If only!
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2016 1:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Cuba: The New Opening
Speaking of vulture funds, I have a strong feeling that our mordern money
lenders are about to be thrown out of the Temples.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/7/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've read part of this and will read a lot more when I have more time.Comandante.
But I am still creeping along in Back Channel To Cuba. It includes an
incredible amount of information. However, some things stand out. The
position of the US visa a vis Cuba has always been that the US is like
a parent, reprimanding a recalcitrant child, attempting to reason with
that child so that he will comply with rules set down by the parent.
Everything that the child does, is considered to affect the parent in
some way. Therefore, the child's behavior needs to be controlled.
Whether we like or dislike what Castro does, I find his approach to
the US to have been refreshing.
Throughout all of the negotiations over all of the years, (I'm now up
to the Reagan Presidency), Castro has insisted that his nation has
equal rights to behave as a nation to those of the US. He has a
domestic policy and a foreign policy and in the same way as the US
would resent his attempting to control its domestic and foreign
policy, he refuses to accept US control over what his country does.
The two things he consistently demanded was the ending of the blockade
and the removal of the US military post at Guantanamo. He was flexible
in terms of dealing with the US in relation to other issues over time,
being sensitive to US politics and how they influenced what
administrations were able to do. He was willing to release prisoners
to the US, also to exchange a CIA prisoner for a Puerto Rican prisoner
held in the US. And, regardless of what his motives may have been or
the fact that like every other leader, he resorted to military actions
to resolve issues, he's been on the right side of history on several
issues, the one most on my mind right now, Puerto Rican independence.
In case you've missed this, Puerto Rico is fighting for its life as
the vulture funds demand payment and our Republican Congress is
attempting to install a board of managers, four of whom from the US
mainland, in place of the elected government.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of S. Kashdan
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2016 9:21 AM
To: Blind Democracy List
Subject: [blind-democracy] Cuba: The New Opening
Hi all,
The below article (written last year) reviews two books with different
perspectives. I find the first book of greater interest. But, taken
together they present a lot of food for thought for those of us who
aren't willing to accept the given narative of any government without
some critical thinking.
For justice and peace,
Sylvie
Cuba: The New Opening
by Enrique Krauze.
Translated from the Spanish by Hank Heifetz
New York Review of Books, April 2, 2015 issue
Reviewed in this article:
Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance,
1959--1971
by Lillian Guerra
University of North Carolina Press, 467 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between
Washington and Havana
by William M. Leo-Grande and Peter Kornbluh
University of North Carolina Press, 524 pp., $35.00
The history taught in Cuban schools exalts the redeeming function of
the Cuban Revolution but it also, for the most part, reduces that
revolution to a biography of Fidel Castro. Someday perhaps Cuban
schoolchildren will have access to other versions of their history. If
that day comes, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and
Resistance, 19591971 by Lillian Guerra, an American historian of Cuban
descent, should be a required (and
saddening) assignment. It tells the story of the construction of the
longest dictatorship in Latin American history (and now the
longest-lasting continuous regime on earth).
The book is not a conventional political history but rather a social
history of the Cuban people subjugated, by choice or by force, to the
new system put into place during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on almost
twenty years of research in Cuban and American archives like the Cuban
Exile Collection and the Cuban Revolution Collection at Yale
University, Guerra reconstructs how Fidel Castro went about narrowing
the range of civil liberties, autonomous institutions, and finally the
society itself, until he completely dominated them.
The revolutionaries came to power on an island where one in six Cubans
owned a radio, one in twenty-five a television set. There were 120
newspapers and magazines, like the political journal Bohemia, which in
the first three weeks of 1959 sold a million copies celebrating the
triumph of the revolution. With this impressive island-wide
coverage--most of it favoring the revolution--Castro could multiply
the effect of his very long speeches, many of them to an audience of a
million people acclaiming him with upraised hands. He was the first
revolutionary to use television with wide effect.
One of Guerra's revelations is the use Fidel made of religious
symbols. As a steady leitmotif he would say things like: "They speak
ill of me because I have spoken the truth. They crucified Christ for
speaking the truth" or "Whoever condemns a revolution like this one
betrays Christ and declares himself capable of crucifying that very
Christ once again. Although he had been educated by the Jesuits,
Castro had no belief in religious dogmas.
