[| I, CWAS |]

Cuba has failed. There are worse off in every aspect since the overthrow.

http://usembassy.state.gov/posts/cu1/wwwh0013.html

[| I, CWAS |]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/P ... 8hqboo.asp

FIDEL CASTRO, always full of bluster, says Cuba will never change its socialist ways. He says he might cut off ties with America altogether by shutting down the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. He's threatening to flood America with a new wave of refugees. We've heard all this before. It's Castro boilerplate.

But there is something new. Cuba is now in deeper trouble, both economically and politically, than at any time in the 43 years of Castro's rule. Not only is Castro slipping mentally and physically, but he's lost most of his friends around the world. Venezuela, whose president is onetime Castro acolyte Hugo Chavez, has halted shipments of subsidized oil, forcing Cuba to institute blackouts. Despite Castro's grousing, the Russians dismantled their massive Cold War listening post in Cuba after having terminated their annual multi-billion dollar subsidy a decade ago. Since September 11, the flow of European tourists has slowed so drastically that 12,000 hotel rooms have been closed up. And the sugar crop, once Cuba's chief export, is approaching its lowest levels of production in more than a century.

With the pressure on, now is not the time to bail out Castro and his failed regime. Yet that's precisely what a growing group of business leaders, agricultural lobbyists, and members of Congress want the United States to do. They're clamoring to lift the trade embargo, the travel ban, and the requirement that Cuba use only cash, not credit, in buying U.S. medicine and food. The argument is that an opening to
Cuba will lead to liberalization and maybe even democracy. It's a bad argument.

We know this from the way dictators act generically, and Castro specifically. Tyrants--Stalin, Hitler, Saddam, Arafat--regard concessions by their foes as acts of weakness to be exploited. But pressure, external and internal, is another matter. Dictators cannot ignore pressure. They must respond, and can thus end up being the ones who make concessions. When Castro has faced domestic economic pressure and America's steady refusal to open full economic relations--as in 1965, 1980, and the early 1990s--he's blinked. In 1965, he announced Cuban Americans could come pick up relatives at a Cuban beach. In 1980, he dispatched the Mariel boatlift. After Russian aid was withdrawn in the 1990s, Castro created a crisis by casting off hundreds of rafts with refugees eager to reach Florida 90 miles away.

But forced migration hasn't been Castro's only tack. Confronted by a deep economic downturn in the 1990s, Castro instituted free-market reforms. He legalized holding dollars. He allowed Cubans to open restaurants and hotels in their homes. He encouraged foreign firms to invest in joint ventures with Cubans. These reforms weren't sweeping, but the point is Castro didn't willingly adopt them. He was forced to, if only to relieve the pressure on his government. Pressure, not concessions, worked.

Castro is under far greater pressure now than in the 1990s. "In a country where unemployment and underemployment taken together exceed 50 percent, the average GDP per capita is a mere $1,500, less than every other western hemisphere nation except Haiti," notes Jerry Haar of the University of Miami. The experience of foreign investors, supposedly protected by Cuba's touted Foreign Investment Law No. 77, has been excruciating. They've been slapped with fraudulent back taxes and had their development plans stolen. The current economic slump has caused Cuba to default on debts to private banks and firms in France, Spain, Japan, Canada, Chile, and Venezuela. Last year, Cuba devalued its peso 18 percent. Nothing has worked.
The pressure has rattled Castro. Since President Bush announced his new Cuban policy of carrot and stick last May, Castro has been frantic, irrational, counterproductive. He insists the U.S. Interests Section is grossly violating Cuba's sovereignty by handing out free radios so listeners can tune into Radio Marti (or any other station). Castro maintains that free radios constitute a serious diplomatic breach. And rather than accept Bush's insistence on democratic and free-market reforms, Castro recently organized a petition drive in favor of socialism. Now he expects us to believe it was signed voluntarily by 99.2 percent of Cuban adults. The national assembly took up the matter and, after three days and 168 speeches, "irrevocably" declared socialism the way of life in Cuba. This, by the way, nullified the authentic Varela petition, gathered by democratic dissidents and endorsed by former President Jimmy Carter when he visited Cuba in May. It called for free elections and capitalist reforms.

Castro's hardline reaction might make sense if it were the only signal he was sending. But that isn't the case. Last winter, he issued no complaint when prisoners of war from Afghanistan were locked up at Guantanamo Bay. Just last week, Cuba celebrated America's Independence Day. And Cuba is so desperate for food that it stiffed its creditors earlier this year and plunked down $73 million in cash to purchase food in the United States. That was twice the amount of food Castro had initially planned on buying.

