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# BEAT THE DEVIL.

## Ideas Men

George Bush's incoherent tirades about "values" in the first debate pointed up, almost more fully than one might wish, the fact that he has not got an idea in his head. For the same reason, he found great difficulty in completing a sentence, hopping like an ecret from tussock to tussock of maimed syntax. It reminded me of the debates before the Republican primary in New Hampshire in 1980, when Ronald Reagan, head bursting with the admonitions of the supply-side crowd, showed up Bush then as the airhead he has always been.

Actually RR did a much better job of it in 1980 than Dukakis eight years later, which only serves to underline the fact that the Governor of Massachusetts has almost as few ideas to rub together as Bush and is simultaneously too arrogant and timid to look to his left to find some. If Daniel Bell ever wants to reissue *The End of Ideology* he might consider putting a photograph of Bush and Dukakis on the cover.

I came across an old issue of *The Public Interest* the other day (Bell was head of its publication committee) and was reminded of how prolonged and thorough the ideological preparation for the Reagan presidency had been, when contrasted with Bush's rushed pre-debate briefings or Dukakis' skirmish with theory at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In this particular Spring 1975 edition could be found Jude Wanniski on "The Mundell-Laffer Hypothesis," William Baer on "The Making of Perfect and Beautiful Social Programs," David Stockman on "The Social Pork Barrel" (the essay that got him the job at the Office of Management and Budget) and Edward Jay Epstein on "The Politics of 'Law and Order,'" which both Bush and Dukakis might care to read before they issue their next summons to a war on drugs.

The evident fact that "Reaganism" has ended up as a series of half-phrases dribbling out of the mouth of the Vice President has been troubling many right-wingers. On August 22 the opinion page of *The New York Times* featured an astonishing piece by Norman Cantor, professor of history, sociology and comparative literature at New York University, which openly lamented the failure of the Reaganants to consolidate a fascist intellectual framework for their plan.

Seeking reasons for this failure, Cantor said it all boils down to confusion and lack of guts. No ordering hand had settled upon the Reaganite bestiary, which Cantor conveniently lists as "the Friedmanite market economists; neo-Darwinian sociologists; neo-1920s modernists; traditional believers in inequality and hierarchy (who never found an effective theoretical spokesman); traditional Roman Catholics; evangelical and Pentecostal (born-again) Protestants; Zionists; exponents of Victorian 'liberal' humanism, and the Bork-Meese constitutional fundamentalists.'"

In Cantor's estimation—though he affects a tentative conclusion—these were all wandering sheep, vainly seeking

the sheltering fold of a robustly fascist philosophy. "It is conceivable," he writes, "that a theory could have been developed to bind all these intellectual traditions in a cohesive doctrine. For example, in interwar European Fascism, there were ingredients for such a comprehensive rightist doctrine, especially as propounded by thinkers on the French right like Charles Maurras."

Now Maurras was notoriously a rabid anti-Semite. Cantor adds, "But the discreting of intellectual Fascism by World War II, Vichy, Mussolini, Nazism and the Holocaust meant that recourse to this intellectual reservoir was never attempted. And in the early post-World War II years, there was some effort to build upon T. S. Eliot's amorphous brand of English rightism, but nothing important came of it." The eerie thing about these tranquil sentences is that Cantor is so busy repining the inhibiting effects of the jackboot and the gas chamber on the good name of European Fascism that he seems to forget that these same jackboots and gas chambers are in part a consequence of the ideas of people like Maurras.

After a passing kick at John Brademas, president of his own university, Cantor announces that the cultural right has suffered its greatest blow since the "Progressives" of the Wilsonian era imported "English welfare ('new') liberalism into the unique American ambience."

Nostalgia for fascist thought is not confined to Cantor. Carl Schmitt is once again being given a turn around the paddock by social scientists, just as he was in the early days of the cold war. Schmitt, like Georg Lukács a student of Max Weber, was a paid-up Nazi—director of the University Teachers' Group of the National Socialist League of German Jurists—whose core idea was the somewhat Nietzschean notion that states are organized not for the mutual benefit of all but as enterprises directed against an enemy, said enemy being aliens, Jews, Bolsheviks and so forth.

This was the philosophy of "decisionism," and more recently Schmitt has been finding some fresh support, *inter alia* among the pages of a special issue of *Telos* in the summer of 1987. (For a highly amusing, if indulgent, account of the preeginations of this journal, I recommend Paul Breines's essay in its twentieth anniversary issue.) From Schmitt we can then travel to the German historians' debate, discussed by Roderick Stackelberg in the Winter 1988 issue of *Radical History Review*.

With this debate, launched by Ernst Nolte in the summer of 1986 in the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*, we are back in Bitburg country. The assumption offered by Nolte and others is that Nazism, so far from being an expression of German civilization and culture, was actually an import from Russia, which, in both its Czarist and Soviet incarnation, furnished the anti-Semitic and totalitarian strains, inflecting the pure spring of German thought. Andreas Hillgruber takes this proposition to its logical conclusion, arguing that German soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front were defending Europe against the Bolshie hordes.

This, as I observed at the time in this column, was the true

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meaning of Reagan's mission to Bitburg, where he stood amid the S.S. men's bones in silent homage to the hour when Americans and Germans united against the rages of the Red Army. (Since then, under Gorby's tutelage RR has become a Leninist, so he probably looks back on the Bitburg visit with some shame.)

So now, in the interlude between the crisis and the catastrophe, we are being offered the "no ideology" of Dukakis and Bush. It cannot be long before the intellectual crusade yearned for by Cantor will once again be promulgated, more vigorously than ever, in the intellectual journals. The auguries are already there to be seen.

## Regrets to Boris

Boris Kagaritsky, whom I interviewed in Moscow last year [see "Beat the Devil," November 28, December 5 and December 12, 1987], has been given an apology by *Komsomolskaya Pravda*, which published an enormous attack on him by Gubenko and Piskarev this January 31.

At that time Kagaritsky, one of the leaders of the unofficial left opposition, was accused of attempts at "destabilization" and of being a self-aggrandizing ignoramus without even a degree. Unwontedly, *Komsomolskaya Pravda* announced in its edition of August 26 that Boris does have the benefits of higher education, has been a longtime student of sociology and is a member of the Soviet Sociological Association. The newspaper says it will not again be requiring the services of comrades Gubenko and Piskarev. Two months earlier Kagaritsky had won a libel suit against *Komsomolskaya Pravda*, thus doing better than Bertolt Ollman, who failed in a U.S. court in his libel suit for similar intellectual and political defamation at the hands of columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Background Reports" for September 2, from which I extract this information, adds its view that since such articles as the one under the names of Gubenko and Piskarev are written by the K.G.B., "it seems, therefore, that Kagaritsky won his action against the KGB rather than against the Komsomol paper. It is also possible that members of the KGB do not agree whether Kagaritsky and his colleagues should be considered dissidents or Communists."

## Strength in Numbers

One of the topics mercifully untouched during the Bush/Dukakis debate was Israel and the treatment of Palestinians. I say "mercifully" since any question on that area of the world would have prompted the usual degrading efforts by the two candidates to outmatch each other in groveling expressions of fealty to that country's government. Just as Henry Kissinger urged in his infamous memorandum, this government has now the satisfaction of knowing that the interest of the U.S. mainstream press in giving any particular prominence to the horrifying brutality meted out in the occupied territories has now waned. Palestinians who three months ago died in headlines now expire in five-line news

briefs. During Rosh Hashana Israel released seventy-seven Palestinian prisoners as a "good will" gesture, with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin announcing at the same time in an interview in the *Jerusalem Post* that 18,000 Palestinians have been arrested since the uprising began last December 9, and 5,000 are still being held.

A reader, sending me a clip of Rabin's announcement from the *San Francisco Chronicle* for September 13, supplied another clip from the paper's edition for September 14, 1986, saying that the South African apartheid regime had detained some 30,000 people since the state of emergency was declared in June 1986. He notes that in South Africa one in every 600 blacks has been jailed and in Israel one in every eighty-three Palestinians, giving a proportion of seven times as many Palestinians in comparison. At least it shows decisionism is alive and well somewhere.

## The Laws of Nature

Since this column has touched on intellectual history, I should include a letter taking me to task for intellectual vulgarity. It's from Ruth Hubbard, professor of biology at Harvard.

Dear Alexander Cockburn,

I am astonished that as stute a social critic as you can write the sentence "At least in the sciences nature sets the terms." (*Nation*, March 26, p. 424.) I guess it shows that the ideology of science escapes scrutiny even from radical critics, if they have not thought much about the ways scientists construct nature. Let me say at once that I am not trying to lead you back to eighteenth century idealism. I am a materialist and firmly believe that nature exists out there, not just "the terms." The nature that the sciences—which means, scientists—tell us about is a nature scientists invent so as to provide the kinds of explanations of it, and use of it, that society requires. Societal intentions toward nature are what shape scientific descriptions of it, the descriptions, if you will, are intention-laden.

Just think! The nature science (meaning scientists) explores is not only not random, it "obey laws"—laws of nature, that is. It operates with linear chains of causality. And it is a machine that can be taken apart and whose parts can be broken down into ever smaller parts without losing anything. Galaxies are made of the same ultimate particles as you and I and the ways the particles come together are not what differentiates us from them. If you are interested and want to read about this, one place to start is with Carolyn Merchant's *The Death of Nature*, which describes how nature became a machine. Another place is version II of Joseph Needham's *Science and Civilisation of China*, especially his essay called "Human Law and the Laws of Nature," which as I recall is reprinted there as well as in a number of his collections of essays, such as *The Grand Titration*.

What I am getting at is that science and the conceptualizations of nature that scientists explain by means of it are no less cultural products and social productions than are economics, political science and philosophy.

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BELTWAY BANDITS.

DAVID CORN AND JEFFERSON MORLEY

■ F.O.I.A. Shock

The increasing use of computers by Federal agencies poses a threat to open government—in particular, the Freedom of Information Act. A new study conducted by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment notes, “New electronic technologies may serve as barriers to, rather than facilitators of, information disclosure.” For example, electronic mail, like the PROF computer message system used by Oliver North, “is significant for FOIA in that it allows data to be created, transmitted . . . and disposed of electronically, without paper printouts,” the report says. The O.T.A. notes that an increasing number of important agency actions result from electronic mail messages. But these records may never exist physically and currently can be withheld from public view. “If Congress wishes to maintain the integrity of FOIA in an electronic environment,” the O.T.A. warns, “the goals of the statute need to be reassessed and statutory amendment pursued.”

■ Spooks for Bush

Back in 1984 a senior aide on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence let loose some information that should be reverberating today but isn't. In an affidavit to Congressional investigators probing the 1980 theft of Jimmy Carter's debate briefing book, the aide, Angelo Codevilla, said that "active duty agents of the Central Intelligence Agency worked for the George Bush primary campaign" in 1980. "I cannot now remember some of these persons," he said, "and am not at liberty to identify others by names or positions because to do so would compromise their cover." C.I.A. agents, like other Federal employees, are enjoined by the Hatch Act from engaging in certain campaign activity.

Codevilla, now resident at the Hoover Institution, later revised his affidavit, striking much of that last statement and noting instead that he was "not at liberty to discuss these rumors." The obvious question: If the spooks turned out for Bush in 1980, what are they doing for him in 1988?

■ Environmentalism Starts at the Border

Environmentalists and right-wing ideologues have something in common: a profound distaste for the World Bank. Ecologists have long protested the environmental effects of the bank's programs, and rightists have complained about itsfratricide with Communist or socialist nations. But lately the right-wingers have adopted the environmentalists' argument as a cover for their own agenda. Consider the maneuverers of Senator Steve Symms, a leading conservative ideologue and longtime opponent of the bank. He rated a zero on the League of Conservation Voters scorecard for 1987 and 1988. He has opposed strong enforcement of the Clean Water Act and strict standards for pesticides. In 1985 he called for a 24 percent cut in the Superfund. Yet Symms has been championing legislation that would force the World Bank to conduct environmental impact studies for the projects it underwrites.

Environmentalists support such a proposal, since the World Bank has financed projects that contribute to vast deforestation, a suspected cause of the greenhouse effect. Currently, they are lobbying against a pending $500 million loan to Brazil's energy sector for operations (such as a hydroelectric dam) that, according to a letter signed by several environmental groups, "are causing or will cause enormous destruction of natural resources, threats to the integrity and survival of indigenous groups . . . and serious social conflicts."

As for Symms, one environmentalist says, "We don't believe he is a born-again environmentalist."

■ High Kill Ratio

Here's an honor roll of sorts: J. Alex McMillan, Curt Weldon, Dean Gallo and Michael Bilirakis. They are members of Congress, each a Republican, who received more than $10,000 in support from the National Rifle Association between 1983 and 1988 yet voted for a bill, opposed by the N.R.A., requiring gun buyers to wait seven days before obtaining their weapon. The forty-three other House members who topped the $10,000 mark all voted in September to torpedo the legislation, which lost 228 to 182.

The four lawmakers stand as stark exceptions since N.R.A. beneficiaries. According to a common cause analysis, of the $1,351,687 the N.R.A. contributed to House members in the past five years, $1,167,908—that's 81 percent—went to legislators who voted against the waiting period. Finding itself opposed on gun control recently by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and other law enforcement groups, the N.R.A. has lately been under siege. Still, their target skills remain formidable.

■ Rolling Back Steele

Two columns ago we reported that Lieut. Col. James Steele, a significant player in Oliver North's *contra* resupply scheme, had been selected for promotion to brigadier general. Then came Senator Tom Harkin. On September 22, Harkin sent a letter to Senator Sam Nunn, chair of the Armed Services Committee, asking that the committee, which must approve promotions from a list of candidates the Army supplies, delay action on Steele until he testifies about his involvement in the private *contra* support network. A Senate aide reports that the committee is expected to place a hold on Steele's advancement.

■ The Early Days of the Drug War

From *The New York Times*, September 23, 1973:

At the opening of a training course for 42 Panamanian narco-tics agents conducted by instructors from the United States, Lieut. Col. Manuel Noriega of Panama's National Guard emphasized that any indifference [to drug smuggling] in Panama was over and pledged a "war to the death" against traffickers.

U.S. officials are publicizing their satisfaction at the latest events in Panama.

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■ CUBA: THE REVOLUTION

Toward Victory
Always, But When?

GEORGE BLACK

Havana

Santiago de Cuba, a sweltering coastal city with a proudly rebellious history, has seen a great number of strange sights in these past thirty years. But none so incongruous to *santiagueros* as the ban-ners that huing in their streets this year to celebrate July 26, the thirty-fifth anniversary of Fidel Castro's failed attack on the Moncada barracks, which marked the formal starting point of the Cuban revolution. The huge signs were printed in the unfamiliar, swirling characters of the Khmer lan-guage, with a translation in Spanish underneath: "We sup-port the process of national reconciliation in Kampuchea."

Heng Samrin, head of the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh, had arrived in Havana a couple of days earlier to big headlines. As metaphor, the televised shots of his wel-come at José Martí International Airport were irresistible: the small white-shotted figure being folded into a bear-hug by the bulky form of Castro, dressed in his invariable olive-green fatigues.

By contrast, the arrival the previous week of a new Soviet Ambassador, Yuri Petrov, a fast-rising, 49-year-old protégé of Mikhail Gorbachev, had been given just a couple of per-functory paragraphs in the official Communist Party news-paper, *Granma*. This appeared to be more than a routine ap-pointment: Petrov's predecessor had been here for little more than two years. Before this posting, Petrov had been First Secretary of the Communist Party in the important region of Sverdlovsk, a job that he inherited from Boris Yeltsin in 1985. The new Ambassador stayed in Havana only a week after presenting his credentials, then flew back to Moscow for a Central Committee plenum. I asked Gennadi Sizov, first secretary at the Soviet Embassy, if his boss had taken the opportunity to meet with Heng Samrin during his stay. Sizov shrugged, "Not as far as I know."

Fidel's July 26 speech, which functions as an annual State of the Nation address, confirmed the sense of tension symbolized by these two arrivals. With his revolution almost thirty years old, Castro faces a fearful symmetry of pres-ures. On one side is the enduring animosity of the United States, which has now appropriated the language of human rights as its latest stick with which to reform Cuba. On the other lies the example of Gorbachev's reforms, whose emu-lation would be cited by Washington as proof of the historic sin-de-sac of Cuban socialism. Fidel used his speech in Santiago to navigate between these problems, issuing a ringing assertion of Cuban independence in a world where the sov-erignty of small countries seems an ever-more quixotic

enterprise. Soon, he told a group of diplomats in jest, they'll be calling us the "Albania of the Caribbean."

There were only a few foreign journalists on hand for the Santiago celebrations, and Cuban officials seemed to be turning down all requests for interviews. Instead, on the morning of Fidel's speech, a Foreign Ministry aide hastened to our hotel to tell us that two "very special" sessions had been arranged. One was with comrade Najmuddin Kawianji, an alternate member of the Poliburo of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The other was with Nicaragua's Minister of the Interior, Tomás Borge.

I remarked to Borge that the Santiago celebration was beginning to look like a mini-summit of Third World revolutionaries. He made a noncommittal response. But when the topic shifted to Nicaraguan-Cuban relations, Borge grew more animated: "If we had to measure a country's solidarität, there would be no measuring tape big enough for Cuba."

Castro's speech early that evening dispelled any lingering doubts about the significance of the occasion: If the fashion for superpower cooperation to resolve "regional conflicts" in Central America, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia meant that Gorbachev intended to abandon the cause of Third World revolution, Cuba was ready to stand by the revolutionaries. It seemed a reprise, though admittedly in a minor key, of the big Cuban themes of the mid-1960s, the days of Che Guevara, the Tricontinental Conference and the Organization of Latin American Solidarity, when Fidel vowed that "every revolutionary movement in every corner of the earth can count on the support of Cuban fighters."

In a minor key, it should be repeated. Instead of arming rebels in Bolivia or Venezuela, as it did then, Cuba now reaches out to established governments. The island was once seen as the *enfant terrible* of world revolution; today it is a welcome guest in polite diplomatic society. Castro an honored elder statesman. Cuba's overseas commitments are numerous but selective; other than in Angola, where Cuban troops have driven South Africa to the bargaining table, doctors and teachers are more in evidence than soldiers.

But Cuban suspicions of the Soviet Union have deep roots, and the desire to distance Havana from Moscow may be stronger now than at any time since Leonid Brezhnev squelched the Prague Spring and Fidel went on television to deliver his painful endorsement. Roles are now to some extent reversed, and the Cuban Communist Party has a number of reasons for feeling nervous about *perestroika*. If Gorbachev's reforms at home are predicated on scaling down foreign entanglements, where does that leave the sacred principle of "proletarian internationalism"? After all, in the wake of Cuba's pitiful history (first as a Spanish colony, then as an American neocolony, the whorehouse of the Caribbean), it is that internationalism, underwritten by Soviet largesse, that has been for Castro the very embodiment of the country's national identity.

That's not all. Gorbachev's economic policies—especially the new attention of Soviet enterprises to the bottom line—

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are likely to pose new questions about Cuba's efficiency as a trading partner and aid recipient. Also, the web of exchanges, agreements and protocols woven over almost thirty years means that Cuba can hardly insulate itself from the cultural impact of *perestroika* and *glasnost*, a point I shall return to.

Finally, after decades of dealing with a monolithic ally, the Cubans are now having to learn how to read mixed signals from a Soviet leadership that is still struggling to resolve fundamental policy debates. The problem was highlighted at the end of July, when Yegor Ligachev (whose traditional view of the "class character of international relations" must be more congenial to the Cubans) attacked the course of Soviet policy abroad under Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

Repeatedly, Cuban officials told me of the difficulties of interpreting Gorbachev's foreign policy. Armando Enralgo, head of the Cuban Communist Party's African Studies Center, complained that a delegation of Cuban academics attending a Moscow conference on Southern Africa last year had found their Soviet colleagues dimly ill-prepared. He bemoaned the low priority that the Russians appeared to be placing on Angola, insisting that the "Cub Africa" agenda was both different and more principled. A scholar from another party think tank was openly hostile to Moscow's "retreat from internationalism." He too was bothered by the uncertainties of this transitional time in Soviet politics. "We don't know who we're dealing with," he exclaimed in frustration. "They don't speak with a single voice." (The Cuban party has an almost visceral dislike of disunity; the fear of the vulnerability that it could lead to has much to do with the Cuban aversion to dissent.)

In recent months, Castro himself has taken a series of thinly concealed swipes at the Soviet Union. He told NBC's Maria Shriver in February that Cuba had decided not to attend the Seoul Olympics in solidarity with North Korea. In contrast to other socialist countries, "We do not exchange our principles for a few gold medals." Now, in his Santiago anniversary speech, flanked by leaders from Kampuchea and Nicaragua, he gave a detailed report of Cuba's military successes in southern Angola that was laced with stinging, if indirect, criticisms of the Soviet Union. A series of tactical blunders had made it necessary earlier this year for Cuba to relieve Angolan elite forces pinned down by the South Africans at Cuito Cuanavale, Castro explained, and "I will merely limit myself to saying that Cuba bore no responsibility for those errors." If Cuba was blameless, clearly the Soviet Union was the guilty party. He added that the decisive factor in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale had been not the Russian tanks and the MIG-23 strike aircraft but "the human factor."

## No More Garlic Millionaires

Carving out an independent model of revolutionary internationalism is only part of the story. The main thrust of Castro's three-and-a-quarter-hour speech on July 26 was his most categorical rejection to date of the idea that Cuba might adopt a domestic version of *perestroika* (although the

word itself was never uttered, and indeed, as far as I could tell from reading a large number of Castro's recent speeches, may never have passed his lips). "We shall always obstinately refuse to be servile copiers of other people's recipes," he declared, assailing "those who believe that we should do straight away what is being done elsewhere" as "people who lack self-confidence." He proceeded to argue that Cuba's problems bore no relation to those of the other socialist countries: "If someone is suffering from corns, why look for a remedy for toothache?" Cuba's revolution had from the outset defied conventional wisdom and the Marxist textbook: "Fue un camino diferente," Fidel insisted—our path was different—the defiant final syllable of the word DI-FE-REN-TE echoing around the plaza from the huge banks of speakers.

If not *perestroika*, what? The Cuban process of reform, first outlined at the Third Party Congress in 1986, is known as rectification—or to give it its proper title, the “rectification of errors and negative tendencies.” It is a process full of ironies. After the failure to achieve an impossible ten-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970, Cuba turned its back on utopianism and buckled down to the orthodox Soviet model of economic planning. Toward the end of the 1970s the country began to experiment with some very limited economic liberalization, especially in the celebrated free peasant markets, where farmers—while still obliged to fulfill production quotas for sale to the state at regulated prices—were allowed to sell their surplus for whatever the market would bear.

In February 1985, just before Gorbachev came to power, Robert MacNeil of PBS's *MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour* asked if it was fair to describe these steps as creeping capitalism. Fidel answered that they were a response to the "idealist mistakes... of wanting to jump over historic stages in trying to get to a more egalitarian society." When the error became apparent, he said, "We rectified this." In a sense, then, the process that began in 1986 is a rectification of the rectification. It is a development replete with villains—some socialist, others capitalist in origin.

The former were the technocrats, those Soviet-influenced planners who rose to prominence during the 1970s, whose demise was signaled by the ignominious sacking in 1985 of Humberto Pérez, head of the central planning agency Juceplan. Castro now derides the technocrats as "tribal witch doctors." He told Havana party officials last December that they had created nothing but "impotence, a parody of socialism." This was an allusion mainly to the quota system that Cuba had learned from the Russians—basic production targets set absurdly low, productivity bonuses run wild, quality sacrificed in favor of the blind pursuit of gross output.

The latter were the petty capitalists set loose by the market reforms. The peasant markets, predictably enough, gave birth to a new breed of middlemen, and while the markets opened the way to hoarding, speculation and price gouging. Similarly, those individuals who were encouraged to compensate for the state's inefficiency in distributing goods and providing services—private truckers, plumbers, elec-

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tricians—found themselves prosperous overnight. Almost as quickly they became an object of resentment. “Marginal and quasi-lumpen sectors got rich without this bearing any relation to the contribution of their labor to the collectivity,” complained Roberto González of Cuba’s High Institute of International Relations.

At bottom, Castro’s anger at the technocrats and the petty capitalists had the same cause: Both groups embodied the idea of money and “mechanisms”—financial, material and technical—as the antidote to the torpor of a centralized economy. Fidel’s tolerance of things material is exceedingly limited. The archetypal villain of the reforms, depicted as a virtual Cuban Ivan Boesky, was the peasant who earned $50,000 by selling garlic, an article in critically short supply. Reading Castro’s speeches on rectification, it was hard not to think of the Chinese celebration of the 10,000-yuan peasant of the post-Mao reforms, of Zhao Ziyang’s freewheeling approach to individual wealth and income differentials; and inconceivable to think of Fidel telling anyone that “to get rich is glorious.”

The backlash against Cuba's modest market experiment has tended to invoke revolutionary morality and ideology rather than economic theory. The peasant markets were “shameful,” Castro told an assembly of cooperatives in June; the working class had to be rescued before it developed a “mercenary mentality.” Worst sin of all, the revolutionary principles of self-sacrifice and communal effort were visibly eroding. At a Havana party meeting last December, Fidel singled out one electronics factory where, “out of 1,900 men, only one volunteered to cut cane in the sugar harvest. . . .” Voluntary work had languished, it had become something of a pastime, a formality.”

## How Long Is Always?

But where does the compass settle? If the 1960s are viewed in retrospect as leading to an ortho of idealism, the 1970s as a descent into mindless technocracy and Brezhnevian sleaze, and the early 1980s as a cautionary tale of the dangers of flirting with capitalism, what is to be done? Ostensibly, Fidel’s goal is a synthesis, a search for the ever-elusive balance between moral and material incentives to unlue an inefficient economy. In his vocabulary these days, it’s sometimes possible to catch a distinct whiff of that old Maoist standby, “Politics in Command.” Yet he has also said—and in so many words—that there will be no Cuban equivalent of the Cultural Revolution.

As so often before, there is change of course depends heavily on Fidel's own considerable powers of exhortation. The most visible result, for all the caveats about past utopianism, is a return to many of the symbols and first principles of the 1960s. Since the twentieth anniversary of his death last October, Che Guevara has been the object of a resurrection that verges on sainthood. But is Che intended only as a salutary reminder of lapsed moral qualities, summed up in that elusive concept, the *hombre nuevo*? Or is the renewed posthumous cult of the heroic *guerrillero* meant to provide a blueprint for actual economic policies relevant to the 1990s? Many Cuban intellectuals were

privately agast at the special prize awarded in 1987 to a turgid volume that depicted Guevara as a distinguished economic theorist.

As an example of the rectification campaign in practice, Cubans invariably point to the revival of the “micro-brigades,” the thousands of volunteer construction gangs who have built apartment houses and day care centers, turning Havana, as a friend of mine put it, into “a scene from a Bruegel painting.” But beyond some bureaucratic belt-tightening and a clampdown on petty corruption, it was harder to grasp what changes rectification has brought to the productive sector of the economy.

Today's slogans tend to dwell on the twin themes of austerity and voluntarism—in part, it appears, to stiffen workers' backbones against the wage cuts that became inevitable once the discredited system of quotas and unearned bonuses had been abandoned. Along the road from Havana toward the province of Pinar del Río, through the unbroken, flat green expanse of cane fields, the billboards that line the highway exhort: “The first duty of the revolutionary is work”; “To be a Communist means sacrifice”; “The working day is sacred.” The recurrent words are *deber* and *cumplir*—duty and fulfillment. And then there is the most venerable of all Cuban slogans, as inscrutable in its way as a Zen koan: *Hasta la Victoria Siempre* (“Toward Victory Always”). But what constitutes victory? And how long is always?

For Fidel, at least, victory is evidently as remote as ever. He gives the impression these days of fighting a frustrating uphill battle against workers who would rather be consumers than *hombres nuevos*. Revolutionary values are conspicuously absent in the workplace, he told the National Assembly of People's Power in July: “We have a greater tendency toward anarchy, chaos and indiscipline.” In his Santiago anniversary speech a few days later, he asked how Cuba was supposed to achieve economic development “working seven, six, five hours a day.” Look at the success story of the Japanese, he went on, causing a minor stir in the crowd. They get by on six days' paid vacation.

But it's been almost thirty years now, I said, toward the end of a long conversation with a high-ranking Soviet bloc diplomat. How long does one have to wait for change? He fixed me with one of those long, amused diplomatic looks that say, what I am about to tell you is a parable; it's up to you to work out how many layers it contains. “Listen,” he told me. “It's like the Soviet Union and Stalin. When Stalin died, everyone in the Soviet Union wept.” He paused for me to digest this. “They fought the great patriotic war for Stalin. And now . . .” Leaving that thought hanging, he shrugged: “Just read Konstantin Simonov's piece that came out recently in three parts in *Znamya*, and you'll see what I mean.” (Simonov, a five-time Stalin Prize winner for his novels, plays and poetry, wrote the extended essay shortly before his death in 1980. It concerns the guilt and shame of Russians whose silence made them complicit in the crimes of Stalinism.)

Whatever the intended parallels between Castro and

Stalin, it would be unjust to reproach Fidel for lacking the capacity for self-criticism; he is, as Cubans often say with irony, the revolution's only dissident and its only investigative reporter. He has accepted responsibility for the planning failures of the 1970s and the “hucksterish mentality” bred by market reforms in the early 1980s. But self-criticism goes only so far. Then as now, no one beyond a narrow circle of trusted advisers was willing, or able, to question the wisdom of policies before they were adopted. Acclaim still too often replaces debate, and “dialogue with the crowd is not the best form of democracy,” as René Dumont, an early adviser to Fidel, put it back in 1963.

## The Problem of Dissent

Why does the Cuban revolution continue to show such distaste for dissenting voices? Discussing that point with a number of journalists, intellectuals and party officials in Havana, it suddenly struck me that when they used the noun *disensión*, it was usually coupled with the verb *sembrar* (“to sow”). In Cuba, dissent has customarily been viewed not as something that arises spontaneously—dialectically, one is tempted to say—but as something that is introduced, with hostile intent, from outside. Gorbachev's conviction that “criticism is a bitter medicine, but the ills that plague society make it a necessity” must have the dangerous ring of heresy to many Cubans.

Anyone hoping for signals of an opening to dissenters in Castro's July 26 speech would have been disappointed. “We must safeguard the ideological purity of the revolution,” he declared. “Cuba will never adopt the methods, philosophies or idiosyncrasies of capitalism.” One-party rule was a greater need than ever, and no one should harbor illusions of creating “pocket-size parties to organize the counter-revolutionaries, the pro-Yankees, the bourgeoisie. . . . We have no need of capitalist political formulas. They are complete garbage.” The reason was as straightforward, and as depressingly vindicated by history, as it had always been: “We must never forget where we are located. We are not in the Black Sea, but in the Caribbean Sea. Not ninety

miles from Odessa but ninety miles from Miami.”

Fidel went on, “I have nothing but contempt for the faint-hearted, the feeble-minded, the weak-willed who fail to understand these realities.” Yet the harsh language provoked a kind of dissonance in this listener, for in a number of small ways modest spaces do seem to have opened up for dissent and criticism, like the pockets of air that form in the roof of a cave when a fierce underground stream subsides. If one starting point for any discussion of Cuba today is *perestroika*, another is the independent human rights advocates who have begun to operate in recent years.

A fresh chapter in U.S.-Cuban hostilities opened in 1982. It actually began in Paris, the first port of call for Armando Valladares, released from jail after twenty-two years thanks to the intercession of French President François Mitterrand. Sought around by Jean-François Revel and the good people of Resistance International, Valladares was accorded the same kind of rapturous welcome as Alexander Solzhenitsyn a decade earlier. And just as Solzhenitsyn's exposure of the gulag had given birth to that vengeful coterie of pseudo-intellectuals who came to be known as the *nouveaux philosophes*, so Valladares's account of his prison years offered a new twist on the God that Failed. The phrase “tropical gulag” entered the lexicon; it was now possible to vilify the Third World as well as Marxism. From Mitterrand's France to Reagan's America. By 1986 Armando Valladares was the author of a best-selling memoir, *Against All Hope*, a year later, and without even a rudimentary command of English, he was made an American citizen, in time to head the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

“The revolution has made many errors, terrible errors,” exclaimed the poet Eliseo Diego as we sat in his study one evening discussing human rights in Cuba. “But *this*,” he went on, referring to the U.S. State Department's recent halucinatory report on the subject, “this reads like. . . .” He groped for the right literary comparison before settling on Thomas de Quincey's *Confessions of an English Opium Eater*. Although less incendiary testimonies than that of

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Valladares make it clear that jail conditions, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, were indeed harsh, the Administration's blind emphasis on the prison issue, and its reliance on wild, unfounded or outdated accounts of torture and execution, has served to obscure the real significance of the emergence of a human rights movement in Cuba.