Nevertheless he affirmed and imposed his beliefs as if they were in
themselves religious dogmas. A new faith, Fidelismo, began to form
around his person. Drawings were published with Fidel inserted into
scenes from the Bible; pilgrimages were conducted to sacralized sites
in the former guerrilla haven of the Sierra Maestra or to the Turquino
mountain, which Fidel had once climbed. In a conversation with a
journalist from the magazine Carteles, an old peasant succinctly
expressed his reverence:
Question: What do you think of the Agrarian Reform?
Blanco: That is a blessing of God.
Question: You mean from Fidel, from the Revolution?
Blanco: I mean from God, through Fidel.
The new faith created its own ample vocabulary. Among its simplest
epithets were "traitors" and vendepatrias ("sell-outs of the nation"),
first applied to those accused of torture and murder in the service of
the defeated Batista regime. The executions of such people during
Castro's first months in power, under the banner of "Revolutionary
justice," had vast popular support. But then Fidel instituted, in his
own words, "Revolutionary terror.
One of its early victims was the popular revolutionary comandante
Huber Matos, who was arrested in October 1959 for criticizing the
clearly increasing influence of the Cuban Communist Party within the
regime. He was sentenced to and served twenty years' imprisonment.
Fidel carried out his political moves with the same rapidity. He made
himself prime minister, dismissed the idea of elections or the
democratic division of powers, installed "true democracy" (voting by a
show of hands in the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana), and carried
out the first purges among those who had fought for the revolution. As
early as March 1959, Raul Castro contacted Moscow to arrange a
Soviet-run training program for the Cuban army and for an organized
secret police force, later to be known as G2.
Nonetheless, into the year 1960, Cuba seemed to be (at least in its
publicly cited objectives) a radical version of the Mexican
Revolution: nationalist, egalitarian, "humanist," and focused on
social justice. In February 1960, a visit to the island by Soviet
Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan marked the beginning of a close
economic relationship with the Soviet Union, centering around the
exchange of sugar for oil, on terms very favorable to Cuba. The
economic connection rapidly impelled the spread of Soviet-style state
controls over the society and a severe erosion of the market.
All independent newspapers and journals disappeared. One of the
saddest episodes was the termination of the once staunchly
pro-revolutionary Bohemia and the self-imposed exile to Venezuela of
its director, Miguel Angel Quevedo. (Some years later he would kill
himself, leaving behind a dramatic description of how he had been
forced out.) Only the newspaper Revolucion remained, later to be
merged in 1965 into a new publication called Granma.
The university was stripped of its traditional and politically
important autonomy and student organizations would expel members for
having anti-regime or anti-Soviet opinions. Television and radio
stations were confiscated. Unions were transformed from advocates of
the rights of workers to instruments of support for the maintenance of
productivity in the increasing number of state-owned enterprises. In
the latter part of 1960, around 550 businesses (Cuban or
American-owned) were expropriated--amounting to 80 percent of the
broad and diversified industries of the country. The Catholic Church
opposed the turn toward communism but was neutralized.
Fidel was trying to create a kind of new militant church of regime
loyalists, intent on defending the "purity" of the regime by armed force.
Guerra gives a detailed description of how the responsibility for such
purification was assigned to the numerous militant organizations
created, early in the 1960s, by Fidel's fiat. The purpose was to
integrate the society vertically, from the masses leading up to the
Organizations were formed for women, students, farmers, workers,reconstructs much of this unrest.
bureaucrats, writers, artists, down to children who marched with rifles.
Among those numerous groups, perhaps the most disturbing and
intimidating entities were the Comites de Defensa de la Revolucion (
CDR ). The CDRs recruited volunteers, city block by block, to oversee
the revolutionary purity of their neighbors and denounce any
deviations. Fidel defined them as "the civil rear guard for the
vanguard of the militias and Revolutionary Armed Forces ( FAR ) in the
struggle against the internal and external enemy," and he added, "it
is impossible that the worms and parasites can make their moves if, on
their own, the people...keep an eye on them.