The truth is Castro has nowhere to turn but the
United States. His only allies are pariah states like Iraq and Libya or Communist states such as China and North Korea. None is offering help. The countries with whom he's had economic relations aren't stepping forward either because they've been burned once too often by Cuba. "We've got him by the nuts," a Bush administration official says inelegantly. And it's true--unless the bizarre alliance of political left and right and corporate America prevails in its campaign to open full relations with Cuba. By unleashing American tourists, if only the curious ones, and allowing Cuba to buy food on credit, they'd give Castro a reprieve. Still, he would decide the terms of trade and what businesses would get to enter the meager Cuban market. And the Cuban people wouldn't be rewarded. The government takes 95 percent of salaries paid to Cuban workers. Socialism would stay.

Contrary to media reports, Bush's Cuban initiative did more than tighten the screws. It was a worthy precursor to his Palestinian policy, offering "a meaningful American response" in exchange for Cuban steps toward democracy, free markets, and private property. Not only would the bans on travel and trade be lifted, but the United States would provide humanitarian aid and scholarships for Cuban students. At the moment, Castro isn't ready to yield. But as poverty and squalor increase over the summer, so will unrest. This time, mass migration won't suffice. Castro may decide he has to strike a bargain with Bush. And that could be, at long last, the beginning of the end of his brutal, dictatorial regime.

--Fred Barnes, for the Editors

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http://www.canfnet.org/News/archived/020712newsa.htm

Bush Planning for Post-Castro Cuba

The Washington Post, Thursday, July 11, 2002; 5:33 PM

by Marcela Sanchez

After years of Congress driving U.S. policy on Fidel Castro's Cuba, the Bush White House is preparing its own plan to nudge Cuba toward democracy and free markets after Castro is gone. The current jockeying for a position of influence in a post-Castro era should not be misread as resignation. The administration clearly would like Castro to leave office sooner rather than later, and in fact fears that unless it steps in, Congress will throw lifelines to the aging Cuban president. At the same time, however, there is apparently deepening realization that Castro's time is nigh and Washington must be in the best possible position to act quickly.

The White House transition planning comes on the heels of an Initiative for a New Cuba that Bush unveiled in May. In that speech, he invited the Cuban leader to adopt democratic reforms on his own. Castro, of course, demurred. Instead, late last month at his behest, the Cuban National Assembly approved a constitutional reform that consecrated the island's socialist system. "Cuba will never return to capitalism," the amendment proclaimed.

Recognizing that Castro would rather die than switch, U.S. officials are preparing for what one described as a "rapid and peaceful" transition to democracy after the inevitable. They figure that once Castro is gone, Cubans will see the light and move toward it--with help from U.S. government and the private sector. "Castro's revolution has not worked…What keeps it in power is repression. Cuba will be democratic," a senior administration official said the other day. "We have begun to plan for the transition...It is not going to be just a government effort, but the government will have a role and we are reexamining all of our tools... to help the Cuban people."

The plan would include offering a transition government various resources, among them people who have studied other post-Communist nations, to help a transition government peacefully accelerate economic prosperity, avoid mass migration, establish the rule of law and restore confidence in the ownership of private property.

This U.S. plan is not the first. In 1997, in order to comply with the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, commonly known as the Helms-Burton Act, the Clinton administration crafted a plan for a likely U.S. role. The report estimated the transition would cost the United States and the international community between $4 and $8 billion. Castro's response to news of the effort was to require that everyone in the military swear personal allegiance to him and his brother and hand-picked successor, Raul, according to one U.S. official. That apparently froze the Clinton administration in its tracks.

The Bush White House has now picked up the cause, and its plan may include some elements of the earlier approach. Congress and the administration agree that the United States should help accelerate the transition, but they disagree on how-now perhaps more than ever. Congress is considering initiatives supported by the U.S. farm and travel industries that, among other things, would ease the 40-year-old embargo against Cuba, lift the ban on travel to the island and make it easier for U.S. firms to sell food and medicine there. Cuban analysts here predict, however, that most of those initiatives will go nowhere until after November's congressional elections. They also say that in order to please the powerful, heavily Republican and staunchly anti-Castro U.S. Cuban-American community, the Bush administration might even propose stiffening the travel ban.

Otto J. Reich, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in an interview last week that Washington also will be asking more freedom for U.S. diplomats stationed in Havana. Cuban diplomats in Washington, he said, enjoy "almost complete" access to Congress, interest groups and universities, among others, and the White House thinks U.S. representatives on the island should have similar access. Still, Bush is expected next week to once again suspend enforcement of a controversial provision of the Helms-Burton Act that allows U.S. citizens to sue anyone benefiting from property seized by Castro after 1959. Among those affected is the Cuban-born Reich, who volunteered during the interview that he would, with some regret, forsake his claim to family properties as a "contribution to social peace."



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