Note to UNESCO: Comandante Ernesto "Che" Guevara is Still Dead

Unfortunately, the United Nations is trying to promote his ideology using U.S. tax dollars

Ideas have consequences and those ideas are sometimes represented by iconic images. This is the case with the image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and the philosophy of political action that he advocated and that others seek to emulate.  His claim to fame was the role he played along with Fidel and Raul Castro in installing a totalitarian communist regime in Cuba and attempting to spread this model using violent means in Africa and Latin America. Guevara was executed  summarily on October 9, 1967 in La Higuera, Bolivia after he and his band of guerrillas were captured trying to overthrow the government there and install a Castro style regime. His is a legacy of blood and terror that should be lamented not celebrated.

However the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) doesn't see it that way and decided on June 18, 2013 to add “The Life and Works of Che Guevara” to the World Registrar. UNESCO is providing funds to preserve Che Guevara’s papers. Guevara in addition to promoting communist ideology, is best known as an advocate for guerrilla warfare who viewed terrorism as a legitimate method of struggle against an enemy. U.S. tax dollars are paying for some of this. As the world threatens to spiral down into more extreme violence, perhaps one should consider some of the messages UNESCO and U.S. tax dollars are paying for in promoting the writings of Mr. Guevara. The website I Hate the Media compiled ten quotes that reflect the overall thinking and legacy of the Argentine communist revolutionary.

1. “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!” (1953)

2. “Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.” (1967)

3. “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary … These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution!” (1959)

4. “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall!” The Wall is a reference to the wall where Che’s enemies stood before his firing squads.

5. “I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ … I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.” (1956)

6. “If any person has a good word for the previous government that is good enough for me to have him shot.” (1967)

7. Che wanted the result of the Cuban missile crisis to be an atomic war. “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.”

8. “In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.”

9. “Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

10. “It’s a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.”

Guevara's legacy and philosophy of hatred, war and death is a recipe for violent failure. Even if the Guevarist disciple is successful on the battlefield the so called victory will be a dystopian nightmare for all. In 2011 events in Libya were still unfolding but the images of Che Guevara on both sides indicated that regardless the outcome the end result would a bloody and violent disaster. Here is what I wrote at the time:

Australia's News Limited reported on March 28, 2011 that jubilant rebels had set eyes on Qaddafi's home town. At one time Qaddafi himself was viewed as an "African Che." This meant that Qaddafi's rule was brutal, bloody and short for dissenters. At the same time the rebels, also embracing Guevara's bloody political code, have in their uprising against a tyrant also engaged in war crimes and despicable behavior. This does not bode well for what ever emerges out of the conflict in Libya.

The fact that UNESCO is now promoting these writings internationally will lead to more unnecessary bloodshed and conflict. Instead of embracing this icon of violence, and others, the world needs to learn from and emulate non violent icons such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, Aung San Suu Kyi, Corazon Aquino, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and Desmond Tutu.

Thankfully, the Nobel Peace Prize has a better tradition of this and has demonstrated it once more in 2015 with awarding it to the National Dialogue Quartet that brought a nonviolent and democratic outcome to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia.

Che Guevara died violently after spending a good chunk of his life arranging executions and using unconventional and violent means to overthrow governments. Sadly, the UN is promoting ideas and philosophies that will turn young people wanting "to be like Che" into becoming cold killing machines and meeting his same fate. This cycle of glorifying violence needs to end. Guevara's ideas like Hitler's and Mao's need to be recognized for the failure that they are.


 

Political exiles and the right to return

Defending a fundamental right

Blanca Reyes: Denied entry to Cuba in 2013 to visit her dying dad

The premise made by the Castro regime in its effort to assassinate the character of Rosa María Payá Acevedo recently when she returned to Cuba is both self serving and false. Here is what they said in the Castro regime's website Yoanislandia:

"In the case that a person has the condition of a refugee  or a political exile in any country in the world they are not permitted to enter the country that they fled for mistreatment, threats, persecution, etc ..."

The trouble is that the claim is not true. Chinese pro-democracy activist Yang Jianli in 2004 was sentenced to five years in prison after having been detained in 2002 and this is a more detailed account of what happened:

In 2002, after completing his Doctorate in Political Economy at Harvard, Dr. Yang returned to China to help the labor movement with non-violent struggle strategies. He was arrested and sentenced to five years imprisonment for “spying”.  Following an international outcry for his release, including a UN Resolution and a unanimous vote of both houses of the United States Congress, Dr. Yang was freed in April of 2007.

Jianli was a long time US resident. Another example, former Chinese political prisoner and current political exile Harry Wu has returned a total of five times to continue his struggle for a free China on the mainland. He succeeded in entering and exiting the country while on other occasions he has also been caught and imprisoned by Chinese authorities. Others are trying to get in but have been denied entrance to their country, even if willing to risk prison.

In the case of Burma (Myanmar) the military junta denied Aung San Suu Kyi the right to leave and return to her own country or allowed her dying husband to enter the country to say goodbye to his wife. They had not been able to see each other for the three years prior to his death.Her children were also denied visas to visit their mother. Suu Kyi understood that if she traveled outside of Burma to visit her family that she would not be allowed back in.

What Rosa María Payá, Yang Jianli, Harry Wu and other activists claim is that they have a fundamental right to enter and exit their own homeland. Their claim is backed under Article 13 subsection 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:  "(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Unfortunately, regimes such as Burma, Cuba, China, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam ignore this right and determine who can or cannot enter their own country based on arbitrary decisions of the dictatorships in those countries. The claim made by the Castro agent that political refugees and exiles "are not permitted" to enter the country they fled under threat is just not true. Rights are not existent in those countries and are subject to political whims.

