12:00 pm
Cuba Si? Not on Dubya’s Watch
With only a couple of months left before the Bush Administration gets indicted leaves office, I was wondering whether Dubya would launch any last-minute foreign policy initiatives. Doing so would not be unprecedented — eight years ago, Clinton spent a lot of his time trying to secure Middle East peace.
According to Jim Hoagland in this morning’s WaPo, Bush isn’t interested in similar efforts, shooting down a proposal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to reach out to Cuba and Iran.
Unlike Hoagland, I think that is a mistake, particularly in the case of Cuba.
Someone (sorry — I can’t find the reference) once said that the best time to open the door to Cuba would be during the second term of a Republican president. The current transition to a new President makes even more sense. Given the fact that every President since Kennedy has been captive to the electoral influence of Florida’s Cuban exile community, the best way to break the cycle is to take action when there’s little or no impact on politics. And it’s not like the move would hurt Republican prospects — Cuban-American Members of Congress (and the 2012 Republican nominee) could condemn Bush’s decision.
I have no illusions about the Castros — in the early 1990s, I spent a year documenting the Castro regime’s use of psychiatric techniques (such as electro-convulsive therapy) to torture dissidents. But I share President-elect Obama’s view that the best way to secure change in rogue regimes is through engagement. The decades-old U.S. policy of isolating Cuba has failed to bring down the Castro regime and has done little to encourage domestic Cuban opposition. In fact, the current embargo only gives the Castros greater legitimacy in the eyes of average Cubans.
It’s been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell. Most Americans — and even most policymakers — no longer think that isolating Cuba makes any sense. It’s no longer a “Soviet aircraft carrier off the shores of Florida,” and it isn’t even the greatest challenge to American influence in Latin America (that dubious honor now belongs to Hugo Chavez and Venezuela).
Rice’s mistake may have been attempting to move directly to the idea of formally recognizing the Castro regime. According to Hoagland, Rice sent a team of senior diplomats to explore the that possibility a year ago. I agree with Hoagland that doing so would have represented moving too quickly and would have severely limited President-elect Obama’s options.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t steps that Bush could take to improve U.S.-Cuban relations. The first, and least politically costly, would be to end the current rule preventing Cuban-Americans from sending remittances to their Cuban relatives. Even the Cuban American National Foundation, the most vocal (and politically powerful) advocate of sustaining the embargo, has said it would support the change.
The second would be to seek an agreement with the Castros to permit more extensive cultural exchanges (including journalists). One of the most effective components of American public diplomacy during the Cold War was a series of exchanges that brought Soviet artists to the United States and sent American artists to tour the Soviet Union. The program helped give Soviet citizens an entirely different view of life in the United States than what they were seeing in Soviet propaganda. (The Soviets also recognized the value of such exchanges, and used them for the same purpose.)
The third would be to end the embargo and permit U.S.-Cuban trade. Allowing the flow of American goods into the country would do much to increase Cuban citizens’ opinion of the United States and end one of the Castro brothers’ most effective arguments against improved relations.
These measures would go a long way toward ending the freeze in Cuban-American relations without undermining the underlying policy — that the Cuban people deserve the opportunity to choose their own government. It also would do harm to Chavez and others who like to argue that the United States is only interested in advancing its neocolonialist policies.
So why would Bush oppose such efforts, even when they involve no apparent cost? The answer has nothing to do with Hoagland’s view that any reassessment of Cuban policy should be left to the next Administration and everything to do with politics: Jeb Bush may still think he can run for President in four years. Given Dubya’s current unpopularity, that certainly looks like the longest of long shots. But President Bush is unlikely to do anything now that would undermine his brother’s popularity in a key Republican constituency.
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