“I understand that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him. ~Equality 7-2521 (as Prometheus), pg 98” ― Ayn Rand, Anthem
Reading Jo Ann Skousen's June 7, 2019 commentary in The Wall Street Journal, "Cubans Pay for Trump’s Travel Ban" left me with mixed feelings and a need to respond to some points she raised. We both agree on the nature of the Castro regime, but differ on how to confront it. I am not a Randian, and disagree with much of Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness" philosophy. However as someone who was a teenager when Soviet communism took over Russia and experienced it first hand until age 20 when she left for the United States, Rand understood the real nature of life under communism.
It is ironic that Ms. Skousen’s libertarian film festival is named after Ayn Rand’s book Anthem, and references the Russian refugee in the festival's website, but ignores her 1964 interview with Playboy on how to deal with communist Cuba and Russia. Ayn Rand told her Playboy interviewer, “I would advocate a blockade of Cuba and an economic boycott of Soviet Russia; and you would see both of those regimes collapse without the loss of a single American life.”
Ayn Rand understood that "a dictatorship - a country that violates the rights of its own citizens - is an outlaw and can claim no rights." This is especially true of Cuba that engages in international terrorism, drug trafficking, outlaw behavior and creating perverse incentives domestically. To do business and engage with the oppressors is to legitimize and extend the life of a hated regime.
For example The New York Times reported on December 8, 2016 in the article "Cuba’s Surge in Tourism Keeps Food Off Residents’ Plates" that more American tourists have translated into less food for everyday Cubans thanks to continued central planning by the communist regime.
“The government has consistently failed to invest properly in the
agriculture sector,” said Juan Alejandro Triana, an economist at the
University of Havana. “We don’t just have to feed 11 million people
anymore. We have to feed more than 14 million.”
The Associated Press is now repeating Cuban government talking points that rationing is taking place in Cuba due to the new sanctions, but food rationing in Cuba, a tool of political control, has been going on since the early 1960s and also mentioned as ongoing in the December 2016 New York Times article.
And what of the new legally recognized private sector?
Let us examine the reality behind the hype. When Cuban American businessman Saul Berenthal announced that his Alabama company was going to open the first U.S. factory in Cuba since the 1959 Cuban revolution it was widely reported. However when the Cuban government rejected the deal the the reason why was obscured because it was not convenient to the narrative being pushed. Poor Saul Berenthal became so enthusiastic with his business venture that he successfully applied to "repatriate" himself and obtain a permanent residence in Cuba. Only problem is that Cuban residents are not allowed to invest and own companies in Cuba (unless you are an immediate member of the Castro family, but those are "state" enterprises.) Sources say that this is the real reason his highly publicized deal fell through.
Cuban law restricts Cubans living on the island from starting their own companies reports the Miami Herald: "Private sector workers in Cuba, known as cuentapropistas (self-employed), are licensed only to work for themselves and cannot legally establish companies to expand their work beyond a small scale. Larger enterprises are allowed only for the government and foreigners. According to a report on the foreign investment law produced by the National Organization of Cuban Law Firms, “Cuban citizens residing in the country cannot participate as partners in a joint venture.” The report added: “This law is designed to favor 'foreign investors' or Cubans living outside the country.”
What about Cubans inside the island? How does one get a license to do "business" in Cuba? Being connected to the communist elite, a member of the nomenklatura, is one way but there are others, and some are nefarious.
When the Castro regime needed to get rid of Sirley Avila Leon, a troublesome local official making noises about keeping a school open so that small children wouldn't have to walk 3.7 miles to school in the morning and another 3.7 miles in the afternoon, they offered "Ruber"an ex-convict a business license as a "cuenta propista" if he tried to kill her. On May 21, 2014 Sirley's home was set on fire. The ex-con's girlfriend Yunisledy had warned Sirley, after Ruber had told her he had been given orders to kill her friend. Both Sirley and Yunisledy lodged a formal complaint, but nothing came of it. Ruber warned Yunisledy to join him in Camaguey (if she did not want to be killed) although he had not succeeded in killing the troublesome official, he had made a good effort and was rewarded. Yunisledy stayed behind.