Furthermore, if people of good will fell into the trap of believing this argument, they would only be serving the interests of these dictatorships in permanently keeping dissenters, who had to flee for their safety at a particular moment, from exercising their right to return.

In August of 2013, Blanca Reyes made public that she was denied the right to enter her country, Cuba, to visit her 93-year old dying father. On October 15, 2013 over twitter Blanca reported that father and daughter were never again to be reunited in life:

"My father died today in Cuba. I did not see him for nine years, the Cuban government stopped me. HOW MUCH LONGER MY GOD?"

Cuba Sanctions: The Importance of Right Intentions and Moral Means

“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.” - Václav Havel

It has been said that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions," but often times they are selfish motives disguised as good intentions. Furthermore, Mohandas Gandhi understood that there is no such thing as the "ends justifying the means" when he wrote: “They say, 'means are, after all, means'. I would say, 'means are, after all, everything'. As the means so the end.” Immoral means lead to immoral ends no matter what the "good intentions" might be under the guise of the supposed end objective.

Right Intention means neither pursuing policies out of a desire for revenge nor collaborating with evil in the pursuit of profit. Mohandas Gandhi said that “Real noncooperation is noncooperation with evil, and not with the evildoer” and  Michael Nagler in  The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action reproduced Gandhi's explanation on how he would apply it in a real world scenario: 

“If we were a free country, things could be done nonviolently to prevent the Japanese from entering the country. As it is, nonviolent resistance could commence the moment the Japanese effect a landing. Thus, nonviolent resisters would refuse them any help, even water. For it is no part of their duty to help anyone to steal their country. But if a Japanese had missed his way and was dying of thirst and sought help as a human being a nonviolent resister who does not regard anyone as his enemy, would give water to the thirsty one. Suppose the Japanese compel resisters to give them water, the resisters must die in the act of resistance.” 

This was seen in action in Czechoslovakia when Soviet troops invaded in 1968 and Czechs disobeyed but at the same time tried not to harbor anger toward the soldiers as people. Gene Sharp calls it an example of a Civilian Based Defense.  

What does this have to do with the question of economic sanctions on Cuba? 

Everything. 

What is the intention behind those who advocate in favor of or against sanctions? People of good will with good intentions can be found on both sides of the debate. However, people of ill will can also be found on both sides of the debate as well. 

Economic sanctions are a tool found in the arsenal of nonviolent action. However, the aim of sanctions should be twofold: 1) to prevent cooperation with evil and to avoid generating debt against the citizenry. 2) The aim of sanctions should be to minimize the evils done by the oppressor not harming the already suffering population. 

A strategy of sanctions that seeks to harm the population into revolt is immoral as is playing the humanitarian card to lift sanctions and enter into business with the oppressor.

A brief history of sanctions on Cuba

What is known as the Cuban Embargo began On January 3, 1961 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower suspended trade with Cuba, a few days after his administration broke diplomatic relations with the country. The embargo on Cuba since its inception has meant restrictions on trade and travel to the island by U.S. citizens and in practice has been a partial embargo. Over the decades these sanctions have been loosened and tightened depending on the circumstances at the time.

An actual embargo would mean that there is a complete ban on or prohibition of trade by the United States with Cuba. This is not the case. What you have in Cuba is a partial embargo which is exactly the same in definition as economic sanctions. Between January 2000 and December 2012 according to the United States Census Bureau there has been $4,318,906.00 in U.S. trade in goods with Cuba.
 
The ban on U.S. imports from Cuba remains but U.S. exports to Cuba have been going on since 1992 with the amounts dramatically increasing since 2002 reaching its peak in exports to Cuba under the Bush Administration in 2008. Despite loosening restrictions further under the Obama Administration trade with Cuba has dropped to 363.3 million dollars in 2011 and figures for 2012 show a slight improvement with total sales to the island at $337.5 million as of September. This is not a total embargo but a partial one in which the United States is one of Cuba’s top trading partners.

Meanwhile countries that do not have sanctions in place, which includes restrictions on granting credits such as Russia, Venezuela, China, Japan, Spain, Argentina, France, Romania, Brazil, Italy, and Mexico are owed billions of dollars. Russia is forgiving $29 billion dollars of debt that the Castro regime owed it and Mexico is waiving 487 million dollars of debt owed by the regime in Havana. Where do you think the United States would be on this list if sanctions were lifted and credits became available to the Castro regime? How much would U.S. taxpayers have to shell out?

At the same time Cuban exiles, many committed to maintaining economic sanctions against the dictatorship, are also a main source of remittances to their families on the island totaling hundreds of millions of dollars per year.  The intention of the embargo on Cuba is not to harm Cubans but to limit hard currency to the dictatorship.  The aim of the embargo initially, during the Cold War, was to penalize the Castro regime for seizing U.S. properties and limit its ability to fund armed guerrillas and terrorist groups in the region aimed at toppling friendly governments. With the exception of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979 this policy was a success in the Americas.
 
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union changes were made to sanctions policies that sought in the 1992 Torricelli Bill and 1996 Helms Burton Bill to make clear that sanctions would remain in effect until all political prisoners were freed, the government tolerated a political opposition and free elections were held. Funds were also set aside by Congress to assist through development assistance independent civil society. In addition Congress in the 1980s established Radio/TV Marti to break the information monopoly of the dictatorship. Also in the late 1980s the United States led an effort at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to expose the systematic human rights abuses on the island and hold the Cuban dictatorship to greater scrutiny.
 
