CUBA LIBRE?

September 23, 2010

Forget Costa Rica. Forget the Bahamas. Forget Mexico for sure. It's Cuba we're all longing to see. The land of Cugat and Arnaz, of Hemingway and the Buena Vista Social Club, of vintage cars and rollicking bars. Not to mention baseball.
Fidel's little admission recently made to a reporter from Atlantic magazine — and then quickly retracted — that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" was soon followed by his brother Raúl's announcement that a whopping half a million people on the government payroll would be dismissed by next March, leaving them to find or create their own jobs in a loosened-up private sector. Equally whopping was his estimate that there are yet another half-million state employees who do virtually nothing and will also be released in time.
"We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where you can live without working," President Raúl Castro wryly noted.
Talk about transparency. Such admissions, and such concrete proposals with hard numbers and even a fixed date, you seldom get from any leader, much less any "dictator." Something's happening on that island, and this is just the beginning.
Details of the plan are thus far sketchy — what the hell do you do with 500,000 newly unemployed? — but the outline released by the government last week gives a good hint of it: Some small state-run businesses like light manufacturing will be turned into private "cooperatives" owned and operated by their employees; this will absorb 200,000 workers. The remainder will be expected to find work on their own, mostly as small-scale entrepreneurs like taxi drivers, plumbers, farmers, and, as the document cited, wine-makers and massage therapists. The government apparently will not assist them in starting up these enterprises — no mention has been made of grants, small-business loans, tax breaks, job and management training, and the like.
Nobody outside the inner circle knows for sure what's coming next, but it does seem that the inner circle has a distinct vision for the future. Teams of Cuban economists have visited China and Vietnam; they are learning from the successes and disasters of other Communist countries' transitions to a freer market, and are determined to get things right from the start. Or so it seems.
What the Castro brothers fear the most is losing control of the process, something entirely understandable. I don't think they fear a revolution as much as a takeover by U.S. interests. They would welcome, of course, a relaxation of the trade embargo which has been strangling the country for decades — it's not just Communism that's made the Cuban economy the worst in the Western Hemisphere. But the last thing they want is to be colonized by their neighbor to the north — that's what prompted Fidel's own revolution in the first place.
If any country can make a peaceful transition to a mixed socialism, Cuba can. As the refugees and their descendants in the United States have amply demonstrated, Cubans are hardly lazy — they don't want to "live without working," they want to live in a society where work pays off. Those on the island have been chomping at the bit for an opportunity to make their country over, and in their own way.
They've been under U.S. interdict for so long that they already have a vision of self-sufficiency; their urban agricultural programs, for example, have been studied by American agronomists as models of "sustainability." What the Castro brothers seem to be saying is, with us or against us, we're going to prosper by ourselves.
By all indications, change in Cuba will not be violent but velvet. There will be no overthrow here. Most people in Cuba, I think, have a genuine affection for Fidel — he's not a despised dictator but a beloved father and liberator. If only the Castros can open up the country to private initiative while preserving the best elements of socialism — medical care, education, equitable distribution of wealth — they could turn Cuba into the Sweden of the Caribbean.
It's interesting that after that momentous announcement there was hardly a peep out of the State Department, and as far as I know, President Obama hasn't mentioned it at all. Perhaps they were taken by surprise and are pondering their next move. The best thing the U.S. can do at this point — and not only for Cuba, by the way — is to tear down that wall of trade.
These are exciting times. Maybe I'll be able to visit the Hemingway house and take in a ball game after all.