In the early 1960s, Cuban cities witnessed an early surge of
dissidence in the confrontations between these Cederistas and groups
or individuals the regime stigmatized as gusanos ("worms"). Guerra,
using newly discovered material from various archives, vividly
The gusanos refused to integrate themselves into revolutionaryviolence known as "
institutions.
Yet most of them criticized the CIA -sponsored invasion at the Bay of
Pigs in April 1961, and considered the Miami-based exiles to be
"servants of the gringos. Nevertheless the CDR s could send them to
jail and even (following the Soviet model) to incarceration in
psychiatric hospitals where they could be subjected to such measures
as electric shock treatments. For their efficiency at forestalling
criticism of the revolution, Castro called the Cederistas "one million
gags," emphasizing that their major effect by far was the stifling of
open dissent.
Another significant (and historically obscure) event was the violent
opposition of peasants to the collectivization of the land in the
provinces of Escambray and Matanzas. Lillian Guerra writes that in
Escambray, the CIA was actively involved in encouraging resistance. In the
la limpia [the cleaning] of Escambray," six thousand people diedvendors'
(combining the losses of the Cuban army and the peasant rebels). In
the summer of 1963 the government permanently moved all the male
population of Escambray to Pinar del Rio and the women and children to
the Miramar area of Havana, a total of 35,000 people. Escambray was
finally converted into a military zone and a national park. In 2005,
for the first time in forty years, Raul Castro called the Escambray
events "a civil war.
Almost simultaneously (and without any CIA intervention, according to
Guerra), the peasants of Matanzas also took up arms against the
collectivization policy. The guerrillas of Matanzas survived as a
group until the beginning of 1963. There were widespread arrests,
summary executions, and extensive campaigns of slogans and arguments
in favor of the revolution. The Second Agrarian Reform (1963) then put
further limits on rural private property and, says Guerra, "the
historically exceptional egalitarian model of capitalist agricultural
production in Matanzas was forcibly reduced to the Communist norm.
In the mid-1960s, the worldwide youth counterculture arrived, a little
belatedly, in Cuba. With their long hair and sandals, their rock
music, their fondness for an anarchic way of life and sexual
permissiveness, many young Cubans were culturally rebellious but not
in active opposition to the regime. Guerra describes how, in the
ephemeral publications associated with the counterculture (like El
Sable or El Puente ), critical comments were published on issues that
are now--in the era of Raul--common currency in the official media,
including bureaucratic abuses and negligence and the wasting of
resources.
Fidel had no patience with what he saw as the lack of revolutionary
zeal among the young. The counterculture publications were closed down
and many of their contributors sent off to work camps for
"re-education. And Fidel went so far as to urge young people to report
on their parents if they expressed an explicit desire to leave Cuba.
In 1965 Fidel had created the Military Units to Aid Production ( UMAP
), which were labor camps to which many of these "anti-social" young
people and various gusanos were sent. (An estimated 35,000 people
passed through these camps between 1965 and 1968.) Alongside other
inmates were members of Protestant and Afro-Cuban religious sects whom
the regime considered unreliable (especially Jehovah's Witnesses and
Seventh-Day Adventists) and who were submitted to systematic tortures.
Based on a conviction that to be revolutionary one must be "macho,"
gay people were sent to the camps and cruelly persecuted. Reinaldo
Arenas, the brilliant homosexual writer who left Cuba in 1980, has
written an account of his treatment, Before Night Falls (1993); but
Guerra supplements it with firsthand personal reports. Gays were
subjected not only to forced labor but also to painful Pavlovian
treatments meant to "cure their illness. This government-inspired
anti-gay persecution lasted until the beginning of the 1980s.
In 1968--proclaimed "the Year of the Heroic Guerrilla"--58,000 small
businesses were expropriated in a matter of days (including street
kiosks, shoemakers, dressmakers, laundries, beauty shops, nightclubs,Stalinism.
etc.).
Many of the owners (labeled "petty bourgeois") were assigned to
compulsory labor in agriculture or construction. Now fully in charge
of what some critics have called "the island plantation of Fidel" (his
father had been the owner of a large hacienda), Castro made one of his
many huge economic mistakes. In 1970 he called for "the Sugar Harvest
of the Ten Million. This marked the absolute limit of Che Guevara's
idealistic push for "voluntary labor. Castro announced that "the honor
of the Revolution" was at stake. A student who had taken part remarked
to Guerra that they had not harvested sugarcane "for Fidel or his honor.