Just as the necessary subtext of the Solzhenitsyn episode was the failure of the left to confront the reality of Stalinism, so, behind the smoke and mirrors of the Valladares spectacle, lay some unavoidable questions about the suppression of dissent in Cuba. The appearance of what officials at the U.S. interest section in Havana like to call a "tiny refusenik community" has at least three interesting aspects. Many of the activists, men like Ricardo Bofill and Elizondo Sánchez, claim to have roots in the dissident Marxist currents of the 1960s, the silencing of which at that time defined the limits of what Castro regarded as permissible deviation. In a more immediate sense, the government in practice has shown greater flexibility toward the unofficial human rights movement than the official rhetoric might suggest. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, the activists raise questions about how far dissent can be taken: Are they just a group of former prisoners bound for Miami? Or is their goal to win a more lasting margin of tolerance for debate?

## A Conversation With Bofill

A great deal has been written about the reliability of these men's testimony. The credibility of Bofill, president of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, was picked to shreds in a superb piece of reporting last February by Sam Dillon of *The Miami Herald*. Father Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the energetic Secretary General of the Cuban Bishops' Conference, says that he applies three basic criteria to any human rights monitoring group: "First, they must be people who are prepared to remain in the country. Second, they must be people with an unimpeachable background. Third, they must be people of enormous psychological fortitude, given the very strong pressures to which they will be submitted. From the outset, the [Bofill] group seems to me to have fallen short on all three counts."

I spent an afternoon with Bofill in his cramped apartment in the industrial suburb of Guanabacoa. He sat in a rocking chair between a painted plaster statue of the Virgen del Cobre, Cuba's patroness, and a Chilean poster condemning the death penalty. Bofill does not so much grant interviews as conduct monologues. He rocked and talked; I listened. Much of his story was riddled with inconsistencies, and yet other parts rang truer, especially where his political and intellectual history was concerned.

Bofill claimed that his troubles began as a result of the influences to which he was exposed in Europe in the mid-1960s. "I brought back to Cuba G.D.H. Cole's seven-volume history of British socialist thought. That was when the problems started: I was told in the university that it was a counterrevolutionary work. Then there was Georg Lukács, who they said was nothing but a counterrevolutionary crackpot." In Paris, Bofill claimed, he met the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel—"such a gentleman, so humble"—as the result

of an introduction from Louis Althusser. (A note of doubt crept in here: Althusser and Mandel could hardly have been on speaking terms at the time.) "Mandel introduced me to the work of Trotsky, above all through the trilogy of Isaac Deutscher, which was unknown in Cuba. I came back with the idea of starting a study circle to read these works, which were not available here. But that led me to the Tarpeian rock, where traitors end up."

The years 1965-68 were the harshest for dissidents in Cuba. This was the time of the university purges and the notorious forced labor camps for thousands of gays and other "antisocial elements," chronicled in the wrenching film by Nestor Almendros, *Improper Conduct*. Bofill was first jailed in the 1967 crackdown on what Fidel called the "Microfaction," a supposed Stalinist grouping that saw the revolutionary government as a "leftist adventurist deviation." In fact, it is unlikely that there was a single pro-Soviet plot, as the trials alleged, but rather a number of dispersed pockets of dissent. But the notion of a grand conspiracy made it convenient to sweep smaller fish, malcontents like Bofill into the same net.

This is not a digression into ancient history. The trial of the Microfaction is important here because it lastingly fixed the boundaries of dissent. As Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote in *Socialism in Cuba* in 1969, those involved in the Microfaction were nobodies. Its leader, an old-guard Communist named Anibal Escalante, was one of the most unpopular men in Cuba. Why then was so much made of the trials? Huberman and Sweezy concluded:

> The only answer that makes sense is that they were used as... a warning... to any Cubans who might feel disposed to take positions or express views which could, rightly or wrongly, be construed as aligning them with the microfaction. And even a cursory reading of the documents leaves little doubt that this could, potentially, include anyone critical of government policies or leaders.

These days, Bofill no longer regards himself as a leftist. In his pantheon of heroes, Cole, Althusser and Deutscher have given way to Aron, Dahrendorf and John Stuart Mill. Bofill aims his vitriol at enemies and one-time allies alike: The Castro government he describes as "Stalinism of the Old School." Those he regarded as his possible North American champions—Americas Watch, *The Herald's* Sam Dillon—have deserted him, dupes of Cuban government propaganda. Searching for the right image to express their treachery, he waved a book under my nose. It was *Mission to Moscow*, the 1939 memoir of Joseph Davies, Franklin Roosevelt's Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who turned a blind eye to the Stalinist show trials. But Bofill's harshestinez, who now heads the separate Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. He accuses Sánchez of being a police spy, or, that most characteristic word of the Cuban *exilio-un traíder*. A traitor. But what would Sánchez's motives be, I asked. To sow dissent, he replied. "Sembrar disensión": that phrase again.

Yet in April, when the Cuban government issued a special

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supplement to *Granma* to vilify Bofill, it included a translation of Dillon's article. Not a word was cut. Via Dillon, Cubans read about the execution by firing squad of 5,000 prisoners in the 1960s; about the forced labor camps; about the arrest in 1983 of five trade unionists who, according to Dillon, had tried to start a Solidarity-influenced movement for workers' rights. And they read, in the official party organ, the complaints of a U.S. journalist about Cuba's resistance to *glasnost*. These may be arcane, coded ways for the government to recognize dissent. Nevertheless, they are real.

Another example. Just four days before Fidel's speech in Santiago, Bofill had pressed on me a typed communiqué announcing the formation of a "Pro-Human Rights Party." Although it described the new party in dangerous phrases like "a vehicle for spontaneous social mobilization," it was basically a glorified petition campaign, taking advantage of a law that allows any request bearing 10,000 signatures to be submitted as draft legislation to the National Assembly of People's Power. Bofill's proposal was to incorporate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the preamble to the Cuban Constitution.

This was no doubt what Fidel had in mind when he lashed out at "pocket-size parties." The language was characteristically harsh: Castro tends to write off the independent human rights groups with phrases like "counterrevolutionary micro-groupuscules." But dismissive rhetoric is a blunt weapon, perhaps deliberately so, and again it suggests a real shift in the political climate. By way of contrast, back in 1981, Andrés Solares, who is now in Miami, was arrested for

having unpublished papers relating to the formation of a political party. He was sentenced to eight years for "possession of enemy propaganda."

Eccentric or not, Bofill's party proposal illuminated the dilemma that he, Sánchez and others face. The Reagan Administration, with its appropriation of the human rights issue, is about to come to an end. This summer has seen an accelerated prisoner release program; by the time the U.N. Human Rights Commission visited Cuba in September, only four long-term *plantados*—those who refused to accept prison discipline—remained in jail. Though it would be the cheapest of calumnies to dismiss all the human rights activists as tools of Washington, might they not find it hard to survive the current episode in U.S.-Cuban relations? Did they have any strategy for establishing a more lasting political presence?

The answer appeared to be no. As Monseñor de Céspedes hinted, many of the leaders of Bofill's committee have already packed their bags and left for Miami. Their replacements are often so transparently in search of U.S. visas that the group has acquired a derisive nickname: "the travel agency." Enrique López Oliva, a Cuban journalist who since September 1987 has been publishing a crudely typed newsletter called *Religion in Cuba*, criticizes the human rights groups for being "too belligerent" and squanderine the opportunity to become the nucleus of an organized opposition. "Why go looking for confrontation when you can't win?" he asks. "They seem to be seeking martyrdom."

## ...how can Americans decide what to think?

The current issue of *Social Justice*, "Human Rights & U.S.-Cuban Relations in the Reagan Era," offers a unique, in-depth look at how our print media deal with news about Cuba. A study of 17 newspapers and magazines shows a 10% objectivity rate. Also in this issue:

* Report on Cuban prisons in 1988 by a delegation of the Institute for Policy Studies

* Human rights as politics, by Tony Platt

* The anti-Cuba lobby
  Send $9.00 inc. SOCIAL JUSTICE, P.O. Box 40601, Dept. N, San Francisco, CA 94140

## A MEETING OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION'S FAN CLUB

"ON BENDED KNEE" concludes that the news media allowed the White House, particularly during President Reagan's first term, to define what was news."

—Andrew L. Yarrow, New York Times

"I can't point my finger at [the Reagan White House]. If there's a failure, it's ultimately the press's failure."

—Tom Brokaw, Anchor and Managing Editor,

NBC Nightly News

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STIRAS

GIROUX

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there's no word of God, as there is for Catholics. Therefore everything is subject to revision, even if Marx said it, or Lenin. Or Fidel Castro.”

## Glasnost and the Intellectuals

Cuba's socialist model should not only be measured, of course, by the latitude it allows to those who stand, however discreetly, outside the revolution. It's also a matter of the openness that exists within the system, of whether the party acknowledges that the right of critical dissent is a necessary release of captive intellectual energy and a guarantee of social vitality—not an indulgence to be granted, under duress, to one's “class enemies.” In his Santiago speech, Castro did appear to acknowledge the existence of dissident sectors within the party, even if he promptly dismissed them as “petit bourgeois” and “second-rate imitators.”

Of course, as Fidel says, if you have corns, don't go looking for a toothache remedy. But Cuba's difficulties in part arise precisely from how different its experience has been from that of other socialist countries. The reforms in China, for instance, came as a consequence of the ruinous upheavals of Maoism and a vacuum in official ideology, which “bourgeois liberalization” has rushed to fill. Glasnost and perestroika are a long-delayed settling of accounts with the Stalinist legacy and a response to the mortal threat of stagnation. But Cuba, until now at least, has passed through no comparable ideological crisis. If the Soviet Union's particular dilemma is to battle the past with the help of a population made passive and cynical by that same history, Cuba's problem may be to develop the habit of leadership and independent thinking in a population that has been carried for thirty years by one man's charismatic energy. Changing the Soviet Union, one scholar wrote, is like turning around a giant oil tanker; changing Cuba may involve bringing some more officers up onto the bridge to offer the captain advice and even, in time, to challenge his orders.

It will happen, though, and Cuba has already become a more ambiguous and complicated society than Castro's black-and-white July 26 speech might suggest. Even if Fidel has never uttered the P-word, he has used the G-word at here; we always did.” True up to a point: The Cuban arts, for example, were never blighted by the precepts of socialist realism. Cuban intellectual life is also wide open to the new Soviet influences. Thousands of students are in the Soviet Union. And although Cuban bookstores still all too often have the sad look of dumping grounds for Progress Publishers' reminders, with yellowing piles of old Bulgarian party statutes and textbooks on bovine tuberculosis, Gorbach's book, *Perestroika*, also arrived in huge quantities and sold out in no time. The inability of the newstands to keep *Novedades de Moscu* (Moscow News) in stock has become legendary.

Alberto Batista, head of the letters Cubanas publishing house, echoed Castro's remarks about *glasnost* almost word for word, although he denied that Cuban readers found Soviet debates particularly interesting, except in economic matters. Then, appearing to contradict himself, he told me

that a Cuban edition of Anatoly Rybakov's novel *Children of the Arbat* would soon be published. “But don't expect that kind of literary creation here,” he insisted, “because we never had that kind of censorship.” If Cuba decreed *glasnost* tomorrow, Batista said, there would be no flood of novels hidden away in secret drawers for twenty years.

Instead, Cuban intellectuals continue to debate exactly what Castro meant in 1961 when he invented the often-quoted formula: “Within the revolution, everything. Outside the revolution, nothing.” Being endlessly ambiguous, the phrase is endlessly open to reinterpretation, and it came up again last February at the Fourth Congress of the Writers Union (UNEAC). In an unusually interesting address to the Congress, Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez appeared to put a very liberal interpretation on the old formula. He said that the revolution was “not a narrow path only with enough room for apologists and acolytes,” and that the party made no claim to the “predetermined critical conscience” of society. He called on intellectuals to “cease being a shapeless and subordinate force and become a part of this battle for renewal,” and ended his remarks with the intriguing proposition, “Although liberalism is dangerous and complacency is unacceptable, more dangerous still are intolerance and dogmatism.”

Between the lines there was obviously some history here, with which I was unfamiliar. “Well,” Batista explained, “Carlos Rafael was responding to a dogmatic backlash to a series of critical articles in the press. We live amid contradictions, but there are certain functionaries who refuse to see them.”

A battle is under way for the soul of Cuban journalists, and Carlos Aldana, the Central Committee's chief ideologue, while urging the press not to be “docile,” has also acknowledged the existence of opposition within the party to the idea of an opening, an *apertura informativa*. By common assent, much of the official press is a disaster—especially the party organ, *Granma*. Mirta Rodriguez Calderon, a twenty-five-year veteran of the paper who now writes for the cultural weekly *Bohemia*, said that while she looked back at the experience with affection, it had also been a professional embarrassment: “We’ve rejected bourgeois journalism, but we’ve completely failed to put anything better in its place.”

Some papers, like the union daily *Trabajadores*, have taken on limited investigative reports on economic and environmental topics—bottlenecks in food distribution, or the black mayonnaise at the bottom of Havana's chronically polluted harbor. But more sensitive matters, such as inner-party debates, remain taboo. And although some media, particularly radio, encourage feedback and criticism from consumers, there is nothing remotely on the scale of the outspoken letters columns in today's Soviet press.

Some of these tensions appeared to erupt in a series of skirmishes last fall. First, the October issue of the teen magazine *Somos Jóvenes* (“We Are Young”) carried an extraordinary exposé of prostitution in Havana—a problem that officially disappeared in 1959 along with Batista and Meyer

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Lansky. The issue was quickly removed from the newsstands, to reappear with the offending article removed. That only created a *succès de scandale*. Copies of the original price. At around the same time, the planned opening of Juris Podnieks's celebrated Soviet film on youth alienation, rock music and the war in Afghanistan, *Is It Easy to Be Young?* was abruptly canceled, provoking a near-riot in the street. (In an interesting contrast, Tengiz Abuladze's *Repentance*, on the relatively safer topic of the gulag, played to sellout crowds in Havana.)

After the *Somos Jóvenes* affair, Aldana called newspaper journalists, education students and their professors to a meeting at the Central Committee offices. It was a turbulent session, with the students bombarding Aldana with questions about *glasnost* and *perestroika*—even the personality cult surrounding Fidel in the Cuban media. Castro himself then made an appearance, but was no more able than Aldana to quell the storm. (“Lost for words for the first time in his life,” one journalist commented.) According to one account, when the Communist Youth section was instructed to discipline the offending students, it demurred.

In November, the iconoclastic magazine *El Caimán Barbudo* (“The Bearded Alligator”), which is read mainly in university circles, ran an article by another journalism student, demanding an end to the press's habit of “accommodation” with official views. This prompted a response from the president of the Union of Cuban Journalists, who admitted that some of the student's complaints were valid,

but also spelled out that the party's concept of *apertura* was to be seen as an integral part of the rectification process. Journalistic standards had to be “more revolutionary, more militant, and more communist”—more those of the *hombre nuevo*. The danger in asking for a more critical press was that it “invariably brings out extremist and liberal currents . . . opportunists and resentful people. These tendencies cannot wait. . . . If some appealing formula appears on the international scene, imitate it, immediately.” A critical press, then, was not to be confused with *glasnost*.

## The Ambiguity of Che Guevara

I never saw much evidence of prostitution in the Vedado hotel district, but I was accosted one day, leaving my hotel, by a young man walking a toy poodle that had been dyed bright yellow. Still pondering this odd encounter, I drove out later that night along the Maleón, the beautiful shoreline drive that sweeps around Havana. Flicking idly around the car radio dial, past the relentless stream of greetings to the fraternal party of Kampuchea and the interviews with guard cane cutters, I finally locked in on a flood of noise, which I took at first to be an FM station from Miami, but the signal was too clear: This was Radio Futuro, Havana, and its theme tune seemed to be the Beatles' “A Day in the Life.” (“I read the news today, oh boy/Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.” What did *that* mean in Cuba?)

The disk jockey introduced the next song in a growl that was an uncanny imitation of Wolfman Jack. “And now, rockers, we’re gonna give you a dose of . . .” (in English)

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"HEAVY METAL!!" When the last screeching chord had died away, the group, which was called Amar ("Love"), moved on to an earnest discussion of its efforts to organize an association of rock musicians and have it legally registered with the help of the Communist Youth.

Gerardo Mosquera, who is considered by some to be the "ideologue" of Cuba's new generation of plastic artists, saw absolutely no contradiction between the new youth culture and the goals of rectification. Indeed, the examples he cited were very much in the spirit of Che Guevara, if somewhat revised and updated: A huge painting, as in a game of hangman, of the words, "REVIVE THE REVO ________" (the pun, REVIVA, is impossible to render in English), and, written underneath, the words, "add your contribution here"; or a piece of performance art in which a group of young artists, covered in gold paint like the Chibcha king in the legend of El Dorado, leap into Havana harbor in a mockery of materialism; or, at a memorial event for Che, another group simply paints, on the huge screen behind the stage, the word MEDITAR—meditate. "In the Plaza de la Revolucion!" Gerardo exclaimed, "Can you imagine?"

But there is ambiguity here, too. It's often hard to tell where reverence for Che ends and impatience to open up the system begins—or indeed, whether the icon of Che means remotely the same thing to Cubans born since 1959 that it does to an older party elite that fought with Castro and Guevara in the Sierra Maestra. El Caimán Barbudo, which is the paper of choice for Cuba's young artists, seems to have paid little heed to the strictures it received last winter. Its July issue, for example, ran an extraordinarily outspoken attack on "the interminable, leaden disiquisations" that went on in the Writers' Union. In Children of the Arbat, the writer said, Rybakov described "a pattern of behavior that characterized Soviet society in the 1930s: people thought one thing, said another, and did a third that was quite different from the other two." The same pattern, he went on, was more and more apparent in presentday Cuba. The conclusion was self-evident. "Defending the essence of socialism means . . . making life miserable for our super-professional yesmen."

It was hard to work out how *The Case of Sandra*, the article on prostration that had caused all the fuss in the first place, fit in here. Was it a case of *glasnost* imitation run amok? Or a clumsy, party-sponsored attempt to be more responsive to the concerns of young readers? Nobody could say for sure, and the text lent itself to either interpretation: It was stunningly frank in its descriptions (and illustrations) of the prostitute's life, yet it concluded with demands for a crackdown, imploring the party to protect "our ideological integrity." Some journalists swore that Fidel himself had signed off on the piece; others said the editor alone was responsible. (He was in fact transferred to *Granma*, the basis of orthodoxy, and a piece that he had planned on gays in Havana was scrapped.)

Opinions were also divided on the merits of the story. Mirta Rodríguez Calderón found it sensationalist, the case of the prostate Sandra nothing more than a "micro-

localism." But on balance he thought he had probably been a good idea to publish it. As a senior editor at Prensa Latina, the government news agency, disagreed: "This wasn't constructive criticism. Why wasn't the information aboutктitutes balanced by praise of our working women, our housewives, the heroic women of the armed forces?" The fact that these heroic women had enjoyed a monopoly in the Cuban press for almost thirty years appeared to elude him.

What would be considered appropriate themes for investigation, I wondered. There seemed no shortage of stories: What, for example, about the *jineteros*, the hundreds of black-market money changers who besiege the visitor in the narrow streets of old Havana with cries of "Chay-money! Chay-money!"? Trafficking in foreign currency can get you five years; the *jineteros* are invariably unemployed black youths, and racism, as Fidel himself has admitted, remains a problem in Cuba. There seemed to be the ingredients here for an interesting study. "Not for us," Mirta felt.

Reluctant to let this drop, I tried another example. The Leningrad Maly Drama Theater had just visited New York City with an extraordinary play, *Stars in the Morning Sky*, about a group of prostitutes who are moved out of Moscow to an abandoned asylum during the 1980 Olympics. It's a thrilling affirmation of the dignity and inner lives of people too long dismissed under socialism as "antisocial elements." This was greeted with a stony stare: "Our people wouldn't find that interesting." Cuba was opposed to this kind of negativism, because it might "damage our unity." In fact— and this time I felt the phrase coming even before it was spoken—it would tend to *sembrar disensión*.

## From Monroe to Gorbachev

It must be tedious for Cubans, after long years of being vilified by the United States, to listen to the insinuations of well-meaning foreigners who should shape up and be like the Soviet Union. But that is not sufficient to explain the depth of resistance to Gorbachev's reforms. It's now widely believed by intellectuals in Havana that the party has taken steps to restrict circulation of the troublesome *Novedades de Moscí*. Other Soviet publications, too, have given offense. Last October, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez engaged in an angry polemic with the internationally distributed *Novoye Vremya* ("New Times"). In an article entitled "Difficult Path," the writer, Vladislav Chirkov, had made some sharp criticisms of the Cuban economy. He catalogued a number of shortcomings, including rationing, high defense expenditures and low productivity. Rodríguez retorted that the article was "inappropriate . . . negative and superficial," and that Chirkov had fallen "into the trap of repeating the prosaic statements used especially by the 'Cubanologists' who live in the United States."

There seemed to be a desire here to seal the country's intellectual borders against the more threatening aspects of the special conference of the Soviet Communist Party in June. Gorbachev's call for a limited presidential term, for example, was studiously avoided in the Cuban media, and press reports of the showdown between Politburo members

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Boris Yeltsin and Yeg-Yig Lagichene were as terse and opaque as a diplomatic communiqué. A couple of buried paragraphs merely informed readers that there had been a full and frank exchange of views on a number of important topics.

If the logic of this resistance to Soviet influence was implicit in Carlos Rafael's reference to U.S. "Cubanologists," it was laid out with absolute clarity in Fidel's speech of July 26. Any hint of imitation—even of the beneficial examples offered by a friendly power—is anathema to Cuba, a potential betrayal of the originality and nationalism of its revolution, and, by strong inference, an act of submission to the implacable enemy less than a hundred miles offshore. Castro said:

> It is not that we want to be more virtuous than anyone else, or purer than anyone else. It's that we are ninety miles away from the most powerful empire on earth, and 10,000 miles from the socialist camp. . . . That is why imperialism tries to weaken the revolution ideologically . . . so that it can swallow us like a ripe apple.

There is a long historical memory at work here. Back in 1823, the year of the Monroe Doctrine, John Quincy Adams declared that Cuba had "an importance in the sum of our national interests, with which that of no other foreign territory can be compared." He described it as a "ripening apple" that "cannot choose but fall to the ground."

It took more than 130 years for Cuba to assert a national identity; it has now spent another thirty single-mindedly

defending it. The Soviet Union, the guarantor of Cuban security, has changed; so, with the end of the Reagan years, may the United States—if to a less dramatic degree.

On August 5, just after my return from Havana, I received a phone call from a friend, telling me that Ariel Hidalgo had been released from prison and expelled from Cuba, and was on his way to New York City. Hidalgo had been in jail since August 1981. His book, *Origins of the Workers' Movement and Socialist Thought in Cuba*, had come out in 1976. Afterward he taught philosophy and Marxist economics at workers' schools in Havana. But his conviction grew that the Cuban economic model was in crisis, and, nervous of expressing his concerns openly in the classroom, he wrote them down in an eighty-seven-page manuscript, "Cuba: The Marxist State and 'The New Class'—A Dialectical Materialist Study." Its only purpose, he told me in an interview, was "to define my own ideas to myself."

In essence, Hidalgo's analysis was similar to the ideas that had been advanced in Poland a decade or more earlier by intellectuals like Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik: Marxism had produced its own forms of alienation; bourgeois ownership of the means of production had given way to "nothing more than a formalistic socialism, ruled by a caste of bureaucrats." In 1980, Hidalgo expressed his opposition to the treatment of Cubans leaving the country via Mariel, who were publicly vilified and attacked in mass "acts of repudiation." State security agents raided his home and found his

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manuscript, and Hidalgo was given an eight-year sentence for "undermining the ideology of young people from below" and "ideological diversionism."

I asked Hidalgo what he had thought of Castro's July 26 speech, which he had heard during his last week in prison. Had the tough talk against dissent depressed him? "Oh, no," he answered with a luminous smile. "On the contrary, it filled me with joy and optimism. Those criticisms of 'petit bourgeois currents'—they weren't aimed at counter-revolutionaries but at the Communist Youth, at all the people inside the party who see *perereikoia* and *glasnost* as the solution to Cuba's problems."

Visiting Havana in May 1959, four months into the revolution, *The Nation*'s veteran correspondent Carleton Beals wondered whether Cuba could simultaneously achieve bread, security and civil rights. Today bread—the rations notwithstanding—is on the table, and Cuba, alone among Third World countries, has not a single child with the swollen belly of malnutrition. After thirty years of honing its defenses, the revolution appears sufficiently secure from external threat to risk the third part of Beals' equation. "After all," said Ariel Hidalgo as we shook hands in farewell, "the Nicaraguans have shown that it's possible to live with dissent, and they face the threat of a real army— not a metaphor." ☐

CUBA: THE DIPLOMACY

Accommodation Is
In the U.S. Interest

WAYNE S. SMITH

The normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, when it comes, is likely to be a far less dramatic event than most Americans expect. Objectively, there is no reason why we could not re-establish relations right now—or not have done so years ago. Recognition is not even an issue. We extended that to the government of Fidel Castro in January 1959, and through the ensuing years have continued to deal with it as the legitimate government of Cuba. In January 1961, under the tense circumstances of the moment, we suspended diplomatic relations. But the failure to resume them has more to do with the peculiarly emotional content of the U.S.-Cuban relationship than with any concrete impediment. The United States does, after all, maintain full diplomatic relations with a whole range of governments which it dislikes and with which it has serious disagreements. If we can have embassies in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Chile, South Africa, Afghanistan and even Nicaragua, why not in Cuba?

Formal relations or not, we have never been without diplomatic channels through which we could communicate with the Cubans. From 1961 until 1977, the Swiss looked after U.S. interests in Cuba and kept the channels open. In 1977, with the establishment of a U.S. interests section in Havana, those functions were once again taken over by the United States itself. Indeed, since that time we had had diplomatic relations in all but name. The interests section does everything an embassy would do except fly the flag and call its chief "ambassador." (Instead, he is a "chief of mission.")

Making those symbolic changes would not be meaningless, but unless accompanied by a more fundamental change of attitude on the part of the U.S. government, it would not necessarily bring any substantive improvement in relations. The United States has full diplomatic relations with Nicaragua, but that has not kept it from mining Nicaraguan harbors, bombing airfields and, for almost eight years, carrying on a surrogate war against that country.

Rather than worrying about the symbols, then, we would be better advised to concentrate on the substance. Or, put another way, the crux of the matter lies not in formalizing

Wayne S. Smith was chief of the U.S. interests section in Havana from 1979 to 1982; before he left the Foreign Service in 1982 over disagreements with the Reagan Administration's policies, he was recognized as the State Department's leading expert on Cuba. Now adjunct professor of Latin American studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, he is the author of The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic History of the Castro Years (Norton).

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the channels of communication but in what we communicate. There are a whole series of disagreements between the United States and Cuba, and what is needed is a coherent negotiating process to address them. The Cubans have for many years indicated their willingness to sit down at the negotiating table. Strangely, the United States has until now shown little interest in testing Cuba's seriousness of purpose. And yet, resolution of most of the problems would benefit the United States as much as Cuba—in some instances even more. For example, Cuba says it is prepared to negotiate a compensation agreement for U.S. citizens whose properties were confiscated in the 1960s. The United States has not responded. Also, Washington complains of Cuban involvement in Central America, yet refuses to discuss with Cuba either the overall problem or those aspects of Cuba's role it finds most troublesome. That makes little sense.

Not all disagreements can be resolved readily, and the United States and Cuba are unlikely to develop warm, cordial relations. Their two political systems and world views are too different for that. Cuba is a Marxist-Leninist state and is likely to remain one; it is the ally of our principal global rival, the Soviet Union, and is likely to remain one. But even adversaries frequently find that accommodation serves their respective interests more than does confrontation.

Whatever the logic of the initial U.S.-Cuban disengagement, none of the arguments against re-engagement any longer hold water. For most of the 1960s, the United States believed (or hoped) that the Castro government would prove transitory, and did nothing that might dilute that prospect, such as entering into negotiations with Cuba—which would have eased Cuba's isolation and conferred new legitimacy on the Cuban government. But almost thirty years have now gone by. Clearly, Castro's revolution is here to stay, and it is high time we acknowledged that fact.

Likewise, while efforts to isolate Cuba may have made sense in 1962 or 1967, today they are absurd. Cuba is not isolated. It maintains diplomatic and trade relations with over 110 countries, including all our NATO allies, and now with the majority of Latin American states as well.

That fact also explodes the argument frequently advanced by right-wing Cuban exiles that Castro is so fanatical, so irrational, that it would be impossible to conduct business with him in a sensible, productive way. The reality is that over a hundred other governments are conducting such business with him. Are the right-wing exiles suggesting that Americans are less competent than other nationalities, that U.S. diplomacy is less effective?

Another frequently heard argument is that U.S. public opinion is so strongly opposed to negotiations with Castro that re-engagement would be political suicide for any President. But this is a misperception. If it was ever true, it certainly has not been for at least a decade. Polls taken in 1977, before the Carter Administration began its opening to Cuba, indicated that while the majority of Americans had a low opinion of the Castro government, they had no objections to negotiating with it. A poll taken earlier this year reflected essentially the same picture.

One of the most persistent arguments against re-engagement

and negotiation is that President Carter tried such an approach and it failed. While Carter talked, the argument runs, Castro increased Cuban troop strength in Angola and went into Ethiopia; Carter offered negotiations and Castro responded with the Mariel boatlift.

In fact, the failure of the Carter negotiations resulted not from our willingness to negotiate but precisely from our failure to do so. The Carter Administration's style, for example, was simply to demand that, irrespective of anything the South Africans might do, Castro remove his troops from Angola. At no time did the Administration make any effort to launch the kind of multilateral negotiating process that has been undertaken recently by Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker. Nor did the United States ever discuss the situation in Ethiopia with Cuba. Rather, it let the Cubans and Russians think that the United States had decided to back Somalia in its quest to retake the Ogaden desert from Ethiopia. When Somalia invaded, Moscow and Havana, thinking the United States was behind it, were quicker than they might otherwise have been to come to Ethiopia's assistance. The United States then condemned not the aggressor—Somalia—but Cuba and the Soviet Union, for aiding the victim!

Mariel is another case in point. In the preceding months, the Cubans had on several occasions urged talks on migration matters. The United States did not respond. And between October 1979 and April 1980, when the Mariel exodus got started, there had been a spate of boat hijackings from Cuba. The Cuban government protested and asked Washington to define its position. Cuba, after all, was cooperating in efforts against aerial hijackings, arresting and trying hijackers and immediately returning the planes and passengers. The United States, on the other hand, neither arrested

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nor tried maritime hijackers. Did that mean the United States condoned such terrorist acts on the high seas, the Cubans wanted to know.

The United States never also responded to Cuban inquiries on the subject. In February 1980, and again that March, Cuban officials warned that unless the United States defined its position, Cuba might take retaliatory measures, which could include allowing large numbers of Cubans to go by small boat to Florida. As one senior Cuban official put it: "If your government wants people in small boats, we can give you more than you bargained for." The Carter Administration simply ignored the warnings—yet was surprised when the Cubans carried out their threat and opened Mariel.

No omission on our part justified Mariel. Whatever we had done—or not done—dumping 125,000 undocumented aliens on U.S. shores was an inhumane and politically unwise overreaction. But it illustrates that, rather than examples of the failure of diplomacy, Mariel, Angola and Ethiopia were all prime cases of what happens when diplomacy is eschewed. In those few instances in which the Carter Administration agreed to negotiate with the Cuban government (on such issues as cooperation between the two Coast Guards, the establishment of maritime boundaries and the release of political prisoners), it found Havana ready to negotiate seriously and to live up to commitments thereby entered into. The tragedy was that the Carter Administration's agenda was so limited.

The Reagan Administration took office hurling threats at Cuba and refusing to negotiate anything. This accomplished nothing. Finally, in late 1984, the Administration agreed to explore various issues having to do with the movement of people between the two countries. As part of the resulting agreement, Cuba committed itself to taking back a number of criminals and other excludables who had arrived in Florida during the Mariel sealift, and also to respect U.S. immigration laws. The United States, in turn, agreed to establish a normal flow of immigration from Cuba.