The result of what amounted to a tightening of sanctions and redirecting them from Cold War considerations to a pro-democracy effort combined with diplomacy was to provide protection to Cuban dissidents on the island, along with the means to reach the populace via radio while also setting up licensing to permit the sending of humanitarian and technical assistance to dissidents by civil society groups in the United States. This led to the growth of the pro-democracy movement on the island and greater support for it internationally.

Policies have consequences: The Obama Administration
The loosening of sanctions and the lower profile on the international front has meant that the regime has not had to face the same level of accountability that it did back in 2003 for example. During the Black Cuban Spring of 2003 the international community’s response caught the Castro dictatorship by surprise with a sustained campaign to release 75 Cuban prisoners of conscience arrested during the March 18 crackdown and sentenced up to 28 years in prison.
 
None of the 75 are serving their sentences in a Cuban prison today. However, today in Vietnam there are still at least 70 prisoners of conscience imprisoned despite normalized relations with the United States. So what have we witnessed in Cuba over the past four years with the Obama Administration's Cuba policy? The deaths, under suspicious circumstances, of national opposition figures such as Laura Inés Pollán Toledo and Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas; The deaths of Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Wilman Villar Mendoza, human rights defenders on hunger strike in the custody of the Cuban authorities; and, an increase both in the number of detentions and the degree of violence used against nonviolent activists.

Another is that of American Alan Gross, arrested on December 3, 2009 and sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban prison. He spent 25 days in a Havana jail before being visited by a U.S. diplomat. By that time Alan Gross had been approached by a Cuban “attorney” who just happened to be representing five Cuban spies imprisoned in the United States for espionage and conspiracy to commit murder. Alan Gross’s supposed crime: Attempting to provide Internet access to the local Jewish community in Cuba. The reality is that he is a pawn of the Castro regime to be used in pressuring concessions from the Obama Administration.
The Administration dangled several offers to the Castro regime and made a unilateral concession: 

• Take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. 
• Waive probation for one of five Cuban agents convicted of espionage in the United States that planned at least one terrorist attack in the United States and provided intelligence that led to the downing of two US civilian planes over international airspace on February 24, 1996 killing four.  
• Cuba democracy programs would no longer be about promoting democracy but "building civil society."
• The White House and Senator John Kerry pushed to unilaterally cut money for the Cuba democracy programs and freeze their funding. 

On the other side of the ledger the Cuban dictatorship did not suffer any repercussions for arbitrarily detaining a U.S. citizen. Alan Gross remains incarcerated to this day and December 3, 2013 marked his fourth year in captivity as an American hostage of the Castro regime. Looking beyond Cuba to China, Vietnam, and Burma, we are presented with a cautionary tale on lifting sanctions unconditionally. In China and Vietnam the United States lifted sanctions, effectively de-linking human rights considerations from economic ones. The result has been a deterioration of human rights standards in both countries. 

The Bush Administration took North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the result has been a more belligerent regime that has threatened to attack the U.S. mainland with Nuclear weapons. Furthermore, during the the Obama Administration it was discovered that the Castro regime was providing arms to North Korea in violation of international sanctions. This is not an argument for taking Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism but returning North Korea to the list.

In Burma, on the other hand, where sanctions were maintained, there have been signs of improvement in rights protections. The military junta, after years of trying to manipulate its way out from under them, has had to recognize the political opposition and provide a space for them in Burma's parliament. Things are still far from perfect, but there is hope that serious and permanent reforms are underway. The ability of Aung San Suu Kyi to run for public office, and for an independent press to begin to operate in Burma following decades of systematic censorship and control, are both positive signs. Aung San Suu Kyi has been clear about the importance of sanctions and of confronting those that would engage the dictatorship at the expense of the human rights of the Burmese people:

“Investment that only goes to enrich an already wealthy elite bent on monopolizing both economic and political power cannot contribute toward égalité and justice, the foundation stones for a sound democracy. I would therefore like to call upon those who have an interest in expanding their capacity for promoting intellectual freedom and humanitarian ideals to take a principled stand against companies that are doing business with the Burmese military regime. Please use your liberty to promote ours.” 

Prominent Cuban-American businessmen have also spoken out against unconditionally lifting sanctions in Cuba, stating in a letter titled “Commitment to Freedom” that “absent the dismantling of the totalitarian apparatus on the island, along with the unconditional release of all political prisoners and the restoration of fundamental human rights, there should be no U.S. unilateral concessions to the Castro regime." They, like Aung San Suu Kyi believe that it is unprincipled for companies to do business with a dictatorship exploiting the suffering of an oppressed people. Things are improving in Burma on the human rights front, while relations are worsening in China and Vietnam. Linking human rights with economic engagement has been a winning formula in Burma- and there’s hope that it can be in Cuba as well.

How to confront and defeat violent regimes and systems

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”  - Mohandas Gandhi

Promised in an earlier blog entry to explain how one can successfully confront violent regimes and unjust and exploitative systems with deep structural violence. At the time gave the CliffsNotes answer: With nonviolence, love and a coherent strategic vision that involves a constructive program as well as creative nonviolent resistance. This is not to be confused with passive resistance or being passive aggressive.

