The Cuba problem
A Washington insider insists that waiting for Castro to die is not a
sound U.S. policy for the future
BY MICHAEL DEIBERT
THE CUBA WARS: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution.
Daniel P. Erikson. Bloomsbury. 333 pages. $28.
NONFICTION | THE CUBA WARS
As a chronicle of 50 years of failed foreign policy, Daniel P. Erikson's
new book should be studied by officials of the incoming Obama
administration lest they repeat the folly of past U.S. governments.
The story of how the authoritarian ruler of a Caribbean island of 11
million people bested 10 U.S. presidents and managed to survive all
attempts to oust him serves as an object lesson of how wishful thinking
is no substitute for a policy based on facts.
For too long, Erikson argues, a coherent strategy in dealing with Cuba
has been subsumed in favor of an ill-conceived ''biological solution''
(awaiting the inevitable demise of Fidel Castro) and a well-organized
though numerically small bloc of Cuban-American political operators and
their supporters in the U.S. Congress.
''While the death of Fidel will remain an extraordinarily significant
political moment when it finally occurs, its impact will necessarily be
diluted by the simple fact that he is no longer Cuba's president,''
writes Erikson, referring to Castro's February 2008 resignation.
Despite ample warnings of Castro's failing health, such as a
well-publicized fainting spell in 2001, the best response U.S.
politicians could muster in recent years was to further curtail trade
and the travel of American citizens going to Cuba -- the sort of move
the Cuban government long practiced on its own people -- and providing
shelter to the likes of Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro militant
wanted in Venezuela for his alleged involvement in a 1976 airplane
bombing that killed 73 people.
Erikson, who serves as senior associate for U.S. policy and director of
Caribbean programs for the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C.,
argues that such a response was hardly robust enough against a
surprisingly resilient adversary.
Erikson does a good job of outlining the Cuban government's ability to
manipulate international upheaval to its benefit, such as timing a 2003
crackdown on internal dissent, which saw 75 Cubans sentenced to a total
of 1,400 years in prison, so that most of the world's attention was
occupied with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
If there is any point that Erikson's book truly brings home, though, it
is that the intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. policy toward Cuba cuts
across the political spectrum. The Communist regime's supporters in
Congress reveal themselves to be every bit as close-minded as some of
its most strident critics, and neither side is willing to commit to
substantive discussions with the other. Ant-Castro Lincoln Diaz-Balart,
the South Florida congressman,speaks knowingly of the situation in Cuba
and advocates unyielding policies though he has not lived on the island
for decades. But Castro's defenders, such as California congresswoman
Maxine Waters, turn absurdly mawkish when they consider the demise of
the country's one-party, totalitarian state.
''I like him and consider him a friend,'' Waters says of Castro,
admitting that she is ''not psychologically prepared'' to consider the
possibility of the Cuban leader shuffling off this mortal coil.
The Cuba Wars has its weaknesses. James Cason, the Bush administration's
feisty chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 2002 until
2005, holds forth over many pages, but the insight we get about Cuba's
ruling clutch of aging autocrats comes mostly from second-hand
allegories and their public statements, which more often than not slide
into mothballed revolutionary histrionics. There is also some
regrettable sloppiness on detail: The patois dialect spoken in Jamaica
is referred to as ''Creole,'' and a famous image by the photographer
Robert Capa of a Loyalist fighter falling in combat during the Spanish
Civil War is erroneously referred to as depicting ``a journalist.''
Still, The Cuba Wars provides a valuable glimpse inside the U.S.
decision-making process with regards to one of its oldest and seemingly
most intractable international disputes. When Erikson writes that his
book was composed with the hope of making policymakers take ''a hard
look at the reality as it is, not as we would like it to be,'' one can
only hope that the incoming administration takes those as words to live
by, not only for Cuba but also for foreign-policy pursuits far beyond
its palm-fringed shores.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The
Struggle for Haiti.
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