Still, the large-scale response revealed Fidel's still-charismatic
capacity to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people from all social
and economic levels, but the harvest failed to meet its objectives.
Faced with rising absenteeism in the fields (the only option left of
the right to strike), he issued a law against vagrancy and further
tightened control of the shores of Cuba. Fidel declared that no one
any longer wanted to leave the country.
And
emigration remained illegal until the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.
The definite sign of Cuba's incorporation into the Soviet bloc was the
show trial (an echo of the Soviet trials in the 1930s) of the poet
Heberto Padilla, who had dared to criticize "our miniature version of
Arrested in March 1971, after five weeks in prison and dailyRevolution, everything. Against the Revolution, nothing.
interrogations he "confessed" his crimes against the revolution. Many
voices of the Latin-American and international literary community
recognized a "show trial" and criticized the persecution, including
some, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who, up to this
moment, had always backed Fidel. Castro then gave precise orders
banning the books of such authors in Cuba. In the 1960s Padilla had
won the national prize for poetry awarded by an international jury.
Now the message was definitive, as in Fidel's words of 1961: "With the
negotiations. When George H.W.
The same slogan still prevails today, though certainly people have
more space. The regime now tolerates a limited amount of private
economic activity, though with many restrictions. There is some
freedom of movement, though Cubans cannot board tourist cruise ships
or buy boats. And people are not persecuted for their sexual or
religious preferences. Still, limits on political life and civil
liberties are essentially the same as in 1971. The government still
controls the print media, radio and television, the universities,
student movements, and labor unions. In these matters nothing has
changed. There is no free access to the Internet and manifestations of
dissidence are persecuted. Dissidents are no longer sent to labor
camps but in 2014 there were 8,899 short-term politically motivated
detentions. "We have a different concept of human rights," said
Josefina Vidal, a diplomat now in charge of relations with the United
States, to Roberta Jacobson, the US undersecretary of state for Latin
America, at their first meeting in Havana on January 22, 2015.
This is the Cuba with which President Obama, bravely and
intelligently, though with considerable political risk, decided to
reestablish diplomatic relations in December 2014.
In light of the economic and political history of Cuba, it becomes
easier to understand its contentious relationship with the United
States, the subject of Back Channel to Cuba by William M. Leo-Grande
and Peter Kornbluh, which explores the mostly secret negotiations over
decades between the Cuban and US governments. It is an impressive
investigation that appeared only months before the agreements between
Raul Castro and Barack Obama and reads like a fascinating and thorough
intellectual introduction to the accords.
The book makes it clear that, during the long period of the
Cuban-Soviet alliance, an agreement was practically impossible, though
the history of attempts reads like a James Bond novel, and the
tireless efforts of some figures to promote a rapprochement did have
some positive results on emigration and the freeing of political
prisoners. After 1971, when the alliance with Russia was solidified,
Cuba adopted much of the ideology, laws, and institutions of the USSR,
especially that of a single all-powerful party. Nevertheless,
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, apparently on his own, put out
some feelers to Cuba, which were suddenly withdrawn after the
announcement that Cuban troops had been dispatched to Angola in 1975.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter (with a cabinet divided between "doves" and
"hawks") made serious attempts to "normalize" relations with Cuba. He
began by opening "interest sections" in Washington and Havana,
reducing travel restrictions, and halting surveillance flights over
the island. In exchange, he secured the freedom of several political
prisoners and a measure of Cuban control over the tide of boat people
crossing the ninety miles to Florida.
But disagreement over the Cuban presence in Angola and Mozambique and
the American embargo (first imposed in 1962) frustrated any positive
result from the dozens of secret meetings in New York, Havana, even in
the Mexican city of Cuernavaca. According to Leo-Grande and Kornbluh,
"Carter aspired to be the first post-Cold War president in an era when
the Cold War was not quite over.