Unfortunately, only five months after the agreement was signed, the Administration chose to put Radio Marti on the air. Castro viewed this as a provocative act inconsistent with the spirit of the migration accord, and therefore suspended the agreement. Only in 1987 did he offer to resume it, provided the United States would discuss with Cuba the whole question of radio broadcasting—most specifically, the possibility of making a channel, or channels, available to Cuba so that it could broadcast to the United States.

The Reagan Administration accepted Castro's offer. The migration agreement was resumed and the talks on radio broadcasting got under way. This seemed to produce a subtle change in the U.S. approach to Cuba. The Administration's rhetoric remained as uncompromising as ever (President Reagan recently declared, for example, that the gulf between Cuba and the United States is "unbridgeable"), but in addition to the radio talks it went on to discuss a number of consular matters with the Cubans, and in February brought about the ongoing negotiations among Cuba, Angola and South Africa. Those talks show some promise of bringing about a comprehensive settlement in southern Africa.

Thus, the Reagan Administration winds up its eight years doing what it said it would never do: negotiate with Havana. The number of issues under discussion remains small, but the change in approach is significant. And what the change suggests, more than anything else, is that the logic for negotiations and re-engagement is so compelling that not even the Reagan Administration has been able to resist it. Moreover, whatever may be said during the current election campaign, the trend toward negotiations will probably be continued or even expanded by the next President, whether that turns out to be Michael Dukakis or George Bush.

What might the agenda look like? Probably it would be best to begin by discussing several relatively noncontroversial issues of a strictly bilateral nature, such as the re-establishment of normal air service between the two countries, measures to avoid interference in one another's radio channels and cooperation between the two Coast Guards.

Having thus broken the ice, the two governments could go on to negotiate an agreement to cooperate in interdiction of narcotics trafficking and exchange views on the situation in Central America. Ideally, the latter would result in a joint statement in which both commit themselves fully to respect the provisions of the Arias peace plan or any other arrangement worked out by the Central Americans themselves to halt armed conflicts in the area.

In this improved atmosphere, the two might then sit down to forge an accord on compensation for former U.S. property owners in Cuba and a timetable for lifting the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. These two issues are so closely related that it would be advisable—even necessary—to negotiate them and announce agreement simultaneously. Indeed, Cuba is not likely to be in a position to pay compensation without the establishment of some kind of escrow account related to its exports to the United States.

As this negotiating process unfolded, the two sides would gain more confidence in each other, and public opinion would be prepared for the re-establishment of diplomatic relations—which, as suggested in the opening sentence, is likely to come as something of an anticlimax. In time, Cuba and the United States could grapple with the more sensitive issues, such as the deployment of Soviet Bear reconnaissance aircraft in Cuba and the continued presence of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo.

Clearly, one objective the United States would have in engaging with Cuba would be to bring about the reduction of Soviet influence and presence. This, however, could be accomplished only in increments and over a long period of time. It is not something that could be demanded as a precondition—which is the way the United States has too often approached the matter in the past. In fact, we have tended to approach the whole Cuban equation in that way, suggesting that Cuba must make sweeping adjustments as a precondition to negotiations. But any Cuban concessions would have to come as the result of negotiations and doubtless would be accompanied by some of our own. Indeed, after thirty years it ought now to be clear that it is only objectives in Cuba. It is long past time to begin the process—

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not because we have decided we like Fidel Castro but in the interests of the United States itself. ☐

CUBA: THE CONGRESS

# The Power of the Anti-Fidel Lobby

JOHN SPICER NICHOLS

Since its establishment in 1981 the Cuban American National Foundation (C.A.N.F.) has been one of the most effective lobbies in Washington. Its extraordinary success in persuading Congress to underwrite a host of Castro-bashing activities is due in no small part to the lobby's lavish funding of the political campaigns of anti-Castro candidates, to slick propaganda and to a willingness to brand its opponents as Communist sympathizers.

While there is nothing particularly unusual about this style of Washington power-politics, the C.A.N.F. has an unfair advantage that violates the spirit if not the letter of Federal law. Federal Election Commission records and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the foundation's efforts to manipulate the debate on U.S.-Cuban relations and other issues are indirectly subsidized by taxpayers' dollars.

The private, tax-exempt foundation has received Federal grants that were ostensibly designed to support the development of democracy abroad, but was able to skirt laws that prohibit the use of such funds for political campaigns or propaganda in the United States. In effect, U.S. taxpayers have been unknowingly picking up the tab for a political fringe group's lobbying of elected representatives, who in turn appropriate additional public funds to support the organization's narrow political goals.

The central figure in this hustle is Jorge Más Canosa, founder and chair of the C.A.N.F. A wealthy Miami businessman and virulent anti-Castro activist with close connections to the Reagan Administration, Más has become, according to *The Miami Herald*, "The most powerful Cuban exile in America." According to the newspaper, Más hopes to use that power to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro and become president of Cuba himself.

Más is a veteran of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the subsequent Central Intelligence Agency-backed operations against the Cuban government during the 1960s. However, his role as a bit player in the Iran/contra scandal notwithstanding, he has increasingly emphasized political action rather than paramilitary action to unseat Castro. By the 1980s, Más had cultivated alliances with key Administration and Congressional leaders, enabling his foundation to wield tremendous influence on U.S. policy toward Cuba.

He quickly developed solid relations with the Reagan

White House and Capitol Hill Republicans, but gaining leverage in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives was more complex. However, by both a quirk of circumstance and an effective carrot-and-stick strategy, Más and his foundation were able to enlist the support of Rep. Dante Fascell, the powerful chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In that position, Fascell can make or break legislation relating to Cuba; but to retain the chair, the South Florida Democrat must win re-election every other year in a district where Cuban-Americans are a potent voting bloc and Más is the *caudillo*.

Although Fascell is normally identified with moderate foreign policy positions, he has been a strong supporter of the foundation's hard line on U.S.-Cuban relations. For example, Fascell supplied considerable muscle to win Congressional approval of Radio Marti, the keystone of the C.A.N.F.'s legislative agenda during the early Reagan years.

In 1983, Fascell was a member of the bipartisan study group that recommended the creation and Federal funding of the National Endowment for Democracy. The outgrowth of a proposal made by President Reagan in a 1982 speech to the British Parliament, the endowment was envisioned as an apolitical mechanism for making Federal grants to private organizations working to advance democracy abroad.

Fascell introduced the enabling legislation, chaired the House subcommittee that reported out the bill and, as floor manager, guided the legislation through a minfield of opposition. Congress passed the bill in late 1983, but only after including provisions that prohibit the use of endowment funds for domestic partisan politics and propaganda and that make N.E.D. operations subject to public disclosure under the F.O.I.A. When the N.E.D. opened its doors for business, Fascell was the first to direct its board, although he resigned a few months later after moving up to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He continues as a member of the endowment's board.

One of the first grants awarded by the new endowment was to the Cuban American National Foundation, "to gather and disseminate information about the human rights situation in Cuba." To date, the foundation has received a total of $390,000 in Federal funds from the N.E.D. Although the deliberations of N.E.D. directors are held out of the public eye in executive session, an endowment spokeswoman confirmed that Fascell has voted for grants to the C.A.N.F. on at least three occasions. He was absent and did not vote on the most recent renewal of the grant.

During roughly the same time period, the political action committee created by C.A.N.F. directors has donated a nearly identical amount of money to the campaigns of scores of political candidates for Federal office, including Fascell. According to the Federal Election Commission, the National Coalition for a Free Cuba Inc.—later reorganized into the Free Cuba PAC Inc.—has reported contributions totaling $385,400 between 1983 and 1988. The PAC's war chest comes largely from the directors of the foundation, who must contribute $10,000 a year for a seat on the foundation board. A pledge of $5,000 a year is required for membership in the PAC. According to F.E.C. records for the

*John Spicer Nichols is an associate professor of communications at Pennsylvania State University.*

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1987-88 reporting period, Más and his wife each gave the PAC $10,000 (the maximum individual amount allowed under the election laws).

The records also show that the Cuba lobby has been one of the largest and most consistent contributors to Fascell's political campaigns. Since 1983, his re-election committees have received $16,500 from the PAC and many thousands more in individual contributions from Más and other foundation directors. For example, during the 1985-86 reporting period, a time of intense Washington activity on several issues of importance to the Cuban-American community, nine C.A.N.F. trustees and directors, including Más, contributed a total of $9,161 to the Fascell campaign.

These figures do not include the many cocktail parties and fund-raisers that foundation members have held in Fascell's behalf. At one recent political event in Miami, according to a *Miami News* reporter who covers the Cuban community, Fascell compared Más with Cuba's foremost national patriot, describing him as "the second José Martí."

In a recent interview, Fascell firmly denied any conflict of interest and noted that he had, for example, strongly supported the economic embargo of Cuba long before the creation of the C.A.N.F. and the Free Cuba PAC. However, he added, "now that the issue has been raised," he would either abstain from future votes for C.A.N.F. grants or refuse additional contributions from its PAC, "in order to eliminate any possibility of an appearance of a conflict."

The only other elected official on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, Republican Senator Or-

rin Hatch of Utah, also voted for the Federal grants to the C.A.N.F. Although he received campaign contributions from the PAC during the 1981-82 reporting period, he has not accepted any such contributions since he joined the N.E.D. board.

Other recipients of Cuban-American largesse are:

§ Senator Paula Hawkins, the Florida Republican who was the prime sponsor of the Radio Martí legislation in the Senate; she received tens of thousands of dollars from the PAC and individual foundation directors to finance her unsuccessful 1986 re-election bid.

§ Senator Ernest Hollings, the South Carolina Democrat, a leading backer of TV Martí (the recently approved sequel to Radio Martí); he received $5,000 from the PAC and sizable supplements from foundation directors for his 1986 re-election.

§ Representative Claude Pepper of Florida, a Democrat; he spearheaded the repeal of the Clark amendment, a Congressional ban on military aid to the Angolan UNITA rebels, at the request of Más. Since 1983, the PAC has contributed $20,000 to his campaigns, and Más and his wife have added $2,500 in individual contributions.

§ Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, veteran Castro-hater; he received $10,000—the maximum allowed under the election laws—from the PAC for his 1984 re-election.

§ The two vice-presidential nominees, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen of Texas and Republican Dan Quayle of Indiana; they received $10,000 and $1,000, respectively, for their most recent Senate re-election campaigns.

§ Vice President George Bush, who has accepted the maximum legal contributions for his presidential bid from Más and other C.A.N.F. directors acting as individuals. They similarly supported Reagan's act-relection campaign in 1984.

"Political contributions do talk," a foundation director told *The Miami Herald*. "We have changed votes with political contributions."

In creating the National Endowment for Democracy, Congress specifically said that no part of N.E.D. assets "shall inure to the benefit of any member of the Board," that N.E.D. funds may not be used to finance U.S. political campaigns and that no grants can be made to organizations "engaged in partisan activities . . . on behalf of any candidate for public office."

However, because the Cuban American National Foundation and its PAC are separate legal entities with separate bank accounts, the Cuba lobby may not have technically violated these provisions. Obviously, when the C.A.N.F. gets a windfall of N.E.D. grants to carry out activities that the foundation would have supported through internal channels, a greater percentage of its existing funds are freed up for use by the PAC. But, according to legal experts, as long as none of the actual N.E.D. dollars go directly to the PAC, no law is broken.

Congress also intended that N.E.D. funds be used only for activities outside the United States. The standard N.E.D. contract, which C.A.N.F. officials signed, specifically prohibits the use of any portion of the Federal grants

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for "lobbying or propaganda which is directed at influencing public policy decisions of the Government of the United States." (Signaling the 1986 contracts for the foundation was its president, José Sorzano. Shortly afterward, Sorzano became senior director for Latin American affairs at the National Security Council, a post he resigned earlier this year to protest that the new N.S.C. leadership appointed after the Iran/contra scandal broke was not sufficiently tough in its policies on Cuba and Central America. Signing the contract for the endowment was its president, Carl Gershman. Both Gershman and Sorzano served concurrently as top aides to Jeane Kirkpatrick when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.)

To circumvent the Congressional restrictions, the C.A.N.F. sought N.E.D. grants from 1983 on to create and finance the European Coalition for Human Rights in Cuba, a Madrid-based organization that disseminates information about alleged human rights violations in Cuba. Officials of the Cuban American National Foundation recruited the controversial Armando Valladares, who had recently been released from a Cuban jail, to head the coalition. To conservatives, Valladares is a poet who was jailed and tortured by the Castro regime because of his political views. To the Cuban government and its supporters, he was a police thug during the Batista dictatorship who feigned disability and invoked his status as a writer in pleasure to international human rights groups in order to win his release from a prison sentence for "acts of public destruction and sabotage."

In either case, Valladares was prohibited by the terms of the N.E.D. contract from lobbying in the United States. Yet in 1985 and 1986, while receiving a hefty salary from the N.E.D. grants, Valladares testified before Congressional subcommittees, spoke on a Texas college campus and helped collect signatures of writers and intellectuals on a letter to President Reagan urging aid for the Nicaraguan *contras*. Valladares openly reported these activities to the N.E.D., but his grant was repeatedly renewed. More recently, and while still on the N.E.D. dole, Valladares helped produce *Nobody Listened*, a film about human rights abuses in Cuba that was widely shown in the United States.

Foundation officials also played a crucial role in the subsequent appointment of Valladares as head of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, where he sought international support for an investigation of Castro's human rights record. "The foundation was never that interested in human rights caliph as a way of hitting Castro on the head," Frank Calzón, longtime C.A.N.F. executive director, told *The Miami Herald*. Calzón is one of a growing number who have recently resigned from the foundation after clashing with Chairman Más.

The documents obtained for this article under the F.O.I.A. do not clarify the extent of direct White House involvement in the activities of the Cuban-American group. *The Miami Herald* reported last April 11 that shortly after Reagan won the presidency in 1980, his first national security adviser, Richard Allen, quietly urged Cuban exiles to form a Washington lobby. A year later, the President signed National Security Decision Directive 17, a plan for covert operations

## Programs to Cuba

<table><tr><td>Primary Health Care Conference</td><td>Nov. 12-20</td></tr><tr><td>Havana Film Festival / Seminar</td><td>Dec. 1-18</td></tr><tr><td>Seminar on the Arts in Cuba</td><td>Dec. 3-18</td></tr><tr><td>Daycare Teachers Program</td><td>Dec. 15-25</td></tr><tr><td>Cuban Labor Law Legal Conference</td><td>Jan. 21-29</td></tr></table>

Under current United States restrictions regarding travel to Cuba, Marazul Tours can make arrangements for individuals in the following categories:

1. Persons who are traveling to engage in professional research or for similar activities.
2. Persons who are traveling to gather news or make news or documentary films.
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394

The Nation.

October 24, 1988

gan's election, and those sympathetic to normalizing relations began to receive menacing visits from F.B.I. agents at their homes and workplaces.

In 1985, after the launching of Radio Martí, the Cuban government effectively ended the Dialogue when it reversed its policy of allowing Cuban-Americans to visit the island for personal reasons. As Marifeli Pérez-Stable has so convincingly argued in *The Miami Herald*, this reprisal wrongly assumed that all Cuban-Americans supported Radio Martí. She adds that, ironically, the Cuban government's action placed it in the same corner as the Cuban American National Foundation, which had been lobbying the Reagan Administration to halt the family visits.

Despite the new freeze between Havana and Washington, the shifts within the Cuban-American community continued. In 1984, at the first conference on Cuban community studies, scholar Rafael Mozo presented the results of a study showing that the number of Cuban-Americans who planned to settle permanently in the United States had jumped from 53 percent in 1973 to 95 percent in 1979. He also noted that ethnic awareness was on the rise as more Cuban-Americans believed they were victims of discrimination. Alejandro Portes added that he saw "faint signs toward a greater future convergence of Cuban voting patterns with those of other Spanish-origin minorities." In 1983, *The Wall Street Journal* confirmed this when it reported that 47 percent of registered Cuban-American voters were Democrats. An overwhelming percentage of the Miami Cuban-American vote in the 1980 election had still gone to the Republicans, but by 1983 *The Miami Herald* was reporting that those up to 35 years old were more likely to be Democrats or unaffiliated.

These liberalizing tendencies are more visible outside of Miami. An exit poll by the Midwest Voter Registration and Education Project during Chicago's 1983 mayoral election showed that Democrat Harold Washington took almost 50 percent of the Cuban-American vote. In both his election campaigns, the Mayor faced scurvy attacks from right-wing Cuban-Americans because of his opposition to Radio Martí. They went so far as to accuse Celia Cruz, the staunchly anti-Castro queen of salsa, of being a "Communist sympathizer" for having played at a Washington benefit. Despite this, the Mayor's 1987 share of the Cuban-American vote increased to 80 percent—higher than the proportion he received from Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans. Young Cuban-Americans were also instrumental in organizing Mel King's failed mayoral campaign in Boston, and in 1987 formed a Cuban-American committee for Jesse Jackson.

Despite these shifts, the Cuban-American gatekeepers in the Democratic Party are trying to convince Michael Dukakis that a harder line toward Cuba is the key to the community's vote. "Cuban-Americans, regardless of party affiliation, demand that a candidate or party demonstrate an understanding of the oppressive nature of the Castro regime," wrote Luis Laureo of the National Hispanic Democrats in the although issue of the group's newspaper. But Cuban-Americans at the new body's founding conference disputed this view. In a moving plea that was greeted with loud applause,

Juan Rivero, an Atlanta social worker, said that what he wanted was a party and candidate that would bring peace and normalized relations with Cuba, so that people like him could visit their families and have their relatives travel to the United States.

Support for normalized relations with Cuba is growing. In 1984, at the height of Reagan's popularity, a Cuban-American Committee exit poll during the presidential race found that more than 40 percent of respondents outside Miami were in favor of normalizing relations. In Miami, the figure was 20 percent, rising to 43 percent among those 18 to 24 years old. This summer, the Washington-based Potomac Associates released a poll conducted in the Miami and Union City areas, the two most conservative communities, in which 41 percent of those questioned said they would favor agreements between Cuba and the United States that would lead to better relations. Forty-two percent said that a candidate's support for normalizing relations would either not influence your vote or make them more likely to favor that candidate. These are all potential Democratic voters.

Francisco Aruca, a member of the Democrats' Business Council and president of Marazul Tours, the travel agency that currently handles most tours to Cuba, wholeheartedly agrees that there are important groups in Miami—especially those with relatives on the island—that are keen to see better U.S.-Cuban relations. Carmen Diaz, president of the Miami-based Cuban-American Committee for Telecommunications Rights, would like to see agreements on mail, telecommunications and unrestricted travel. Diaz believes that with the large influx of Mariel Cubans, who have more recent ties, there is greater support for this than there was in the 1970s.

Local groups increasingly argue that the community's traditional leaders, in their obsession with toppling Castro, have failed to address the everyday needs of Cuban-Americans. Local groups share that view. The Cuban-American Network/Chicago, for example, found in 1987, brings together "Cuban-Americans who support a progressive Latino agenda." María Concha Bechly, its president, was one of the 15,000 children brought to the United States in the early 1960s under a State Department-sponsored program called Operation Peter Pan. Today she believes that Cuban-Americans should support Latino employment, equal opportunities and educational and cultural rights—without demanding that other Latino groups, in return, abandon their quest for more equitable U.S. policies toward Latin America.

Xavier Miyares, the only elected Cuban-American delegate to the Democrats' Atlanta convention, agreed in an interview that the party's future support lies in the growing number of liberal and progressive Latinos, including the many Cuban-Americans who want improved relations (either because of family considerations or because they see this as the way to open new political space inside Cuba). These are the voters that the party should be courting. In the process, it would not only find new reservoirs of support, it would also help the Cuban-American community to escape the stranglehold of U.S. national security delusions that have distorted its development for the past thirty years. ■

October 24, 1988

## CUBA: THE DEMOCRATS

# A Party Divided And Paralyzed

WILLIAM M. LEOGRANDE

Washington's policy toward Cuba in the 1980s resembles nothing so much as its policy toward China in the 1950s. Cuba's active involvement in Africa and Latin America has made it the bête noire of American foreign policy, just as China's role in Korea and Southeast Asia made it our nemesis in that earlier era.

The United States refuses to recognize Fidel Castro's Cuba, as it refused to recognize Mao Zedong's China, long after the last faint hope of restoring the *ancien régime* has faded. Instead, Washington clings to a tattered policy of isolating Cuba, even though that alienates U.S. allies more than it isolates Havana. The old China hands would recognize the anachronism immediately. And instantly from their own painful experience they would understand instantly that the persistence of Washington's hostility toward Cuba has more to do with domestic politics than with geopolitics.

The damage done by such irrationality reaches beyond individual countries, poisoning policy toward whole regions of the world. Just as Washington's inability to come to terms with the Chinese revolution led the United States into the quagmire of Vietnam, its inability to face up to the Cuban revolution has led it into the morass of Central America. The United States went into Vietnam to block what it feared was Chinese expansionism; today, it is involved in Central America to prevent "another Cuba."

Washington's policy of hostility toward Cuba no longer makes any sense, if it ever did. In the bowels of the foreign policy establishment, opinion is growing that the time has finally come to begin normalizing relations with Cuba. A recent opinion poll conducted by Gallup for Potomac Associates found that 51 percent of a sample of policy-makers and opinion leaders think that past policy toward Cuba has hindered U.S. interests rather than promoted them, and 85 percent favor negotiations leading to full diplomatic ties.

A number of liberal think tanks have mounted campaigns to put Cuba on the agenda of the next President. The Institute for Policy Studies, Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America (PACCA), the International Center for Development Policy (headed by former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White) and the Arca Foundation have all initiated projects promoting normalization. Even militantly centrist groups like the Council on Foreign Relations are talking about Cuba again for the first time in years. Three decades of Washington's unsuccessful

William M. LeoGrande teaches political science in the School of Public Affairs at The American University. He is writing a book about U.S. policy toward Central America, to be published by Oxford University Press.

The Nation.

395

efforts to oust or intimidate Fidel Castro speak eloquently of the need to try something different.

But the logic of policy is one thing, the logic of politics another. For Democrats Cuba has become, like China before it, the political equivalent of nitroglycerin. Except for Jesse Jackson, who revels in violating political taboos, no major figure in the Democratic Party openly advocates restoring formal relations between the United States and Cuba.

The reason is fear. Democrats are afraid of a domestic political backlash ignited by the anti-Castro Cuban-American community and the right wing of the Republican Party—the present-day equivalent of the China lobby. What makes this fear so potent are the scars left by McCarthyism. The party that McCarthy charged with twenty years of treason, the party that lost China, is still terrified of being branded soft on Communism. Cuba is Communism in our own backyard.

Congressional Democrats are divided on the issue of Cuba, and hence paralyzed by it. Liberals would support a policy of normalization if the impetus came from the White House, but they are unwilling to take up such a quixotic crusade on their own. Southern conservatives oppose normalization on ideological grounds and would put up a fight if their liberal colleagues broadened the subject. Moderates balk at normalization for the same reason that they vacillate on the issue of aid to the Nicaraguan *contras*: fear that in the next election their Republican opponents—never shy about questioning the patriotism of their adversaries—will accuse them of betraying Latin America to Communism.

For Democrats in Florida, this fear is not hypothetical. The growing financial and political might of the Cuban-American community, with its ultraconservative views on foreign policy, especially Cuba, has forced Democrats to scamper toward the right or face political extinction.

With Florida Representative Dante Fascell chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrats in the House are not going to offer bold initiatives on Cuba. In fact, Congressional Democrats have mounted only the most desultory opposition even to the Reagan Administration's most provocative proposals, such as TV Martí, which would beam propaganda television broadcasts to Cuba by bouncing the signals off a dirigible floating over the Florida Keys.

Policy analysts who advocate normalizing relations with Cuba argue that, outside of Florida at least, the Democrats' fears of a political backlash are ill-founded. When Nixon went to Beijing, they recall, the vaunted China lobby proved to be a paper tiger. Perhaps the same would be true in the case of Cuba if a new Democratic President was willing to weld the power of leadership that comes with the Oval Office. Indeed, there was no firstorem of opposition on the right when President Jimmy Carter moved to improve relations in 1977. Significant support even came from within the Cuban-American community, some of whose leaders opened their own dialogue with the Castro government on prisoner releases, immigration and visitation rights.

Although the dialogue's leaders were vilified by the rejectionist element in their community, a significant number of Cuban-Americans continue to favor a more conciliatory approach. The Potomac Associates poll found that 41 percent of Cuban-Americans favor negotiations between Cuba and

Michael G. Kozak

Current
Policy
No. 1204

# Cuba: A Threat to
Peace and Security
in Our Hemisphere

United States Department of State
Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, D.C.

Following is a statement by Michael G. Kozak, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, before the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Washington, D.C., August 2, 1989.

Thank you for the opportunity to come here today to discuss our policy with respect to Cuba. These hearings are a timely initiative on the part of the committee. Cuba has been in the news a lot lately. Many speculate that events in Havana may portend changes in Cuba's internal and external behavior, and in our policies toward the Castro regime.

## Background

Since January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro assumed power, bilateral relations between the United States and Cuba deteriorated sharply. This development can be attributed in part to the imposition of a rigorous dictatorship in Cuba and, in part, to a pattern of unacceptable international behavior on the part of the Cuban Government. Our principal concerns were and remain:

* Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union,

* Cuba's support for terrorism and efforts to destabilize democratic governments, especially in this hemisphere, and

* Widespread human rights abuses and political repression within Cuba itself.

More recently, we have had serious differences with the Castro regime on narcotics. Let's look at these issues one at a time.

## The Soviet Relationship

Since the early 1960s, relations between the Soviet Union and Cuba have been close. The relationship is mutually beneficial. Cuba gets critical economic and security assistance which both keeps its economy afloat and enables it to maintain one of the largest and best equipped military establishments in the Western Hemisphere. Approximately 15% of Cuba's population is militarized—either in the regular army or in the militia. Without Soviet help, Cuba's economy would probably collapse; without Soviet assistance, Cuba would not be able to project its power and influence to places like Central America and Southern Africa. Soviet-bloc aid to Cuba exceeds $4.0 billion in economic aid and trade subsidies and $1.5 billion in military assistance annually, accounting for almost a quarter of the national product. The Soviet Union, in turn, receives important military, strategic, and political benefits. Let me give you some examples. Soviet aircraft and naval vessels make extensive use of Cuban facilities, while shipments of Soviet equipment destined for Central America are often routed through Cuba. In addition, the Soviets have installed the largest single intelligence gathering installation outside the Soviet Union in Cuba.

Although there are increasing signs that the Soviets are becoming disillusioned by wasteful Cuban economic policies and stubborn resistance to reform and would like very much to reduce assistance levels to Cuba, we do not believe cuts would be so severe as

to endanger their special relationship with Cuba. The relationship will remain intact for the foreseeable future.

## Cuban Foreign Policy

For several years now, Cuba has pursued a two-track policy toward its Western Hemisphere neighbors, seeking formal diplomatic ties and improved trade and cultural relations with existing governments while continuing support for radical political groups and violent subversive movements. Cuban support for violent groups has included military and intelligence training for cadres, supplying weapons, providing guidance and organizational support, and working to unite splintered opposition groups.

Over the years, Cuban support for anti-democratic groups has been evident in Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Cuba's Caribbean neighbors. For example, Cuba provides a wide range of support for the FMLN [Farabundo Marti National Liberation] insurgency in El Salvador; the M-19 in Colombia, a terrorist group which itself has ties to trafficking organizations; and guerrilla groups in Guatemala. Cuba has close relations with and provides extensive military and economic assistance to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, which in turn provides materiel support to guerrillas throughout Central America.

Let me take a minute to focus on Central America. The nations of Central America have called on governments outside the region to stop supplying military assistance to insurgent or irregular groups. This is a central tenet of the Esquipulas agreement. The United States is in compli-

Noriega dictatorship in Panama. We do not know yet the true motivation behind the execution of General Ochoa and others and find it highly improbable that extensive and high-level official Cuban involvement could have escaped the attention of the Cuban leadership only to be recently "discovered." Nevertheless, if for any reason Cuban policy in this area is changing, we would like to take advantage of it. We intend to do what we can to stimulate serious action by Cuba against drug trafficking. Interdicting drug trafficking is a very high priority for the United States. If we become convinced that the Cuban Government has had a change of heart and genuinely intends to stamp out trafficking by Cuban officials and citizens, we can consider mutually beneficial information exchanges. How can we know whether this has happened? Instead of just talking, the Cubans could begin acting like a country with a serious anti-drug policy. For example:

* They could stop propping up Panama's Noriega, an indicted drug dealer.

* They could respond vigorously to reports of air drops or other suspicious activities, as they have not done in the past.

* They could cause Cuban officials, mentioned in indictments, to come to the United States to stand trial, or failing that, take proper enforcement action on their own. This has not been the case; rather, at least one member of the tribunal that judged Ochoa and the other three officials executed by the Cuban Government is under indictment in the United States for drug trafficking.

* They could share with us the results of their investigations of Ochoa, De la Guardia, and others, so that we could initiate parallel investigations in the United States, if warranted. After all, most if not all of the drugs in question were destined for the United States.

* They could stop dealing with the Medellin cartel.

We are interested in deeds, not words. To the extent operational coordination is required, the channels already exist in the communications between our air traffic authorities, our coast guards, and through our interest sections.

## The Outlook

As indicated earlier in this presentation, U.S. policy is the result of an unacceptable pattern of domestic and international behavior on the part of the Cuban Government. This behavior continues, and as long as the Castro regime refuses to make concessions in areas of concern to us, relations cannot and should not improve. And the changes must be permanent ones. We have witnessed the superficial and temporary efforts on the part of the Cuban Government to improve the human rights situation in that country in 1988, only to resume their bad habits after the pressure was off.

The Government of the United States is not naive about the difficulty of making progress with Cuba. We recognize that issues not connected with national-security and ideology are easier to solve, and we have made some headway on such issues. We have been

willing to look at even the toughest problems with an open mind to see if we could bring about a change in Cuban behavior that would be advantageous to the United States. We are following our own agenda, whether we are broadcasting accurate information to Cuba on Radio Marti, raising Cuban human rights violations in the UNHRC in Geneva, or discussing problems whose resolution could benefit the American people.

One central fact remains: We still do not like what we see of the Cuban reality. U.S. policy is strongly influenced by tangible Cuban conduct, not merely assertions of good conduct. In Cuba, one man exercises decisive control over his country's destiny, and he has never been a friend of the United States or of free men anywhere. He proved this again last week when, in a long hangarue, he said that the United States has never been more threatening than now to Cuba. He understands better than anyone else exactly what kind of a threat we pose. We threaten Castro because the United States represents what people can achieve, including the Cuban community in the United States, given freedom and opportunity. In contrast, the Cuban revolution has impoverished and imprisoned the Cuban people.

As President Bush acknowledged on May 24, and again on June 28, our policy must remain a constant one until such time as Cuba begins to act as a responsible member of the international community instead of a threat to the peace and security of its neighbors. ■

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A quick reference aid on U.S. foreign relations
Not a comprehensive policy statement
Bureau of Public Affairs • Department of State

US-Cuba Relations

February 1990

**Background:** US-Cuban relations deteriorated sharply following Fidel Castro's assumption of power in 1959. This development resulted in part from Castro's imposition of a repressive dictatorship and his government's efforts to destabilize democratic governments in neighboring countries. The US broke diplomatic relations in 1961 and imposed an embargo on trade and financial relations in 1962. The embargo was prompted by the seizure, without compensation, of US private property in Cuba and was set up to deny the Castro government access to US dollars and goods and services.

**Attempts to renew relations:** Talks were conducted between US and Cuban representatives in the mid-1970s, but were halted when Cuba intervened in Angola. In 1977, "interests sections" were established in the two capitals: the US section in the Swiss Embassy in Havana and the Cuban section in the Czechoslovak Embassy in Washington, D.C.

The dialogue begun in 1977 did not prosper because Cuba remained unwilling to compromise on issues of importance to the US. Cuban military intervention in Africa, increasing Cuban subversion in the Caribbean Basin, continuing Cuban dependence on the USSR and its arms, and the Mariel boatlift--which was an assault on US sovereignty--destroyed prospects for better bilateral relations.

**Status of relationship:** Four key elements of our relationship are:

- **Absence of normal diplomatic relations.** The interests sections provide a line of communication between our two governments, but their existence does not constitute normal diplomatic relations. Legally, the US is represented in Havana by the Swiss ambassador.

