight years of the Obama White House there has
been an eleven fold increase in politically motivated arbitrary
detentions
with 2016 being the worse.
Religious repression escalated in Cuba in 2016 including the beating of pastors, the confiscation of Churches and some demolished by the dictatorship.
This worsening situation in Cuba is also reflected in an increase in Cubans fleeing the island. In 2008 there were slightly more than 10,000 visaless Cubans entering the United States compared to 46,635 visaless Cubans entering the United States in the first ten months of 2016.
On the economic front the Obama White House repeatedly claimed to have achieved
$6 billion in trade with Cuba
under the new policy but the actual number according to the U.S. census
bureau is $380.5 million dollars in trade in goods with Cuba.
Trade between Cuba and the
United States imploded under the Obama Administration. Peak year of
U.S. trade in goods with Cuba was 2008, the last year of the
Bush Administration. The two worst years in trade are the ones
following the new Cuba policy launch in December of 2014. All of the details
are available at the U.S. Census Bureau. The Cuban economy
contracted in 2016 and at the same time
military control over it has expanded.
The consequences
in the region have also been negative. The Castro regime's military and intelligence services have been heavily involved in the attempt to build and impose a totalitarian regime in Venezuela for the past 18 years. Furthermore in Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Ecuador regimes with links to Havana pursue an anti-democratic agenda. Yoani Sanchez, the Cuban dissident blogger journalist, wrote a May 28, 2017 entry titled "
The Kremlin is Back." The Russians returned to Cuba, and made new inroads into Latin America during the Obama years.
Conclusion
The New York Times
has a terrible track record in Cuba and its latest editorial continues that lamentable tradition trying to make the case for the Trump Administration to continue the failed policies of the Obama Administration on Cuba. However, even a broken clock is right twice a day and The New York Times on December 8, 2016
reported how increased U.S. tourism to Cuba has meant more food shortages for Cubans because food production is geared to tourists. The record indicates that the case for tightening sanctions, and pushing a human rights centered policy will best serve both U.S. national interests and the prospects for a non-violent democratic transition.
The good work on Cuba was undone by the Obama Administration when it prioritized engaging with the Castro dictatorship, marginalized Cuban democrats, ignored the regime's support for outlaw regimes, and
terrorist groups all in the service of a flawed policy.
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