The devil is in the details, and in the dictatorship in Cuba.
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| Mariel Boatlift crisis |
Florida Keys News
reported on December 22, 2017 that "[f]or the second time in three months, Cuban migrants made landfall in the Florida Keys this week." The
news report then credits the reduction in the number of refugees to the Obama administration repealing "a decades-old policy
treating those fleeing the communist nation as refugees." This blog
also documented Cubans trying to reach the United States in May of 2017.
The credit is misplaced. Historically the number of Cubans making landfall in the United States decline under Republican administrations. The Obama Administration claimed to have opened a "new chapter" on Cuba,
but in reality it was a reboot of the worst aspects of the Carter and
Clinton Administration's Cuba policies that created humanitarian tragedies during both presidencies with
Mariel (1980) and
the Rafter Crisis (1994 - 1995).
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| Dictator Fidel Castro and President Jimmy Carter |
First Time
The Carter Administration was the first to try normalize relations with the Cuban dictatorship, and both sides
opened Interest Sections in their respective capitals between 1977 and
1981. Then from 1981 to 1982, the Castro regime executed
approximately 80 prisoners, which was a marked escalation when
compared to 1976.
Furthermore, during the Carter presidency, Fidel Castro
took steps that
resulted in
the violent deaths of US citizens.
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. This first attempt at normalizing relations saw a worsening human rights situation and migration crisis.
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| President Bill Clinton with Dictator Raul Castro |
Second Time
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.
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 for another twenty years.
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| Dictator Raul Castro with President Barack Obama |
Third time
The Obama Administration beginning in 2009 loosened sanctions on the
Castro regime. By December 17, 2014 the Obama
administration had freed all five members of the
WASP spy network, including
Gerardo Hernandez
-- who had been
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
continued sponsorship of terrorism and smuggling of weapons to sanctioned countries in order
to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. President Obama is following through on his pledge made
at the State of the Union to work for
the lifting of economic sanctions
on the dictatorship. On his watch human rights worsened with an
escalation in arbitrary detentions, violence against activists and
prominent opposition leaders, such as
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, who would have been critical for a
democratic transition killed in what appear to have been state security
operations.
The Obama administration
gutted the
Cuban Adjustment Act
on January 12,
2017 but it was restricted before in 1994 by the Clinton
Administration. This did not reduce the number of Cubans arriving in the United States then but it did change their composition.
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| 1994 Cuban rafter crisis |
How the Clinton Administration undermined the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1994
The first effort to gut the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act was initiated by President Bill Clinton who on August 19, 1994 stopped bringing Cuban refugees
picked up on the high seas to the United States and took them to
improvised camps on the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base. This was followed on
May 2, 1995 with a further break in past practice when his Attorney
General Janet Reno announced: "Effective
immediately, Cuban migrants intercepted at sea, attempting to enter the
United States or who enter Guantanamo illegally will be taken to Cuba."
Never before had U.S. ships returned Cuban refugees to communist Cuba.
This
re-interpretation of the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1995 was done without
consulting Congress, without changing the law and was the result of
joint agreements between the United States and the Castro regime made public in a joint statement supposedly "to regularize further their migration relationship."
This is how the highly irregular Wet Foot Dry Foot policy came into
effect.
With the Wet Foot Dry Foot the U.S. Coast Guard began to return fleeing Cubans to their captors.
How the Lottery benefits the Castro regime
But that was not all. As they say the devil was in the details. The
agreement with the Castro dictatorship opened up a lottery for Cuban
nationals between 18 and 55 years of age in which according to a 2009
report authored by Ruth Ellen Wasem, a specialist in immigration policy
at the Congressional Research Service titled "
Cuban Migration to the United States: Policy and Trends"
they must answer "yes" to "two of the following three questions. Have
you completed secondary school or a higher level of education? Do you
have at least three years of work experience? Do you have any relatives
residing in the United States?" If they win the lottery they must have a
medical examination and are "given parole status with a visa that is
good for six months." According to
the above mentioned report
by the Congressional Research Service: "Over the years, there have been
reports of barriers the potential Cuban parolees face, such as
exorbitantly priced medical exams, exit visa fees, and repercussions for
family members who remain in Cuba."
Not stated is that the Castro
regime could turn this lottery
into a reward mechanism for Cubans loyal
to the dictatorship
while blocking those who are politically persecuted
by the regime. Up to
20,000 Cubans a year can be granted visas through this lottery that has been in place since 1995.
The dog that didn't bark
The
Cuban Adjustment Act,
in effect from 1966, to address a previous migration crisis did not
generate a constant exodus of Cubans. Under the Nixon, Reagan and
Bush 41 and Bush 43 presidencies there was not a single
Cuban migration crisis. This leads to the question if it is not the Cuban Adjustment Act what other factor
could explain the reason for these different migration waves? Under
Carter,
Clinton and
Obama
there were overarching efforts to normalize relations, even at the
expense of US national interests. Two possibilities that are not
mutually exclusive emerge: 1) Cubans believe that the free world will no
longer be in solidarity with their desire to be free and in despair
they flee. and 2) The Castro regime believes that it can
use migration as a weapon to extract concessions from a White House that they perceive as weak and vulnerable. The Obama administration remained silent as U.S. diplomats in Havana
suffered brain damage in what appear to have been attacks and continued making concessions.
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| President Trump meeting with the Cuban diaspora in Miami |
This is apparently not the case
with the current Administration that immediately complained about the
harm being done to U.S. diplomats in February 2017. Furthermore the
Trump administration did
not seek to whitewash the Castro regime's terrible human rights record. Finally, President Trump's stance on controlling the border and restricting immigration
sent a message to the Castro regime that this was not business as usual. This may have more to do with the drop in Cubans arriving on the U.S. shoreline than the Cuban Adjustment Act.
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