- **Economic embargo.** The embargo prohibits transactions between persons subject to US jurisdiction and Cuba or its nationals, unless authorized by the Treasury Department. Except for informational materials, no Cuban goods or products with Cuban content may enter the US, nor may US goods be exported to Cuba. The Department of Commerce can license the export to Cuba of small gift parcels and has on occasion licensed the export of critical medical equipment unavailable to Cuba from other sources.

- **Travel restrictions.** Travel to Cuba by persons subject to US jurisdiction is not prohibited, but travel-related transactions, such as buying airline tickets or meals in Cuba, must be licensed by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Treasury does not license such transactions for tourism or business purposes, but it has issued general licenses for full-time journalists on assignment, government employees on official business, persons traveling to visit relatives in Cuba, and certain researchers engaging in Cuba-specific research. Persons desiring to travel to Cuba should contact OFAC for information (202-376-0922).

- **Migration.** The 1984 US-Cuban Migration Agreement was reinstated in 1987 and has permitted more than 11,000 Cuban immigrants and ex-political prisoners to immigrate to the US. Cuba had suspended the agreement in 1985, when the Voice of America's Radio Marti began broadcasting to Cuba. The agreement normalized Cuban emigration to the US and provided for the return to Cuba of criminals and others excludable under US immigration law who had arrived during the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

**Impediments to better relations:** Three major impediments to better bilateral relations remain:

- **Support for subversion abroad.** Cuba supports antidemocratic, violent groups with arms, training, and guidance. Secretary Baker told the Organization of American States in November 1989 that shipments of arms and supplies through Cuba to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels in El Salvador "support violence, destruction, and war" in the region. In 1989, a major FMLN weapons cache that included more than 300,000 rounds of Cuban ammunition was discovered in downtown San Salvador.

- **Internal repression.** The Cuban Government cracked down on the human rights movement during 1989 and arrested most of the prominent dissidents in Cuba. President Castro denounced reforms sweeping through the USSR and Eastern Europe and continues to deny the Cuban people basic freedoms.

- **Soviet connection.** The Soviet-Cuban relationship remains intact, although strains are appearing between the two countries. The Soviet 2,800-man motorized rifle brigade remains in Cuba; the Soviets have an intelligence collection facility there targeted at US communications; and the USSR supplies Cuba with more than $5.5 billion yearly in economic and military assistance, including advanced MiG-29 aircraft in 1989.

**Outlook:** US policy results from the Cuban Government's unacceptable behavior at home and abroad. As long as this behavior continues and Fidel Castro remains hostile toward the US, overall relations are unlikely to improve. Two positive developments: the Cubans are withdrawing their 50,000 troops from Angola under the timetable set forth in the 1988 Angola-Namibia accords, and they also pulled their forces out of Ethiopia during 1989. Troop withdrawal from Africa by itself, however, will not lead to an overall improvement.

Thirty years of strained relations have not precluded cooperating on issues of interest to both countries as geographic neighbors, such as migration and search and rescue, but prospects appear poor for cooperation on matters such as narcotics and regional security.

Harriet Culley, Editor (202) 647-1208

CONTENTS

Congressman Tom Lantos,
*Chairman, House Human Rights Committee*................................5

Ambassador Alexander F. Watson,
*Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs*............15

Paula Valiente,
*Cuban Opposition Leader*................................................25

Francisco J. Hernández,
*President, Cuban American National Foundation*................29

Ambassador José Sorzano,
*Former National Security Advisor*................................32

The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992........................................36

STATEMENT OF
THE HONORABLE TOM LANTOS

REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

MR. LANTOS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman and colleagues. It is a pleasure to appear before you and to share a number of impressions from my recent brief trip to Cuba.

I suspect I should begin by suggesting something I found remarkable. I was the first Member of the House of Representatives in four years to have visited Cuba. Unless my information is erroneous, it is my good friend Congressman Rangel who was last there prior to my visit.

May I encourage all of my colleagues here in the room and, indeed, all my colleagues in the Congress to go to Cuba. Whatever expert testimony you will receive today and whatever impressions I have the opportunity to share with you, nothing will come close to personally visiting the island.

I will tell you why I am saying this. I am clearly not an expert on Cuba, but I am an expert on Communist dictatorships. I have been visiting Communist dictatorships on a systematic and annual basis since 1964, ranging from the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and China. Three years ago, I was the first American public official in two generations to have visited Albania while it was still under Communist control.

So I brought to my visit no expertise as such on Cuba—except, perhaps, a tremendous amount of reading on the subject. I did, however, bring with me an enormous expertise, a lifetime of experience with Communist dictatorships.

U.S. Policy and the Future of Cuba

Hon. Tom Lantos

Let me say at the outset that I consider Castro's Cuba in the closing weeks of 1993 to be a Stalinist tribal vestige of the Cold War. It is very difficult to realize that at this stage in modern history, when cataclysmic changes have swept across the globe from South Africa to the Middle East, this beautiful land of magnificent people should be frozen in time. There is a time warp that embraces the island and the people who deserve an infinitely better fate.

It is a bankrupt society and it is a bankrupt economy. As a professional economist, I must admit I had difficulty visualizing what happened to the approximately $100 billion of Soviet and East European aid that was provided Castro through the years. It is almost incomprehensible to find a society in 1993, recently the beneficiary of as much as $6 billion per annum in subsidies, which has an infrastructure that has crumbled to the extent the Cuban infrastructure has crumbled and which has really no redeeming feature whatsoever in the economy. As a matter of fact, I must tell you that I have never before seen a country under Communist dictatorship so destitute as to virtually lack all public transportation.

We drove some distance down the main highway that runs the full length of the island. It is a highway bereft of traffic. There are, of course, no private automobiles, but there are also no buses. Occasionally, a run-down truck comes by. People stand for hours in line in order to clamber atop this open truck and be transported like cattle.

There is no place to buy even a soft drink, let alone anything else. It is almost unreal. As a matter of fact, the whole experience has a surrealistic quality.

6

I was also struck by the degree of unanimity of thought regarding the regime which was present in the views of the tremendous variety of people I talked to in Cuba.

I met both with the leadership of the Catholic Church in Cuba and with the very distinguished Papal Nuncio. I met with Western ambassadors. I met with ambassadors from Central Europe. One in particular had served in a diplomatic position in Cuba for five years while there was a Communist regime in his own country and has now been serving for four years as his country's Ambassador.

I find that their appraisals of the economy, of human rights conditions, of the presence of a one-man dictatorship of Stalinist proportions, are almost identical. There seems to be no redeeming feature in Cuba, either in terms of economic development or in terms of some lessening of the pattern of political repression.

This is particularly interesting because many of the Communist dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe showed over a period of time varying degrees of liberalization, opening, relaxation of pressures.

There seems to be very little of that in Cuba—certainly nothing in the field of human rights or political rights—except, perhaps, tentative embryonic moves in the field of economic reform, but with barely noticeable results.

No one knows, of course, how accurate the statistics are. The best estimate one is able to get is that the combined unemployment and underemployment in Cuba is somewhere in the range of 35 to 45 percent.

The poverty of the people is penetrating. Children today

7

receive milk only up to the age of seven. Everything is rationed theoretically, but of course ration cards are often not honored.

It is very difficult to believe that an island which is potentially so wealthy—as all of my colleagues know, in the 1950s, Cuba was endowed with one of the highest living standards in the entire hemisphere—should be as drab, destitute, and desperate as Cuba is today. This is the result of a society where the people are repressed and the economy mismanaged.

I must tell you that whenever I have met with human rights activists anywhere, from South Africa to the former Soviet Union, I have been enormously impressed by their courage and determination. These are the finest people in Cuba, as indeed these are always the finest people in all totalitarian and repressive societies. These Havels and Nelson Mandelas of this world are there in large numbers in Cuba. Some are highly literate and highly educated. Others are simple, humble people. But they have a common thread—an indomitable pattern of courage and a commitment to decency and human values.

It is difficult to return from Cuba without being profoundly depressed at the tragedy that has been unfolding for decades so close to our shores on the part of a people who deserve so much better.

Let me also say that I was profoundly disappointed by the rigidly ideological approach taken by the Cuban government leaders I had occasion to meet. To give you just one example, the Cuban Foreign Minister was out of the country, so my first appointment was with the acting Foreign Minister. I was advised that the head of the U.S. Interest Section would not be allowed to attend the meeting with the acting Foreign Minister of Cuba.

8

Hon. Tom Lantos

I was to be picked up by one of their automobiles. I chose instead to ask the head of our Interest Section to drive over to the foreign ministry with me anyway. He did. When I met the acting Foreign Minister, I indicated to him that there would be no meetings unless the head of our Interest Section was allowed to participate. After some degree of argument and debate and delay, the head of our Interest Section was allowed to join me in that and all of my subsequent meetings with Cuban government officials.

This gives you a clue to the degree of rigidity and political blindness that permeates this regime—that the first visit of a Member of the U.S. Congress in four years to decide to see if there might be an opening for changing our policies, toward moving to some degree to a more civilized relationship with Cuba, is greeted by the attempt to deny the head of our Interest Section the opportunity to meet with the acting Foreign Minister and other Cuban high officials. There is a systematic pattern of making life for our Interest Section very difficult.

I must say that I am not very optimistic regarding any change on the part of the Cuban government in the near future. I made it clear, speaking for myself and myself only, that at a time when Yassar Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands on the White House lawn, that at a time when Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk are working together to move toward a non-discriminatory and democratic South Africa, the lunacy of a Stalinist dictator persisting 90 miles from our shore is not something the American people or the American Congress want to see.

We are eager and anxious to have trade, travel, tourism, invest-

9

ment, intellectual contacts, sports contacts, academic contacts, youth contacts of all types with Cuba. But there has first to be a change from the Stalinist regime which represses his remarkably talented and long-suffering people.

I also made clear the obvious. And I am closing on this note, Mr. Chairman. **Cuba has nothing to fear from the United States. There is no military threat to Cuba from the United States of any kind, shape, manner, or form.** I think it is very important that at the highest level this be repeated time and time again.

We are looking for a peaceful transformation such as we have seen elsewhere, for this anachronism of a Stalinist dictatorship 90 miles off our shores is simply unacceptable as a state of affairs.

I will be delighted to answer any questions, Mr. Chairman, that you may have.

## QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIOD

**MR. TORRICELLI:** Thank you, Mr. Lantos. Do members of the committee wish to ask any questions?

**MS. ROS-LEHTINEN:** The dissident movement, Congressman Lantos, in Cuba; can you give us some insight as to information you received about the dissidents there? What is it that they are calling for? How are they organized? Do you believe that Castro only allows certain sanitized dissidents that he uses for his own projects or do you believe there really is a dissident movement alive and well in Cuba?

10

Hon. Tom Lantos

**MR. LANTOS:** There are two dissident movements in Cuba, as there always are under all Communist dictatorships. There is the dissident movement that carries the seal of approval of the Communist regime and is only an arm of the government. But then there is the real dissident movement. It is many-splendored. It covers churchgoers, people that would like to develop into a labor movement, young people, women, journalists, and others. They are destitute. The most primitive means of developing communications networks among themselves are denied. They are threatened.

Numbers vary as to whether there are 600, 800, 1,000 or 2,000 political prisoners in Cuba. [Estimates by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba are that 8.2% of the total number of 276,000 people in Castro's jails are political prisoners; that is, over 22,600.] The penal code is an abomination. People are arrested and put into prison for long periods of time for such crimes as "dangerousness", i.e. disparaging the government.

There is a very narrowly circumscribed sphere in which the Church is able to operate. Churches are not allowed to undertake any activity outside the actual walls of the church. All churches must be registered and approved by the state. **There are neighborhood spy committees who watch every waking hour of every citizen.**

I think all the demands made by our Government, namely, releasing human rights activists, allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit Cuban jails, and allowing the United Nations Special Rapporteur and legitimate human rights groups to visit Cuba, are demands that we must continue to press.

11

Hon. Tom Lantos

I must say that, given the terror that exists, my admiration for the human rights activists who were willing to meet with me is unbounded.

**MS. ROS-LEHTINEN:** Just a quick follow-up question about the political prisoners. As we know, the U.N. Rapporteur was not able to go to Cuba to visit the jails. Did you get any reports on the current situation of those political prisoners, how many there would be, where they are, the conditions to which they are subjected?

**MR. LANTOS:** My information is second hand and is, I am sure, available to the committees through other means. I must say that the whole atmosphere of the society is so permeated with fear on a day-in, day-out basis, that the large number of people leaving or attempting to leave—although many are killed in the process of fleeing the country “illegally”—indicate a degree of repression not seen in Central and Eastern Europe, for example, since the 1950s.

This is a society which, in many ways, reminded me of Communist regimes decades ago—the most repressive Communist regimes decades ago. I visited Ceausescu's Romania during the worst periods of repression, and any impression is that the pattern of terror is greater in Cuba today than was the pattern of terror during Ceausescu's worst years in Romania.

**MR. TORRICELLI:** Mr. Berman?

**MR. BERMAN:** Just one comment. Very interesting testimony, Tom, but to my way of thinking, it is precisely the poor

12

prospects for government-to-government engagement which you have concluded from your trip down there that makes some kind of people-to-people contact essential if we are not to isolate ourselves from the Cuban people. In other words, carving out from the embargo non-commercial, non-tourist-related kinds of visits to those people, the kinds of people you met with, because Members of Congress are not able to make a steady stream of trips down there. In some ways, I think your testimony makes a case for my position on why we should divorce that kind of travel from the decision on whether or not to continue to strengthen and internationalize the embargo. Thank you.

**MR. TORRICELLI:** Mr. Lantos, do you have any sense about whether there is an understanding, even within people in the Cuban government, that in the Cuban Democracy Act, we unilaterally extended an offer to Cuba of opening communications and telecommunications. And though we strongly held the line on economic subsidies to the Castro dictatorship, we did make a strong exception in allowing telecommunications and other means of communications to open with the idea that, even if this produced foreign exchange for Castro, the truth, the pressure that would come from communications, as Mr. Berman is assessing, was worth the price.

Mr. Castro, of course, predictably has not taken our offer, but is the fact understood that communications remain interrupted because of Mr. Castro not taking the offer rather than us not making the offer?

**MR. LANTOS:** Mr. Chairman, I believe it is understood by some of the top leadership. It is my impression that there are in

13

the top leadership some highly sophisticated and knowledgeable people with a great deal of experience in free and democratic societies. It is my impression that they are so terrorized by Castro himself that even if they would like to move in the direction of relaxation and opening up, creating new channels, they are terrified to do so.

**MR. TORRICELLI:** Other Members of the committee?

**MR. DÍAZ-BALART:** Very briefly. Tom, did the dissident community have an opportunity to let you know its position with regard to the Cuban Democracy Act, our embargo?

**MR. LANTOS:** I met with a sizeable number of dissidents. With one exception, they were all supportive of the existing legislation.

**MR. TORRICELLI:** Most importantly, people have been sending me photographs of these posters with my picture with a noose around my neck. Did you happen to see any of them?

**MR. LANTOS:** I looked hard for the posters, but they must have removed them, knowing I was coming.

**MR. TORRICELLI:** The committee will recess for a vote. I urge Members to please come back promptly. We have a number of witnesses we would like to hear from, not the least of which will be Mr. Rangel.

14

STATEMENT OF
**AMB. ALEXANDER F. WATSON,**
**ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INTER-AMERICAN AFFAIRS**

**MR. WATSON:** Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity to discuss recent developments in Cuba, U.S.-Cuba policy, and the impact of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992.

Let me state at the outset that **President Clinton's policy toward Cuba is to maintain our economic embargo until there is true democratic reform and respect for human rights, while reaching out to the Cuban people to alleviate their distress. He does not intend to deviate from this policy.**

Cuba today is confronting the most serious economic crisis in its history. Six billion dollars in annual Soviet aid has ended. The ensuing economic collapse has laid bare the simple, sad truth that Cuba's inefficient planned economy is unable to meet its people's most basic needs. Remember that in the 1950s, Cuba had a per capita income among the very highest in Latin America; today, it is among the very lowest. Foreign trade has fallen by 75%. Factories are closing, underemployment and unemployment may well be approaching 40%, and the 1992 sugar harvest was the smallest in thirty years. Rationing has never been tighter. Milk is only available to children under seven, and Cubans are authorized but one shirt, one pair of shoes, and one pair of pants or a skirt per year.

These tragic facts should come as no surprise. They are the result of the failures of Cuba's command economy. Command economies everywhere have produced shortages and rationing, whether in Europe, the Soviet Union, Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean.

15

In the face of this economic disaster, the Cuban government has made some grudging modifications, but they have been too little and too late. The government's first priority is clear to maintain control of the Cuban people. For example, individual private enterprise, abolished in 1968, is again permissible, but the individual must fall within one of about 130 specific categories, and register with and be approved by the state. Those engaged in private enterprise cannot be university graduates and may not hire another person or form a company. Farmers still cannot sell their produce to city dwellers, and it is still illegal for Cubans to freely buy and sell their homes or make a private investment.

Cuba touts its high-priority tourism and biotechnology industries in which it has invested so much scarce hard-currency resources. These industries, however, cannot succeed in resolving Cuba's pressing economic needs, mired as they are in centralized inefficiency. In addition, Cuba maintains an enormous and costly military and security apparatus. Its armed forces, although smaller than in the past, are still the third largest in Latin America, after only Brazil and Mexico, countries with populations significantly larger than Cuba's. Its massive state security forces seek to control every detail of the daily life of the average Cuban. They are an enormous drain on the Cuban economy. More importantly, however, they indicate the regime's determination to maintain absolute political control.

The modest economic changes I have outlined have not been accompanied by political change. Basic human rights remain repressed and democratic practices are not tolerated.

16

Amb. Alexander F. Watson

In short, **Cuba is a country at a dead end.**

The economic and political systems have failed, and provide the Cuban people with neither the prosperity nor the freedom that they long for. Their daily existence is marked by scarcity, rationing, and long lines. Their future under the current regime is without hope.

What is our response to this human tragedy, in a country just 90 miles from our shores? On the one hand, we will continue our diplomatic, political, and economic isolation of the Cuban government and maintain our economic embargo as a form of leverage and pressure on the Cuban government to start to meet the economic and political needs of its people. On the other hand, we will actively reach out to the Cuban people with humanitarian assistance, an offer of improved telecommunications and an increased flow of information. This two-track policy, which is reflected in the Cuban Democracy Act, is supported by this Administration because it meets our strategic as well as our humanitarian interests as a nation.

These two tracks are clearly complementary. As the authors of the Cuban Democracy Act wisely recognized, we must make it clear that the regime's denial of basic human rights is and will remain unacceptable to the United States, while still reaching out to the Cuban people.

Against this backdrop of Cuba's current situation, let me review the Act section by section.

Section 1703 of the Cuban Democracy Act correctly describes current U.S. policy. We believe that the future of Cuba is for the people of Cuba to decide through free and fair elections under international observation. We believe that the embargo and

17

Amb. Alexander F. Watson

> "Without the embargo—and vigorous enforcement of its provisions—our leverage to promote peaceful change would dissipate overnight."

diplomatic isolation are the best ways to maintain pressure on the Cuban government to adopt democratic reforms and to start respecting the human rights of the Cuban people. We also want the Cuban people to know, to use the words of Section 1703, that we are also willing to "reduce the sanctions in carefully calibrated ways in response to positive developments in Cuba." To date, we have seen no movement towards democracy or towards respect for human rights.

Section 1704 authorizes the President to suspend foreign assistance to any country that provides assistance, including loans, leases, or credits at non-market rates, to Cuba. We continue to monitor this situation closely. Although six billion dollars a year in Soviet assistance to Cuba has ended, we have made very clear to the Russian Government repeatedly and at the very highest levels the potential and serious consequences of any contravention of this provision. Earlier this year, Russia announced a $380 million credit to complete projects started by the Soviet Union in Cuba, and we are monitoring the agreement to ensure that it is on strict market terms. Many Western countries, such as Sweden, Canada, and Germany, have ended their modest aid programs to Cuba due to human rights concerns. Others, such as

18

Mexico and Venezuela, no longer provide goods to Cuba on concessional terms because Cuba failed to pay back earlier concessional credits. Although the European Community (EC) and Spain have made loans for humanitarian assistance to Cuba in 1993, France is the only country we know of that maintains an assistance program to Cuba today. Neither France nor the EC receives any U.S. aid; Spain is a candidate for some IMET funds. Spain's loan to Cuba, however, was for humanitarian purposes, specifically the purchase of food.

Section 1705, "Support for the Cuban People", is being implemented. Food donations to Cuba-based individuals or non-governmental organizations have been deregulated. Medicine and medical supplies may be licensed by the Department of Commerce for private donation to individuals and non-governmental organizations in Cuba. The humanitarian sale of medicine to Cuba may also be licensed, when there is adequate on-site inspection and other appropriate means to verify that the export is not misused.

Since the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA) was passed last year, licenses valued at over $3 million have been authorized for large humanitarian aid shipments to Cuba. These have included medicines and dental, medical, and hospital supplies to numerous non-governmental organizations in Cuba, including the Cuban Red Cross, the Cuban Ecumenical Council, the Cuban Baptist Convention, the Jewish Casa de la Comunidad Hebrea, and CARITAS Cuba, the charitable organization of the Catholic bishops.

Earlier this year, the Administration also authorized the "¡Basta!" organization to send two flotillas from Key West,

19

Florida, with cargos of medical and hospital supplies for the Cuban Red Cross and other non-governmental groups. These large shipments are in addition to the thousands of fully licensed packages that individuals send to their relatives on the island. We continue to look at ways to streamline procedures for sending humanitarian goods directly to the Cuban people.

I want to emphasize, Mr. Chairman, that there are legal means to provide significant amounts of humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people. This Administration will continue to vigorously oppose politically motivated efforts to undermine the U.S. economic embargo.

In regard to telecommunications, the Cuban Democracy Act authorizes "efficient and adequate" telecommunications between the U.S. and Cuba. Under guidelines issued by the Administration, U.S. companies are now negotiating with Cuban authorities for a substantial increase in telephone links, with all current settlement at standard international rates. Unfortunately, the Cuban response has initially been less than positive. However, we know how important it is to Cuban-Americans to be able to talk with their loved ones, and will continue working for better phone links.

In regard to direct mail delivery, our approach to Cuba in the past for such service met with a negative Cuban response. We hope that subsequent overtures will be more fruitful.

On assistance to support democracy in Cuba, The National Endowment for Democracy continues to support human rights projects related to Cuba, disbursing over $500,000 in FY 1993. These projects are undertaken by a wide variety of groups outside of Cuba, such as Freedom House, the José Martí

20

Amb. Alexander F. Watson

Foundation, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, and the Human Rights Information Bureau. They are designed to promote nonviolent democratic change, as the CDA calls for.

Section 1706(a), the prohibition on licensing trade with Cuba by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. firms, has been in effect since the Act was signed on October 23, 1992. The Department of the Treasury has ceased to issue licenses for trade with Cuba by U.S.-owned or U.S.-controlled firms located in third countries that had previously been permitted under certain circumstances by Treasury's Cuban Assets Control Regulations. Subsequent to the Act's passage, and consistent with its provisions, Treasury only licensed such transactions where the underlying contracts were entered into before the Act was enacted.

Section 1706(b), sanctions on vessels calling at Cuban ports, has also been implemented. The Department of Treasury, in coordination with the Customs Department, has issued notices to all United States port authorities, informing all shipping agents of the CDA prohibitions. All indications have been that notification deterred such vessels coming into our ports to load or unload cargo.

"We will be ready to help Cuba in appropriate ways in its transition to democracy, once the process is underway."

21

Sections 1707 and 1708 concern U.S. aid and assistance to a transitional and to a democratic Cuban government. We, of course, will be ready to help Cuba in appropriate ways in its transition to democracy, once the process is underway. We have read the draft "Free Cuba Support Act" legislation proposed by Congressman Robert Menéndez and several co-sponsors with interest and wish to work with this committee on ways to respond to the inevitable change in Cuba.

Although the CDA does not deal extensively with the issue of travel to Cuba, I believe it is an important issue to address, since it has received widespread attention in the past few months. The freedom to travel is a right that Americans cherish. As you know, U.S. law does not prohibit travel to Cuba. It does, however, prohibit spending money on travel to Cuba except for certain authorized categories, such as a visit with close relatives, or professional journalists reporting on events in Cuba. Over 15,000 American citizens and residents traveled legally to Cuba last year. The U.S. Government has no desire to keep its citizens from learning about the country of Cuba, its people and its culture, but we do want to deny the Cuban government hard currency. We do not want to prolong the suffering of the Cuban people under a dictatorship, which could happen were the Cuban government to receive the economic windfall open travel would provide.

In October, the State Department gave provisional approval to the application of a licensed air charter service provider to increase flights to Cuba following changed visa procedures by the Cuban government. The Congress and the Administration were concerned that we not acquiesce in any attempt by the

22

Amb. Alexander F. Watson

Cuban government to require individuals going to visit relatives to purchase hotel accommodation packages in order to obtain expedited visas. Therefore, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a General Circular advising licensed travel service providers that they could sell such packages only if a traveler voluntarily indicated he wished to stay in a hotel.

We have been monitoring the new travel procedures carefully since the issuance of the OFAC circular. Information received from the air charter service provider indicates there has been compliance with the circular. We intend to work with OFAC to continue close monitoring of these travel-related transactions to ensure that any hotel packages sold are purchased on a voluntary basis. Meanwhile, we have begun a policy of approving additional flights, after a careful review, on a month-to-month basis. The demand, however, has not been as great as the air charter service providers anticipated.

Also on the subject of travel, approximately one hundred and seventy members of the Ad Hoc Committee for Freedom to Travel took a protest trip to Havana the second week of October. Their publicly stated goal was to violate the embargo's ban on travel-related expenditures and assert an unqualified right to travel for any reason. Customs officials interviewed many of the protesters and confiscated passports which had Cuban entry stamps as evidence of travel to Cuba, for possible use in prosecutions. The Department of Justice is reviewing the situation to determine if there is sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution. As with humanitarian donations, the President's policy on travel is to support both the letter and the spirit of the embargo.

The other major travel-related issue eliciting significant inter-

23

est has been the ongoing inter-agency review of the free flow of information as it relates to all economic sanctions programs which Secretary Warren Christopher told Congressman Berrier we would undertake. We seek to strike a balance between the U.S. interest in promoting democracy through enhanced information exchange, including by travel, and our pursuit of other U.S. foreign policy and security goals. On Cuba, the President's dual commitment is to enforce a strong economic embargo against the Cuban regime, while reaching out to the people of Cuba.

In conclusion, I wish to emphasize the importance of both tracks of our policy and how closely they are intertwined one with the other. Without the embargo—and vigorous enforcement of its provisions—our leverage to promote peaceful change would dissipate overnight. Without humanitarian assistance and information-sharing, our policy would be needlessly harsh and could add to the suffering of the Cuban people.

Taken as a whole, we have a comprehensive, well-reasoned program—the result of close collaboration between Congress and the Executive branch—and one which enjoys bipartisan support. We are saying “no” to a dictatorial government as we give an emphatic “yes” to the people who suffer under it. And we look forward to the day when the Cuban people regain their freedom, their economic security, and the bright future they have been denied for so long.

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STATEMENT OF

MS. PAULA VALIENTE

AFRO-CUBAN OPPOSITION LEADER
EXILED ON NOVEMBER 8, 1993

MS. VALIENTE: [Through the interpreter] My name is Paula Valiente. I was born in Cuba, and arrived in the United States ten days ago, on the 8th of November, 1993. I am part of the growing internal opposition movement in Cuba and, as a human rights activist, I preside over the group Mothers for Dignity founded on the 1st of November, 1991.

From its beginning, the purpose of the group was to denounce human rights violations in Cuba and to promote religious freedom on the island. For more than thirty years, Castro's regime has prohibited the image of the Virgin [Mary] to be taken out of Cuban churches. That is why on July 8, 1992, with five other persons and the right of all human beings to practice their faith, we organized a pilgrimage, taking the statue of the Virgin through the streets of Havana.

As a result, all participants were arrested. I was brutally beaten and dragged by my hair to a patrol car which took me to the police station where I remained under arrest for 24 hours. There, I was warned that this type of activity would not be "tolerated". From that day on, we organized pilgrimages on the 8th of every month, always with the same results.

A few months later, as more people joined us, the pilgrimages began to take place on both the 8th and the 24th. During that time, I was beaten and arrested on numerous occasions. On the 8th of September, 1992, I was previously arrested [prior to the

25

Paula Valiente

> "All monies Fidel Castro gets from investments or tourism will go towards financing his gigantic repressive apparatus."

pilgrimage] in order to stop me from attending. But not without being again brutally beaten, and this time confined to bed for two weeks.

I was beaten in my face, all over my body, and my kidneys were affected. I urinated blood for several days. On the 24th of the same month, despite ailing health,

I went to the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. At the end of that Mass, I went over to Monsignor Jaime Ortega, Bishop of Havana, to explain what had happened to me. I was beaten and dragged out of the church by Castro security agents.

Once outside, they threw me in front of the Rapid Action Brigade, which, I would like to point out, is nothing more than a government-backed lynch mob to eliminate those who dissent. I was beaten until I lost consciousness and incarcerated for five days. I continued to be a victim of harassment and repression, along with the other members of Mothers for Dignity.

On January 28, 1993, during a Mass celebrated on the birthday of Cuban patriot José Martí, I was once again beaten by a large number of agents in plainclothes who dragged me from the church out into the middle of the street. I was beaten with clubs, cables, and bottles until I was unconscious.

That was not the last time I was beaten and arrested. The 1st

26

of May of that same year, after another beating, I was imprisoned for 18 days. I was later sentenced to a year in prison, which, thanks to international pressure, was changed to two years of house arrest.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the Cuban American National Foundation, which publicly denounced each time that I was the object of beatings and arrests. I also wish to thank the Congress of the United States for supporting Radio Martí. The broadcasts of Radio Martí and The Voice of the Foundation kept denouncing my situation. It is thanks to these broadcasts that the people of Cuba and the rest of the world can know about the opposition in Cuba and the repression of which they are the victims.

During my last two arrests on the 8th and 24th of September, 1993, State Security warned me that I should leave Cuba. If I refused, my 17-year-old son would be sent to prison for eight years. A few hours after getting ready to leave for the United States, I was told that my daughter would not be able to come with me despite the fact that she had authorization from her father and a U.S. visa.

Inside a police station, my daughter was forced to say that she wanted to remain in Cuba with her grandmother. Can you really believe that a child is sincere when she repeats these words in tears? I was not allowed to embrace my daughter, despite the fact that she stretched out her arms for a final embrace. I was forced to go into exile to save my son from an eight-year prison term while the state took custody of my daughter Cheila.

This, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, is an example of the inhumanity practiced by the Castro regime. The Cuban prisons

27

are full of men and women whose only crime is to dissent.

I am here to offer once more my support for the Torricelli Bill [Cuban Democracy Act], just like I did while inside Cuba. In Cuba, the food situation is critical, there is no medicine, the country is in bankruptcy—not because of the [U.S.] embargo but because the regime spent all its Soviet aid on international war rather than on helping its people. All monies Fidel Castro gets from investments or tourism will go towards financing his gigantic repressive apparatus.

Today, young men and women escape on rafts from the sad destiny imposed by Castro of “Socialism or Death!”. In Cuba, all human rights are violated. There are no individual freedoms, and each day repression increases. There have been no substantial changes, and each day Cuban families are divided more. Mothers are condemned to losing their children in the Florida Straits or to rotting in prison.

Recently in the town of Regla, a mother lost her 24-year-old son, assassinated by Castro's police. The town took to the streets in support of the mother, who denounced how the beating had caused his death. So brutal was it that it destroyed his face, his body, his testicles. How much more do you think the mothers of Cuba can bear?

As a representative of a country victim to the worst of repression, I ask that you please not abandon us. I have faith in God and in the Virgin that soon the Cuban people will be able to live in freedom.

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STATEMENT OF
DR. FRANCISCO J. HERNÁNDEZ
PRESIDENT, CANF

DR. HERNANDEZ: Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, members of Congress, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the issue of U.S.-Cuba relations. I would especially like to express our gratitude to Mr. Torricelli for the leadership he has shown on this issue and for his tireless efforts on behalf of freedom and democracy for the Cuban people.

Today, one year after the Cuban Democracy Act was passed by overwhelming bipartisan support, I believe there is no better affirmation as to the effectiveness of U.S. policy towards Cuba than the fact that the unilateral lifting of U.S. sanctions has become the number one foreign policy priority of the Castro regime.

