ENCASA REJECTS bush admistration cuba commission Report

Emergency Network of Cuban American Scholars and Artists for Change in U.S.-Cuba Policy

“Insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result… We can’t

solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

                                                                                                         --Albert Einstein 

When we read the first report of the Bush Administration’s so-called “Commission for Assistance for a Free Cuba (CAFC),” issued in 2004, we were alarmed, appalled, dismayed, indignant, saddened, and outraged. Reading the second report—released on Monday, July 10, by the U.S. State Department—evokes the same feelings, but now amplified, intensified and reinforced by our knowledge of what needless and mindless suffering has been wrought by the implementation of many of that report’s most nefarious recommendations. 

The measures put into place by the U.S. government during the last two years have produced no positive results for Cubans on the island, for Cuban-Americans in the United States, or for the American people. Instead, new travel restrictions have further separated Cubans, here and there, from family and friends living on the opposite of the Florida straits; the Commission went so far as to absurdly redefine the meaning of what constitutes “family” for Cubans to exclude aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins, permitting only one visit every three years for immediate family members regardless of circumstance. (So much for “family values.”)  In addition, the right of Americans to pursue educational travel to Cuba has been abridged, while the U.S. government has denied visas to scores of Cuban scholars who were to present papers at scholarly conferences in the United States and Puerto Rico. The Cuban government has responded to aggressive moves to undermine it, as called for in the 2004 report, with its own crackdown.  No one is better off as a result of the work of the Commission. Almost everyone is worse off, including the Cuban people, Cuban Americans in this country, U.S. taxpayers, students, scholars, business people, and farmers—everyone except some elements of the anti-Castro industry in Miami and Washington who have benefited from the largesse of the U.S. government.

The new 2006 CAFC report, long delayed and just released, and the accompanying “Compact with the Cuban People,” cannot be read without experiencing a sense of déjà vu or without being struck by the many ironies contained therein, ironies that would provoke belly laughs if their consequences were not so deadly serious.

What are we to make, for example, after the Katrina debacle, of the pledge, made by the U.S. government to a hypothetical “Cuban transition government” as part of the “Compact with the Cuban People” to “provide emergency food, water, fuel, and medical equipment and help ensure that these vital supplies are rapidly distributed throughout Cuba?” (In fact, the Cubans have repeatedly demonstrated that they are extraordinarily effective in managing disasters such as hurricanes; it is the Cubans who should be instructing FEMA and the U.S. government on the rapid distribution of vital supplies in an emergency, rather than the other way around.)

In light of this and other absurdities, rather than attempt here a detailed, reasoned analysis of a report that is based on anything but reason or analysis (although we have prepared just such an analysis in a separate document), we have chosen to make use of the finest traditions of Cuban and American irreverence to respond to this second edition of the CAFC report in the manner that it deserves. 

10. It is an exercise in political opportunism

How coincidental is it that the Bush administration rediscovers Cuba on even years (2004, 2006) just before tough elections? This is a sure sign that Cuba policy is made not in the interest of the American or Cuban people but with an eye to winning a few thousand votes in Florida (and its electoral votes in presidential elections).

9. It is contemptuous of international law and world opinion

At a time when the United States should be seeking to repair an image tattered by brazen disregard for international norms and for the views and rights of others, the last thing this country should be doing is reinforcing a policy already roundly condemned by almost every nation in the U.N.  (The vote against the U.S. embargo of Cuba in the United Nations last year was 182-4. The 4 voting “no” were the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands.)  Yet this is what this report recommends when it seeks to tighten enforcement of extra-territorial U.S. laws designed to strangle Cuba economically by infringing on the sovereign rights of other nations.

8. It is a failed welfare program for the professional anti-Castro set

In the 1960s, the CIA spent tens of millions of dollars and employed thousands of Cubans in Miami in its failed campaign against the Cuban government. The U.S. government does not seem to have learned the lesson of that experience. A two-year, $80 million program purportedly designed to help dissidents in Cuba is a centerpiece of the CAFC report. We don’t have space to detail all the things that are wrong with this initiative. For starters, much of this money is sure to end up in the bank accounts of people who have made a lucrative career out of fighting Fidel Castro from the safety of the United States. Then there is the fact that the very existence of this fund of money tends to cast suspicions regarding the motives, the independence and the patriotism of anyone in Cuba who disagrees with the government. This has led some prominent members of the opposition in Cuba to reject this component of the report.  Finally, there is the matter of a double standard.  U.S. law does not allow foreigners even to contribute to candidates for public office here, much less allow foreign governments to financially support Americans bent on changing our political system. And how would the American people feel about those who would take foreign government money to influence politics in the United States?

