Is U.S. aid reaching Castro foes?

Posted on Wed, Nov. 15, 2006

PROMOTING DEMOCRACY IN CUBA | FIRST OF TWO PARTS
Is U.S. aid reaching Castro foes?
Democracy-building programs for Cuba are dogged by shipping costs and
oversight problems, and hindered by a policy that forbids sending money
directly to dissidents.
BY OSCAR CORRAL
ocorral@MiamiHerald.com

Ten years ago, a Republican-led Congress pressed President Clinton to
help bring democracy to communist Cuba in the wake of Cuban MiGs'
shoot-down of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes and mounting
U.S. fears of yet another rafter crisis.

Today, the program -- funded by the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) -- has spent at least $55.5 million, for studies on
a future Cuba without dictator Fidel Castro, for exile groups to lobby
foreign governments to sanction the island and to ship children's books,
food, medical equipment, laptops and clothes to dissidents and their
families.

None of that money has reached the dissidents in cash -- a policy
designed to protect Cuba's opposition from being branded mercenaries and
imprisoned.

Instead, most of the USAID money has remained in Miami or Washington --
creating an anti-Castro economy that finances a broad array of
activities, ranging from university studies to spending millions to ship
goods surreptitiously to the island's opposition. At least $13 a pound
-- and as much as $20 per pound -- is paid to an intricate network of
''mules'' to smuggle medicines, laptops and books into Cuba. That's 13
to 20 times more than it costs to ship to many other Caribbean countries.

Several Cuba experts in the Bush and Clinton administrations blame
arbitrary USAID rules that ban sending cash directly to dissident groups
in Cuba for derailing the program's purpose.

Now that President Bush has promised $80 million over the next two years
to amp up pro-democracy programs for Cuba -- a strategy announced before
an ailing Castro ceded power July 31 to his brother, Raúl -- the
philosophical battle over whether to send cash directly to Cuban
dissidents endures. And the question of USAID's effectiveness in Cuba
has become all the more relevant.

LAX OVERSIGHT

Bush's plan, likely to be taken up by a majority Democratic Congress
next year, comes as the General Accountability Office releases today its
audit on how well USAID's Cuba program is working. That audit found lax
oversight of USAID's programs.

Although no USAID funding is allowed to go to Cuba, at least one other
taxpayer-funded program that promotes democracy in Cuba -- the National
Endowment for Democracy -- allows its money to go to the island in cash.
NED has sent about $970,000.

Millions of USAID dollars get spent locally on companies and people that
specialize in slipping goods into Cuba. Washington struggles to verify
how much aid and information actually reaches the island -- or whether
it has had any effect in promoting democracy.

What's more, the Cuba program's first USAID director, Peter Orr, and
other Clinton era officials said it was designed to be weak as a divided
administration bickered over the goals of pursuing regime change and
some worried about exile groups' using the money for militancy.

''Shipping stuff into the island is an incredible waste. It's very
expensive, it can get confiscated. All these arguments were raised by me
and others at the time,'' Orr told The Miami Herald. ``And my opinion --
I can prove it -- is that the decision was consciously made to distance
the program from the ground in Cuba, and to make it less effective.''

A Miami Herald review of USAID Cuba programs found that many of the same
accountability problems raised by a 2000 outside examination remain
unresolved. That study, conducted for USAID, found congressional
disagreements over Cuba policy hindered the program; USAID had no one in
Cuba to ensure supplies made it; the program was ''severely
constrained'' by its policy prohibiting cash to be sent to opposition
groups in Cuba.

The Miami Herald reviewed hundreds of USAID records -- some requested
more than two years ago through the Freedom of Information Act -- and
interviewed more than 100 people for this series. The Herald found:

• Paying mules and other shipment costs swallowed nearly half of the
$7.4 million spent by Grupo De Apoyo a la Democracia, the largest USAID
recipient, and almost half the $3.2 million spent by Cuba OnLine to send
pro-democracy mailings to Cuba from 2001 to 2004, according to tax
records and interviews. As a result, Grupo De Apoyo only spent about 13
percent of its U.S. funds, or $986,000, on food and medicine.

• USAID still has no employee at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana to
monitor the program's effectiveness there. Successes are often based on
media reports -- something as minor as someone taking the glasses from a
John Lennon statue at a Havana park -- or statements from relatives of
dissidents on the island.

• A 1996 confidential memo from USAID reveals there was broad bipartisan
support -- from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the State
Department -- to let USAID groups send as much as $400 at a time to
''victims of repression'' in Cuba.

• Two top USAID managers who helped create the program said it was set
up to preserve the status quo in Cuba. Clinton's senior Cuba advisor,
Richard Nuccio, believed both the Clinton and Bush administrations used
the programs to court Cuban-American voters.

''My impression is that during the second Clinton term and continuing
into the Bush administration, the way the program was administered
turned it more into a program to garner political support from the Cuban
American community . . . than to actually produce things inside Cuba to
benefit a democratic transition,'' Nuccio said.

Several Clinton officials also feared that directly funding dissidents
could subject them to persecution in Cuba, which routinely accuses
dissidents of being U.S. mercenaries.

BAD DECISION

Nuccio now thinks it was a bad decision. ``We shouldn't be so arrogant
as to decide for them [the dissidents] that they could be contaminated
by this, and therefore we won't provide it.''

Orr said he left USAID's Cuba post by 1997, frustrated that he was
unable to convince higher-ups to have Cuba's program work the same way
USAID operates in Haiti and most troubled countries -- with cash sent to
reformers working inside the country.