If Castro's reaction to the Cuban Democracy Act may be used as an indication, there must be no doubt that the congressional statement of policies and intentions against dictatorship and repression represented by the CDA is the most effective, clear, positive, non-violent statement ever made in support of freedom and democracy.

Since 1965, when Castro exterminated all armed resistance of the Cuban people with the killing and imprisonment of thousands of guerrilla fighters in the Escambray mountains, the dictatorship had never confronted the massive manifestations of popular unrest and open rebellion that we have seen during the last twelve months. Literally thousands of Cubans have taken to the

29

Francisco J. Hernández

> "There is no better affirmation as to the effectiveness of U.S. policy towards Cuba than the fact that the unilateral lifting of U.S. sanctions has become the number one foreign policy priority of the Castro regime."

incidents in which the population has stoned military officers on the street. Whole neighborhoods are virtually taken over by the people during the frequent blackouts. On the other hand, openly active opposition groups are multiplying and increasing their membership.

The Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, a project of the Cuban American National Foundation, maintains daily contact with over 40 opposition organizations inside Cuba, all of which support the Cuban Democracy Act, as they stated to Congressman Lantos during his recent visit to Havana. Furthermore, they support the internationalization of the

streets, openly challenging the government's authority in towns such as Cojímar and Regla, only a few miles from Castro's seat of power in Havana.

Reports from recent defectors such as Captain Leonides Basulto, the pilot who flew his plane to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo, indicate that military personnel have been instructed to use civilian clothes when traveling to Havana because of a number of

embargo. One of them, the Maceísta Movement for Dignity, whose membership consists of mostly black Cubans, has sent a letter to this effect signed by over 1,000 Cuban men and women to Secretary General Boutros-Ghali of the United Nations.

I have their letter, Mr. Chairman, and all the names of the over 1,000 Cubans who have signed in support of the Cuban Democracy Act and the internationalization of the embargo. In their letter they say: "**We must not be deceived. The Cuban conflict is not essentially between the Cuban government and the United States; no, it is primarily a conflict between the Cuban government and its political opposition, that is the Cuban people.** In essence, Fidel and Raúl Castro are the problem. They, therefore, cannot provide the solution."

Mr. Chairman, let us not be deceived. **The lifting of the embargo would amount to betrayal of the Cuban people's hopes for freedom and democracy, a moral Bay of Pigs.** Let us not abandon the Cuban people now that they are gathering their best efforts, now that they see the light at the end of the long disgraceful tunnel of Castro's Communism.

They are not asking for weapons. **They are not asking us to spill American blood in their defense. They are asking for the moral support embodied in the Cuban Democracy Act.** Thank you.

30

31

> "Fidel and Raúl Castro are the problem. They, therefore, cannot provide the solution."

Amb. José Sorzano

STATEMENT OF
AMB. JOSÉ SORZANO

AMB. SORZANO: Thank you very much, Mr. Congressman. I would like to say that, having heard the moving and powerful statement of Congressman Lantos, there is very little else that needs to be said. I would like to say, however, that I fully support what he has to say, and in the interest of time, I would like to only discuss the question of the United Nations and Cuba.

I had the position of Deputy Permanent Representative at the United Nations. I served there for five years, and I think I may be able to shed some light on the question of their recent vote on the U.S. embargo.

It is really intriguing, if not to say befuddling, that two separate organs of the United Nations, one, the Security Council and the other, the General Assembly, almost within a period of days, have actually made decisions that are completely at opposite ends.

On the one hand, we have the Security Council voting to impose a tremendously tight embargo against Haiti with the purpose of bringing about democracy and human rights in Haiti.

On the other hand, we have the General Assembly of the United Nations voting overwhelmingly to condemn the embargo of the United States on Cuba which has precisely the same purpose, of bringing about democracy and human rights in Cuba.

How that is explicable, I think, depends on an understanding of the particular dynamics of the General Assembly. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that less than one-third of the representatives in the General Assembly actually vote on instruc-

32

tions. Many may believe that the General Assembly represents the opinion of the world or even the opinion of the respective governments. In my experience, I found this not to be true.

Most of the time the government representatives have a very broad discretion. They essentially have said: On this particular subject, follow the lead of the Non-Aligned Movement, or on that particular subject, follow the lead of the G-7 countries.

In this particular case, I am not surprised that the United States was isolated. It has long been a practice of the General Assembly to have votes in which the name of the game is to isolate the United States. And during my time there—and I believe it continues to be the case—it was a common phenomenon for the United States to be isolated.

So the argument that somehow or other this has created a situation in which we have been embarrassed, I don't think is any truer than in the past.

I would say one should lobby not only in New York [at the General Assembly] and the respective capitals, but also here in Washington. Next time you see an important vote coming, I would recommend that you call in the ambassadors of those countries and alert them to the vote. I believe you will see that it has an enormous, and actually very surprisingly, positive impact.

Thank you.

33

Cuban Democracy Act of 1992

# TITLE XVII
## CUBAN DEMOCRACY ACT OF 1992

*Signed into law on October 23, 1992*

### SEC. 1701. SHORT TITLE.

This title may be cited as the "Cuban Democracy Act of 1992".

### SEC. 1702. FINDINGS.

The Congress makes the following findings:

(1) The government of Fidel Castro has demonstrated consistent disregard for internationally accepted standards of human rights and for democratic values. It restricts the Cuban people's exercise of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and other rights recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. It has refused to admit into Cuba the representative of the United Nations Human Rights Commission appointed to investigate human rights violations on the island.

(2) The Cuban people have demonstrated their yearning for freedom and their increasing opposition to the Castro government by risking their lives in organizing independent, democratic activities on the island and by undertaking hazardous flights for freedom to the United States and other countries.

(3) The Castro government maintains a military-dominated economy that has decreased the well-being of the Cuban people in order to enable the government to engage in military interventions and subversive activities throughout the world and, especially in the Western Hemisphere. These have included involvement in narcotics trafficking and support for the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador.

(4) There is no sign that the Castro regime is prepared to make any significant concessions to democracy or to undertake any form of democratic opening. Efforts to suppress dissent through intimidation, imprisonment, and exile have accelerated since the political changes that have occurred in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

(5) Events in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have dramatically reduced Cuba's external support and threaten Cuba's food and oil supplies.

(6) The fall of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the now universal recognition in Latin America and the Caribbean that Cuba provides a failed model of government and development, and the evident inability of Cuba's economy to survive current trends, provide the United States and the international democratic community with an unprecedented opportunity to promote a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.

(7) However, Castro's intransigence increases the likelihood that there could be a collapse of the Cuban economy, social upheaval, or widespread suffering. The recently concluded Cuban Communist Party Congress has underscored Castro's unwillingness to respond positively to increasing pressures for reform either from within the party or without.

(8) The United States cooperated with its European and other allies to assist the difficult transitions from Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Therefore, it is appropriate for those allies to cooperate with United States policy to promote a peaceful transition in Cuba.

Cuban Democracy Act of 1992

SEC. 1703. STATEMENT OF POLICY.

It should be the policy of the United States—

(1) to seek a peaceful transition to democracy and a resumption of economic growth in Cuba through the careful application of sanctions directed at the Castro government and support for the Cuban people;

(2) to seek the cooperation of other democratic countries in this policy;

(3) to make clear to other countries that, in determining its relations with them, the United States will take into account their willingness to cooperate in such a policy;

(4) to seek the speedy termination of any remaining military or technical assistance, subsidies, or other forms of assistance to the Government of Cuba from any of the independent states of the former Soviet Union;

(5) to continue vigorously to oppose the human rights violations of the Castro regime;

(6) to maintain sanctions on the Castro regime so long as it continues to refuse to move toward democratization and greater respect for human rights;

(7) to be prepared to reduce the sanctions in carefully calibrated ways in response to positive developments in Cuba;

(8) to encourage free and fair elections to determine Cuba's political future;

(9) to request the speedy termination of any military or technical assistance, subsidies, or other forms of assistance to the Government of Cuba from the government of any other country;

38

and

(10) to initiate immediately the development of a comprehensive United States policy toward Cuba in a post-Castro era.

SEC. 1704. INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

(a) CUBAN TRADING PARTNERS.—The President should encourage the governments of countries that conduct trade with Cuba to restrict their trade and credit relations with Cuba in a manner consistent with the purposes of this title.

(b) SANCTIONS AGAINST COUNTRIES ASSISTING CUBA.—

(1) SANCTIONS.—The President may apply the following sanctions to any country that provides assistance to Cuba:

(A) The government of such country shall not be eligible for assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 or assistance or sales under the Arms Export Control Act.

(B) Such country shall not be eligible, under any program, for forgiveness or reduction of debt owed to the United States Government.

(2) DEFINITION OF ASSISTANCE.—For purposes of paragraph (1), the term "assistance to Cuba"—

(A) means assistance to or for the benefit of the Government of Cuba that is provided by grant, concessional sale, guaranty, or insurance, or by any other means on terms more favorable than that generally available in the applicable market, whether in the form of a loan, lease, credit, or otherwise, and such term includes subsidies for exports to Cuba and favorable tariff treatment of articles that are the growth, product, or manufacture of Cuba; and

(B) does not include—

39

Cuban Democracy Act of 1992

(i) donations of food to non-governmental organizations or individuals in Cuba, or

(ii) exports of medicines or medical supplies, instruments, or equipment that would be permitted under section 1705(c)

(3) APPLICABILITY OF SECTION.—This section, and any sanctions imposed pursuant to this section, shall cease to apply at such time as the President makes and reports to the Congress a determination under section 1708(a).

## SEC. 1705. SUPPORT FOR THE CUBAN PEOPLE.

(a) PROVISIONS OF LAW AFFECTED.—The provisions of this section apply notwithstanding any other provision of law, including section 620(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, and notwithstanding the exercise of authorities, before the enactment of this Act, under section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or the Export Administration Act of 1979.

(b) DONATIONS OF FOOD.—Nothing in this or any other Act shall prohibit donations of food to nongovernmental organizations or individuals in Cuba.

(c) EXPORTS OF MEDICINES AND MEDICAL SUPPLIES.—Exports of medicines or medical supplies, instruments, or equipment to Cuba shall not be restricted—

(1) except to the extent such restrictions would be permitted under section 5(m) of the Export Administration Act of 1979 or section 203(b)(2) of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act;

(2) except in a case which there is a reasonable likelihood

40

that the item to be exported will be used for purposes of torture or other human rights abuses;

(3) Except in a case in which there is a reasonable likelihood that the item to be exported will be reexported; and

(4) except in a case in which the item to be exported could be used in the production of any biotechnological product.

(d) REQUIREMENTS FOR CERTAIN EXPORTS.—

(1) ONSITE VERIFICATIONS.—(A) Subject to subparagraph (B), an export may be made under subsection (c) only if the President determines that the United States Government is able to verify, by onsite inspections and other appropriate means, that the exported item is to be used for the purposes for which it was intended and only for the use and benefit of the Cuban people.

(B) Subparagraph (A) does not apply to donations to non-governmental organizations in Cuba of medicines for humanitarian purposes.

(2) LICENSES.—Exports permitted under subsection (c) shall be made pursuant to specific licenses issued by the United States Government.

(e) TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES AND FACILITIES.—

(1) TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES.—Telecommunications services between the United States and Cuba shall be permitted.

(2) TELECOMMUNICATIONS FACILITIES.—Telecommunications facilities are authorized in such quantity and of such quality as may be necessary to provide efficient and adequate telecommunications services between the United States and Cuba.

41

Cuban Democracy Act of 1992

(3) LICENSING OF PAYMENTS TO CUBA.—(A) The President may provide for the issuance of licenses for the full or partial payment to Cuba of amounts due Cuba as a result of the provision of telecommunications services authorized by this subsection, in a manner that is consistent with the public interest and the purposes of this title, except that this paragraph shall not require any withdrawal from any account blocked pursuant to regulations issued under section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

(B) If only partial payments are made to Cuba under subparagraph (A), the amounts withheld from Cuba shall be deposited in an account in a banking institution in the United States. Such account shall be blocked in the same manner as any other account containing funds in which Cuba has any interest, pursuant to regulations issued under section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

(4) AUTHORITY OF FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION.—Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to supersede the authority of the Federal Communications Commission.

(f) DIRECT MAIL DELIVERY TO CUBA.—The United States Postal Service shall take such actions as are necessary to provide direct mail service to and from Cuba, including, in the absence of common carrier service between the two countries, the use of charter service providers.

(g) ASSISTANCE TO SUPPORT DEMOCRACY IN CUBA.—The United States Government may provide assistance, through appropriate nongovernmental organizations, for the support of individuals and organizations to promote nonviolent democratic

change in Cuba.

SEC. 1706. SANCTIONS.

(c) PROHIBITION ON CERTAIN TRANSACTIONS BETWEEN CERTAIN UNITED STATES FIRMS AND CUBA.—

(1) PROHIBITION.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no license may be issued for any transaction described in section 515.559 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as in effect on July 1, 1989.

(2) APPLICABILITY TO EXISTING CONTRACTS.—Paragraph (1) shall not affect any contract entered into before the date of the enactment of this Act.

(b) PROHIBITION ON VESSELS.—

(1) VESSELS ENGAGING IN TRADE.—Beginning on the 61st day after the date of the enactment of this Act, a vessel which engages a port or place in Cuba to engage in the trade of goods or services may not, within 180 days after departure from such port or place in Cuba, load or unload any freight at any place in the United States, except pursuant to a license issued by the Secretary of the Treasury.

(2) VESSELS CARRYING GOODS OR PASSENGERS TO OR FROM CUBA.—Except as specifically authorized by the Secretary of the Treasury, a vessel carrying goods or passengers to or from Cuba or carrying goods in which Cuba or a Cuban national has any interest may not enter a United States port.

(3) INAPPLICABILITY OF SHIP STORES GENERAL LICENSE.—No commodities which may be exported under a general license described in section 771.9 of title 15, Code of Federal

42

43

Cuban Democracy Act of 1992

Regulations, as in effect on May 1, 1992, may be exported under a general license to any vessel carrying goods or passengers to or from Cuba or carrying goods in which Cuba or a Cuban national has an interest.

(4) DEFINITIONS.—As used in this subsection—

(A) the term "vessel" includes every description of water craft or other contrivance used, or capable of being used, as a means of transportation in water, but does not include aircraft;

(B) the term "United States" includes the territories and possessions of the United States and the customs waters of the United States (as defined in section 410 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. 1401)); and

(C) the term "Cuban National" means a national of Cuba, as the term national is defined in section 515.302 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as of August 1, 1992.

(c) RESTRICTIONS ON REMITTANCES TO CUBA.—The President shall establish strict limits on remittances to Cuba by United States persons for the purpose of financing the travel of Cubans to the United States, in order to ensure that such remittances reflect only the reasonable costs associated with such travel, and are not used by the government of Cuba as a means of gaining access to United States currency.

(d) CLARIFICATION OF APPLICABILITY OF SANCTIONS.—The prohibitions contained in subsections (a), (b), and (c) shall not apply with respect to any activity otherwise permitted by section 1705 or section 1707 of this Act or any activity which may be regulated or prohibited under section 5(b)(4) of the Trading with the Enemy Act (50 U.S.C. App. 5(b)(4)).

44

## SEC. 1707. POLICY TOWARD A TRANSITIONAL CUBAN GOVERNMENT.

Food, medicine, and medical supplies for humanitarian purposes should be made available for Cuba under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954 if the President determines and certifies to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate that the government in power in Cuba—

(1) has made a public commitment to hold free and fair elections for a new government within six months and is proceeding to implement that decision;

(2) has made a public commitment to respect, and is respecting, internationally recognized human rights and basic democratic freedoms; and

(3) is not providing weapons or funds to any group, in any other country, that seeks the violent overthrow of the government of that country.

## SEC. 1708. POLICY TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC CUBAN GOVERNMENT.

(a) WAIVER OF RESTRICTIONS.—The President may waive the requirements of section 1706 if the President determines and reports to the Congress that the Government of Cuba—

(1) has held free and fair elections conducted under internationally recognized observers;

(2) has permitted opposition parties ample time to organize and campaign for such elections, and has permitted full access to the media to all candidates in the elections;

45

Cuban Democracy Act of 1992

(3) is showing respect for the basic civil liberties and human rights of the citizens of Cuba;

(4) is moving toward establishing a free market economic system; and

(5) has committed itself to constitutional change that would ensure regular free and fair elections that meet the requirements of paragraph (2).

(b) **POLICIES.**—If the President makes a determination under subsection (a), the President shall take the following actions with respect to a Cuban Government elected pursuant to elections described in subsection (a):

(1) To encourage the admission or reentry of such government to international organizations and international financial institutions.

(2) To provide emergency relief during Cuba's transition to a viable economic system.

(3) To take steps to end the United States trade embargo of Cuba.

## SEC. 1709. EXISTING CLAIMS NOT AFFECTED.

Except as provided in section 1705(a), nothing in this title affects the provisions of section 620(a)(2) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

## SEC. 1710. ENFORCEMENT.

(a) **ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITY.**—The authority to enforce this title shall be carried out by the Secretary of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury shall exercise the authorities of the

46

Trading With the Enemy Act in enforcing this title. In carrying out this subsection, the Secretary of the Treasury shall take the necessary steps to ensure that activities permitted under section 1705 are carried out for the purposes set forth in this title and not for purposes of the accumulation by the Cuban Government of excessive amounts of United States currency or the accumulation of excessive profits by any person entity.

(b) **AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.**—There are authorized to be appropriated to the Secretary of the Treasury such sums as may be necessary to carry out this title.

(c) **PENALTIES UNDER THE TRADING WITH THE ENEMY ACT.**—Section 16 of the Trading with the Enemy Act (50 U.S.C. App. 16) is amended—

(1) by striking "That whoever" and inserting "(a) Whoever"; and

(2) by adding at the end the following:

"(b)(1) The Secretary of the Treasury may impose a civil penalty of not more than $50,000 on any person who violates any license, order, rule, or regulation issued under this Act.

"(2) Any property, funds, securities, papers, or other articles or documents, or any vessel, together with its tackle, apparel, furniture, and equipment, that is the subject of a violation under paragraph (1) shall, at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury, be forfeited to the United States Government.

"(3) The penalties provided under this subsection may not be imposed for—

"(A) news gathering, research, or the export or import of, or transmission of, information or informational materials; or

47

"(B) clearly defined educational or religious activities, or activities of recognized human rights organizations, that are reasonably limited in frequency, duration, and number of participants.

"(4) The penalties provided under this subsection may be imposed only on the record after opportunity for an agency hearing in accordance with sections 554 through 557 of title 5, United States Code, with the right to prehearing discovery.

"(5) Judicial review of any penalty imposed under this subsection may be had to the extent provided in section 702 of title 5, United States Code.".

(d) **APPLICABILITY OF PENALTIES.**—The penalties set forth in section 16 of the Trading With the Enemy Act shall apply to violations of this title to the same extent as such penalties apply to violations under that Act.

(e) **OFFICE OF FOREIGN ASSETS CONTROL.**—The Department of the Treasury shall establish and maintain a branch of the Office of Foreign Assets Control in Miami, Florida, in order to strengthen the enforcement of this title.

## SEC. 1711. DEFINITION.

As used in this title, the term "United States person" means any United States citizen or alien admitted for permanent residence in the United States, and any corporation, partnership, or other organization organized under the laws of the United States.

## SEC. 1712. EFFECTIVE DATE.

This title shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.

USA TODAY • THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 1994 • 11A

OPINION USA

# End Cuba Cold War policy

It is responsible for the
latest anxiety attack
over Cuban refugees.

A week after President Clinton issued stern warnings to Cuban President Fidel Castro about unleashing a tide of Cubans onto U.S. shores, the administration announced contingency plans to blockade the strait between Florida and Cuba.

The concern about a glut of illegal refugees is understandable. The 1980 Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 Cubans to U.S. soil, triggered a wave of unpleasant internal repercussions, including political trouble for Clinton as governor of Arkansas.

But the United States bears much responsibility for the boiling point this crisis has reached.

First, some background. What Castro has threatened is to stop preventing the illegal emigration of Cubans, which could cause a glut of asylum-seekers on the U.S. doorstep.

By Rehka Basu, a columnist for the Des Moines (Iowa) Register.

Castro wants the United States to scrap its old Cold War ways of rewarding illegal Cuban emigrants. The official U.S. position is that only Cubans who have applied for and obtained visas at a refugee processing center in Cuba are welcome.

"It is our policy to encourage legal, orderly and safe migration," said Nancy Beck, a State Department press officer.

But the United States has traditionally proved just the opposite in its actions.

It has limited entry for Cubans who applied the legal way but readily accepted Cubans who fled and arrived illegally.

The 1966 Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act makes it easy for Cubans to become legal, permanent residents in a

PRESIDENT: Fidel Castro

AFP

year after they raft or hijack their way into the country.

Now comes the paradoxical situation: This threatened surge of refugees would not be "fleeing" but leaving with Castro's permission, and U.S. officials are crying foul.

After Mariel, under a 1984 U.S.-Cuba agreement, the United States pledged to issue up to 20,000 visas a year to Cubans applying to emigrate legally. But the number of actual visas granted has fallen far short of that.

Neither Beck nor a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service could provide a number, but, according to *The Washington Post*, legal migration has been limited to "an ungenerous 5,000 or so."

Rafael Dausa, a press officer for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington (Cuba and the United States don't maintain embassies in each other's countries, only "interests sections" attached to another nation's embassy) puts it only between 2,000 and 3,000.

But asylum requests from Cubans who have already made it to the United States are rewarded with much greater generosity. The INS spokeswoman said it's not completely automatic, but she verified the Cold War era presumption that those leaving communist countries are

likely to have a well-founded fear of persecution.

That presumption has worked against asylum-seekers fleeing non-communist governments, like Haiti, no matter how repressive the conditions. They have been assumed to be "economic" refugees unless able to prove persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular group.

Castro's threat clearly puts the United States in a bind. How could this country in good conscience admit any Cuban who voluntarily left, while turning back desperate Haitians?

The threat comes at a time of internal political dissent for Castro, and U.S. officials are quick to point out that freeing dissenters to leave without visas is a ploy to relieve the pressure on the Castro government.

No doubt there's some truth to that. But the United States also has contributed to hardships in Cuba by maintaining an economic embargo against Cuba covering food, medicine and other necessities since 1960. That economic hardship certainly has helped fuel the desire of many Cubans to leave.

U.S. officials maintain Cuba's problems are caused by its "refusal to reform its economic and political system." President Clinton has followed through with his campaign pledge to play hardball with Cuba by refusing to lift the U.S. embargo or normalize relations.

That's a wrongheaded policy.

It's in the interests of both countries to end the double standard and the economic embargo. There is no happy outcome in sight for anyone if tens of thousands of Cubans risk their lives to arrive in unwelcoming southern U.S. communities already feeling burdened by more than their share of immigrants. And Cuba should be helped to develop its economy so its citizens will be less tempted to leave.

The Cold War is over everywhere else. Why does it persist against Cuba?

# CUBA IN THE NEWS

Provided by The Cuban American National Foundation

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 1994

## REVIEW & OUTLOOK

### Castro's Winter

The long autumn of the world's dictators continues, while each awaits the winter of cold exile or colder death. That is at least one more choice than the totalitarian dictators gave their own people, and now the choice appears to have arrived for Fidel Castro as it did for Erich Honecker, who fled, and for Nicolae Ceausescu, who got a nervous firing squad in a vacant lot. There is a sense spreading among the community of Cuba watchers that the dam of repression is bursting apart around Castro. As Cuban specialist Jarifeli Perez-Stable told the Journal's Jose de Cordoba this week: "We are a step closer to the point where the Cuban government will have to take a decision to fire against masses of Cubans on the street."

Last Friday there was a riot in Havana's streets, a virtually unheard of event in the Cuban police state. Now Cuban boats are being hijacked by desperate refugees fleeing the island's dead and stinking economy. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Congressman with a Cuban-American constituency, says "the Cuban people have said by their actions that they no longer fear the dictatorship."

Castro's fall has been predicted before, so it is important for the course of U.S. policy to understand why he seems closer to the cliff this time.

The source of Cuba's discontent is the failure of Castro's economic model, an inevitability after the Soviet sugar daddy went belly up in 1991. Cuban imports have shrunk from $8 billion a year (with So-

Fidel Castro

viet price supports) to $1.7 billion in 1993. Now, the masses survive on one daily meal of rice, beans, soy and water. Electricity blackouts occur four days a week. There is no water system three days a week. Most hospital operating rooms have closed down, and they are running out of surgical thread and using glue on open wounds.

The main problem, though, is productivity. Everything of value is sold for dollars, made legal to trade and hold in July 1993. But the government keeps cracking down on the ways one can earn dollars. As a result, Fidel can't get anybody to work for pesos, which mainly buy the meager rations or transportation. According to Cuban economist Julio Carranza, there's been a 45% drop in productivity since 1990, as Cubans become ever more reluctant to work for constantly depreciating pesos.

Many workers at state enterprises simply don't go to work at all. In his 1992 book, "Castro's Final Hour," journalist Andres Oppenheimer described the surreal spectacle of an 82-piece orchestra whose "employment" was to play four times a week for 15 or so mental patients at a psychiatric hospital.

The sugar harvest will be down to 4 million tons this year, less than last year's disastrous crop. The primary source of hard currency is tourism, from which Cuba hopes to get $1 billion in 1994. Even that doesn't touch the average citizen, as a middle-class Cuban explained recently to a visitor from this page: "The embargo isn't our problem. Look at the black markets. You can get anything you want from Canadian Coke to German canned ham (even U.S. products). The problem is that we can't earn dollars to buy anything on the black market. Whenever we try, we are arrested. But we don't care anymore about being arrested, because jail life isn't much worse than this."

Castro still appears to be in control of the army and police, but this elite cadre is also under pressure. The army is getting less money than ever, and its officers are grumbling loudly. Many ex-officers may be found on the streets of Havana, offering services as taxi drivers or informal (and illegal) guides. The only group whose loyalty Fidel can rely on is a praetorian guard of security forces; estimated at about 2,000.

If Cuba is a powder keg, that changes calculations about how U.S. policy can best serve the interests of liberating the island's people from the dictatorship. We had been inclined to the view that lifting the embargo would sensibly benefit Cuba's people, but that may be inadvisable now if the dollar flow merely paid for Fidel's political resuscitator. "Do Not Resuscitate" seems the more humane course.

As to the refugees, leaving aside any attempt by Castro again to dump criminals and to empty mental institutions, we're glad to have them if they arrive; the Cuban-American success story is astounding. But again, the better course at this volatile moment may be to redirect those departing back to support the courageous protesters in the streets.

The Cuban exodus to the U.S. since 1959 does, however, offer one solid policy course for our officials. Cuban-Americans are not merely an economic success but a democratic success. They are an active, voting presence in the politics of Florida. The U.S. government should start talking out loud now about holding free elections in Cuba. That would integrate Cuba quickly into the Americas.

As for Fidel himself, assuming he survives the wrath of a firing squad, perhaps the former pitcher could become the general manager of democratic Cuba's Major League Baseball franchise. The old dictator would fit right in.

THE CUBAN AMERICAN NATIONAL FOUNDATION

MIAMI: P.O. BOX 440069 / MIAMI, FLORIDA 33144 / TEL: (305) 592-7768 / FAX: (305) 592-7889
WASHINGTON: 1000 THOMAS JEFFERSON STREET N.W., SUITE 505 / WASHINGTON, D.C. 20007 / TEL: (202) 265-2822

Boat rumors spark riots in Havana

By MIMI WHITEFIELD
And SUSANA BELLIDO

Herald Staff Writers

Thousands of Cubans rioted in Havana Friday, shouting "Freedom!" throwing rocks at police and smashing dollar-only shops after police broke up a crowd drawn to the harbor by rumors that boats would take them to the United States.

Police fired shots in the air and several people were "gravely wounded" during the melees that began in early afternoon and continued into the evening, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported.

No details were offered about the wounded.

Witnesses said the trouble began between 2 and 3 p.m., continued for two or three hours before becoming scattered and sporadic. For the most part, it was confined to the waterfront Malecon boulevard and adjacent downtown area.

A Reuters reporter, talking to his office in Miami, described trying to keep track of the unrest:

"The crowd is all over Havana, not in one specific place. I've been driving around all day. I estimate it at about 5,000 people, not 20,000.... The situation is the same. Rock throwing still going on. There's a lot of security officers on the streets.

"Some cops supposedly killed yesterday. Lots of folks hang around the Malecon. People just organized and started shouting, then threw rocks at security officers."

While the rioting appeared to be limited to the downtown area — President Fidel Castro visited the area shortly afterwards — it represented by far the most serious sign yet of popular unrest with Cuba's authoritarian system and its bankrupt economy.

A woman named Olga, who lives two blocks from the U.S. Interests Section, said the disturbances were still going on in neighborhood at 6:30 p.m., with the crowds swinging sticks and throwing stones.

"Things are really hot here. There are protests; the people are out on the streets."

She said 10,000 to 15,000 people were rioting in her neighborhood. "They are breaking windows, breaking into stores, throwing rocks at cars."

Foreign reporters in Havana said such numbers appeared to be exaggerated, and other witnesses said it was difficult to tell participants apart from spectators as the action shifted from one location to another.

## Ferry service suspended

A Cuban reporter reached by telephone told the Associated Press that several hundred people were actively involved in the riots, apparently starting with a crowd gathered by the side of the entrance channel to the Havana harbor. The reporter said he saw hundreds of Cubans gathered on the Malecon on Friday morning, shouting "adios" and waving at a small ferry that looked like it was headed out to sea.

The Mexican news service Notimex, with reporters stationed in Havana, said ferry service was suspended Friday morning, and police imposed tight security along the harbor shore.

Since July 26, three ferries have been hijacked from the port of Havana by fleeing Cubans. The third, taken Thursday evening as hundreds watched from the Malecon, was last reported out of fuel and adrift about 11 miles north of Cuba. Castro said Friday that two security officers were killed trying to prevent the hijacking of that ferry.

## Rampant rumors

Havana was rife with rumors Friday that boats would pick up people in the harbor and take them to the United States. "Great numbers" of Cubans were seen walking toward the harbor, according to a report from the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana.

One woman who watched the crowd gather from her balcony said about 100 people were grouped around La Punta Fortress at the mouth of Havana harbor about midafternoon when police arrived and began telling the crowd to move away from the Malecon.

The crowd started moving west, shouting "Freedom!" and "Down with Fidel" as more onlookers began following them, the woman told The Herald in a telephone interview.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 1994

THE HERALD

The woman said she and a friend joined the crowd and moved up the Malecon for nearly two miles until they reached a park in front of the Almeijeras Hospital. By that time, motorcycle police had blocked off the Malecon in both directions and were firing shots in the air to disperse the crowd. Shortly afterward, neighbors along Neptuno Street, which runs roughly parallel to the Malecon, told The Herald that crowds began smashing the windows of several dollar shops — where imported goods are on sale for U.S. dollars only — and at the Deauville Hotel on the Malecon.

Mexico's Notimex news agency reported that the protesters were armed with rocks and clubs, and had clashed with members of Cuba's Rapid Action Brigades, paramilitary groups designed to keep government opponents in line.

"The opposition people, who were shouting slogans against the government, moved along some 2.4 miles, between the Maceo Park and the Paseo de Paula, provoking clashes with the government groups," Notimex reported.

The Cuban news agency Prensa Latina said Fidel Castro toured the Malecon and an adjacent commercial district.

A Reuters television correspondent saw him, with a heavier escort than unusual, getting out of a jeep and waving at supporters who chanted "Viva Fidel. Viva Fidel."

Later, Prensa Latina published a report of Castro virtually threatening to allow an exodus of refugees to the United States. He said Havana cannot continue to stop people from leaving the island while Washington encourages them:

"Either they [the United States] take serious measures to guard their coasts, or we will stop putting obstacles in the way of people who want to leave the country and we will stop putting obstacles in the way of people who want to come and look for their relations here," he said.

So far this year, 4,904 people have reached U.S. shores aboard everything from rubber tubes to hijacked ferries and tugboats — far more than all of last year, which was a record.

U.S. Warns Cuba Against Repeat of Boatlift

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 1994

Castro Threatens
Repeat of Chaotic
1980 Mariel Boatlift

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer

MIAMI, Aug. 6—After threats by Cuban President Fidel Castro to unleash a mass exodus of refugees, U.S. officials today warned the communist regime they would not permit a replay of the chaotic Mariel boatlift that brought 125,000 Cuban refugees to South Florida in 1980.

