The US Army Talks Cuba

The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College has issued a paper on Cuba, specifically post-Castro Cuba. I will comment on Castro's Cuba: Quo Vadis? once I get around to digesting its 50+ pages.

Foreign Policy Debates Fidel

With "el lider Maximo" clinging to life the topic of a post-Castro Cuba is a ripe one for the journals. First we had Foreign Affairs with Julia Sweig's cloying take. Now Foreign Policy has a more balanced "debate" on Fidel's legacy. (sub. required) The cover of FP features the story with a photo of the bearded assasin. As for the debate in one corner we have my intellectual hero, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and in the other Castro apologist Ignacio Ramonet.

I will confess that Carlos Alberto stumbles in the opening. The debate is supposed to be on whether or not Castro was good for Cuba and instead of focusing on this Carlos Alberto strays into a discussion on how he thinks Cubans will react to Fidel kicking the bucket. It is an overly optimistic scenario with change coming relatively quickly - not only do I not subscribe to this theory but it allows Ramonet to avoid the issue of Castro's destructive reign. Once the opening salvo is done however Carlos Alberto is unrelenting and Ramonet increasingly doctrinaire. Here is where Carlos Alberto takes back the fight:

In spite of political differences, all human beings have the same hopes: They prefer freedom to oppression, human rights to tyranny, peace to war, and they want their living conditions to improve for themselves and their families. This statement is as true in Hungary as it is in Cuba. Cubans want the same changes that repressed peoples have always fought for. And when Fidel Castro’s passing provides them a chance to make those changes, they will seize it.

Just look at the facts. At cubaarchive.org, Cuban economist Armando Lago and his assistant, Maria Werlau, have compiled a balance sheet that explains why Castro’s regime forced 2 million Cubans (and their descendants) into exile. Under Castro, there have been roughly 5,700 executions, 1,200 extrajudicial murders, 77,800 dead or lost raftsmen, and 11,700 Cuban dead in international missions, most of them during 15 years of African wars in Ethiopia and Angola. Castro’s legacy will be one of bloodshed and injustice, not one of Latin “solidarity” and reform.

You blame the United States and its embargo for the Cuban people’s material problems. But your analysis ignores the devastating impact that collectivism and the lack of economic and political freedoms—not the United States—had upon Soviet Bloc countries, ultimately leading to their demise. And statistics on Cuba’s economic growth are highly suspect. The official Cuban numbers for Castro’s economic and social achievements are so poorly regarded that the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean opted not to take them into account when it compiled its own statistics on the true measures of Cuban society. And the idea that Cuba is now more independent than ever is laughable, considering that much of the economic growth that you cite is buoyed by $2 billion a year in Venezuelan subsidies.

When Castro’s revolution started, he asserted that all of the country’s economic ills originated from Washington’s exploitation of the island. Since then, he has claimed that they are due to the fact that Washington does not exploit it. Which is it? It is also a curious paradox of the Castro regime that it fiercely opposes the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas, while it demands that the embargo be lifted so it can trade freely with the United States. These contradictions notwithstanding, the truth is that the United States is a remarkable trade partner of Cuba’s. Every year, the United States sells to Cuba roughly $350 million in agricultural products, it permits money transfers estimated at $1 billion a year (or half the island’s exports), and, what’s more, it grants resident visas to 20,000 Cubans each year, relieving the government of serious social pressures. And the United States is already preparing for the end of the sanctions once Cuba proves to be headed down the road to democracy. That is not the behavior of an implacable enemy.

From that point on Ramonet's arguments are colored by his hatred for America than anything else:

No serious organization has ever accused Cuba—where, in fact, a moratorium on the death penalty has been in place since 2001—of carrying out “disappearances,” engaging in extrajudicial executions, or even performing physical torture on detainees. The same cannot be said of the United States in its five-year-old “war on terror.” Of these three types of crimes, not a single case exists in Cuba. On the contrary, to a certain extent the Cuban regime stands for life. It has succeeded in increasing life expectancy and lowering infant mortality. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asserted in a Jan. 12, 2005, article, “If the U.S. had an infant mortality rate as good as Cuba’s, [it] would save an additional 2,212 American babies a year.”

Later he brushes off human rights concerns by citing the following:

As long as we are talking about gross human rights violations, why don’t we begin with the United States’ continued protection in Miami of two avowed terrorists, Cuban exiles Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who are accused of blowing up a Cuban civil aircraft on Oct. 6, 1976, killing 73 people? This act has yet to be denounced by those in Miami who continue to nurse old resentments against Cuba. They have not protested against the 3,000 Cuban victims killed by terrorist actions financed by and directed from the United States. Could this be a double standard, a repudiation of “bad” (al Qaeda) terrorism and an acceptance of “good” (anti-Cuban) terrorism?

Ramonet closes his argument with the same drivel - praising Castro for not being America:

It is not even a question of an intellectual stance. Being an intellectual must be earned. And the first step is to become informed and not to mention South African apartheid while ignoring that it collapsed only when its elite troops were defeated in December 1986 at Cuito Cuanavale, “apartheid’s Stalingrad,” not by U.S. forces, but by Cuban troops. That is what prompted Nelson Mandela, an icon for our time, to say that Fidel Castro’s revolution “has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.” He, like so many of the Cubans who will mourn their leader’s passing, was wont to cry, “Viva comrade Fidel Castro!”