Today is the perfect day to begin to enter more concretely into this subject matter for a number of reasons: 1) Today marked the 100th day of the King Center's 100 Days of Nonviolence. 2) Today marks the official observance of the Armenian Genocide. 3) Just finished reading Michael N. Nagler's The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action 4) In Venezuela saw that medical students were engaged in a combination of civil disobedience and a constructive program that bears closer examination.

Nagler describes in his book the two basic ingredients for nonviolence to work:

1. We approach out situation with right intention. We are not and do not need to be against the well-being of any person.

2. We employ right means. Wrong means such as violence can never, in the long run, bring about right ends.

Reading the two theorems or postulates above led me to recall the words of the late Bishop Agustín Román first on the importance of having the right intentions: 

"If what we do for Cuba, we do not do for love, better not do it. If all of us who want the good of the nation, of the important internal dissident movement and the persevering of exile arm ourselves with these virtues, we will be effective. If we are committed to not let personalism, or the passions dilute them, we will have won. If we keep them and transmit them to all our people, we will have secured for Cuba a happy future. "

Secondly Bishop Agustín Román on the importance of employing the right means or of action being consistent with conscience:

More concretely, I would say that the greatest importance of the internal dissident movement in Cuba today, is that it has proven that political action can be consistent with what conscience knows and that is that the force of reason is, and should be more powerful than the reason of force.

This is a rejection of Machiavellian power politics that claims that the ends justify the means. The Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi  offers an explanation that should resonate with Cubans:

"I do not believe that means can be separated from ends.The means that you use to achieve your ends will in the end color those very ends themselves. If we are to march along the road to freedom full of hatred and full of the instincts of violence what we find at the end of the road will not be freedom but another kind of prison. A prison that we have constructed for ourselves through our own feelings of hatred and violence."

Mohandas Gandhi on September 11, 1906 coined the term Satyagraha which according to Michael Nagler literally means "clinging to truth" but has also been translated to mean "soul force."  Nagler goes on to explain the power of nonviolence in a nonviolent moment when overwhelming violent force is stopped by nonviolence and its dynamic citing Gandhi's explanation:

What satyagraha does in these cases is not to suppress reason but to free it from inertia, and to establish its sovereignty over prejudice, hatred, and other baser passions. In other words, if one may paradoxically put it, it does not enslave, it compels reason to be free." What he calls "reason" here is better described as the innate awareness that we are all connected and that nonviolence is "the law of our species."

 In the quote at the top of the page, Gandhi is saying that we do not need to wait to see what the world is going to do but in changing ourselves we are also changing the world. In that spirit let me close this blog entry with 5 Basic Training Practices for Nonviolent Living taken from Michael Nagler's book:

1. Avoid the major networks and media outlets.
2. Learn about nonviolence.
3.Take up a spiritual practice.
4. Be more personal with others.
5. Find a project and get active.

For Cubans reading this blog entry on nonviolence who remain skeptical please answer the following question: "How many more national saviors using violent means to dislodge a despotic regime only to become a worse version than his predecessor?  Violently overthrowing Spanish imperialism with the help of the United States ended with Independence war hero General Gerardo Machado becoming Cuba's first dictator who was then violently overthrown by a coalition of students and soldiers turning Fulgencio Batista into a national figure and next dictator who was then violently overthrown by Fidel Castro who then set up a totalitarian dictatorship that endures to the present day. Isn't it time to stick with nonviolence and try a different approach?" 

Cuba's democratic period that lasted between 1940 and 1952 was the product of a dialogue and negotiation between all political tendencies that although imperfect was the best period in Cuba's republican history between 1902 and the present. Unfortunately the regime now in power has proven that it will not change through a process of conflict resolution but that only means that creative nonviolent resistance combined with a constructive program can achieve lasting change on the island.

To be continued...

Aung San Suu Kyi remembers Václav Havel two years after his passing

"May truth and love triumph over lies and hatred." - Václav Havel

Aung San Suu Kyi on the significance of Václav Havel

 What would be the best way to remember Václav Havel on the second anniversary of his passing? Some began a new tradition last year, inspired by the beginning of his presidency, when Havel appeared in public several times wearing noticeably short trousers, of wearing rolled up trousers and are repeating it again this year.  Perhaps another would be by listening to the words of one of the individuals who represent a movement that sought to live in truth and counted on the Czech dissident's support. On September 15, 2013 at the Prague Crossroads in the opening ceremony of the 17th Forum 2000, Aung San Suu Kyi spoke about her appreciation for President Václav Havel and his active solidarity over the decades for freedom in Burma. Below is the video and text from the event.

Aung San Suu Kyi: Thank you. It is indeed a signal honor to be able to speak some words of appreciation about the late President Václav Havel, a great man and a true friend of the movement for democracy in Burma. He kept the flame of hope alive for us during our most difficult times, and we will never forget him.

So much has been said about him and written about him that there is very little, I feel, that I can contribute towards his memory, but yet I would like to make an effort because what he did for Burma and for human rights and for democracy, all over the world, is so vast that I think there will never be a time when we can stop talking about it.

Of course, all of you know that it is thanks to him that I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and I have never made a secret of the fact that if instead of nominating me he had accepted the nomination for himself, he would have been the Nobel Peace [Prize] Winner of 1991. I will always believe that because I think that was the truth – and he believed in truth, facing the truth.