The exchange follows an extraordinary few weeks in Cuba. In the past 10 days, three passenger ferries have been hijacked in Havana harbor by Cubans desperate to flee their country. And thousands of angry Cubans gathered in Havana on Thursday and Friday, some to taunt government security forces and chant "Down with Fidel."

Crowds of Cubans, estimated by some observers to have reached as many as 10,000, gathered in old Havana when rumors spread that another Mariel boatlift was beginning. Thousands of Cubans watched as a ferry hijacked by passengers Thursday headed out to sea. As of this evening, the ferry, which had run out of fuel, was back under the control of Cuban authorities, according to news reports from the island.

At one point Friday, hundreds of Cubans also tried to board Chinese and Canadian freighters in the port. Police and members of rapid response teams, many wielding guns and clubs, dispersed hundreds of rock-throwing protesters, who set trash cans afire and besieged special "dollars-only" stores, as trucks filled with police drove from hot spot to hot spot.

Cuban exiles in Florida today were urging their countrymen to continue the protests, but Havana reportedly was tense but quiet, with large numbers of police on the streets but no widespread demonstrations.

After crowds participating in the melee in Havana were dispersed Friday, Castro and other top officials toured the area.

The Cuban news agency Prensa Libre quoted Castro as saying, "Either they [the United States] take serious measure to guard their coasts, or we will stop putting obstacles in the way of people who want to leave the country and we will stop putting obstacles in the way of people who want to come and look for their relations here."

U.S. officials today said they would not allow Cuban refugees to again pour into South Florida as they did in 1980, when thousands of Cuban exiles

CUBA, From Al

here chartered fishing boats to bring their relatives and friends from Mariel, Cuba, to Key West, Fla. Among the more than 125,000 refugees were thousands of mental patients and criminals that Castro released from state institutions and prisons.

"The United States has stated repeatedly that we will not permit Fidel Castro to dictate our immigration policy nor to create a replay of the Mariel boatlift, a cynical move on the part of Castro," said State Department spokesman David Johnson in Washington. "We urge the Cuban government to carefully consider all the implications of such incitement. We urge the citizens of Cuba and their relatives in the U.S. to remain calm and not to participate in this ploy of the Cuban government. We call on the Cuban government to refrain from the use of force against its own people."

Cuban exile groups here reported getting hundreds of calls from anxious relatives, and some exiles said they were ready to get in boats and go to Cuba. Miami officials opened a telephone hot line to deal with the wild rumors here.

Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the Cuban American Foundation here, also appealed for calm and argued that another massive boatlift would only benefit Castro by removing his most dissatisfied and vocal critics from the island.

"The solution to the Cuban crisis is not the migration of thousands of Cubans, but the removal of one man—Fidel Castro," said Mas, who also said he supported the U.S. government's opposition to another boatlift. Mas said another Mariel could wreak havoc in South Florida and give Castro "a safety valve."

Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said today that the widespread protests were a clear signal that ordinary

Cubans no longer supported the Cuban regime and were prepared to openly defy the Castro government.

"It is extremely significant," Diaz-Balart said. Other exiles here called the protests the largest and most confrontational in Castro's 35-year reign.

The protests were sparked in part by anger in Cuba over the deaths of 32 passengers, including women and children, who drowned July 13 after their hijacked 115-year-old tugboat was rammed by a Cuban government vessel.

Many Cuban exiles here compare the dramatic event to shooting refugees who tried to climb the Berlin Wall. The Catholic Church in Cuba called for a complete investigation. The Cuban government called the drownings "a terrible accident" and said it was trying to save the passengers from an overcrowded and unseaworthy boat. Cuban officials blamed the United States, which grants asylum to virtually all Cuban refugees while turning away others, notably Haitians, who arrive illegally by sea, for encouraging Cubans to flee in dangerous rafts and hijacked boats.

In a speech July 26, Fidel Castro's brother, Raul, minister of Cuban Armed Forces, lashed out at the United States, saying that "anti-Cuban hysteria" was worsening the refugee situation. He charged that the U.S. government withheld legal visas for Cubans, while treating those who leave on rafts as heroes.

Cuban refugees who make it to the United States on leaky boats, or, more commonly, who are rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard, routinely are allowed to stay while Haitian refugees are refused entry into the United States. Some 16,000 Haitians fleeing their country languish in "safe haven" at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Special correspondent Marc Frank in Havana
contributed to this report.

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

While Haiti Grabs Headlines,
Cubans Head for Their Boats

WHILE the Clinton administration is preoccupied by Haiti, a new crisis may be looming for the United States in the Caribbean. Conditions are becoming so intolerable in Cuba that the US faces a sharply increased tide of refugees.

Already this year the flow of Cubans to Florida has doubled. More arrived in the first half of this year than in all of 1993.

A series of recent events seems likely to accelerate this flow. In mid-July, the ancient tugboat, Marzo 13, chugged out of Havana harbor carrying 72 people attempting to escape and find freedom in the US. Aboard were 30 women, 20 children aged 3 to 10, and 22 men.

After 45 minutes, the Marzo 13 was seven miles off the coast. It was intercepted by two Cuban fireboats that turned their high-pressure hoses on the passengers. Two other fireboats arrived and rammed the tugboat, tipping it over and

sinking it. From the sea, Cuban Coast Guard boats rescued 31 survivors. The other 41 were lost. One woman, Maria Victoria Garcia Suarez, told a Miami TV reporter that she lost her husband, her 10-year-old son, her brother, three uncles, and two cousins.

This outrage by the Cuban authorities has been little publicized in the US. But in Latin America and Spain there has been substantial publicity and criticism. The Spanish government has demanded an official investigation by the Cuban government.

Fidel Castro Ruz's regime is smarting. In an attempt to limit circulation of the story inside Cuba, it has increased its jamming of Radio Marti, the US government-run radio station that broadcasts uncensored news to Cuba. When Mrs. Garcia Suarez gave a follow-up interview in Cuba to a Miami TV reporter, she was arrested for spreading foreign propaganda. But uproar in her Havana neighborhood of Guanabacoa forced authorities to release her within 24 hours.

Reasoning that the authorities dare not risk an embarrassing repetition of the tugboat killings, many would-be refugees think this is the best time to escape from Cuba. Just last week, 78 people from the town of Nuevitas fled in a shallow cement-bottomed boat. Though shadowed for 15 miles by a frontier guard boat, they were not attacked. Also last week, nine teenagers hijacked a Havana harbor ferry boat and sailed it 30 miles out to sea before rendezvousing with a US Coast Guard rescue boat. They, too, were merely shadowed by a Cuban patrol boat.

"It means," says a Washington expert on Cuba, "that if refugees think it's easier to get away, they're going to head for Florida in ever-increasing numbers."

Conditions in Cuba are encouraging an exodus. The economy is fast deteriorating. This year's sugar harvest was 3.5 million tons, 20 percent less than last year's. This means it will earn fewer dollars in overseas markets for the Cubans to buy essential items, like spare parts, fertilizer, and oil, needed for a good harvest next year.

Cuba's subsidies from its former communist friends are no more, and its own capacity to earn foreign exchange is sharply limited. Thus ordinary Cubans face increasing shortages of food and basic goods.

Criticism of the regime is far more open today, despite surveillance by the authorities. Interestingly, the big July 26 anniversary celebration last week of the birth of Castro's revolutionary movement was held not in Havana, but on the Isle of Youth, south of Havana. Some experts speculate that this was to avoid hostile demonstrations. Although Mr. Castro was in the audience, he did not speak, as is traditional.

All this suggests an atmosphere of hardship and volatility in Cuba that could send a new flood of refugees toward the US.

THE BOSTON HERALD, THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 1994

DON FEDER

Cuba is a better
invasion target

A pologies to the U.N. Security Council, but I'm really not in the mood to invade anyone. Still, if America must liberate a small island nation in our hemisphere, Cuba is a far better candidate than Haiti.

On any criteria other than the whims of the Congressional Black Caucus, an invasion of Cuba makes more sense than sending the Marines to Port-au-Prince to install Castro sympathizer and Robespierre admirer Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

What's the Clintonite rationale for an invasion of Haiti? Suffering people oppressed by a cruel regime, mass starvation, fear of immigrant hordes inundating these shores? All are as applicable to Cuba or more so.

Haitians are hungry? So are the Cubans. Writing from Fidel's island gulag, The Wall Street Journal's David Asman notes: "Except for children under 7, everyone eats just one meal a day.... Most of the time that consists of rice and beans. I am shown ration books that indicate they have had no beef and only two chickens per family over the past six months."

Last year, the Communist Party newspaper Granma urged famished Cubans to chow down on the leaves and seeds of edible plants by the wayside. Better they should eat the communists.

Angela Herrera, a dissident leader forced into exile, reports the disappearance of cats from the streets of Havana. The Cuban American National Foundation's Jose Cardenas was showing her around Washington last week. When a squirrel ran across their path, Herrera stopped dead in her tracks. "Back home, that would be dinner," she dryly observed.

Since Castro lost his annual $7 billion Soviet subsidy, things have gone from privation to desperation. Productivity dropped 45 percent from 1990 to 1993. In summer, power outages of 20 hours a day are normal. Last year's sugar harvest was the smallest in 30 years. (Bad weather and central planning go hand in hand.) And the average Cuban worker earns between $1.50 and $3.00 — not per day or week, but per month.

In Haiti and Cuba, repression wears different faces. (Both are rated among the world's 20 worst regimes by Freedom House.) There's probably more outright political murder in Haiti. Cuba has a more pervasive police state. Gen. Raoul Cedras has been in power for three years. Castro has had 34 glorious, fun-filled years to perfect his totalitarian techniques.

It may not be exactly a kinder and gentler government, but at least the Haitian junta doesn't murder refugees fleeing the island. Emigrants build boats in full view of police.

Castro has created a wavery equivalent of the Berlin Wall. Last month, his goons massacred at least 40 refugees, including children, when Cuban fireboats used hoses to sweep passengers overboard and rammed a refugee ship until it capsized.

We're told Haiti's junta is intransigent. No more so than the bearded one, who has vowed never to relinquish power, saying he will defend the revolution "to the last drop of blood." No need for the people to ask whose.

U.S. Haitian policy is prompted in part by concerns over illegal immigration. In 1980, Cuba sent 120,000 sailing to Miami.

Granted, Cubans are easier to assimilate than Haitians. But suppose things get really tense? How many of Cuba's 11 million people can we absorb? Since the 1959 revolution, over a million have voted with paddles and sails.

In terms of national security, the only valid consideration for military intervention, there's no comparison. Haiti is about as vital to our interests as Fiji.

Castro has been our principal hemispheric headache for the past three decades. Whatever else they say about Haiti's military rulers, no one has accused them of sending troops abroad to prop up other juntas or of backing right-wing insurgencies.

The 1980s saw Havana's support for communist guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Honduras and Cuban troops or advisers in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Angola and a dozen other nations. If Russia turns feral (with Zhirinovsky, a distinct possibility), Castro's foreign legion could see action again.

"Tell me, why don't you gringos invade the island?" a 45-year-old farm worker asked the Journal's Asman. "In 1959 it wouldn't have worked, because too many people supported the revolution. But today 95 percent of the people would support an invasion."

One reason Clinton isn't running to the United Nations for its blessings to launch an invasion of Cuba — while the left is spoiling for a fight with Haiti's Duchy of Grand-Fenwick army — is becauseiberals still harbor romantic illusions about Castroism. Back in the 1960s, Hillary probably fantasized about cutting sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade.

Much as one can sympathize with Cuba's wretched masses, she will have to liberate herself. One thing's certain: Whoever follows Fidel will be a damn sight better than Jean-Bertrand Aristoide.

EDITORIAL

BY MORTIMER B. ZUCKERMAN
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

LET'S START TALKING TO CASTRO

America's policy toward Cuba is like nothing so much as the grinding and squeezing that take place in the Cuban sugar mills, where huge steel cylinders with blunt spikes pulverize the cane as it comes off the conveyor belt. For 33 years, America has tried to pulverize Cuba's economy in the hope that the resulting discontent would provoke a revolt against Fidel Castro. Now Sen. Jesse Helms, Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wants to squeeze even harder in the hope of speeding Castro's departure, as he puts it, "in a vertical or horizontal position." His mechanism is a secondary boycott: Any country that imports Cuban sugar, syrups and molasses would not be able to export goods containing more than 35 percent of these products to the United States. Visas would be forbidden to foreigners who "trafficked" in property claimed by Washington to have been confiscated from U.S. companies in Cuba. "American" property would include property owned by someone who was not even a citizen at the time of its loss, thus asserting jurisdiction by the U.S. government over the transfers of property between two non-American parties occurring outside the United States.

These are bad ideas, violations of practice and law, and abrogations of our international trade agreements. America has consistently opposed secondary boycotts by Arab countries against Israel. They represent foreign policy by emotional reflex rather than rational calculation, for the exponential expansion of the number and value of U.S. property claims against Cuba—which, according to the White House, might rise from $5.6 billion to more than $100 billion—would, as a practical matter, minimize the chances the claims could ever be resolved. At the same time, they would enhance Castro's support among those Cubans who fear they might be thrown out of their homes by the Miami Cubans whom they remember as supporters of the hated Batista tyranny in the 1950s. The Helms-Burton bill, paradoxically, would *reduce* the incentive to create a new government in Cuba, since any new government would have to resolve these expanded claims before being able to normalize relations with Washington. Expanding the embargo and aggravating

the economic desperation in Cuba at the risk of civil war would have only one sure-fire result: more Cuban refugees trying to get to Florida.

The Helms grinder won't work. Cuba's economy is not flourishing, but Castro still has enough popularity and power to survive, and he is helped by the fact that the economic pain is shared by all. He retains a political base because of widespread gratitude for his social welfare programs in health and education. He still controls the security services and the armed forces, which remain loyal and united. If anything, the intensified U.S. sanctions policy has made Uncle Sam a scapegoat for Cuba's woes and a rallying point for Cuban nationalism.

A more pragmatic approach is to induce Castro to pay the political price to normalize his relations with the United States. It would have sounded absurd 10 years ago, but Castro has changed, like the world. By definition, Cuba is no longer a Soviet satellite. Castro has begun to open what had been a rigidly planned economy to foreign investment and to privatization—the new farmers' markets are a prime example. And he now demonstrates an apparent willingness to consider change within the country, as revealed in an exclusive U.S.

*News* interview (Page 48). The flavor of it is insistently amicable: "I don't think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States. . . . We will not give this country to those people in Miami. . . . This is not a personal matter. We are not going to yield our revolution, that is, the revolution as we conceive it today—which can't be the way we saw it 10 or 20 years ago. . . . We are prepared to do things to improve relations with the U.S. because we place the interests of our country above our personal interests."

The words provide an opening for a dialogue. We can call on Castro's concern over the pain and suffering of the Cuban people. He knows that many have lost faith in and even tolerance for his government, an erosion he would like to stop. This is the moment to explore a peaceful transition in Cuba in exchange for normalization with the United States. It is not an opportunity to be squandered in amateur theatricals. ■

U.S.NEWS & WORLD REPORT, MAY 15, 1995

# Anti-Castro Lobby Falls Out of Favor

R. NORMAN MATHENY - STAFF

POLICY RETREAD:

White House policy toward Cuba is moving away from the position favored by anti-Castro conservatives, many of whom live and work here in Little Havana, Miami.

## LOBBY from page 1

“ORGE Más Canosa is no longer a welcome guest at the White House,” one of the State Department officials said, according to a Cuban American participant in the meeting. “The Cuban-American [National] Foundation is not going to drive US-Cuba policy.”

Clinton first signaled his independence from the conservative Cuban-American community when he declined to consult with the Foundation before announcing the May 2 immigration accord with Havana, which also allows 20,000 Cubans detained at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to come to the US. The break now appears to be complete.

“When the US government changes a 36-year-old policy without consulting with the major interest group involved, I think you can say that group has lost influence,” says one former US official with long experience in Latin America.

Various sources familiar with CANF say the group retains considerable influence on Capitol Hill, where it has shifted the bulk of its lobbying resources since the May 2 announcement. But as the administration and CANF gear up for battle over pending legislation to tighten US sanctions on Cuba, they say its vaunted influence in Washington may be in permanent decline.

### Cuba reality check?

“Reality may be catching up with the Cuba issue,” says a congressional source, referring to the changing diplomatic environment of the post-cold-war era. “It means it will not be as easy for the Cuban-American lobby to prevail over the long term, even if it wins this one.”

Unlike the pro-Israel lobby, which is backed by large numbers of influential jews scattered across the country, the Cuban-American lobby draws most of its strength from two regions: south Florida and New Jersey, where most of the country's 1.5 million Cubans Americans are concentrated.

But CANF has made up for its narrow geographical base with aggressive lobbying and large financial contributions to lawmakers, gaining a reputation for political clout on Capitol Hill and, until now, within the executive branch.

“Más Canosa knows how to play the game better than most,” says another former US official. “He knows whom he can win over with money and whom he is going to

have to use tough tactics against” by flooding congressional districts with mail or subsidizing opposition candidates.

US policy toward Cuba has always been heavily influenced by domestic politics in Florida, where opposition to Mr. Castro has historically run high. But with most Floridians now more concerned about an influx of refugees at home than politics in Cuba, Clinton is free to write off most of the Cuban-American community, which traditionally votes Republican.

The foundation has been a staunch opponent of the Castro regime and has used its formidable influence in Washington to ensure that tight sanctions are maintained on Cuba. Any diminution of the lobby's influence would make it easier to begin normalizing relations, a course advocates say could hasten Castro's downfall.

“As long as the administration was listening to Más Canosa was listening to Cuba. Any diminution of the lobby's influence would make it easier to begin normalizing relations, a course advocates say could hasten Castro's downfall.

Several calls to the CANF headquarters in Miami were not returned.

One key to the influence of the foundation is that, until the end of the cold war, it has largely had the field to itself. There was no significant opposition in or outside Congress to the propositions that Cuba was a threat to US interests, that

the nation should be contained, or that Castro should be toppled.

But since the end of the cold war, two things have changed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the termination of political support and financial subsidies from Moscow, Cuba

has ceased to be a national security threat.

Under pressure of economic necessity, meanwhile, Castro has begun to liberalize Cuba's economy, legalizing the US dollar, allowing Cubans to start their own businesses, opening private agricultural markets. An imminent foreign investment law will allow foreign companies to have wholly owned operations in Cuba for the first time since 1959, the year Castro seized power.

All of which has split the community of US Cuba experts down the middle.

New organizations, including those representing US businesses eager to gain a share of the opening Cuban market, now contest the Foundation for influence, aggressively making their case with the White House and Congress.

“Until now, only one point of view has made it to the desks of policymakers,” says one private expert on Cuba who asked not to be identified. “Now that's changing.”

Where the foundation has focused on Cuban politics, including Castro's dismal human rights record, other groups now stress economic changes they say allow for reciprocal concessions by the US under the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act.

“The lines are more sharply drawn than ever before,” adds the expert. “Some people say that as long as Castro is alive and on that island, the US should not embrace Cuba no matter how much it changes.

Others say that if Cuba makes economic and political changes it doesn't matter if Castro is there or not.”

### Bad news for foundation

Last month's presidential slight has been accompanied by other bad news for the foundation.

Despite intense criticism from CANF, Clinton's immigration agreement has won widespread support in Florida and is even backed by 45 percent of Cuban-Americans in Florida, according to a Miami Herald poll.

Last March, meanwhile, a group of experts commissioned by the Pentagon challenged one of the CANF's chief premises, that tightening US sanctions would administer the coup de grâce to Castro's regime.

“With few exceptions, the panellists agreed that Cuba was stable,

with little chance of international rebellion; that its military was extremely unlikely to oppose the leadership of Fidel Castro, and that the majority of the Cuban people and military support the Revolution,” their report concluded.

The CANF is also facing a crucial test on the pending “Helms-Burton” legislation which would tighten the embargo on Cuba.

The legislation is expected to pass in the House. But in the Senate only 29 members are for or leaning for the bill,

while 46 are against or leaning against and 30 are still undecided. According to the Center for International Policy.

Among other things, the Helms-Burton bill would prohibit sugar imports from countries that import sugar from Cuba and urge the president to seek a UN embargo against Castro.

If the legislation is passed in its original form, it is likely to draw a presidential veto, in part because of its secondary boycott provisions, which several governments, including Canada and European nations, have protested.

Defenders say Helms-Burton will force Castro out of power. Opponents of the bill, including a growing number of large US corporations, say it will only strengthen Castro by making the US the scapegoat for Cuba's continuing economic difficulties.

Several corporate giants including Boise-Cascade, Kraft, and Amstar have argued against provisions of the bill on Capitol Hill.

Of the 100 mostly Fortune-500 companies that are members of the New York-based US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, nearly all “would like to see movement as quickly as possible to normalized commercial, economic, and political relations with Cuba, with or without Fidel Castro,” says the council’s president John Kavulich.

### Conservatives balk

Some conservative groups have also opposed provisions requiring Cuba to make good on an estimated $30-to-$100 billion in claims by Cuba landowners; whose property was seized after Castro came to power 1959.

“This legislation is not a scheme for freedom; it's a scam to pay of wealthy Cuban land barons,” says Gary Jamin, chairman of the US Cuba Foundation, an association of conservative Republicans who support lifting the Cuba embargo.

> 'Until now, only one point of view [on Cuba] has made it to the desks of policymakers. Now that's changing.'
> 
> — Cuba expert

8

Thursday, May 25, 1995

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
MONITOR

GERARDO MAGALLON

# Helms Bill on Cuba Sparks Canada's Ire Over 'Bully' Tactics

By Mark Clayton

Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

TORONTO

CANADA is pulling out all the stops to help defeat US legislation that aims to penalize nations that allow their companies to do business with Fidel Castro Ruz's Cuba.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R) of North Carolina, chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, wants to knock away Mr. Castro's financial supports. But his new legislation risks alienating North American Free Trade Agreement partners Canada and Mexico, and other countries.

At least 230 joint ventures between Cuba and foreign companies from at least 25 countries are "one of the main reasons" the Castro government is still afloat, says John Kirk, a professor of Cuban studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Last month, Canadian and Mexican officials vowed to fight the Helms bill together.

Canadian officials acknowledge Castro's poor human rights record and agree it would be best if he were gone. But for decades, Canada has parted company with the US on the way to lift the "maximum leader" off his perch. And the US has honored that difference of opinion, tolerating Canada's role as Cuba's economic backdoor to North America.

NOW the US is using "bully-boy tactics," says Professor Kirk. "It's time the US realized that the whole world is fed up with the US stance on this. Most of Latin America and the world want better relations with Cuba."

Canada's US Embassy is operating on overdrive, with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's nephew - Ambassador Raymond Chrétien - making the rounds on Capitol Hill to tell legislators why the Helms bill is bad.

"This problem is a lot more serious than a lot of congressmen may realize," Bill Graham, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons, said. "They say 'Come on, this is Cuba. You shouldn't get fussed about it.' But what we're really talking about here is the ability of smaller countries to be independent in their relationships with other countries."

While the US has embargoed Cuba for three decades, Canada has expanded its ties. Canada-Cuba trade was $220 million last year. In winter, direct flights from 11 Canadian cities zip warmth-seekers to Cuba's beaches.

Countries that help Cuba are "a pain in the neck," Senator Helms told a large audience of supporters last month. "I'm talking about Canada. I'm talking about England - all the rest of them who say we can do business with Castro."

Such remarks have greatly irritated Canadian officials and editorial writers. "No Canadian should be surprised at the gall, the arrogance, the blind assumption of right sometimes exhibited by the United States in its dealings with the rest of the world," said an editorial by the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper.

Canadian officials say the Helms bill violates international trade agreements, infringes on Canada's right to make its own foreign policy decisions, and would cost Canadian companies about $500 million. Worse, it will probably lead to a trade war between the US and Canada.

"The American Congress is saying, 'We don't care about trade agreements we've signed, there are no rules, just US power politics,'" Graham says. "Canada is entitled to have an independent foreign policy."

SEEKING PASSAGE: Cuban citizens wait outside the offices of the American Interest Section in Havana May 17 with hopes of obtaining US visas. An accord signed this month cuts off the sea for legal entry.

# Tide of Cubans Support Accord

CUBA from page 1

Cubans picked up on the Straits of Florida now will be returned to Cuba and no longer automatically granted refugee status. In addition, as Zequeira knows, most of the 21,000 Cubans detained at the United States military base in Guantánamo since last August's massive flight will be admitted to the US, something both governments long sought to avoid.

"The change is positive, because Cubans will no longer be risking their lives on little rafts in the sea, but can do things legally," says a well-dressed man in the crowd waiting for interviews with US officials, who declined to give his name. He has hopes of joining his family in Miami.

Last September, an initial agreement between the two countries guaranteed that 20,000 Cubans can emigrate legally to the US each year.

The safety issue is almost always cited as the first reason Cubans support the accord, since rumors abound here of perhaps hundreds of missing rafters each year. But many Cubans also say the accord is a sign of improved relations with the US.

"It gives me some hope for the better relations we need to improve things for the majority of Cubans who aren't going anywhere," says a transportation engineer who asked to remain anonymous.

But, he says, that hope was tinged by a realization that the decision reflected an "undstandable" self-interest on the part of a US "a little weary of all these immigrants."

"It goes in the direction of the will of the American people," he adds, revealing a knowledge of recent US immigration politics by citing California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187 and similar proposals in Florida.

SOME people here who support the accord as a sign of improved relations say the thought of the US and Cuban governments working together gives them the jitters.

"It makes me feel like I live in medieval times with the king and the local lord suddenly working together, but not in the interest of the peons," says María Isabel Álvarez, an unemployed radio reporter.

A less commonly heard reason for supporting the accord is that it may increase pressure on Cuban leader Fidel Castro Ruz to speed up and broaden timidly undertaken economic reforms.

"While I can understand the emigration, it should have been closed off years ago" by the

US, says Elizardo San Pedro San Martin, a dissident and founder of an illegal opposition political party. "If it had been, there would now be more pressure on the government to change."

Mr. San Pedro also supports legislation now being debated in the US Senate, the so-called Helms bill, that seeks to tighten the US economic embargo on Cuba by punishing foreign companies operating here.

But that is a minority view. Most government critics maintain that Washington's hostility actually strengthens Mr. Castro's position.

"I have no doubt that if Castro could sneak into the Senate the day they vote, he would raise his hand with glee," says prominent dissident Elizardo Sánchez, general secretary of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation. "It's his greatest propaganda windfall in more than 10 years."

SOME Western officials agree that Castro may be running some risk in accepting a shutting off of the "safety valve" that has permitted hundreds of thousands of unhappy Cubans to leave the country over the last decade.

"This [change] gives some hope to those who believe the future of Cuba should be influenced by all the talented people who have been leaving," says Robert Pastor, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Program at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

But others downplay that theory. "The safety valve is simply institutionalized" with the accords, says a State Department source, citing the guarantee that 20,000 Cubans will leave for the US each year.

Still, the satisfaction most Cubans express with the accord augers well for the Cuban government, at least in the short term. Some analysts believe the regime, facing worrisome youth unemployment and a hot summer, is now in a better position to avoid a repeat of the street unrest of August 1994. Some Cuban officials at least tacitly recognize this.

"The [emigration] situation, as it was, created an internal turbulence that was not conducive to the reforms the government is seeking to implement," says Miguel Alfonso, spokesman for the Cuban Ministry of External Relations. "We are now in a better position."

Whether satisfaction over the US accord will continue is important for both Cuba and the US. Without economic relief and signs that relations with the US truly are improving, the Cuban hope could turn to ire. And that could mean new tension for Cuba - and perhaps a new wave of seafaring immigrants for the US.

DICTATORSHIPS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS:

THE LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION ON CUBA

Alfred G. Cuzán

Department of Government
The University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL 32514

In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Jeane Kirkpatrick, declaring President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy a failure, diagnosed the cause to lie in "the blinding power of ideology."

In the application of human rights as a criterion of foreign policy, the administration's "progressive liberalism" had produced a perverse double standard. Right-wing regimes of the traditional variety, such as that of Somoza's Nicaragua, which had historically been friendly to Washington, were being abandoned to Marxist revolutionaries, even as overtures were made to Soviet-style dictatorships in Cuba and elsewhere, looking toward the "normalization" of relations with them.

But why would an American president apply a double standard which not only involved his administration "in the wholesale contradiction of its own principles," but whose practical effects were to undermine allies and legitimate enemies, thus violating "the strategic and economic interests of the United States"?

Because socialism of the Soviet/Chinese/Cuban variety is an ideology rooted in a version of the same values that sparked the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions of the 18th century; because it is modern and not traditional; because it postulates goals that appeal to Christian as well as to secular values (brotherhood of man, elimination of power as a mode of human relations), it is highly congenial to many Americans at the symbolic level. Marxist revolutionaries speak the language of a hopeful future while traditional autocrats speak the language of an unattractive past. Because left-wing revolutionaries invoke the symbols and values of democracy--emphasizing

egalitarianism rather than hierarchy and privilege, liberty rather than order, activity rather
than passivity--they are again and again accepted as partisans in the cause of freedom and
democracy.

Nowhere is the affinity of liberalism, Christianity, and Marxist socialism more
apparent than among liberals who are "duped" time after time into supporting "liberators"
who turn out to be totalitarians, and among Left-leaning clerics whose attraction to a
secular style of "redemptive community" is stronger than their outrage at the hostility of
socialist regimes to religion. In Jimmy Carter--egalitarian, optimist, liberal, Christian--the
tendency to be repelled by frankly non-democratic rulers and hierarchical societies is
almost as strong as the tendency to be attracted to the ideal of popular revolution,
liberation, and progress. Carter is **par excellence**, the kind of liberal most likely to
confound revolution with idealism, change with progress, optimism with virtue.¹

The double standard born of progressive liberalism which corrupted President Carter's
human rights policy has its parallel in the political activities of the Latin American Studies
Association (LASA). For nearly three decades, the Association has pursued a Carter-style human
rights campaign around the Americas. On the one hand, it has been invariably critical of right-
wing assaults on academic freedom and, as one resolution had it, of "U.S. complicity therein."
On the other hand, LASA has been curiously silent when it comes to the violation of human
rights and the lack of academic freedom in Castro's Cuba. Indeed, far from condemning the
Castro regime, LASA has for many years persevered in pursuing "scholarly relations" with it, in
seeming contradiction of its own principles. This paper documents and analyzes LASA's
academic double standard with respect to Castro's dictatorship, now in its 37th year, a Latin
American record.

Founded in 1966, LASA boasts over 3,000 individual and about 80 institutional members.
It holds an international congress every 18 months, which of late has attracted about 1,800
participants (LASA **Forum**, Summer 1994: 1). Members receive a scholarly journal, the **Latin
American Research Review** (LARR), and the LASA **Forum** (formerly the LASA **Newsletter**),
a quarterly publication of announcements, reports, analyses, and opinion. It is the **Forum**, which

The
Endowment for
Cuban American Studies

A Project of the Cuban American National Foundation

## Objectives of the Endowment

The Endowment for Cuban American Studies of the Cuban American National Foundation promotes scholarship and ultimately public awareness on issues pertaining to social, political and economic trends in Cuba and their potential impact on Florida and the rest of the United States.

To achieve these objectives, the **Endowment:**

* Provides grants to support relevant scholarly research by graduate students and faculty at Florida's institutions of higher education;

* Sponsors conferences, workshops and seminars as forums for the scholarly analysis and discussion of the relevant issues, with the goal of improving public awareness of those issues, and in some cases, of finding and recommending solutions to the public-policy problems those issues pose;

* Publishes or co-sponsors the publication of scholarly papers, conference proceedings, and books concerning Cuba and the Cuban people.

## HISTORY OF THE ENDOWMENT

Since its inception in 1981, The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) has been recognized for its publications on issues of Cuban concern, which have been authored by such prestigious scholars as Lord Hugh Thomas, Paul Hollander, Susan Kaufman Purcell, Mark Falcoff, and Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick. Through its Occasional Paper Series, CANF has regularly provided over 15,000 U.S. and international academics, libraries, public policy experts, businessmen, diplomats, government officials, and the media with the latest information and analysis on the issue of Cuba. CANF publications have been frequently cited in the speeches, essays, and articles of U.S. policy makers, academics, and journalists as well as assigned by professors of political science, history and Latin American studies as required reading in their courses and seminars.

In early 1989, based on this track record, CANF approached a group of state legislators with a proposal to create an endowment for Cuban studies in Florida. CANF committed itself to raising funds from the private sector in order to match, dollar for dollar, any funds provided by the State for the Foundation's endowment. The Endowment for Cuban American Studies (ECAS) was born in May 1989, when the Florida Legislature passed a bill providing one million dollars in matching funds to The Cuban American National Foundation for the establishment of the Endowment, which is to be financed in perpetuity from the interest derived from the State grant and the matching funds.