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| Yunisledy Lopez Rodriguez: Brutally murdered at age 23 in 2014 |
On September 26, 2014 while preparing food for her children the
individual known as "El Tejon" entered the house and stabbed Yunisledy 18 times in front of her two children. This was done to give the appearance
of a crime of passion. Yunisledy was 23 years old. Sirley Avila Leon, was the target of a brutal machete attack on May 24, 2015 that she miraculously survived and provided this testimony.
This is an anecdotal account, as was Ms. Skousen's but on the macro level the reality is that the Cuban economy, especially tourism, is run and owned by the Cuban military and the intelligence services. On September 9, 2016 the Associated Press in the article
“Cuban military expands its economic empire under détente” reported:
“The military’s long-standing business wing, GAESA (Armed Forces
Business Enterprises Group), assumed a higher profile after Gen. Raul
Castro became president in 2008, positioning the armed forces as perhaps
the prime beneficiary of a post-detente boom in tourism. Gaviota, the
military’s tourism arm, (a subsidiary of GAESA) is in the midst of a
hotel building spree that outpaces projects under control of nominally
civilian agencies like the Ministry of Tourism.” The same article also
reported that “Gaviota has 62 hotels with 26,752 rooms across Cuba,
pulling in some $700 million a year from more than 40 percent of the
tourists who visit Cuba.”
The military general in charge of GAESA is
Luis Alberto Rodriguez, General Raul Castro’s son in law.
Under Obamas detente the Cuban military grabbed sectors of the economy that had been controlled by less problematic elements of the government.
"Over a quarter century, Eusebio Leal (the city historian) turned Old Havana into a painstakingly restored colonial jewel, a tourist draw that brings in more than $170 million a year, according to the most recent available figures. His office became a center of power with unprecedented budgetary freedom from the island’s communist central government. That independence is gone. Last month, the Cuban military took over the business operations of Leal’s City Historian’s Office, absorbing them into a business empire that has grown dramatically since the declaration of detente between the U.S. and Cuba on Dec. 17, 2014."
Paul Hollander, who passed away on April 9, 2019 at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, wrote an important work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, that anyone planning to travel to a totalitarian regime must read before their visit. It should also be read by anyone wanting to decipher what is being reported in the news.
Totalitarian regimes whether Nazi or Communist have a track record of effectively using tourism, athletic events, and academic exchanges to present their regimes in a way that historically legitimized them and covered up their hostile objectives often with disastrous results
not only for their own countries but the international community as a
whole. They have also successfully compromised journalists, who in order not to be expelled from the country must self censor their reporting.
Visitors to totalitarian states become targets of both the state security
service and the propaganda ministries. These regimes will pull out all
the stops to show themselves in the best light possible and make sure
that high profile visitors have a great time but within a reality fabricated by
them.
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| Charles Lindbergh visiting Nazi Germany in 1937 |
The famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh, visited Germany five times between 1936 and 1939.
Lindbergh was taken on tours of airfields and factories, lavishly
entertained by Air Marshal Hermann Göring, and awarded one of the Third
Reich’s highest civilian honors. Lindbergh wrote to the banker
Harry Davison, “With all the things we criticize, he [Hitler] is
undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German
people," and he continued observing that they "seemed to have a sincere desire for friendly relations with the United States, but of course that is much less vital to them." It is important to remember that following Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 it was Nazi Germany that declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941 to back their ally Imperial Japan.
The Soviets, the Chinese communists, and the North Koreans have had similar successes. However the Cubans have had a sophisticated apparatus of influence. The friendly sounding "Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP)" claims to encourage
visitors to see the real Cuba for themselves and works to educate
visitors about the "real Cuba" while debunking criticisms of the 60 year
old dictatorship.
The reality, according to
counter intelligence
expert Chris Simmons,
is that "ICAP’s intelligence collaboration with the Directorate of
Intelligence (DI) dates back over three decades. It is not a DI entity
per se, but is believed to be roughly 90% DI-affiliated due to a large
pool of collaborators who serve the small team of ICAP-embedded DI
officers." A past president of the ICAP was indicted for drug smuggling in the United States in 1982.
In 2014 the FBI published a report detailing how Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting
leftist American academics and university professors as spies
and
influence agents. This is not new and has been going on for decades with
some major successes by the Castro dictatorship that compromised U.S. national
security and cost American lives.