All the while Carlos Alberto hammers away:

In addition to this quantification of the “human cost of the revolution,” anyone who wants to know the cruelty of the communist repression in Cuba can read the 137 Amnesty International reports and press releases on the subject, or the abuses documented in numerous Human Rights Watch accounts. The most publicized crime of the Castro era has so far been the deliberate sinking of the boat “13 de Marzo” ordered on July 13, 1994, with 72 refugees on board. Of the 41 who drowned, 10 were children.

Castro will not be remembered as a luminary or an upholder of human rights. The Cuban people will look back on the Castro era with sadness. He leaves as an inheritance a detailed catalogue of how not to govern. We should have different political parties and not just one dogmatic, inflexible, impoverishing, and misguided one. We should respect human rights.

We should trust in the democratic method, in the rule of law, in the market, and in private property, just as do the most prosperous and happy nations on Earth. We must tolerate and respect religious minorities and homosexuals, forever prohibiting “acts of repudiation” or pogroms against people who are different. We must permanently eradicate the “apartheid” that prevents Cubans from enjoying the hotels, restaurants, and beaches that only foreigners are allowed to frequent. We must live in peace, giving up the international adventurism that cost so much blood in Africa, as well as in half of the planet’s guerrilla groups, which Castro inspired. With his passing, we must strive to be, in short, a normal, peaceful, and modern nation, not a delirious revolutionary project aimed at changing the history of the world.

His closing is a clarion call for liberty:

There are always intellectuals ready to justify crimes. It was the case with Stalin and Franco, and now it will be the case with Castro. It is morally incomprehensible: They love the executioners and hate the victims. How can the Cuban government simultaneously respect solidarity with its Latin neighbors and yet fail to uphold human rights in its own backyard? Where is the mutual incompatibility between solidarity and democracy? Judging a half century of incompetent and atrocious dictatorship by the cataract operations it performs is the fascist argument characteristically wielded by Franco’s apologists: His dictatorship was good because Spaniards managed to eat three times a day. It was also the argument of South Africa’s racists: Apartheid was good because the country’s blacks were not as poor as their neighbors. Castro’s dictatorship was good, we now learn, because it leased doctors to the Third World.

No, all dictatorships—like all forms of terrorism—are reprehensible. Don’t forget that Castro came to power using guerrilla and terrorist tactics (Havanans remember perfectly the “Night of 100 Bombs” in 1958), but more serious is the fact that the island has been used as a staging area for narcotraffickers, including the Colombian group farc. Do these intellectuals want a regime like Cuba’s for France? I suppose not. And if they do not want it for France or for themselves, why do they want it for us Cubans? Do we Cubans not have the right to freedom and democracy? But, despite this sad complicity, the day will come for releasing the political prisoners, for holding pluralist elections, and for beginning the material and moral reconstruction of an artificially impoverished society cruelly terrorized by repression and devastated by Stalinist totalitarianism. After Castro, Cuba will be free.

Which Left is Winning?

I kind of like Alvaro Vargas Llosa. No, he does not posses his father's talents nor is he nuanced in his views and yes Liberty in Latin America, despite the promising title, was a painful read but Alvaro's heart is in the right place. Incidentally Liberty in Latin America is so bad that it almost made me a Chavista (just kidding). In a recent piece Alvaro notes that there have been 12 elections and 12 months and while the left is obviously winning, it is not clear which left is clearly ahead. More interesting to me is his take on the post-Fidel outlook in Cuba and Venezuela's role:

Will next year bring a change to the balance of power that seems to exist between the carnivores and the vegetarians? One factor could alter this balance of power: Cuba after Fidel. With the Maximo Lider on his way out, Chavez will assume, probably next year, the definitive leadership of the carnivores. But it is by no means a foregone conclusion that he will dictate the terms of the new Cuba.

His relationship with Raul Castro is tense. Yes, he has important allies, notably Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage, who hinted sometime ago at creating a confederation of the two countries with Chavez as president. But other “apparatchiks” resent his intrusion and are beginning to develop nationalistic sentiments that could well limit Venezuela’s influence after Fidel dies.

Castro “made” Chavez by anointing him his continental heir and helping him set up a powerful political structure a well as the foundations of the social aid network through which the Venezuelan government has made itself indispensable for large numbers of poor people. The symbolism of Cuba turning away from Venezuela would be powerful enough to do what three severe setbacks Chavez suffered in 2006—the Peruvian elections, the Mexican elections, and Venezuela’s failure to win the Latin American seat at the U.N. Security Council—did not quite achieve: bringing his regional projection back to modest proportions.

All this is quite interesting but a radical swing either towards or away from Venezuela is unlikely. One of Fidel's most trusty weapons in his bag of tricks is nationalism. There is no way that you could sell the Cuban people on a confederation with Venezuela taking the lead. Of course Raul is testy once it comes to Chavez, he recognizes the latter's obsession with succeeding Fidel in the international stage. As for Lage lining up on the opposite end that is no surprise considering that he has illusions/delusions of his own. With no internal power base to match Raul's he needs to turn to the outside for support

As for turning away that is just as unlikely. Venezuela gives Cuba too much in terms of fuel. Cuba now owes Venezuela - so much that it can't just ignore Chavez. With the only other major benefactor in the region being the US Raul is in a tough spot. I would imagine the savier Castro bro triangulating between the two extremes.