An advisory board of scholars was promptly organized to orient the Foundation as to the *modus operandi* for screening and evaluating scholarly proposals and processing grants. Chaired by renowned Cuban American political economist Dr. Antonio Jorge, the board's other members included: Irving L. Horowitz, Jean-François Revel, Leví Marrero, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gonzalo Facio, Lord Hugh Thomas, Mario Vargas Llosa, Monsignor Eduardo Boza Masvidal, Luis Aguilar Leon, Horacio Aguirre and Jaime Suchlicki.

The University of Miami, which has one of the nation's oldest, most respected traditions of research and publication on Cuba and the Cubans, helped the Endowment coordinate its major projects during the first year through its Institute for Interamerican Studies and its Soviet & East European Studies Institute, both part of the University of Miami's Graduate School of International Studies. The Endowment for Cuban American Studies has subsequently published over two dozen books, supported a similar number of research projects, organized three international conferences and sponsored numerous lectures and colloquia by top scholars and intellectuals at various universities in Florida. The Endowment has also created the "Reinaldo Arenas" scholarship at Florida International University and continues to serve as a clearinghouse of information on Cuba and the Cuban people for students and scholars, libraries and think tanks, throughout the United States.

### Other Endowment Publications:

* "Cuban Exiles in Florida: Their Presence and Contribution." Antonio Jorge, Jaime Suchlicki and Adolfo Leyva, Editors.

* "Cuba in a Changing World." A collection, in book form, of the commissioned papers and proceedings from the seminar of the same name.

* "Human Rights in Cuba" by Juan Clark, Amaya Sanchez and Angel De Fana. This book examines the Castro regime's human rights record since 1959 in terms of each of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

* "Juegos y Rejuegos" by Julio Matas. A collection of plays.

* "Cuba: La Nación que Agoniza" by Dr. Luis Gómez Domínguez. An analysis of the reasons for the emergence and resilience of the Castro regime.

* "Currency Reform for a Market-Oriented Cuba" by Steve H. Hanke and Kurt Schuler.

* "Embargo: Propaganda & Reality" by Adolfo Leyva de Varona.

The Endowment recently co-published a second edition of Cuba: Mito y Realidad, Cuban-American sociologist Juan Clark's exhaustive analysis of all aspects of Cuban reality under the Castro regime. $25.00

### Submitting a Proposal to ECAS

If you wish to obtain support from the Endowment for Cuban American Studies for a project which meets the objectives of the Endowment, you may submit a proposal at any time. Proposals are submitted to a peer review panel of three scholars specializing in the subject area of the proposed project. The scholars' review and recommendations are then presented to the Executive Committee of the Endowment. The Executive Committee meets 3 times a year to select the proposals which will be funded among those recommended for approval by the peer review panel. To obtain the Endowment's proposal submitted form with instructions, please write to the Endowment for Cuban American Studies, c/o CANF, 7300 N.W. 35th Terrace, Miami, FL 33122, or contact Adolfo Leyva de Varona, Executive Coordinator of ECAS, at (305) 592-7768.

"The Cuba Paper Series" of short research papers and essays on contemporary issues pertaining to Cuba is also published by the Endowment.

* Paper #1: "An Update of the Human Rights Situation in Cuba." Selected documents from the 49th Session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Geneva 1993.

* Paper #2: "The Inexorable Collapse of the Cuban Economy: A classified report of the Castro regime to its Council of Ministers."

* Paper #3: "Modelo de Economía Libre y Democrática" by José M. Illán.

* Paper #4: "Investment, Trade and Taxation of Business Profits in Cuba" by Sergio A. Leiseca.

* Paper #5: "CUBA: Considerations of a Future Constitution-Making Process" by Donald T. Fox, Esq. and Eduardo L. Tabio, Esq.

* Paper #6: "A Vision of Capital Markets in a Democratic Cuba" by Bluford H. Putnam, Louis A. Hall and D. Sykes Wilford.

* Paper #7: "Competitive Banking System in Cuba" by F. Joseph Owens, Jr.

* Paper #8: "Cuba and Privatization in an International Context" by James R. Silkenat.

* Paper #9: "Cuba Opportunities Briefing."

* Paper #10: "La Independencia de Cuba No Fue Made In U.S.A." by Luis Fernández Caubi.

* Paper #11: "Consultatoria entre José Martí, Friedrich von Hayek y Michael Novak, tres enamorados de la libertad" by Lillian D. Bertot, Ph. D.

* Paper #12: "Tres Ensayos Sobre la Agricultura Cubana" by Raúl Fernández García.

* Paper #13: "Dictatorships and Double Standards": The Latin American Studies Association on Cuba. By Alfred G. Cuzán.

The papers are $3.00 each.

prints LASA's resolutions, task force reports, and related documents whose contents will be analyzed in these pages.

LASA is governed by an executive council consisting of nine voting members: six elected representatives, an elected vice-president (who automatically succeeds to the presidency), the president, and the immediate past president. The council also includes four ex-officio members: the LASA executive director, the editor of LARR, the current congress program chair, and the chair of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP) steering committee. With the council's consent, the president makes appointments to task forces charged with specific missions. Two of the oldest, each more than twenty years old, are the Task Force on Scholarly Relations with Cuba and the Task Force on Human Rights and Academic Freedom. It is in these and other task forces that most of LASA's official pronouncements and reports have germinated or come to fruition. Another arena is the business meeting of the international congress. Here political resolutions are born, although official adoption must wait ratification by mail ballot, almost invariably a foregone conclusion.

Like other learned societies, LASA became radicalized during the 1970s.² This radicalization resulted in the Association applying a double standard on human rights and academic freedom in Latin America. It also led to direct confrontation with the U.S. Government. The Association took to denouncing in impassioned language atrocities perpetrated by Latin American military regimes and, as one resolution had it, their "accomplice," the U.S. Government. At the same time, LASA passed over in silence similar violations by Castro's Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua. More to the point, it took the side of these regimes in their respective conflicts with Washington.³

As recalled by Ronald Chilcote of the University of California, Riverside, a self-professed
radical who later criticized the Association for not going far enough in its denunciations of U.S.
policies, the struggle for LASA's political soul started at a conference sponsored at the Latin
American Center of the University of California, Los Angeles.

A series of prominent speakers, some conservative and some liberal or radical, had been invited to participate in what appeared to be a dull program of tedious talks organized one after the other in a format that precluded involvement of some one hundred participants. It was too much for the radicals in attendance who demanded that the conference be reorganized to allow for involvement of all. A confrontation with the organizers of the conference resulted in the restructuring of the program, and two days of interesting dialogue ensued. The Union of Radical Latin Americanists [URLA] was born shortly thereafter, bringing together radicals on the West as well as East Coasts (LASA *Newsletter*, June 1973: 31).

Flushed with success, URLA sponsored a series of resolutions at the next three LASA congresses.⁴

Two resolutions from the 1973 Madison, Wisconsin meeting put an imprint on LASA political activities for the next two decades. Resolution 1, "On Repression in Latin America and United States Complicity Therein," accused the United States of supporting, "through its police and military training program" and other assistance, such things as the abduction and murder of students and priests, internment and torture of political prisoners, exiling of dissidents, and the abolition of university autonomy in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay. Colombia, too, was accused of repressing "university professors with the purpose of destroying academic freedom." Resolution 1 directed the establishment of a "Committee on Human Rights and Academic Freedom which shall investigate and prepare reports on the above-mentioned situations and any other similar situations to be distributed to the LASA membership and to public officials and the mass media" (LASA *Newsletter*, March 1974: 9-10).

Resolution 4, "On the U.S. Blockade of Cuba and Chile," "publicly condemned" the U.S. "economic and political blockade against Cuba" as well as the "invisible blockade" against Chile (which was at the time under the administration of Marxist president Salvador Allende). Resolution 4 provided for its own dissemination "through the major newspapers of the United States and other appropriate channels" (LASA Newsletter, March 1974: 12).

By the time these resolutions were ratified by mail ballot, Allende's government had been overthrown in a military coup. This turn of events persuaded LASA's Executive Council not to implement Resolution 4. In a letter to the LASA membership, Executive Council member Karen Spalding of Columbia University, sponsor of the resolution, explained:

> My own reason for withdrawing the resolution passed is that subsequent events have proven that my understanding of the lengths to which U.S. corporations and the U.S. Government would go to achieve the overthrow of a government that was not completely subservient to their interests was limited and incomplete. While many of us sought to draw the attention of the U.S. public to the "invisible blockade" of Chile, which was instrumental in the deterioration of the Chilean economy, and asserted that this blockade was essentially the same as the blockade of Cuba, agencies of the U.S. Government were actively supporting the plans being made for the overthrow of President Allende.

> Subsequent events have made it brutally clear that the U.S. Government is prepared not only to deal with governments representative of the most extreme forms of fascism and repression, but also to actively participate in their accession to power. The resolution I presented painted a picture of economic advantage being used for political ends; it is now clear that the U.S. Government is prepared to use **any** ends to prevent the extension of socialism in the Americas. The growth of fascism in the Americas is consistent with and in fact part of the long term political objectives of U.S. policy in Latin America (LASA Newsletter, December 1973: 2; emphasis in original.)

The vote to ratify these resolutions was close. "On Repression in Latin America and U.S. Complicity Therein" received 402 votes in favor, 340 against, and 16 abstentions. The tally on "Regarding Government of U.S. Blockade Against Cuba and Chile" was 416 for, 326 against, and 16 abstentions. As a proportion of the vote, the resolutions passed by 53 percent and 55 percent,

respectively. Somewhat less than half of the ballots were returned (LASA *Newsletter*, December 1973: 1).

Ironically, at about the same time as these resolutions were ratified, a majority of members, in a separate survey, disapproved of political resolutions.⁵ In September 1973, due to divisions in the Executive Council regarding the propriety of LASA adopting "resolutions of a political nature," a questionnaire was sent to the membership asking whether "concern with political resolutions" should or should not "be a part of LASA's activities." The "poll" was taken "only for informational and further discussion purposes," yet it elicited a near-record response: of about 1,600 questionnaires mailed, 865 (54 percent) were returned. The results were: 522 (61 percent) of members participating *disapproved* of political resolutions while only 329 (38 percent) approved and 14 (under 2 percent) abstained (LASA *Newsletter*, 1973: 26).

This "poll" was the high water mark of opposition to LASA's radical resolutions. After that, the oppositionist tide quickly receded. The results of the survey notwithstanding, political resolutions continued to be proposed at every business meeting, approved by near unanimity of those present, and, in a turn-around from the contested votes of 1973, ratified by ever-larger margins, ranging from three-to-one to well over ten-to-one. Ever since, the radicals have exercised uncontested hegemony over the resolutions of the Latin American Studies Association.

This is not to say that the entire membership was radicalized. In fact, participants at the business meeting have always been but a fraction of those attending the international congress. As a proportion of the total, the number of ratification ballots returned has never again exceeded 40 percent. In recent referendums, such as "Resolution on Violence Against the Academic

6

Community in Guatemala" and "Resolution on U.S. Relations with Cuba," only about 500 ballots, representing less than 20 percent of the membership, have been returned (LASA **Forum**, Winter 1993: 35). In other words, a majority of the membership has kept silent. The meaning of this silence is not obvious, however. It is reasonable to suppose that at least some choose not to attend or speak out because they "have felt intimidated from expressing dissenting views on resolutions and motions presented at the business meetings," as the Executive Council argued when it changed the by-laws to provide for secret voting at the congress (LASA **Forum**, Summer 1984: 8).

Furthermore, vocal opposition to the radicals did not cease altogether. An intermittent trickle of letters and other expressions of dissent has appeared in the **Forum** from time to time. For example, a letter by Abe Lowenthal and Jane Jacquette complained that "the content and style" of business meetings motions and resolutions amounted to a "collective violation of professional norms," did damage "to the Associations's reputation for scholarly integrity," and reduced LASA's "scant chance to affect the real world beyond words by these rhetorical outbursts" (LASA **Newsletter**, September 1979: 2-3).

During his presidency, Jorge Dominguez also criticized the Association's radicalism. Noting that "LASA has a mixed public reputation among academics and nonacademics," and that "many find appalling what goes on at LASA business meetings and may recoil as well from some of what passes for scholarship at our conventions," he confessed to

shar[ing] the views of those who indict part of the convention's activities for being grossly unprofessional.

... [O]ne of the darkest moments of my professional life in LASA was the Bloomington plenary meeting on Nicaragua. That meeting revealed appalling behavior for any audience,

but it was even more scandalous for an audience presumably composed of academics. Specifically, the lack of minimal courtesy, and the expression of naked intolerance toward James Cheek, then deputy assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, was damnable (LASA *Forum*, Summer 1982: 1, 3).

Other LASA presidents have alluded to members quitting the Association for political reasons. Helen Safa admitted that "I am well aware that strong partisanship can destroy LASA and that some disenchanted members have already left the association" (LASA *Forum*, Summer 1983: 3). Cole Blasier agreed: "We need to attract those Latin Americanists who left LASA when the organization's policy orientations differed sharply from their own" (LASA *Forum*, Winter 1988: 4). Still, minority dissent and majority silent notwithstanding, one thing comes across clearly in the pages of the *Forum*. From the early 1970s through the 1990s, among Latin Americanists who renewed their LASA membership and who chose to return their ratification ballots, a consensus solidified behind the radicals.

LASA's radicalization resulted in the application of a double standard. On the one hand, the universalism of human rights—including academic freedom—and the purity of scholarship were repeatedly invoked to condemn, and to avoid any type of contact with, right-wing military regimes, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Defense Department. On the other hand, the very same standard was used, not to deplore the repression of intellectual freedom in Castro's Cuba or Sandinista Nicaragua, but to oppose any U.S. Government restrictions on LASA's reaching out to these regimes for the purpose of establishing "scholarly relations."¹⁶

A motion at the 1976 Atlanta meeting, "A Reaffirmation of the Commitment of the Latin American Studies Association to the Universal Applicability and Necessity of Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of the Higher Educational Community" reads as follows:

8

That the Latin American Studies Association reaffirms its beliefs that Academic Freedom is necessary for a free and progressive society, in all nations of the world, and,

That the Latin American Studies Association reaffirms its commitment to the pursuit of truth as a social responsibility, and to the greater accountability of the academic community to the whole society, national and international, and

That U.S. institutions and organizations representing academia and individuals acting on their behalf, should be ready to take all necessary steps to dissociate themselves from any actions and relationships with countries in which it is evident that massive and systematic violations of academic freedom have occurred in order that such actions and relationships might not appear to condone these violations (LASA Newsletter, June 1976: 6; emphasis added). "Resolution on LASA Guidelines for Relations Between U.S.

Scholars and Universities and Latin American Scholars and Universities Under Repressive Regimes" came next. Proposed at the 1980 Bloomington meeting and subsequently ratified by the membership, the "Guidelines" appear to be aimed, at least in part, at Latin Americanists who do contract work for the CIA. It reads in part:

1) Covert operations and covert sponsorship of open operations have no place in scholarly pursuits. For the sake of the integrity and effectiveness of the profession as a whole, LASA members must shun all projects the purposes and sponsorship of which cannot be openly acknowledged.

2) LASA members must struggle against censorship in all its forms, including the most subtle, most pervasive, and most threatening form of all: **Self-censorship**. We must guard against distortion of our own work and against the suppression by any public or private entity of information that should be in the public domain. And we must guard against giving credence to "disinformation."

5) Honesty--not neutrality--is the guiding principle of scholarship. In Dante's vivid imagination, "the hottest place in hell is reserved for the man who in time of great moral crisis remains neutral." We must continue, therefore, to raise our voices against abuses of human rights throughout the Americas (LASA Newsletter, December 1980: 2.)

Even as LASA invoked academic freedom to shun the CIA, it used the very same rationalization to build bridges to Fidel Castro's regime. Probably no country in the Hemisphere has received more consistent attention from the Executive Council throughout the years as Cuba. Funds from the Ford Foundation have been used to finance activities of the Task Force on

9

Scholarly Relations with Cuba, to pay for trips of LASA officers to the Island and of Cuban "scholars" to LASA congresses, and to organize small conferences in Havana. The "Cuba Task Force" is "among the most active of the Task Forces and one that involves many scholars from both its targeted area of interest and in the United States," as a recent report put it (LASA Forum. Fall 1992: 16). The present chairman of the Task Force is Wayne Smith of Johns Hopkins University. In light of the opening paragraphs of this essay, it is not without interest that Mr. Smith represented President Carter's administration when it opened a U.S. Interest Sections in Havana. At the time, this was seen as a first step in the "normalization" of relations with Cuba. Nowadays Mr. Smith is often seen on CNN's "Crossfire" and other talk shows, usually advocating that the U.S. extend diplomatic recognition to the Castro regime.

In the early 1970s and then again in the mid-1980s, when the U.S. Government did not issue visas to Cubans wanting to participate in academic conferences, LASA lobbied hard for a change of policy. When Cubans were able to attend a LASA congress, they were welcomed with "great pleasure" (LASA Newsletter, December 1977: 10), their "incisive contributions" to the discussions praised (LASA Newsletter, March 1978: 7).

But LASA's pronouncements concerning Cuba have gone beyond the issue of "scholarly relations." Ever since Resolution 4 was ratified in 1973, hardly a congress has gone by without a motion or resolution adopted demanding that the U.S. Government cease its "hostility" to Cuba and establish full diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro's regime. The following is representative:

Whereas the U.S. government has pursued a policy of hostility toward Cuba;
Whereas the U.S. government is denying many U.S. citizens the right to travel to Cuba as tourists; and
Whereas professional scholars must seek special clearance from the U.S. government if they wish to do research in Cuba;

10

Therefore, be it resolved that the Latin American Studies Association urge the U.S. government to end its policy of hostility and to begin negotiations for the further normalization of relations between the two countries, including the lifting of obstacles to travel (LASA Forum, Spring 1984: 3.)

In pursuit of "scholarly relations with Cuba," LASA officers have met with high officials of the Cuban Communist Party. Helen Safa, then president of LASA, reported that a three-member LASA delegation headed by herself had met in Havana "with several members of the Departamento de America of the Central Committee of the PCC [America Department of Cuban Communist Party], with Armando Hart, minister of culture, and Rene Rodriguez, head of the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos" (LASA Forum, Fall 1984: 9). Be it noted that the Americas Department of the Cuban Communist Party is said to have responsibilities in the area of covert operations.⁸

I hasten to interject that I am not accusing Helen Safa or any other LASA current or former officer of engaging in conspirational activities. My only purpose in quoting Safa on this point is to note the operation of LASA's double standard, one that called for the scrupulous shunning of the CIA and right-wing Latin American regimes but which was less than fastidious about engaging the one regime in the Americas that came closest to replicating the Stalinist model.

While in pursuit of "scholarly relations with Cuba," LASA has been uncharacteristically circumspect about the state of human rights and academic freedom in the Island. The Task Force on Human Rights and Academic Freedom has not published a single word on the subject. However, here and there in the pages of the Forum, there are hints that LASA is aware of the lack of academic freedom in Cuba. In 1985, the Forum published a letter signed by Samuel Farber of Brooklyn College, Noam Chomsky of MIT, the writer I.F. Stone and 22 others calling

11

attention to the plight of "Ariel Hidalgo, a Cuban leftist writer, historian and educator," who had been sentenced to from one to eight years in prison under the article in the penal code punishing "enemy propaganda."

The letter reads in part: "We believe that Hidalgo's trial, the law under which he was punished, and the prison conditions which he is currently enduring, fail to meet the most elementary standards of human rights. Consistent with our stand in support of struggles for freedom and self-determination throughout the world, we ask the Cuban government to release Ariel Hidalgo, and any other persons whose rights have been similarly denied" (LASA Forum, Spring 1985: 6).⁹

In response, Van R. Whiting, Jr., Cochair, LASA Task Force on Cuba, wrote to Ramon Sanchez Parodi, Head of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, D.C. Because it is so rare for an officer or representative of LASA to say anything about human rights in Cuba in the pages of the Forum, Whiting's letter to Parodi is reproduced in full.

As you know, the LASA Task Force on Cuba is committed to the improvement of scholarly relations between the United States and Cuba.

We are also charged with monitoring the conditions of human rights in Cuba, especially with relation to the scholarly community. For the most part, this function falls to another LASA group, the Task Force on Human Rights. But when a specific case is brought to our attention, we must demand a clarification.

The case of Ariel Hidalgo is a case in point. The enclosed letter, published in the LASA Forum, raises serious concerns about the conditions for academic freedom and for judicial process in Cuba. Freedom of opinion is essential for open scholarly endeavors. If the description contained in the enclosed letter is accurate, Ariel Hidalgo was convicted for expressing his opinions, not for taking any subversive action. The conditions of his trial suggest that he was not allowed to present an adequate defense. Finally, the conditions of his imprisonment seem unjustifiably harsh.

We ask that you make immediate inquiries into the case of Ariel Hidalgo. Given the conditions stated in Samuel Farber's letter, we call upon the Cuban government to release Ariel Hidalgo.

Let us take this opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to academic freedom, as well as our continued commitment to the expansion and improvement of contact between

12

the scholarly communities of Cuba and the United States (LASA Forum, Spring 1986: 36.)

The matter seems to have been dropped there, as nothing has been published again in the Forum on the case of Ariel Hidalgo or any other Cuban intellectual or academic imprisoned for expressing opinions. Neither the Task Force on Scholarly Relations with Cuba, nor the Task Force on Human Rights and Academic Freedom, nor any other LASA officer has protested, in the style LASA reserves for other Latin American governments (or in any style, for that matter), violations of human rights and academic freedom in Cuba in the pages of the Forum.

The closest a LASA representative has come to speaking to political repression in Cuba again happened by way of a response by then-president Cole Blasier to a complaint from the U.S. State Department concerning a LASA resolution asserting that U.S. measures on travel between the two countries were more restrictive than Cuba's. The official had written:

> It is astonishing that an organization composed of scholars interested in Latin America would make such as [sic] assertion. The closed nature of the Cuban system is too sufficiently known as to require elaboration here, but it should be clearly understood that Cuba exercises complete control over all persons who would be permitted to leave Cuba to visit the United States just as it applies severe sanctions to those who seek to leave Cuba without official permission. It also controls carefully the admission of American scholars who wish to visit Cuba, as you are aware from a case at the University of Pittsburgh.

Blasier responded: "Almost all Latin Americanists of my acquaintance [sic] are familiar with the characteristics of the Cuban system which you correctly describe. Even so, the fact remains that U.S. visa policies are more restrictive than Cuba's in the sense that the United States refuses visas to most Cuban academics, while Cuba admits most U.S. academics" (LASA Forum, Spring 1987: 20).

13

That LASA would criticize U.S. policy toward Cuba for allegedly violating the right to travel while managing to say nothing about "the closed nature" of Castro's regime is, indeed, "astonishing." But that was not the last time. Take, for example, the most recent "Resolution on Ending the United States Embargo Against Cuba." It accuses the United States of having "built a wall between the two nations by banning travel and restricting cultural exchange with Cuba, preventing the free flow of people and ideas between two countries in contradiction with the principles of freedom of thought and civil liberties for all peoples . . ." (LASA Forum, Spring 1994: 28). Regarding freedom of thought and civil liberties in Cuba itself, this as well as every previous resolution said nothing.

Since LASA's officers appear reluctant to discuss them in public, let us examine the "characteristics of the system" they are so anxious to maintain "scholarly relations" with. To begin with, the Castro regime is a 36 year old, one-party, one-man dictatorship of the Stalinist type, complete with midnight arrests, physical and psychological torture of prisoners, show trials where the accused make abject public confessions or profess undying admiration for the maximum leader, summary executions, and hard labor camps.¹⁰ All media of communication, publishing houses, and cultural organizations are under the direct control of the party-state, as are labor unions and other forms of association. There is absolutely no freedom of expression or of assembly. Toleration for a handful of human rights activists waxes and wanes with international interest in their fate. When the world is looking the other way, they and other dissidents have been assaulted by mobs led or incited by plain clothes security personnel, pelted with garbage, dragged through the streets holding a sign reading "I am scum," in the style of China during the worst days of the Cultural Revolution, tried for disseminating "enemy

14

propaganda" or practicing "ideological diversionism," and sentenced to long prison terms. Time and again, foreign journalists, academics, and others who have provoked the regime's displeasure have been accused of being CIA agents and either expelled or refused entry into the Island.¹¹

The educational system, from the elementary grades through the university, is made of the same Stalinist mold. Throughout high school, there is a "Cumulative School Dossier" for every student. Here are recorded, in addition to marks and comments on purely academic performance, such things as the degree of political and ideological "integration" (e.g., membership in "mass organizations") of both students and parents or guardians. This information is used by university personnel to make decisions on admissions and scholarships, and to channel students into different careers. Only students with a "revolutionary" attitude are admitted to study social sciences, disciplines which are heavily represented in LASA: "Chances for admission (especially to the study of law, economics, philosophy, political science, psychology, and the diplomatic corps) are especially affected by a student's demonstrated participation in communist youth organizations. For these disciplines, such criteria are much more important than the student's past academic record. . . ."¹²

Once at the university, the student is required to take courses in Marxist-Leninist philosophy, to do "volunteer" work, and to participate in the "militia." More ominously:

> Throughout his or her university experience, the student is aware of State Security's ubiquitous presence. There is an ample network of informants whose task is to ferret out opponents or dissidents. Even an apolitical student is not safe, for to be unengaged with the Revolution is to be suspect. For those who do not identify with the regime, the experience of studying in such a controlled and repressive environment is exhausting.¹³

15

The faculty does not fare any better. Tenure having been abolished, all professors are on yearly contracts. Most faculty have no more freedom to read prohibited works than do students or the general public.

Foreign newspapers, journals, and books which in any way challenge the reigning orthodoxy have been banned from public circulation. . . . Similar treatment has been accorded books about Cuba by eminent European or North American scholars. . . . There is an extensive list of materials to which access has been limited in university libraries. These have a so-called fondo de reserva [reserve fund] into which only those who have been authorized by their supervisors and by the appropriate Communist party organization can delve. Even then, these books must be returned very quickly. The Jose Marti National Library has an entire floor of publications which are on "reserve" for the privileged few. . . . ¹⁴

If merely reading heretical books is next to impossible in Cuba, writing them is downright dangerous. Ariel Hidalgo, whose arrest and imprisonment was noted earlier, is a case in point. While a professor of "socioeconomics" at the Manolito Aguiar Workers' College, his writings were informed by a Marxist perspective. For a while, he enjoyed the favor of the regime. All this changed, however when

One day in April of 1979 he opposed an "act of repudiation" against a student who had asked permission to emigrate. (These acts are public humiliations instigated by the authorities.) As a result, he was dismissed from his teaching position and barred from continuing his studies. Like so many other pariahs in Cuba, he had to fall back on construction work, but he continued his studies in the evenings. In 1981 he decided to write an essay on the contradictions of Cuban socialism that has [sic] led to the creation of a new exploiting class. He was completing the essay when the State security police got hold of a copy and arrested him for its possession. . . . ¹⁵

A copy of the manuscript reached Hidalgo's sister in New York. In it, Hidalgo argues that a "managerial ruling class" of Communist Party members rules Cuba. In his words:

> The people, above all the youth, see an ever greater separation between a socialist theory that proclaims the equality of classes and well-being and a reality increasingly plagued by economic penuryes and social inequality. . . . The administrators of all important businesses and enterprises in Cuba enjoy privileges that the working class is denied. How does one explain the existence of the lavish homes of these functionaries

16

with their luxurious furnishings, their pantries bulging with many foods, their yachts, automobiles and sumptuous parties, while the majority of the workers must resign themselves to coping with deprivations under the guise of "proletarian austerity"? Foreign delegations are shown model schools and hospitals which are generally utilized by the families of the upper echelon; for every one of those centers there exist dozens more in wretched conditions which are utilized primarily by the children of the workers.¹⁶

In the face of this inequality, Hidalgo proposes a classically Marxist remedy:

> In countries where there is managerial rule, the workers, under the leadership of an ideological and revolutionary minority, have to rise up at the sounding of the new herald in order to expropriate the superpower, that exclusive and universal exploiter, the State. To the pusillanimous, to those who believe that every sacrifice is in vain, to those who see human evolution as the vicious cycle of Sisyphus, we say: history does not stop. The sun of freedom may be eclipsed at each sunset, but it rises all the more radiant with each dawn.¹⁷

For writing these words Hidalgo was sentenced to eight years in prison, of which he served seven before he was released to go to Miami. His case is hardly unique. A similar fate befell Ricardo Bofill, until his arrest in 1968 a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana.¹⁸ The only thing unusual about Ariel Hidalgo is that, his fate having been called to its attention, LASA took brief note of him before lapsing into silence again.

> The "characteristics of the Cuban system," then, are those of a totalitarian regime. There is no freedom to read, speak, or write. The mere act of putting down on paper words offensive to the regime is punishable by a long prison term. Like all other institutions, the universities must submit to the dictates of the party-state. As the slogan emblazoned on the gates of the University of Havana proclaims, "The university is only for revolutionaries."¹⁹

Yet, LASA has steadfastly refused to raise its voice, as it has done repeatedly throughout the Hemisphere, to condemn the repression of intellectual and academic freedom in Cuba. On one occasion, the Association even turned a deaf ear to demands from a delegation of Cuban-

17

Americans, including several recently released political prisoners, that LASA take their side vis-a-vis the regime.²⁰

In 1989, after a hurricane forced the cancellation of a scheduled international congress in Puerto Rico, LASA assembled in Miami. This is a city populated by hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees, including many former political prisoners, and their American-born offspring. Upon learning that a number of academics from the Island were going to attend the congress, a host of Cuban exile and Cuban-American organizations, led by the Society of Cuban Writers and Artists in Exile, held a press conference where they called on LASA to adopt the following resolution:

Cuba at the Crossroads of the Times

At times when the tide of freedom and liberalization is [sic] sweeping anachronistic structures in most of Eastern Europe, Cuba's totalitarian government has refused to contemplate any reforms that would compromise its absolute power.

It is evident that it is time for academicians specializing in Latin-America and attending LASA next week to join the growing international appeal for political reforms in Cuba, as evidenced by the call for a plebiscite signed by hundreds of intellectuals, scholars, artists, and leaders from all over the world last year, and, in consonance with the events unfolding in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the USSR, to join us in demanding for Cuba:

1) Academic Freedom.

2) The resignation of the current Cuban leaders, who refuse to give the Cuban people their freedom, dignity and human rights.

3) A general amnesty for all political prisoners.

4) Free and multi-party election in Cuba.

5) The freedoms and rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.²¹

After a series of contretemps, including an attempt by LASA representatives to eliminate the demand for "the resignation of the current Cuban leaders," a three-member delegation attended the business meeting for the purpose of presenting their proposed resolution. The delegation included the writer Reinaldo Arenas (who had been imprisoned by the regime), the

18

philosopher and human rights activist Ricardo Bofill (also a former political prisoner), and Lillian Bertot (currently with the Endowment for Cuban Studies). Bertot and Arenas read, respectively, an English and a (longer) Spanish version of the resolution to a hushed hall. LASA President Paul Drake broke the silence by referring to the Task Force on Human Rights and Academic Freedom a suggestion that LASA consider recommending that human rights be taught at the University of Havana.²²

Regarding these events, a cryptic report appeared in the next issue of the **Forum**:

Enrique Baloyra, who had participated in pre-meeting discussions with some of the representatives of the Cuban community in Miami, moved that the document to be read next into the record of the business meeting proceedings:

1. be received by the LASA Executive Council;

2. be submitted subsequently to the LASA Task Force on Scholarly Relations with Cuba;

3. and that the Task Force maintain contact with three individuals that were nominated by the group that formulated the document.

He also moved that the Task Force request a more precise document from the formulators of the document, and that the Task Force invite the government of Cuba to deliver a response, both documents to be made available for the next LASA congress.

[LASA President] Paul Drake further suggested that the document also be referred to LASA's Task Force on Human Rights and Academic Freedom.

Prior to the reading of the document, attendees were referred to a written statement formulated by the Sociedad de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos en el Exilio, "Cuba at the Crossroads of the Times," that has circulated widely throughout the past two days of the congress.

The document then read by Reynaldo [sic] Arenas, on behalf of the Sociedad de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos en el Exilio was an expanded version of that document, which was then turned over to Paul Drake for referral as indicated in Baloyra's motion (LASA Forum, Winter 1990: 13-14).