CUBA AND VATICAN CLOUT

July 15, 2010

One of the many dashed hopes contrasting the Obama campaign with the Obama administration has been that of a fresh and open approach by the United States government toward Cuba.
Two months after his inauguration, President Obama rescinded the Bush-era restrictions on Cuban-Americans' travel to Cuba and on sending dollars to their relatives there, and immediately got this response from Cuban President Raul Castro: "We are willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about."
Such a disarmingly frank overture yielded exactly nothing. Things have remained just the way they've been for half a century, with Cuba strangling from an economic embargo that has only served to stiffen its ideological stance: a little Cold War going on long after the big Cold War had ended.
Last week, the Cuban government announced that 52 of its 167 political prisoners would be released, and on Tuesday the first six of them were reunited with their families and left for exile in Spain.
It was not the United States, stuck in its unbending demand for unilateral social and political change, that arranged the releases but the diplomatic efforts of Spain and, most significantly, of the Roman Catholic Church.
Last month, the Vatican's foreign minister, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, paid an official visit to Cuba to celebrate 75 years of diplomatic relations. While there, he and the Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, along with Spain's foreign minister Miguel Moratinos, met with Cuban President Raul Castro to negotiate a prisoner release.
The effort was successful, partly as a gesture to the Church, which since Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998 has experienced less repression and growing influence. Cardinal Ortega has not softened his criticism of the totalitarian state nor his calls for democratization and social justice, and yet he has simultaneously managed to convince the government to relax its restrictions on religious activities. It is entirely possible that Raul, unlike his brother Fidel, sees the Church not as an enemy but as a pragmatic ally, an institution whose diplomats can go where Cuba's own cannot, to improve relations with other governments including the U.S., and whose influence on the citizenry can facilitate gradual internal change by promoting stability and restraining the advocates of radical overthrow.
Ortega pulls no punches on the other side either, sharply criticizing the Obama administration's apparent abandonment of its promise of dialogue. In a recent interview in the Archdiocese of Havana's magazine, Palabra Nueva, he noted that on the campaign trail Obama had "indicated he would change the style and would seek to talk directly with Cuba. After taking office, however, the new U.S. president has repeated the old model of previous governments."
On both the macro and the micro levels, we see playing out the unique political position of the Catholic Church, at once a religious body and a secular state, a fusion formed over 1500 years ago to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman Empire. Long a world power, in modern times the Vatican lost its armies and almost all of its land, but it continued to play a significant role in international affairs, both through a diplomatic corps in formal parity with other states' and through its social teachings born of that fusion, more pragmatically philosophical than religious. The instrumentality of John Paul II in bringing down the Soviet bloc is perhaps its most recent and potent example.
Unfortunately, much of the Church's political power has been undercut by the internal corruption of the sex-abuse scandals. In contrast to Cuba's, American Catholic bishops — once greatly respected and regularly called upon to testify before Congress on social issues — have now been rendered impotent, partly because of the scandals and partly because of an obsession with abortion that has put them at odds with otherwise valuable political allies and even with some of their own institutions, as the opposition of Catholic hospitals and women's religious orders to the bishops during the recent health-care debate has shown. With the exception of Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and several of his colleagues on immigration reform, the American hierarchy's voice for justice is now largely mute.
That's why it was almost rehabilitative to hear of the political successes of the Church in Cuba. In some areas of the world at least, the Church as state can still play hardball.

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS

April 23, 2009

Dale Carnegie would be proud.
Lao Tzu too.
Barack Obama must have gone down to the Summit of the Americas meeting of Western Hemisphere leaders last week with a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People in his pocket.
Before he left, he rescinded the Bush-era restrictions on Cuban-Americans' travel to Cuba and on sending dollars to their relatives there, and immediately got this response from that old revolutionary, president Raul Castro: "We are willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about."
When he got to the meeting in Trinidad, he gave Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela and the surly spitter of anti-American vitriol, a broad smile and a warm handshake — and Chavez smiled back.
Right out of How to Win Friends, that primordial self-help text that has been showing people how to shake the fruit from other people's trees since 1936. It's just common sense, codified: If you treat people with respect, they're much more likely to do what you'd like them to do.
And heads of state are people too.
Anyone who has read a self-improvement book, from Carnegie to Covey — and who hasn't? — or taken a human-relations course, or been in family counseling, has learned the "habits of highly effective people." Of course, it's one thing to know it and a whole other thing to do it.
Obama seems to be doing it.
How to make people like you? Carnegie's approach is simple: Be genuinely interested in them; smile; be a good listener; talk in terms of their interests.
How to win people to your way of thinking? Show respect for their opinions; if you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically; let them feel the idea is theirs; see things from their point of view; let them save face.
Obama is deftly employing those tactics with Cuba, and they may win him the success that almost 50 years of belligerence from nine other presidents has failed to achieve.
Previous administrations have demanded that Cuba initiate democratic reforms before the U.S. would consider lifting its trade embargo and re-establishing diplomatic relations. But Obama's principle that negotiations, even failed ones, are always worthwhile is allowing Castro himself to bring up the very issues that have irked America from the start, dealing with them, as he said, "as equals, without the smallest shadow cast on our sovereignty and without the slightest violation of the Cuban people's right to self-determination."
In Carnegie's formula: Let them feel the idea is theirs; let them save face.
In an even more unexpected turnabout, Castro went on: "We could be wrong. We admit it. We're human beings."
I have no doubt that this admission arose as a direct result of Obama's own frankness about U.S. policy errors — especially and most recently the disclosure of the tactics of torture inflicted on its own political prisoners: the equality of mutual fault.
Carnegie again: If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
Of course, there are other factors that may lead to the relaxing of tensions — the eclipse of both the doctrinaire Fidel and the equally doctrinaire first generation of Cuban refugees, as well as the utterly un-doctrinaire American businesses chomping at the bit to hit the Cuban marketplace — but it's the approach from the top that's facilitating it.
What a contrast from the G. W. Bush approach, where a smile became a smirk, where other countries were treated not as equals but as inferiors, where America was never wrong, no matter how wrong it was.
Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher who wrote The Way of Taoover two millennia ago, characterized leadership this way: "When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised. The Master doesn't talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, ‘Amazing: We did it all by ourselves!'"
Oh, for a Havana cigar!