It was quite the opposite with his successor, Ronald Reagan. In March
1981, Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, expressed his
inclination to "turn that fucking island into a parking lot. During
the eight years of his presidency, Reagan was infuriated with Cuba for
its support of independence movements in Africa, the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua, and the guerrillas in El Salvador and
Guatemala. It was a period of renewed prestige for the Cuban socialist
revolution among a new generation of young Latin Americans. Fidel
resisted the increasingly active antagonism of the Reagan government,
which officially listed Cuba as a terrorist state, tightened the trade
embargo, and launched the propaganda station Radio Marti.
Yet even in this administration there were some open channels and some
advances on emigration issues, according to Leo-Grande and Kornbluh.
But after the war in Angola was no longer an issue (it ended by an
accord that sealed the victory of the Cuban troops and their allies)
and elections were held in Nicaragua and El Salvador (both reverses
for Cuban foreign policy), Cuba lost some of the chips it could use in
Bush became president, he explicitly demanded a change of regime in Cuba.the verge of collapse.
In 1993, the crisis hit. With 50 percent inflation, a 35 percent
decline in the GDP, and a plunge of 80 percent in the resources
available to meet the needs of each Cuban citizen, the country seemed on
Inin Cuba.
1993 the Torricelli Amendment, passed after the fall of the Soviet
Union, seemed to herald (and exult over) the approaching end. It
prohibited foreign-based subsidiaries of US companies from trading
with Cuba, forbade travel to Cuba by US citizens, and no longer
permitted remittances to be sent by Cuban-American families to relatives
Mexico.
President Bill Clinton decided to lower the tone of fierce opposition;
he increased passenger flights between Havana and Miami. Fidel
accepted the repatriation of Cubans with criminal records he had sent
to America in 1980 as part of the Mariel Boatlift. And unexpectedly,
he asked for direct discussions. In 1994, with the "Crisis of the
Boat-People"--the attempt by thousands to emigrate by small boats and
rafts--Clinton requested the intervention of President Carlos Salinas of
strengthened the embargo.
The Crisis de los Balseros was resolved in a couple of intense weeks
of negotiation. Fidel's only bargaining chips were his political
prisoners, to whom freedom was granted in groups at his discretion,
and the threat of unleashed emigration. A Republican Congress voted to
turn back the clock with the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which further
Bushan impossible demand.
the Younger returned to the intransigence of his father but Castro had
by then encountered a new ideological and political acolyte and a new
Maecenas in Hugo Chavez, elected president of Venezuela in 1999.
There had been one interesting possibility of rapprochement decades
earlier during the presidency of John Kennedy, as reported in
Leo-Grande and Kornbluh's fine book. After the Cubans had defeated the
invading forces at the Bay of Pigs and Cuba had formally adopted
communism in May 1961, Che Guevara sent Kennedy a box of cigars and a
letter offering five surprising
concessions: payment for nationalized properties, a renunciation of
the Cuban alliance with Communist Eastern Europe, and free elections
(but only after the revolution had consolidated itself), as well as
promises never to attack Guantanamo and to reconsider Cuba's
activities in other Latin American countries.
Later, after the release of the 1,200 prisoners from the invasion
force had been negotiated, Fidel expressed (to Tad Szulc of The New
York Times as well as others) his desire to somehow reestablish
connections. One year later, despite the missile crisis in October
1962 and the CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel, the possibility still
seemed to exist. "If he kicks out Sovs we can live [with] him," said a
note from the National Security Council. And so argued Lisa Howard,
the very active ABC reporter who was close to Fidel. It was a hope
also supported by Jean Daniel, the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur.
This was one of those moments that might have changed history. "Maybe
things are possible with this man," Castro said to Daniel on November
20, 1963.
Daniel had recently visited the White House, and he had been given to
understand that relations could improve. Fidel suggested that Kennedy
might possibly become "the leader who may at last understand that
there can be coexistence between capitalist and socialists, even in
the Americas. Two days later, when he was informed by telephone that
Kennedy had been assassinated, Castro turned to Daniel and said, "This
is the end of your mission of peace.
Today another possible turning point has arisen, for several reasons:
the economic crisis in Venezuela, the impoverishment of the Cuban
economy, the reduced influence (and changing views) of voters of Cuban
origin. (Recent polls show a majority of Florida Cubans favor lifting
the embargo.) And the major supporters of mutual enmity have receded
from the foreground. There is no doubt that the intransigence of Fidel
Castro was a continual obstacle to "normalization. His fixation on
Cuba as David confronting Goliath can be seen as justified in its time
and for many years, but no longer. And his definition of Cuban
identity as deeply negative (permanent opposition to the United States
seen as a continual challenge) impoverishes the rich history of Cuba.