I have tried to look at different aspects of his life and of his work for human rights and for democracy and wondered how I would like him to be remembered in my country and in other countries where democracy and human rights are valued. I see him primarily as a man who loved freedom. That is so important for us – freedom – and when I say that he loved freedom, what I mean is that love entails cherishing, and cherishing entails enhancing. He loved freedom, he cherished freedom, and he enhanced freedom because he lived his ideas and his beliefs as few other people have lived.

When I was under house arrest for many years in Burma I knew that somewhere in the world there was a man who was speaking out for me and because of whom my freedom remained intact, in spite of physical detention. He made me feel free, because he was free and he believed in the right of every human being to freedom.

When I say that he cherished freedom I mean that he knew the value of freedom. He knew how to value freedom. He did nothing that would take away from the value of freedom. Many people have committed crimes in the name of freedom; this was not the kind of thing that Václav Havel ever did. Whatever he did enhanced the value of freedom, made us understand what freedom truly was.

The ultimate freedom was that of “living in truth,” the kind of freedom that can never be taken away from any of us. Because he believed in freedom, he believed in living in truth. If you cannot live in truth, if you cannot live as you believe you should live, you are not a free person, even if you are not physically detained in any way, even if you think you can do anything you like. But as long as you do not have courage to face the truth and live the truth, you cannot truly be a free person. And that is what he taught me, and I am sure he taught this to others as well: that to be completely free you have to be true to yourself and to your beliefs.

We in Burma have started out on the process of transition, which is why it is so appropriate that I should be able to come here today and thank the man who made it possible for us to keep alive our belief in our ability to effect transition from military dictatorship to democracy. We have not effected this transition yet. We are still in the process of trying. And if he were alive today and here with us, I am sure he would say to me – to all of you – it is not going to be easy but you persevere and you will get there. And this exactly what I believe. It is not going to be easy and we have just started out.

I have repeatedly spoken out against over-optimism because that could make us complacent. It could cause us to lose the way. It could cause us to stumble. We have to forge ahead with our eyes open, recognizing the difficulties that lie in our path and facing the truth as President Václav Havel would have wished us to do. I do not think he would have approved of blind optimism. He would have wished us to face our problems fairly and squarely and to cultivate the courage and the capacity to overcome these problems and meet our challenges successfully.

When I was under house arrest in Burma, I used to think of Czechoslovakia, as it was then, as a faraway friend on whom we could always rely in times of need. I knew that some of our dissidents were given sanctuary in your country, and I knew that all the time your leader was speaking out for us, for me, for our country, for democracy, for human rights. When I received his books – I was allowed to receive books from time to time – I read them avidly to try to find out how I too could survive the years of struggle as he survived, and that is when I understood that the ultimate freedom was to be able to live in truth. And that is what we are still trying to do in my country.

We want to live in truth. We want to live as we believe we should live as human beings, in harmony with one another, with courage, with hope and with the desire to share whatever goods may come our way with others – not just others in my country but with others all around the world. And now that I am here in Prague, I would like to share with you our deep gratitude to President Václav Havel and all those people in your country who have stood by us and who, I know, are still standing by us in this time of immense challenge.

Texto de discurso en castellano

Embargoing Human Rights for Trade? The Sanctions Paradox

 Laura Inés Pollán Toledo in Cuba  and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma

 The Obama Administration has continued to extend a hand to the Cuban regime and has little to show for it, except increased repression, the deaths of high profile activists, and an American citizen rotting in a Cuban prison. There is no reason to suppose that further unilateral concessions will produce a different outcome.

Sanctions are the last nonviolent way of seeking to change an unjust system by refusing to cooperate with tyranny. When discussing the Cuban embargo in the mass media these two aspects are rarely, if ever, touched upon. Academics and the lobbyists for big business, such as USA Engage, often claim that sanctions never work; rather, it is economic engagement that leads towards greater respect for human rights.

However, recent history in China, Burma, and Vietnam indicate otherwise. This disconnect from reality stems from two factors: self-interest and a reading of power dynamics that ignores people power in favor of focusing on regime elites.

In a New York Times article entitled "Easing of Restraints in Cuba Renews Debate on U.S. Embargo," Carlos Saladrigas claims that “maintaining this embargo, maintaining this hostility, all it does is strengthen and embolden the hard-liners . . . what we should be doing is helping the reformers.” Essentially, Mr. Saladrigas argues that lifting sanctions would weaken and dissuade hardliners while at the same time benefiting reformers. Over the past four years the Obama Administration has loosened economic sanctions on Cuba.

If Mr. Saladrigas is correct, we should observe former outsiders in the regime tackling and winning policy discussions, but that has not been the case. On the human rights front the situation has actually deteriorated. One of the policy objectives of the Castro regime both internally and internationally is to portray itself as David against Goliath. Despite having normal trade relations, Hugo Chavez has undertaken the same kind of campaign in Venezuela. Often times the U.S. State Department has fallen short of explaining the sanctions policy fully or for that matter defending it in a vigorous manner at international forums. This has allowed the Cuban government a free hand in a sustained campaign to portray itself as a victim blaming all of its economic woes on the American blockade on Cuba.

Nevertheless as John Adams once observed, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” The facts at present demonstrate that the arguments of the regime and its apologists do not hold up under scrutiny. First, one of the problems with the sanctions debate is that words are used interchangeably which are not synonymous while others that should be are not.

For example the Cuban government and many of its apologists use the terms blockade and embargo as if they were the same thing. At the same time the terms embargo and sanctions are viewed as somehow different. A blockade is specifically a military term that according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “for the isolation by a warring nation of an enemy area (as a harbor) by troops or warships to prevent passage of persons or supplies.” In the case of Cuba there was only one time when a blockade was put in place and that was by President John F. Kennedy during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis beginning on October 22 and it was ended less than a month later on November 20, 1962.