7. It is a combination of political science fiction, wishful thinking, delusion and sour grapes.

Rather than admit the abject failure of the measures called for in the last report and, more generally, of a policy in place for almost five decades, the report seeks to cast blame on external actors, mainly Venezuela (which is mentioned no fewer than 15 times).  The tone of much of the report is almost surreal and delusional in its talk about a hypothetical Cuban “transition” government and its detailed description of the policies such a government might undertake and the U.S. government actions that would result. Repeatedly, the report implies an imminent collapse and asserts cause and effect relationships without any logical, factual or historical foundation. For example: “…as we rapidly approach the transitional moment, the more economic pressure is on the regime, the greater the likelihood there will be dramatic and successful change for the Cuban people.” But that has been precisely the failed approach taken by U.S. policy since it imposed a trade, travel and financial embargo on Cuba 45 years ago.  In psychiatry and in the reality-based community at large, a delusion is defined as "a false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence." The 2006 CAFC report is as delusional in this regard as its 2004 predecessor.  Both evidence a profound ignorance of Cuban history and society.

6. It is a model of cynicism and cruelty disguised as concern

This is true in too many respects to describe here. The report is replete with crocodile tears and expressions of concern over the humanitarian needs of the Cuban people and promises of help--but only after a transition is under way. What about the problems faced by Cubans today?  In that regard, the report recommends measures to tighten the U.S. embargo which inflicts untold hardships on the Cuban people right now.  It is yet another version of “destroying the village in other to save it.” The message seems to be that the U.S. will punish the Cuban people unless or until they change their system and their leadership, in which case they will reap rich rewards, compliments of U.S. taxpayers. Such promises are not worth the paper they are printed on, as the transition experience of Nicaragua and other countries shows. Worse, this kind of blackmail is unworthy of the United States and an insult to the dignity of the Cuban people.

5. It infringes on the freedom of American citizens

The report calls for tightening the enforcement of travel restrictions even further, keeping Cuba off-limits to U.S. citizens. It is yet another irony that a set of policies purportedly intended to promote freedom in another country diminishes the freedom of people in this country.  What ever happened to the U.S. government’s pious pronouncements of the “free exchange of ideas”?

4.  It is not about the desires and the dreams of Cubans abroad

The same commission whose recommendations have led to Cubans in the United States being punished for visiting relatives, for sending them aid, and for having a more inclusive view of family than that approved by the U.S. government, now dares to invoke “the vital role of Cubans abroad?”  What “vital role” is this—to do what the U.S. government wants and nothing else? The report states that “Cubans abroad should re-double their efforts to foster reconciliation on and off the island.” This is completely inconsistent with the tone, tenor and policy implications of the report. Is the Commission speaking in a code in which reconciliation means confrontation, isolation, and economic strangulation?

3. It is not transparent

The existence of a classified secret annex, one of the more ominous aspects of this second report, recalls the long U.S. history of deniable invasions, numerous assassination attempts, sabotage, clandestine incursions, and other cloak-and-dagger operations. Given this background, and the track record of this administration, one can only imagine what items of dubious legality and sheer lunacy may be contained in this classified portion of the report.

2. It is not about sovereignty

“There is no transition and it’s not your country.” We could not find words more apt than those of the Secretary General of the OAS (Organization of American States). The repetition in the report of the phrase “if requested by the Cuban transition government” doesn’t do anything to mask the sheer arrogance implicit in the ideas contained therein as well as in the very existence of the Commission and of an office of Cuba Transition Coordinator in the State Department.

The report’s emphasis on “restoring sovereignty to the Cuban people” is one of its most Orwellian aspects. A state that respects the sovereignty of another nation and its people does not produce a detailed script for the political future of that nation and that people.

More than century of repeated U.S. transgressions against Cuban sovereignty and of meddling in Cuban affairs are at the heart of much of what has gone wrong in Cuba since 1902 and of troubled U.S.-Cuba relations over the last 50 years. This report, the assumptions that underlie it, and the policies it champions, embody the same misbegotten principle enshrined in the interventionist Platt Amendment—which the United States arrogantly attached to the fledgling Cuban Constitution in 1902, giving the U.S. the right to intervene unilaterally in Cuba’s internal affairs—and in much of U.S. policy toward Cuba since.  In once again resorting to a Plattist approach, the authors of the CAFC report have failed to learn the lesson that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

1. It is about regime change, stupid

And regime change, by any other name, by any other means, would still carry the same stench of illegitimacy and the same steep moral, human and material costs as the one the Bush Administration launched in Iraq in 2003. Make no mistake about it; this is a blueprint for accelerated regime change. Evidently, the Bush Administration has not been sobered by the disastrous result—for Americans for sure but especially for the Iraqi people and its devastated nation—of its recent adventure in U.S.-imposed regime change. Nor has it learned how far astray certain kind of exiles, with their own agendas and delusions and totally disconnected with the people back home, can lead this country.