Instead, Clinton's inner circle opted for a go-slow, indirect approach,
Orr said, because the Democratic president worried that political
instability in Cuba could result in mass migration to the United States.
Clinton lost reelection as Arkansas governor in 1980 after Mariel
refugees rioted at a prison there.

''The shocking conclusion was that nobody in the administration wanted
to rock the boat in Cuba,'' Orr said.

Larry Byrne, an assistant USAID administrator from 1993 to 1997, never
wanted to send money directly to dissidents. He called the program he
helped devise -- under pressure from Republicans in Congress -- ``a
waste of U.S taxpayer dollars.''

``It's just ridiculous that someone would think this program would
destabilize Cuba. I thought it was a good idea to open up a dialogue
with Cuba. I didn't think the program was ever going to work. It was ill
conceived, ill thought out, underfinanced.''

Clinton did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A spokesman at
the William J. Clinton Foundation referred questions to Mark Schneider,
the assistant administrator of Latin America and the Caribbean at USAID
from 1993 to 1999.

Schneider said the program was designed to get ''noncontroversial''
support into Cuba.

``These programs by themselves cannot bring about change The people
carrying it out tried hard to make it work, but it's very hard.''

Even supporters of the no-cash policy concede the bulk of the money is
getting siphoned off by exorbitant shipping costs.

''There is a strong philosophical debate here, and it's a tough one,''
said Roger Noriega, who was undersecretary of state for the Western
Hemisphere during President Bush's first term. He said the policy
``created a ridiculous situation where we were spending 10 times the
cost of shipping to send in materials that could be bought on the market
[in Cuba] if we just gave cash and got a receipt.''

NO GUARANTEES

Getting items into Cuba is an art for USAID groups: Documentaries about
dissidents' struggles and human right abuses are packed in DVDs with
covers of Cuban musical bands.

Still, there are no guarantees that supplies make it to the island -- or
that when they do that they're not sold on the black market.

University of Miami professor Jaime Suchlicki, who runs Cuba OnLine and
the UM's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, both
USAID-funded programs, said he relies on phone calls and letters as
proof that his mailings reach Cuba. He estimates that ''50 to 60
percent'' of Cuba OnLine's mailings get through. Mailings are sent
because few Cubans have access to the Internet, and Cuba blocks many of
the e-mails CubaOnLine sends.

''We assume a great percentage get in,'' Suchlicki said. ``This has to
be based on partial evidence.''

David Mutchler, the USAID Cuba program's director, would not elaborate
on how the agency verifies whether shipments arrive: ``We do have ways
to check.''

Mutchler points to a study, published by USAID-funded Directorio
Democrático Cubano, that chronicles instances of civil disobedience in Cuba.

Based in Miami, Directorio has received more than $3 million in federal
money. It has documented an increase in peaceful anti-government
activities, such as dissident meetings, in Cuba from 44 in 1997 to 1,805
in 2004.

Adolfo Franco, USAID's Latin America and Caribbean program director,
said sending money to dissidents would result in a Cuban government
crackdown, as happened in 2003 when 75 dissidents, independent
journalists and librarians were jailed.

The Cuban government considers the USAID program subversive and
imprisons or harasses Cubans who dissent.

Franco said the program is effective: ``If it's such a waste of time and
money and patronage, I think they'd be laughing about it in Havana as
money down the rathole. But I think that's a measurement -- [the Cuban
government], they've put a lot of effort into trying to derail this
program.''

COLORING BOOKS

During a recent tour of the Washington office of the Center for a Free
Cuba, director Frank Calzón pointed to a toy water gun the size of his
palm, not far from a Hello Kitty: Use Your Imagination coloring book.

''This is one of the counter-revolutionary things we send to Cuba,''
Calzón joked of the water pistol. ``We send arms.''

Calzón's human rights group received more than $5 million from USAID
from 1998 through 2004, according to the group's March 2004 report. The
group sent more than 209,244 books, pamphlets, magazines and videos to
Cuba, the report states.

Calzón also lobbies foreign governments to condemn Cuba's human rights
abuses. In 2004, a Cuban diplomat knocked Calzón unconscious in Geneva
after a United Nations vote that condemned Cuba's human rights record.

''Our basic mission is to encourage and help build a democratic, civil
society in Cuba,'' Calzón said. ``That cannot be done if Cubans have no
access to books, tapes and other material explaining democratic ideas.''

Among other items shipped by USAID-financed groups to Cuba: books by
former Czech President and Soviet-era dissident Vaclav Havel, veterinary
manuals, powdered milk and children's videos -- along with the Harry
Potter series and wheelchairs,

''It's a complicated program to quantify,'' said Xavier Utset, who
directs the Cuba Democracy Project at Freedom House, which received $2.7
million in USAID funds from 1996 to 2005. ``Internal repression makes it
difficult to evaluate a program that supports people inside the island.''

Federacion Sindical de Plantas Electricas, Gas y Agua, a Miami-based
group of exiles who once worked at Cuban electric, gas or water plants,
got almost $600,000 from USAID since 2003 and tens of thousands more
from the National Endowment for Democracy, NED.

The group sent $9,000 from NED directly to two women in Cuba -- only to
learn they were Cuban agents, said Joel Brito, former director of
Federacion. ''It's very difficult to tell from Miami who the people are
that we help in Cuba,'' he said.

Vladimiro Roca, a pro-democracy activist in Cuba, said in a telephone
interview from Havana that fax machines, computers and more can be
bought on Cuba's black market. ''What we need most is money,'' he said.

Miami Herald researcher Monika Z. Leal and writer Jasmine Kripalani
contributed to this report.

Read Oscar Corral's blog Miami's Cuban Connection in the blogs section
of MiamiHerald.com or at http://blogs.herald.com/

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