What is known as the Cuban Embargo began On January 3, 1961 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower suspended trade with Cuba, a few days after his administration broke diplomatic relations with the country. The embargo on Cuba since its inception has meant restrictions on trade and travel to the island by U.S. citizens and in practice has been a partial embargo. Over the decades these sanctions have been loosened and tightened depending on the circumstances at the time.

An actual embargo would mean that there is a complete ban on or prohibition of trade by the United States with Cuba. This is not the case. What you have in Cuba is a partial embargo which is exactly the same in definition as economic sanctions. Between January 2000 and September 2012 according to the United States Census Bureau there has been $4,291,200,000.00 in U.S. trade in goods with Cuba.

The ban on U.S. imports from Cuba remains but U.S. exports to Cuba have been going on since 1992 with the amounts dramatically increasing since 2002 reaching its peak in exports to Cuba under the Bush Administration in 2008. Despite loosening restrictions further under the Obama Administration trade with Cuba has dropped to 363.3 million dollars in 2011 and figures for 2012 show a slight improvement with total sales to the island at $337.5 million as of September. This is not a total embargo but a partial one in which the United States is one of Cuba’s top trading partners.

At the same time Cuban exiles, many committed to maintaining economic sanctions against the dictatorship, are also a main source of remittances to their families on the island totaling hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The aim of the embargo initially, during the Cold War, was to penalize the Castro regime for seizing U.S. properties and limit its ability to fund armed guerrillas and terrorist groups in the region aimed at toppling friendly governments. With the exception of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979 this policy was a success in the Americas.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union changes were made to sanctions policies that sought in the 1992 Torricelli Bill and 1996 Helms Burton Bill to make clear that sanctions would remain in effect until all political prisoners were freed, the government tolerated a political opposition and free elections were held. Funds were also set aside by Congress to assist through development assistance independent civil society. In addition Congress in the 1980s established Radio/TV Marti to break the information monopoly of the dictatorship. Also in the late 1980s the United States led an effort at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to expose the systematic human rights abuses on the island and hold the Cuban dictatorship to greater scrutiny.

The result of what amounted to a tightening of sanctions and redirecting them from Cold War considerations to a pro-democracy effort combined with diplomacy was to provide protection to Cuban dissidents on the island, along with the means to reach the populace via radio while also setting up licensing to permit the sending of humanitarian and technical assistance to dissidents by civil society groups in the United States. This led to the growth of the pro-democracy movement on the island and greater support for it internationally.

Policies have consequences

The loosening of sanctions and the lower profile on the international front has meant that the regime has not had to face the same level of accountability that it did back in 2003 for example. During the Black Cuban Spring of 2003 the international community’s response caught the Castro dictatorship by surprise with a sustained campaign to release 75 Cuban prisoners of conscience arrested during the March 18 crackdown and sentenced up to 28 years in prison.

None of the 75 are serving their sentences in a Cuban prison today. So what have we witnessed in Cuba over the past four years? The deaths, under suspicious circumstances, of national opposition figures such as Laura Inés Pollán Toledo and Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas; The deaths of Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Wilman Villar Mendoza, human rights defenders on hunger strike in the custody of the Cuban authorities; and, an increase both in the number of detentions and the degree of violence used against nonviolent activists.

Over the past four years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of arbitrary detentions in Cuba: from 870 in 2009 to 5,625, thus far, in 2012. One example of this disturbing trend is the death of Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia from pancreatitis, caused by the brutal beating he received from Cuban government agents.

Another is that of American Alan Gross, arrested on December 3, 2009 and sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban prison. He spent 25 days in a Havana jail before being visited by a U.S. diplomat. By that time Alan Gross had been approached by a Cuban “attorney” who just happened to be representing five Cuban spies imprisoned in the United States for espionage and conspiracy to commit murder. This Cuban attorney represented Alan Gross before his show trial and later appeals. Alan Gross’s supposed crime: Attempting to provide Internet access to the local Jewish community in Cuba. The reality is that he is a pawn of the Castro regime to be used in pressuring concessions from the Obama Administration.

The Administration dangled several offers to the Castro regime and made a unilateral concession: 

• Take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. 
• Waive probation for one of five Cuban agents convicted of espionage in the United States that planned at least one terrorist attack in the United States and provided intelligence that led to the downing of two US civilian planes over international airspace on February 24, 1996 killing four.  
• Cuba democracy programs would no longer be about promoting democracy but "building civil society."
• The White House and Senator John Kerry pushed to unilaterally cut money for the Cuba democracy programs and freeze their funding. 

On the other side of the ledger the Cuban dictatorship did not suffer any repercussions for arbitrarily detaining a U.S. citizen. Alan Gross remains incarcerated to this day and December 3, 2012 will mark his third year in captivity as an American hostage of the Castro regime. Looking beyond Cuba to China, Vietnam, and Burma, we are presented with a cautionary tale on lifting sanctions unconditionally. In China and Vietnam the United States lifted sanctions, effectively de-linking human rights considerations from economic ones. The result has been a deterioration of human rights standards in both countries. '

In Burma, on the other hand, where sanctions were maintained, there have been signs of improvement in rights protections. The military junta, after years of trying to manipulate its way out from under them, has had to recognize the political opposition and provide a space for them in Burma's parliament. Things are still far from perfect, but there is hope that serious and permanent reforms are underway. The ability of Aung San Suu Kyi to run for public office, and for an independent press to begin to operate in Burma following decades of systematic censorship and control, are both positive signs. Aung San Suu Kyi has been clear about the importance of sanctions and of confronting those that would engage the dictatorship at the expense of the human rights of the Burmese people:

“Investment that only goes to enrich an already wealthy elite bent on monopolizing both economic and political power cannot contribute toward égalité and justice, the foundation stones for a sound democracy. I would therefore like to call upon those who have an interest in expanding their capacity for promoting intellectual freedom and humanitarian ideals to take a principled stand against companies that are doing business with the Burmese military regime. Please use your liberty to promote ours.” 