But it can be argued--as LeGrande and Kornbluth observe in their
concluding chapter--that the US has been even more intransigent, often
failing to act on its promises even when Cuba made significant
concessions. It is worth remembering that during the Carter
administration, which was perhaps the most open to the possibility of
"normalization," the government refused to open a real crack in the
embargo by selling Cuba needed medicines impossible to obtain from any
other country. Such an extreme (and cruel) outlook is still alive in
some quarters, especially within the Republican Party.
The most sensible voices of the Cuban opposition, on the island and
abroad (including some major US businessmen and a few right-wing
political
figures)
welcomed the agreement put forward by Obama in December. They
understand and have suffered from the repressive policies of the
regime. They know how much effort it will take to pry any fraction of
power from forces that have retained it for so long. But they have
faith in what Obama has described as a means to "more effectively
empower the Cuban people.
This could result from greater contact with people from abroad whose
mere presence in Cuba (not to speak of information, ideas,
remittances, investments, and any newly possible business
arrangements) will disrupt the long isolation of the island from much
of the world. They believe that this new flow of contact will unleash
and strengthen a general demand for civil liberties with which the new
generations of leadership will finally have to make their compromises.
A recent tweet from the blogger Yusnaby Perez presents photographs of
small American and Cuban flags appearing together in the windows of
Havana. Perhaps an omen of changes to come.
But the prospects are by no means certain. The road to new relations
will be rugged and the process could fail. A troubling signal was Raul
Castro's recent address at a leadership Conference of CELAC (the
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), held at the end of
January in Costa Rica.
He
asserted that the possible accord had to meet four criteria: a US
return of the Guantanamo naval base, the cessation of American radio
and television broadcasts to Cuba (Radio and TV Marti), the end of the
trade embargo, and "compensation to the Cuban people for the human and
economic damage suffered as a result of American policies.
The return of Guantanamo may eventually happen but it will be no easy
task to achieve it. Cessation of propaganda transmissions would not be
difficult but, with the present makeup of Congress, could set off a
political confrontation. The end of the embargo--certainly
desirable--cannot be done immediately, and the payment of "reparations" is
Clinging to such requirements (without any substantial concessions on
internal political liberty) would seem more appropriate to Fidel than
to Raul, if he truly wishes to move closer to the US and respect the
present enthusiasm and hopes of large numbers of Cubans. Dealing with
those problems is an issue for private diplomatic discussions. Using a
confrontational rhetoric in public (and backing the repeatedly
repressive moves by the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro) only
provides ammunition for those who want to continue the embargo. And
Cuba could thus abort a golden opportunity for normalizing relations
with the US.
This would be a very unfortunate turn of events, because Obama has
taken a truly historic step not only in relation to Cuba but also to
Latin American anti-Americanism, one of the most profound and
historically justified political passions on the continent. Its
contemporary form crystallized during the Spanish-American War of
1898, reached its climax in Cuba in 1959, and has begun to recede,
perhaps substantially to disappear, as a result of this possible
resumption of American-Cuban diplomatic relations. The next step
should be the elimination of the embargo, though a Congress dominated
by Republicans will do its best to block such a move.
At the next meeting of the Organization of American States (scheduled
for April in Panama) Obama as a result of this opening--will arrive
with a greater moral legitimacy than any twentieth-century American
president, even more in this case than FDR. He should use this new
prestige to achieve Latin American consensus that Cuba should honor
the agreements on human rights that were signed by Raul at the 2008
summit meeting in Lima of Latin American, Caribbean, and European
nations. Cuba must legalize the basic liberties that have been denied,
including the freedom to connect to the Internet.
Only then will Cuba be able to turn the page of history. When the
virtual shelf is filled with articles and books that have not been
allowed to circulate on the island, the Cubans themselves, we may
hope, will be able to freely decide whether to absolve or condemn the
aged dictator who lives on, mostly in silence, somewhere in Havana.
March 3, 2015;
Translated from the Spanish by Hank Heifetz