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| Dr. Carlos & Elsa Alvarez: Castro spies at FIU |
This hit close to home for me at my alma mater, Florida International University (FIU. Psychology professor Carlos Alvarez who was the associate professor for educational leadership and policy studies at FIU,
and his wife Elsa Alvarez, counselor for the psychological services
department at FIU were arrested by the FBI on January 6, 2006. Professor Alvarez conducted trips to Cuba with students and young professionals in the late 1990s in what was billed a conflict resolution project. Alvarez was sentenced to five years in prison and his wife to three years in prison on February 28, 2007 for conspiring to act as unregistered Cuban agents.
Ms. Skousen's assertion that "[s]anctions, embargoes and travel bans play into their hands. They can blame America instead of socialism for their economic woes" is not contingent on actual policies the Castro regime owns and controls all media in Cuba and has fed a diet of anti-American propaganda for 60 years. Similarly in Venezuela, the regime's rhetoric claimed U.S. skullduggery for years prior to the first sanction placed on Caracas.
Let me suggest another possibility, that can be taken from the Chinese example, that engaging with the oppressors after the Tiananmen Square massacre and prolonging the dictatorship in China out of perceived economic gain for U.S. corporate interests is "making America hated around the world - and in our own backyard."
Consider for a moment the words of Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese dissident and former prisoner of conscience,on
how jailers used the engagement policy to demoralize Chinese democrats:
“The
second time I was in jail, before I was officially given a
fourteen-year sentence, some of my jailers said, "What’s the point of
you fighting like this? Your so-called friends in the United States
are very good friends with our leader. They are in a pact together. You
are wasting your time." At the time I refused to believe them. But, now
that I am outside, I am forced to believe because I have seen it with
my own eyes.”
Anti-Americanism
has been on the rise in China since 1989 despite the United States
completely de-linking human rights considerations from trade with the communist regime. Apologists for the policy of engaging and doing business with the Chinese dictatorship claim that it is because of the United States paying lip service to human rights in China. However, it could be that the Chinese see that the United States and U.S. corporations have collaborated with their oppressor to profit off the Chinese people
while modernizing and strengthening totalitarianism?
The aim of the economic sanctions aimed at both repressive actors in
Cuba and
Venezuela is to
raise the cost of repression for the military and intelligence apparatus currently killing Venezuelans and Cubans seeking freedom.This is why The Miami Herald Editorial Board has
approved the measure.
How the travel ban on Cuba was codified into law
Lastly, this is not "Trump's travel ban" but existing U.S. law that goes back decades with a Supreme Court decision and an act of Congress.
Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981 and re-imposed the Cuba travel ban, toughened economic sanctions undoing
Jimmy Carter's detente with Fidel Castro, 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.
Opponents of the travel ban challenged the
Reagan Administration in the courts. The US Supreme Court heard the case (
Regan v. Wald) challenging restrictions on travel-related transactions with Cuba in 1984.
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court
affirmed President Reagan’s authority to issue travel bans in the interest of national security, although they might infringe upon Americans’ Constitutional rights to travel and move freely.
On March 1, 1982 the Castro regime was placed on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. less than three months after the US State Department confirmed that the Castro regime
was using a narcotics ring to funnel both arms and cash to the Colombian M19 terrorist group then battling to overthrow Colombia’s democratic government.
The Clinton Administration
attempted to normalize relations with the Castro regime in the 1990s and ended up with an international crisis when Cuban MiGs
shot down two civilian planes over international airspace on February 24, 1996 killing four while engaged in a search and rescue operation for Cuban rafters.
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| Clinton signs the Helms-Burton Bill on March 12, 1996 |
It was an election year and Bill Clinton had three options: take military action against the Castro regime, impose sanctions, or do nothing.
On March 12, 1996, President Clinton
signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996, generally known by the names of its principal sponsors as the
Helms-Burton Act into law. This Act, among other things, codified existing economic sanctions and the travel ban that had previously been an executive order now had
the force of law.
The Obama Administration resurrected the "people to people" contact exemption. This was a policy
invented by Bill Clinton in 1999 that ran counter to the spirit of the above mentioned law he had signed in 1996.
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