Prominent Cuban-American businessmen have also spoken out against unconditionally lifting sanctions in Cuba, stating in a letter titled “Commitment to Freedom” that “absent the dismantling of the totalitarian apparatus on the island, along with the unconditional release of all political prisoners and the restoration of fundamental human rights, there should be no U.S. unilateral concessions to the Castro regime." They, like Aung San Suu Kyi believe that it is unprincipled for companies to do business with a dictatorship exploiting the suffering of an oppressed people. Things are improving in Burma on the human rights front, while relations are worsening in China and Vietnam. Linking human rights with economic engagement has been a winning formula in Burma- and there’s hope that it can be in Cuba as well.

Room for improvement

However, there are always opportunities for improving sanctions policies- seeking out approaches that make the people, and not the dictatorship, the priority. For example on August 4, 2011 the Obama Administration announced a ban on visas for people who the State Department finds have been involved in human rights violations. Unfortunately, since then we have seen that human rights violators of the Castro regime are immigrating to the United States. If this ban were applied vigorously to the hardline elements of the Cuban regime it would be positive step that would protect dissidents by holding abusers accountable and providing a penalty, but this ban also needs to be expanded to follow the path taken by the European Union when dealing with the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Banning the relatives of the hard line elements of the dictatorship from visiting the United States would create greater pressures on the regime for change.

Unfortunately, what has gone on in practice is that the children and relatives of the hard liners have an easy time obtaining visas to the United States while the families of dissidents have a more difficult time.

There are two profoundly different visions of how to achieve positive change in Cuba. One views the populace and their representatives in the emerging independent civil society, or dissidents, as the protagonists of change. The second views regime elites and possible reformist elements within the dictatorship as the protagonists for change. The trouble with the latter view is that it often mistakes profiteering with progress, as China has demonstrated. This approach also undermines the morale of dissidents and the populace at large, thus emboldening the dictatorship. History has shown us that change occurs from the ground up. Thus, when sanctions are lifted in an effort to allow elements within the regime to reform, the action actually has the opposite effect. The paradox is that the most effective way to encourage reform is to empower dissidents by pressuring the regime with sanctions. If the current policy of loosening sanctions and not holding the regime accountable for its gross and systematic human rights violation, beyond pro-forma denunciations of atrocity after atrocity then things will get a lot worse and they will never improve for Cubans.

U.S. sanctions policy with regards to the dictatorship in Cuba was about containment of the exportation of the Cuban model throughout the hemisphere, and during the Cold War having Cuba serve as a drain on Soviet resources that contributed to its eventual bankruptcy. In the post Cold War years it shifted once again with a focus on human rights. The failure of the United States to do this in China, Cambodia, Venezuela and Vietnam with their deteriorating human rights situation is not that the policy in Cuba is incorrect as some would claim but that the policies in these other countries are profoundly immoral and ignore human rights concerns.  Instead these policies favor of short-term corporate economic interests that run counter to the interests of the majority of  U.S. citizens not to mention the long term economic well-being of the United States.

The Difference between passive aggressiveness and nonviolence

They say, 'means are, after all, means'. I would say, 'means are, after all, everything'. As the means so the end - Mohandas Gandhi

Non-violence requires great patience. - Mohandas Gandhi

A dear friend of mine after learning of my commitment to nonviolence as a method of resistance confuses (I hope ) the terms passive resistance and passive aggressiveness . October 2 is Mohandas Gandhi's birthday and it has been designated by the United Nations as the International Day of Nonviolence what better day than today to reflect on nonviolence contrasting it with passive aggressive behavior?

While on the surface the terms passive aggressive and passive resistance may appear similar.  The only characteristic that they share in common is stubbornness. Otherwise they are polar opposites.

Passive aggressiveness is a type of violence and is considered a personality disorder. Passive resistance better known as nonviolent resistance or civil disobedience is a rejection of violence both in action and in its Gandhian aspect in spirit. Mohandas Gandhi along with other Indians in South Africa coined the term Satyagraha which has as its root meaning "holding on to truth." Gandhi stopped using the term passive resistance because although nonviolent there was nothing passive about it.

Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent resistance is also the antithesis of communism because it rejects class struggle as violent which is why during his life time Soviet writers dismissed him as a reactionary utopian. Presently many honor Mohandas Gandhi the icon but reject his cause as impractical.

Why this obsession with nonviolence, Gandhi and his followers? The short answer is that looking back over the past century and a half of Cuban history the way of violence and political intrigue has led Cuba into a cultural and spiritual death spiral that threatens to destroy the Cuban nation. Furthermore, recalling that the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over again while expecting a different result one should try something different.  The previous paragraph is a negative appraisal but there is also a positive one where nonviolent resistance has achieved concrete results that have benefited millions over the past century.

