Guest Opinion:
Cuba must change before U.S. ends embargo
By RAY WALSER
WASHINGTON - No president, as leader of the Free World, wants to embrace
the Cuba of the Castros without some tangible proof that the 50-year,
anti-American dictatorship is loosening its repression of the Cuban people.
President Barack Obama has made future steps contingent on something
positive occurring in Cuba: release of political prisoners, freedom of
travel or freedom of speech - signs of an opening toward democratic change.
The Castro regime's human rights record is bad. With 200 prisoners of
conscience and regular police surveillance and repression, the Castro
system routinely denies freedom of speech, association, information and
travel.
The very grass-roots foundations of freedom - civil society, trade
unions and individual enterprise - are routinely squashed by the
juggernaut of the Cuban state. The communist regime deadens the lives of
millions of Cubans, leaving them apathetic, isolated and devoid of hope.
Second, no president would feel comfortable taking steps that would help
fill the coffers of Castro Brothers Inc.
Cuba's regressive government controls 90 percent of all economic
activity. It writes every contract and enforces labor discipline. It
directs the judicial and bureaucratic machinery and doles out wages and
profits as it chooses. The cupola of the communist regime, not the
people or the market, calls every shot and reaps the lion's share of
benefits.
The 1962 embargo has been substantially modified over time. The U.S. now
sells hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food on a cash-and-carry
basis. Remittances from the United States add hundreds of millions more
and are certain to grow. Lifting of restrictions on telecommunications
will allow freer communications, if the Cubans so desire.
Two million foreign tourists bask annually in Cuba's sun while the
majority of Cubans subsist on less than $20 a month. The United States
doesn't impede Cuba's ability to barter, borrow or trade with the rest
of the world. Venezuela's anti-American president, Hugo Chavez, props up
the Castro regime with an estimated $2 billion annually. Nevertheless,
Fidel Castro calls U.S. policy "genocidal." More than a billion dollars
in trade and remittances has thus far bought a goose egg's worth of
liberalization and human rights changes. Would additional billions
accomplish anymore without a profound structural, democratic transition
in Cuba? In 2009, the partial embargo serves two purposes. It's still a
leveraging point for bargained change in U.S.-Cuba relations. Second, it
represents the moral divide between liberty and repression, between
dictatorship and democracy.
The Cuba embargo is like a wall, starkly demarcating two opposed ways of
thinking. It should have fallen in 1989 or in the 1990s as the rest of
Latin America and much of the world moved to democracy.
It can still quickly disappear once a dissenter like Dr. Oscar Elias
Biscet walks out of prison, when blogger Yoani Sanchez is free to write
and travel without hindrance, and when a humble Afro-Cuban cane-cutter
like Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez is able to speak his mind without
fear of retribution and imprisonment.
In the end, Cuba's hope for change centers on Havana, not Washington.
Ray Walser is a senior analyst for the Heritage Foundation, 214
Massachusetts Ave. NE, Washington, D.C. 20002.
BillingsGazette.com :: Guest Opinion: Cuba must change before U.S. ends
embargo (12 June 2009)
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2009/06/12/opinion/guest/80-cuba.txt
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