(This article originally appeared in the weekly Easy Reader, Hermosa Beach, Calif.)


November 8, 2007

It’s not that anybody was expecting surprises when President Bush mounted the podium at the State Department on October 24 to talk about Cuba।

"In this building," he began, "President John F। Kennedy spoke about the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba’s dictatorship. . . . Today another president comes with hope to discuss a new era for the United States and Cuba."

Actually, after 45 years, it was just more of the same.

Among the wonderful things he named to usher in the new era are a "Freedom Fund" for economic development, admission to the Partnership for Latin American Youth scholarship program, and — "Here’s an interesting idea to help the Cuban people," he said, as if he’d just thought it up — blanketing the country with internet-ready computers to be supplied by non-governmental organizations and faith-based groups. Such benefits will become available, however, "only if the Cuban regime, the ruling class, gets out of the way." Until then, the embargo and travel restrictions will continue, diplomatic relations will remain severed, and no negotiation will take place.


This is a new era?

Perhaps the most convincing proof of the futility of America’s intransigent policy toward Cuba is that Fidel Castro has outlasted nine American presidents and may very well outlast the tenth। Bush calls Castro’s "a failed regime।" If that’s failure, it’s certainly a durable one।

If ever there was a time for a major shift in Cuba policy, it is now। The once-blustering Fidel is sick and has turned the reins over to his younger, more circumspect brother Raul. A practical man, Raul masterminded a now-thriving tourist industry to bring in hard currency after Soviet aid dried up in the 1990’s. He also developed a creative urban-farming plan with a free-market component to lessen dependence on foreign food imports. There are signs that he is favorable toward a Chinese-style economy. Nothing could create the atmosphere for a "velvet revolution" more than normal relations with the U.S.

But Bush will not deal with dictators. Period.

Sound familiar?

There’s no doubt that this administration’s policy, like that of its predecessors, has been shaped by the politically powerful Cuban exile community in Miami. But there is something more radical at work here. The rhetoric of this speech was pure Bush, the Bush who brought you Iraq and may soon bring you Iran. It was Bush the idealist, Bush the ideologue, who was on display.
With his now familiar but no less frightening axis-of-evil hyperbole, he identified Cuba as "a tropical gulag," a place of "terror and trauma," with "horrors still unknown to the rest of the world."

Consistent with his approach toward repressive governments in Iraq, Iran, and Syria among others, and toward the Hamas in Palestine and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, Bush sees no room for compromise or tolerance toward the Castros or their likely Communist successors. "Life will not improve for Cubans under their current system of government," he declared. "It will not improve if we seek accommodation with a new tyranny in the interests of ‘stability.’ . . . The operative word in our future dealings with Cuba is not ‘stability.’ The operative word is ‘freedom.’"

What his own failed international policies have not taught him is that freedom is better nurtured by stability — by negotiation rather than confrontation, by inducement rather than sanction.
In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS last week, the head of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, Mahomed ElBaradei, gave a refreshingly frank and lucid analysis of the present dynamic with Iran: The more the U.S. threatens, he said, the more the Iranian people will hunker down behind their government, no matter how oppressive it is and no matter how attracted so many of them are to Western ideas and lifestyles.
It is the same with Cuba, and then some.

Despite economic hardship, collectivization, and restrictions on free speech, reports suggest that most Cubans hardly consider their island "a tropical gulag." They are grateful for their educational and health-care systems and fiercely proud of their culture. Though they are obviously dissatisfied with the Communist system and eager for change, there is little apparent desire for overthrow. Many, in fact, retain a genuine affection for Fidel and for the ideals, if not the implementation, of his revolution.

What Cubans on the island fear more is attempts by the United States to engineer a "transition" — or even an Iraq-like invasion — when the Castro era ends. They want nothing more than free and open relations with the U.S. — but on their terms, not ours.

As one friend of mine, an organizer in the urban agriculture movement who has often visited Cuba to research its sustainable food production program, told me: "What I hear people saying is, ‘We want change, but we want to do it our way, not America’s way. Bush wants to liberate us, but we want to liberate ourselves.’"

You can’t help hoping that Bush might still surprise the world by emulating his predecessors. Richard Nixon’s initiative toward China — a total turnaround by the consummate Cold Warrior — has become a political paradigm of the triumph of common sense over ideology. While continuing to castigate Communist repression, he unexpectedly offered more amicable relations and freer trade, a move that sparked the systemic changes that have propelled China’s astounding economic growth. Much the same can be said about Ronald Reagan’s overtures to Soviet Premier Gorbachev after years of Evil Empire rhetoric. Both Nixon and Reagan proved to be practical politicians who saw the opportunity to induce change by acting synergistically with systems poised for change.

Bush’s speech indicates that he’s no Nixon nor Reagan. But he’s still got over a year to surprise us.