It is for that reason that nonviolent resistance and the path of Mohandas Gandhi makes sense. At the same time others over the decades following Gandhi's death in 1948 have carried on the struggle in defense of human dignity and freedom. It has been my good fortune to read their works briefly meet with two of them: the late Vaclav Havel and this past week with Aung San Suu Kyi. At the same time the truths that are told can be difficult to digest for what it says about ourselves and the societies we live in. For example Havel's observation in 1990 holds true today as freedoms slip away throughout the West: 

When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

The struggle for freedom is ongoing everywhere and when individuals cease to struggle and to be vigilant those freedoms are lost not only in places like Cuba but right here in the United Stats. The first step to confront the challenge is to live in truth by making an accounting of one's virtues and defects and work to free one self. The second is to speak the truth as one sees it while willingly suffering the consequences. It is to attack the root causes of the totalitarian rot and not contribute to it.

Vaclav Havel explained it in his 1984 essay Politics and Conscience:

It surely makes much more sense to operate in the sphere of causes than simply to respond to their effects. By then, as a rule, the only possible response is by equally immoral means. To follow that path means to continue spreading the evil of irresponsibility in the world, and so to produce precisely the poison on which totalitarianism feeds. I favor "anti-political politics," that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favor politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.

 This is an implicit rejection of Machiavellian power politics. This past week at the San Francisco Freedom Forum participants heard an explicit rejection of power politics from Aung San Suu Kyi who affirmed:

I do not believe that means can be separated from ends.The means that you use to achieve your ends will in the end color those very ends themselves. If we are to march along the road to freedom full of hatred and full of the instincts of violence what we find at the end of the road will not be freedom but another kind of prison. A prison that we have constructed for ourselves through our own feelings of hatred and violence.

 How would this anti-political politics manifest itself? The late Vaclav Havel in the above cited 1984 essay provided an answer, referencing his martyred mentor:

When Jan Patočka wrote about Charter 77, he used the term "solidarity of the shaken'. He was thinking of those who dared resist impersonal power and to confront it with the only thing at their disposal, their own humanity. Does not the perspective of a better future depend on something like an international community of the shaken which, ignoring state boundaries, political systems, and power blocs, standing outside the high game of traditional politics, aspiring to no titles and appointments, will seek to make a real political force out of a phenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power the phenomenon of human conscience?

Havel later demonstrated in action not only with the nonviolent Velvet Revolution of 1989, but with his Presidency and afterwards organizing gatherings of Forum 2000 and maintaining solidarity with dissident movements around the world until the end of his life.

Mohandas Gandhi, Vaclav Havel, Aung San Suu Kyi and thankfully many others serve as exemplars for nonviolent activists to learn from.  Nonviolent resistance is about first recognizing then resisting and overcoming the defects in ones own character while at the same time using moral and ethical means to achieve moral and ethical ends.

The Complete Archive of the San Francisco Freedom Forum Online

First Session

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Second Session

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Third Session

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Aung San Suu Kyi on the success of sanctions in Burma

Sanctions and boycotts would be tied to serious political dialogue. - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi 

Aung San Suu Kyi at the San Francisco Freedom Forum (Photo by the author)

The debate on Cuba often degenerates into a conversation of sanctions versus dialogue. It is at best a failure of imagination. A more useful conversation would be one that combines strong sanctions and boycotts while pursuing dialogue to obtain a democratic opening with concrete measures. In a meeting with reporters and editors of The New York Times on September 26, 2012 Aung San Suu Kyi responded to the following two questions concerning sanctions in Burma and on whether or not they have been and how it has impacted the Burmese:

Q: Is it fair to say the sanctions worked?
A: Yes, I always say that sanctions work. Not in the way people think it did. Now the emphasis is on the economic effect of the sanctions, but I always quote the IMF by saying that for years IMF reports have consistently made the point that the sanctions have affected Burma’s economy very little and it was mismanagement that put us in a terrible mess. But partly, the regime started believing their own propaganda that sanctions are responsible for the ills of the country. This always happens. I think the eagerness to go ahead economically, I think the perception was that if you improve the economy, everything else would improve. I don’t subscribe to that view, I think you need political reforms as well as economic reforms. So the sanctions needed to be removed, because a lot of people saw them as an obstacle to progress.

Q: So the sanctions hurt ordinary Burmese but they helped evoke change?
A: I do not think sanctions hurt ordinary Burmese, as much as the IMF has gone into this and they have concluded that they did not hurt ordinary Burmese. If you remember, the garment industry had a setback after 2007 [when the U.S. prohibited imports] but it picked up very quickly… I think it had picked up within a little over a year.

The full transcript of the meeting is available here.

San Francisco Freedom Forum: “Many Paths, One Goal”

In her first trip to the United States in more than 20 years, Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to San Francisco on September 28, to accept the Václav Havel Award for Creative Dissent and join a range of leaders from advocacy, business, media, policy, and technology at the first U.S. Freedom Forum. The event will begin at 12:00pm PDT.

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Those speaking alongside her include: Russian democracy activist Garry Kasparov; Saudi women’s rights pioneer Manal al-Sharif; Pussy Riot spokesman Pyotr Verzilov; Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy; Slate editor William J. Dobson; Ghanaian economist George Ayittey; drug policy reformer Ethan Nadelmann; anti-genocide artist Naomi Natale; conflict psychologist Justine Hardy; Iranian author and former prisoner of conscience Marina Nemat; and Venezuelan journalist Marcel Granier.