The text of neither "the document" nor "the statement" was printed, and nothing else has appeared ever again in the **Forum** about them or what was resolved at this meeting. In other

19

words, having parried a demand from Cuban exiles that it take a stand on human rights and
academic freedom in the Island, LASA fell silent once again.

The foregoing analysis should be sufficient to establish that the Latin American Studies
Association has applied a double standard when it comes to human rights, including academic
freedom, in this Hemisphere. On the one hand, LASA has been almost lyrical in its declarations
about the universal necessity of academic freedom, the obligations of U.S. academics to
dissociate themselves from countries that suppress academic freedom, and the dangers of
censorship, including self-censorship. Furthermore, LASA has gone on record as regarding even
minimal travel restrictions to Cuba imposed by the U.S. Government, such as a recent
requirement that academics request special permission six weeks prior to departure, as an
intolerable violation of academic freedom. On the other hand, LASA has maintained a nearly
perfect silence on the gross violations of academic and intellectual freedom in Castro's Cuba.
And, far from dissociating itself from a country where academics are not free to read or write
heretical words, as the 1980 Guidelines call for, LASA has doggedly pursued "scholarly
relations" with it.

Having documented LASA's academic double standard when it comes to Cuba, the next
step is to try to figure out why the Association has engaged in such a perverse practice. To
attempt an answer would be beyond the scope of this paper. Here only fragments of an answer
are essayed. First, though, ignorance has to be discarded as a possible explanation. As Cole
Blasier said, almost all Latin Americanists of his acquaintance "are familiar with the
characteristics of the Cuban system." Ignorance being out of the question, the conclusion is

20

inescapable that LASA has officially engaged in self-censorship, something that the 1980
Guidelines, invoking the hell of Dante's "vivid imagination," warned against.

Self-censorship is a logical outcome of the on-going "scholarly relations with Cuba." This
is because, as is well known, the Castro regime does not tolerate criticism from any quarter.
Foreign journalists, academics, and others who have dared to criticize it have found themselves
expelled and unable to return. LASA's self-censorship, then, is probably one of the conditions
implicitly or explicitly exacted by the regime for the maintaining of "scholarly relations." Is it
worth it? Presumably, "scholarly relations with Cuba" are a means to an end. For scholars, the
end should be obtaining more or better knowledge or information about various aspects of life
in the Island. Are the means conducive to the end? What, exactly, does LASA as an academic
organization, or individual Latin Americanists, get in return for their silence? What knowledge
or information are they able to obtain and make use of that would otherwise be unavailable, and
how much does it improve individual or collective scholarly understanding of Cuba? If the
double standard is simply a cost of "doing business" with the regime, it would be helpful if
someone were to do an evaluation of the addition to knowledge from visits to the Island by
LASA officers and individual Latin Americanists, and from attendance at LASA congresses on
the part of Cuban "scholars." Since, on their face, "scholarly relations with Cuba" violate
LASA's own principles, and open the Association to the charge of hypocrisy, the additions to
knowledge generated by those "scholarly relations" need specification on the part of those who
carry them out and defend them.

But perhaps the assumption that "scholarly relations with Cuba" are a means to a scholarly
end is incorrect. It may be that "scholarly relations with Cuba" actually amount to an end in

21

itself. What end could this be? Simply the making of a statement or the displaying of a posture
of political "independence" vis-a-vis the U.S. Government. The fact that, in keeping with the
1974 resolution "On Repression in Latin America and U.S. Complicity Therein," LASA's
condemnations of Latin American right-wing regimes and counter-revolutionary forces have
usually been coupled with a denunciation of their "accomplice," the U.S. (see LASA resolutions
on El Salvador and Nicaragua in, respectively, the LASA *Newsletter*, Spring 1982: 44 and LASA
*Forum*, Winter 1987: 25), lends plausibility to this hypothesis. In other words, LASA's double
standard may simply be another manifestation of the "adversary culture," a symptom of an
alienated intelligentsia.²³

A related explanation would involve something akin to Kirkpatrick's diagnosis of
President Carter's double standard on human rights, i.e., the "blinding power of ideology." What
Tony Judt calls "the myth of revolution,"²⁴ which was alive and well among French intellectuals
as recently as the 1980s, has also exerted a powerful influence on Latin American universities²⁵
and, by extension, Latin Americanists²⁶. It may very well be that, paraphrasing Kirkpatrick,
nowhere is the affinity with the Castro regime greatest than among left-leaning Latin American
Studies faculty safely tenured on U.S. campuses, whose attraction to the regime's revolutionary
mythology is stronger than their outrage at its hostility to academic freedom.

22

NOTES

1. Jeane Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," *Commentary*, November 1979, p. 42.

2. Ira Eli Wessler, *The Political Resolutions of American Learned Societies*, doctoral dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences, New York University, 1973. For a previous study of LASA's radicalism, see William Ratliff, "Latin American Studies: Up from Radicalism?" *Academic Questions*, 3 (1), 1989-90, pp. 60-74. See also Robert A. Packenham, *The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Be it noted that by "radical" I here mean three concurrent things. One, that the association became politicized, going beyond the usual scholarly analysis that is of interest only to academics to take publicized positions on policy issues of the day, seeking to influence their outcome. Two, that those political activities were carried out in an uncivil atmosphere that was intolerant of dissent. Finally, that the content of the positions was "very leftist" (see Webster's 1983 edition).

3. This study focuses on LASA's relations with Cuba. For an analysis of LASA's relations with Sandinista Nicaragua, see Alfred G. Cuzán, "The Latin American Studies Association vs. the United States: The Verdict of History," *Academic Questions*, Summer 1994, pp. 47 ff.

4. Here's how a founding member of the Association recalls the 1970 meeting: "I was present at the 1970 LASA conference in Washington when Chilcote and several others interrupted the proceedings with loud shouting. LASA's president at the time, historian John J. Johnson of Stanford, could not restore order without calling on the hotel security forces to restrain the few who were most vociferous." Telephone conversation with Marvin Alisky, October 22, 1993.

Compare Alisky's account with what transpired a year earlier at the American Economic Association business meeting: "... a group of twenty-five dissenters, members of the Union for Radical Political Economics, pushed their way onto the speaker's platform and denounced their more conservative colleagues as 'sycophants of inequality.' After order was restored, the members approved a sense of the meeting motion censuring the United States Department of State for refusing to grant a visa to the Marxist economist Mandel who had been invited to give a series of lectures in the United States." See Wessler, *op. cit.*, p. 166.

5. A similar paradox was noted regarding the American Sociological Association. Between 1967 and 1968, the ASA membership was simultaneously polled, on the one hand, on whether they agreed with a resolution demanding "an immediate end to the bombing of Vietnam and the immediate withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam" and, on the other, on the propriety of political resolutions. While "an overwhelming majority believed that the ASA, as a professional and scientific body, should not take a position on the resolution," a majority of members did support it. See Wessler, *op.cit.*, p. 207.

6. It was, in fact, over this issue that LASA joined a suit against the U.S. government which suggested the title for the *Academic Questions* essay. In 1986, following "approximately a dozen separate incidents of [U.S.] Customs [Service] harassing travelers [returning from Nicaragua], including the seizure and photocopying of scholars' research materials, personal journals, address books, and draft news articles," LASA joined a suit initiated by the Center for Constitutional Rights. A federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the government declined to appeal. See LASA *Forum*, Fall 1986: 11 and Fall 1989: 3.

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More recently, the chairman of the Task Force on Scholarly Relations with Cuba, Wayne Smith, has engaged in civil disobedience to protest the U.S. Government's travel restrictions to Cuba. According to LASA President Cynthia McClintock,

On November 30, in an act of civil disobedience, Wayne [Smith] and three other LASA members (Phil Brenner, Jean Handy, and John Nichols) travelled to Cuba without seeking Treasury Department licenses. In Havana, they met with scholars at the University of Havana. Upon their return, they were interrogated by Treasury Department agents. The delegation was accompanied by a lawyer representing the Center for Constitutional Rights; a key goal is to launch a legal challenge against the administration's regulations. Our expectation is that delegations will travel to Cuba monthly in defiance of the restrictions (LASA Forum, Winter 1995: 3-4).

7. I put the word in quotation marks because in a Stalinist regime scholarship as an autonomous endeavor is problematic at best. The norm is for political considerations to compromise academics into self-censorship at best, and into parroting the official line, at worst. Furthermore, travel abroad is a privilege granted to those believed to be loyal, but on whom the regime keeps tabs anyway with one or more political officers introduced into their ranks. Those traveling alone know that, if they defect, it will be years before they can see their loved ones again. LASA, though, proceeded publicly to treat every Cuban affiliated with a university or research institute as a bona fide scholar, and to chastise the U.S. Government when it did not agree.

8. Rex Hudson, Castro's America Department (Washington, D.C.: The Cuban-American National Foundation). Originally published in *Terrorism: An International Journal*, 9 (2), 1987: 125-67. See also Andres Oppenheimer, *Castro's Final Hour. The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba* (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 196.

9. On Hidalgo and the w. f. of other Cuban intellectuals, see Robert E. Quirk, *Fidel Castro* (New York: W. E. Norton, 1993), Ch. 21 "Outside the Game" and Ch. 24 "Poets and Prisoners." See also Carlos Ripoll, *Harnessing the Intellectuals. Censoring Writers and Artists in Today's Cuba* (Washington, D.C.: The Cuban American National Foundation, 1985). Originally published by Freedom House under the title, *The Heresy of Words in Cuba*; Eusebio Mujal-Leon, *The Cuban University Under the Revolution* (Washington, D.C.: The Cuban American National Foundation, 1988); and Heberto Padilla, *La Mala Memoria* (Barcelona: Plaza & Janes Editores, S.A., 1989).

10. See Oppenheimer, op.cit.; Padilla, op.cit.; Quirk, op. cit. See also Juan Clark, *Angel de Fandián* and Amaya Sanchez, *Human Rights in Cuba. An Experiential Perspective*. A Publication of the Research Institute for Cuban Studies, North/South Center, University of Miami (Miami: Saeta Ediciones, 1991); Jorge Edwards, *Persona Non Grata* (Barcelona: Ediciones Grijalbo, 1973); Jean-François Fogel and Betrand Rosenthal, *Find de Siglo en La Habana* (Bogota: TM Editores, 1994); Carlos Franqui, *Vida, Aventuras y Desastres de un Hombre Llamado Castro* (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1988); Pierre Golendorf, 7 Anos en Cuba. 38 Meses en las Prisiones de Fidel Castro (Barcelona: Plaza y Yanes, 1978); Roberto Luque Escalona, *Fidel: El Juicio de la Historia* (Merida: Editorial Dante, 1990); Carlos Ripoll, *Los Fundamentos del Estalinismo en Cuba* (Miami: Granada Art Services, 1990); Armando Valladares, *Against All Hope. The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares* (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986); and Jorge Valls, *Twenty Years & Forty Days. Life in a Cuban Prison* (New York: Americas Watch, 1986).

24

11. Come to think of it, perhaps it is simply the fear of losing their precious "scholarly relations with Cuba" that explains LASA's silence on human rights and academic freedom in the Island. In that case, LASA is officially practicing the very self-censorship it condemned in the 1980 "Resolution on LASA Guidelines for Relations Between U.S. Scholars and Universities and Latin American Scholars and Universities Under Repressive Regimes."

12. Mujal-Leon, op.cit., p. 31. See also Clark et al., op.cit., pp. 38-44.

13. *Ibid.*, p. 33.

14. *Ibid.*, p. 34.

15. Carlos Ripoll, *Harnessing the Intellectuals*, p. 39.

16. Quoted in *Ibid.*, p. 40.

17. Quoted in *Ibid.*, p. 41.

18. *Ibid.*, pp. 41-44. See also Mujal-Leon, *op.cit.*, pp. 38-39.

Be it noted that, to this day, in response to international requests or pressure, the Castro regime sometimes releases political prisoners before the end of their terms, but only if they agree to leave the country. This is "an unacceptable option that violates Cuba's international human rights obligations," according to Human Rights Watch/Americas Executive Director Jose Miguel Vivanco. See *New York Times*, May 26, 1995, p. A4.

19. Mujal-Leon, op.cit. p. 36.

20. In contrast to LASA's silence, writers and artists the world over have periodically protested the imprisonment of their Cuban fellows. See Quirk, *op.cit.*, p. 671, and Padilla, *op.cit.*, pp. 199-202. See also "Open Letter to Fidel Castro," signed by well over a hundred artists, writers, poets and other distinguished figures from the world of arts and letters, including several Nobel Prize winners. The letter called on Castro to borrow a page from Pinochet's book and hold a plebiscite on whether he should remain in power (*New York Times*, December 27, 1988).

21. Flyer from the *Sociedad de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos*, Inc., December 1, 1989.

22. Lillian Bertot, "Figuras y Tropos de la Opresion en la Obra de Reinaldo Arenas," in Reinaldo Sanchez (Ed.), *Reinaldo Arenas: Recuerdo y Presencia* (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1994), pp. 63 and 71-72.

23. Paul Hollander, *The Survival of the Adversary Culture* (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988) and, by the same author, *Anti-Americanism. Critiques at Home and Abroad* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and *Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also Elie Kedourie, "Politics & the Academy," *Commentary*, August 1992, pp. 50-55; Gary Saul Morson, "What is the Intellectsia? Once More, an Old Russian Question," *Academic Questions*, 6 (3), Summer 1993, pp. 20-38.

24. Tony Judt, *Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1955-56* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 294.

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ifco NEWS

Fall 1995

Clinton's Terrorism Act:
Returning to the Days of McCarthy

Reminiscent of the McCarthy era, the Clinton Administration has proposed legislation that will assault the right to due process, freedom of association and other first amendment rights — all in the name of fighting terrorism. In fact, the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 seeks to dismantle the fundamental rights of all US residents — foreign and US born alike.

Among the worst features of the bill:

* The violation of basic principles of due process by establishing special courts that can use "secret evidence" denying the accused access to evidence and preventing self defense to order the deportation of an undocumented person accused of no crime. The bill grants the government the power to deport individuals who are deemed undesirable because of their political associations and beliefs.

* Loosens restrictions on FBI wiretaps, enabling the FBI to obtain access to credit, hotel and travel records -- all without a subpoena or any form of judicial review.

* Resurrecting guilt by association, judging an undocumented person's eligibility for entrance and their deportability on their association with the peaceful activities of organizations that may also engage in violence, rather than on the individual's conduct. This also applies to persons coming to the states to discuss prospects for peace.

The bill's subtle, but crucial change in the definition of "engaging in terrorist activity" would allow deportation of any undocumented person who "affords material support to an individual, organization, or government which the actor knows -- or reasonably should know -- has committed or plans to commit terrorist activity." That means contributions to support the peaceful, legal activities of groups like the ANC, the IRA, the Sandinistas and other groups that you and IFCO have supported would be illegal and a direct infringement on the first amendment's right of association.

Under the bill it would be a crime to contribute money to the peaceful activities of foreign groups that the President designates as "terrorist" - potentially groups that IFCO has supported. If it is a crime to make contributions to these groups, it is simply another step to deny citizens the right to support groups like IFCO.

Currently the bill has passed the House and is stalled in the Senate. However, it can be resurrected at any time. That is why it is still crucial to call your Senator to express concern about this bill's regressive effects on your constitutional rights.

MARCH TO END THE ECONOMIC WAR AGAINST CUBA!

SATURDAY OCTOBER 14

● CHICAGO ● 11 AM ● Federal Building

● SAN FRANCISCO ● 11 AM ● UN Plaza

SATURDAY ● OCTOBER 21

● NEW YORK CITY ● 12 Noon Across from UN

Page 2

IFCO NEWS

# US Turns to a "Track Two" Strategy to Destabilize Cuba

by Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr.

The Clinton administration realizes that however much Cuba is suffering from the effects of the cruel and inhumane blockade, Cuba is *not* on the verge of collapse. In spite of constant US efforts to force the Cuban government to cancel the social gains of its revolution, not one hospital, school or day care center has been closed. The peso is regaining value against the dollar. The resiliency and creative vitality of Cuba in the face of the longest blockade in history is a reality for which the Clinton administration is groping to find a response.

For 35 years US administrations have entertained various scenarios about Cuba's imminent collapse. At least 32 actual assassination attempts have been made against President Fidel Castro. The CIA has attempted to organize intellectuals and political activists to flood Cuba with opposition parties which the US could *recognize* and to which the US would give *economic and political aid*. One of the most cherished dreams of Cuba's enemies has been that the Cuban public would rise up and participate in one of the numerous U.S.-supported invasions. None of Cuba's enemies thought Cuba could survive the devastating impact of the Torricelli bill. Many in the US administration believed that the immigration crisis of 1994 would lead to social upheaval in Cuba and result in the collapse of the Cuban government. Instead, the Cuban government is more popular and the US has been forced to hold bilateral negotiations to resolve the immigration issues. Since all these efforts to undermine Cuba have failed, the administration must now decide what to do. The logical and humane course for US policy toward Cuba would be to recognize that Cuba is no threat to the US and will not succumb to the US big-stick policy. Events of the past year have proven that both countries benefit when they negotiate their differences. There is ample evidence to support a move toward normalization of relations between Cuba and the US. Unfortunately, this overwhelming logic seems too difficult for the US to accept.

Now, we're saddened to report, a new strategy for the destruction of Cuba is finding considerable support in administration circles. In fact, the Cuba policy changes that the Clinton administration announced on October 5 are a part of this new strategy — known as *Track Two*. Its name derives from that obscure and self-serving reference in the Torricelli Bill which cynically claims the objective of opening communication and promoting the flow of food and medicine to Cuba. Of course, since the passage of the Torricelli Bill the US has tightened travel restrictions. And such flow of aid as the US law allows, requires a license from the US government. IFCO has always maintained that to accept a license from the US government is implicit acceptance of the US embargo of Cuba. IFCO refuses to be used by the US government as its legitimizing exception to its sadistic policy of murder.

The strategy of *Track Two* is that the State Department will forge ties with non-governmental organizations in the US and, through those NGOs, with what

*(Continued on page 15)*

> IFCO has always maintained that to accept a license from the US government is implicit acceptance of the US embargo of Cuba.

IFCO NEWS

Page 3

# The People Can Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu Jamal

Thanks to the hard work and committed support of the international community, brother Mumia Abu-Jamal, whom the State of Pennsylvania had scheduled to murder on August 17, 1995 by "lethal injection", has won a stay of execution. But we cannot afford to be lulled into complacency by these latest developments.

The fight to win a new trial could take months or years. So while we at IFCO celebrate Mumia's stay we are also clear that it is simply not enough.

The case against Mumia is so riddled with blatant bias and gross violations of his constitutional rights that even those who are not convinced of his innocence have acknowledged the need for a new trial to unearth the facts.

**And just what are the facts?** Mumia Abu-Jamal is an African-American free-lance journalist whose exposés on racism and police brutality in Philadelphia, especially his sympathetic coverage of the MOVE organization, have won him broad-based global support, praise from fellow journalists, and the wrath of the Philadelphia police.

In December 1981 Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. A seriously wounded Mumia, sitting in a pool of his own blood a few feet away, was charged with first-degree murder and brought to trial. Despite numerous indications that Mumia's constitutional rights were violated throughout the trial, he has been sentenced to death.

## Fighting for Truth and Justice

In the words of one Mumia supporter this fight is not so much for Mumia the individual as it is for truth and justice. If we fight for truth and justice then we are automatically fighting for Mumia.

**So what is the truth?** The truth is that the prosecution won its conviction despite faulty ballistic evidence. No effort was ever made to examine Mumia's licensed .38 caliber pistol to see if it was fired. Furthermore, the Police Department's own medical examiner concluded that Faulkner had been killed by a .44 caliber bullet.

The truth is that the prosecution won its conviction despite the testimony of questionable witnesses. There were two eyewitnesses who testified that Mumia was the gunman -- one was a woman with a record of over 35 arrests and was serving a sentence in Massachusetts and the second was a cab driver who was on probation for a felony arson conviction. No one saw the woman at the scene until after the shooting and the cab driver's testimony contradicted a deposition he made the night of the crime in which he said the gunman was a larger man who fled the scene.

Furthermore, the two witnesses who claim that Mumia made a confession in the hospital turned out to be a former partner of Faulkner's and a friend of the slain officer. Neither spoke of a confession until months later. Another officer who was with Mumia from the time he left the murder scene until he was seen by physicians reported that Mumia never spoke. At the time of the trial that officer was on vacation and "*unavailable for trial.*"

*(Continued on page 14)*

> This fight is not so much for Mumia the individual as it is for truth and justice.

Page 4

IFCO NEWS

What we represent here today is a commitment to continue in the face of a new onslaught against the people of this country by our own government.

Building the New United States

Editor's Note: The following excerpt was taken from a speech that Rev. Lucius Walker, IFCO Executive Director, delivered at the June 17 March on Washington to End the US economic blockade of Cuba.

And so we're here in a real spirit of victory. We know that the end is in sight. We know that this blockade will be ended. And we know that we will play a significant role in bringing down the wall of the blockade. We will continue the caravans as long as necessary. You must continue all of the solidarity work that you do in all parts of the United States as long as necessary.

We are increasingly being joined in this effort by the solidarity movements around the world. I recently visited Europe and from each one of the countries I visited I bring to you words of support -- from Sweden, from Germany, from Holland, from England. They're saying keep the pressure on. They're saying that they will increasingly join our efforts. They have been encouraged and heartened by what you have done. And therefore we must continue to lead the way. We have a special responsibility because we are in the belly of the monster. But we can know that we have motivated other countries to do caravans, other countries to begin to bring together their solidarity forces in a new way.

I want to also suggest that there is no substitute for the kind of people power that you represent. Not only will it end the blockade, but it will end the career of Jesse Helms. It will, in fact, assure that no matter what passes Congress, the spirit of protest, the spirit of resistance will remain alive and well in the United States. I would like to think that what we represent here today is a commitment to continue in the face of a new onslaught against the people of this country by our own government. We represent the spirit of resistance and our numbers will grow.

And we will see the day when a real contract with, and for, and on behalf of the people of this country will be written. It will not be the contract with America that Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich represent. It will be more like the contract which the Cuban government has with the Cuban people. I say let us continue to work until we have universal health care in the United States. Let us continue to the work until we have universal free education in the United States. Let's continue towork until there is an end to capital punishment in the United States. Let us continue to work until all the political prisoners in the United States are free. Let us continue to work until our country has an official policy against sexism, against homophobia, against racism.

We're not just here on the narrow agenda of ending the blockade. Ending the blockade against Cuba is part and parcel of freeing our own country from some of the most despicable evil policies that this country has ever known. We cannot ultimately have what we need in this country until we recognize what Cuba has in its country and until we join with Cuba in celebrating that revolutionary principle and way of life which Cuba represents in the world.

We have never had a true revolution in the United States. What did we have? At best we had a coup. We had a take-over by the rich white men who had come to the United States from the rich white men who had stayed back in England.

IFCO NEWS

Page 5

Well I'm here to tell you that this gathering is representative of the forces that are coming together in this country. And the reason they are so concerned about us is because they know that we represent the wave of the future. We're not here today to look back or to look down, we're here to look forward and to look up. Because we represent the majority; we are black, white, Asian, Hispanic, straight and gay, men and women, old and young. We represent the will of the people. We represent the future in this country. Never forget it. Never lose heart.

Always work hard to bring about that new day which we must have in the United States. Our foreparents fought for it and they passed the baton on to us. We must fight for it and we must pass the baton on to our children. We must continue to work until all of the walls of hatred, of evil, of racism, of sexism in our own country fall down. We must continue to fight and to work until that new day comes in our country. That's who you are. That's what you represent. Never lose heart. Never forget it. On to victory. On to the new day. Today we end the blockade against Cuba. Tomorrow we end the blockade of the ghettos, of the poor, of the political prisoners in our own country. Our vision is a broad, large vision. We are the people who will build the new United States!

Join IFCO in the Fight to Build a Bright Future

Congress' feverish push to dismantle affirmative action, welfare and reproductive rights; to pass more anti-immigration legislation; to build more jails and less schools; to abandon people living with AIDS; makes the work that IFCO does — work that you make happen through your support — vitally important.

In addition to the work that IFCO conducts on behalf of our brothers and sisters in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, we continue our rich tradition of nurturing and supporting local community organizing efforts. For example, through our financial support and technical assistance IFCO helps to maintain projects that offer legal advocacy and literacy training for Haitian refugees; health advocacy and peer support for people who are HIV positive; community-sponsored employment services; advocacy for death row prisoners; inner-city free clinic care; innovative strategies for alternative housing; international links for artists and solidarity workers; training for high school youth to become the next generation of progressive political activists, and so much more.

This is the kind of tangible difference you make when you give to IFCO. For 28 years IFCO has fought against injustice at home and abroad and you have been with us every step of the way. And we continue to count on your support. Every dollar you send is a commitment to our future. Step by step, together, we can build that future. Please take a moment now to make a generous tax-deductible contribution to IFCO.

I agree that the future is bright and the spirit of resistance strong.

Here's my contribution to the struggle for real change.

$500 $250 $100 $75 $50 $35 $25

Name Tel.

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City State Zip

Please send this coupon with your tax-deductible contribution to:
IFCO • 402 W. 145th Street • New York, NY 10031. Thank you!

Page 6

IFCO NEWS

Analyzing the Victory
of the Fifth US-Cuba Friendshipment

Editor's Note: In a surprising development, US Customs officials at Buffalo, New York allowed the Fifth US-Cuba Friendshipment, with more than 150 tons of humanitarian aid for Cuba, to leave the United States unhindered. Prior to the caravan's crossing, Customs officials had threatened caravan participants with mass arrests and prosecution if they insisted on taking the cargo to Cuba. In light of the change in the government's response to this caravan, we at IFCO/Pastors for Peace provide the following analysis of the Fifth Friendshipment's victory. It is designed to put our past and future work to end the US government's blockade of Cuba into some perspective.

On Friday June 23, 1995, the Fifth US-Cuba Friendshipment -- 35 vehicles, 118 caravan drivers from the US, 30 Canadians and representatives from 12 different nations of Latin America and Europe - approached the International Peace Bridge which connects Buffalo, NY and Fort Erie, Canada with more than 150 tons of humanitarian aid destined for Cuba. The Canadian Friendshipment, which had just traversed Canada collecting additional aid for Cuba, and more than 100 supporters from across the US had joined us for the crossing.

During our orientation, the caravan drivers had agreed that ALL the aid in this caravan would go to Cuba. We were determined that not a single item would be confiscated by the US government. And we were prepared to be arrested, if necessary.

We began to prepare for the harshest possible consequences after we were visited on June 21 by two representatives of the US Treasury Department, one of whom had traveled all the way from San Antonio. They indicated that mass arrests were planned. Detention facilities had been prepared for us, they said, and the government was prepared to fully enforce the embargo. One of the Treasury officials went so far as to declare that "Cuba is going to be the 51st state."

The caravanistas responded to Treasury's threats by strengthening our resolve and our discipline. In the finest tradition of civil disobedience, we prepared to face arrest to demonstrate our moral outrage against the criminal blockade of Cuba. Our challenge was international; even the Canadians with us were prepared to face the US authorities. We were determined that this faith-based people-to-people challenge to the blockade would be a success.

The Friendshipment began rolling through Buffalo at 9:30am, led by a spectacularly colored van pulling a trailer loaded with a solar energy system capable of providing power for several homes, a hospital operating room, or a small village. The 150 tons of aid also included vitally needed

IFCO NEWS

Page 7

prescription medicines and medical equipment, computers, bicycles, powdered milk, school supplies, and several vehicles to be donated to Cuba. When the caravan got to the bridge, the solar panels were uncovered; 30 caravanistas chanting "Cuba Sí- Bloqueo No" surrounded the trailer and the van and began moving with it towards the bridge.

At the bridge, in a very strange turn of events, there were no US Customs officers to be seen. It was like going to a ball game and having the other team not show up! The caravan was met only by the Buffalo City Police and officers of the Bridge Authority, who BEGGED us not to unload the vehicles, URGED us to withdraw the wall of protection from around the solar trailer and ASKED us to proceed across the bridge -- with the clear understanding that we were going to Cuba without a license. Someone overheard a Buffalo police officer saying to a colleague, "I thought we were supposed to arrest these people!" But Customs had sent word, through the police and the Bridge Authority, that they would not inspect or confiscate our cargo. In other words, US Customs was complicit in this breaking of the blockade.

This was a surprise development, especially in light of the serious threats which had been made only 48 hours earlier. Why were we allowed to proceed without inspection or confiscation, and with the guarantee that there would be no arrests? Why had the US government caved in, instead of confronting us as they had before? We liked the response of one Washington official when he heard of our victory:
The government knew they could not win.

It is now apparent that an order was issued to the Customs office in Buffalo to call off their planned confrontation. One Customs official said, "The decision was not made in Buffalo." He indicated that the word had come from a very high level of the administration..."close to the President."

IFCO has several alternative explanations for this sweeping victory.

Our first interpretation is the most optimistic: that the US government no longer has the will to continue enforcing this cruel and criminal blockade; that the Administration has decided that its policy toward Cuba must change. In light of *Track Two* (see p.2) this scenario appears even more likely.

A second possibility is that the US government knew they couldn't win a victory against the Friendshipment, so they opted to stay home. The government's tactic of seizing humanitarian aid has always backfired on them, giving high international visibility to the irrationality and meanspiritedness of the blockade.

A third likely possibility is that the government knew they couldn't afford a public confrontation about the blockade of Cuba at the very moment that Helms/Burton was due to go to the floor of Congress. Helms/Burton was already having rough sledding and those who support the bill would surely not have welcomed the close public scrutiny that a confrontation would have created.

Our fourth interpretation is that the Treasury and Justice Departments may have planned to let our aid cross the bridge and go to Cuba -- and may be planning to prosecute caravanistas *after the fact*. Treasury and Justice may reason that it is easier to attack us in the courts when we are separated in our local communities rather than when we are joined in dramatic united action at the border.

Our response to this possibility must be our very strongest show of unity. No matter how geographically dispersed the caravanistas might be, **we will respond as a total movement when ANY ONE OF US ANYWHERE is targeted for prosecution.** The threat of prosecution is one we must take very seriously. We are confident that this is a battle we can win; but it will require vigilance and hard work.

We can't be lulled by the government's lack of response to the Fifth Friendshipment. We need to respond by continuing to organize stronger and more creative challenges. Call IFCO at 212/926-5757 to find out how you can participate in the next Friendshipment next summer.

000

Page 10

IFCO NEWS

## IFCO's Pastors for Peace: Combining Action with Education

Since 1967 the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) has worked with clergy and laity, progressives and activists to support the struggles of oppressed people for justice and self-determination. Through a series of innovative projects, IFCO has historically sought to combine active support of community-based programs designed to make social change with meaningful education about the causes and potential solutions to the various forms of racial, social and economic injustice.

IFCO has continued this effective strategy through its Pastors for Peace project. Through Pastors for Peace we are committed to offering opportunities to witness, first-hand, the reality of life in Central America and the Caribbean, as well as hands-on solidarity with the people of the region. Consider traveling with IFCO/Pastors for Peace and experience Central America and the Caribbean as you never have before! For more information about these programs contact IFCO's Pastors for Peace project office at our new number: 612/870-7121 or write us at: 610 W. 28th St. Minneapolis, MN 55408

### Learn More About Mexico's Indigenous Struggle: Travel to Chiapas with IFCO/Pastors for Peace

International presence in Chiapas has proven critical for the defense of human rights and for furthering the peace process. You can support the grassroots struggle for justice in Mexico by participating in one of the following IFCO/Pastors for Peace trips:

*   **Humanitarian Aid Caravan to Chiapas November 8 - December 4, 1995**
    *   Chiapas Youth Delegation December 29, 1995 - January 5, 1996
    *   Chiapas Faith and Reconciliation Delegation - January 5 - 12, 1996

Raise awareness about this historic struggle throughout the United States. Work with leaders of indigenous communities in Chiapas. Deliver food, medicine and clothing to thousands of internal refugees.

### Human Rights Observer Delegation February 4 - 11, 1996
Visit Civilian Encampments in Chiapas: Ongoing Trips

Working with the diocese of San Cristobal, the Fray Bartolome Human Rights Center and CONPAZ, a coalition of NGOs, IFCO/Pastors for Peace has established international civilian encampments in the zones of conflict in Chiapas, Mexico. The encampments provide a measure of security for internally displaced refugees as they return to their communities, report human rights violations and maintain a source of supplies for civilian populations. Volunteers serve between 10 and 30 days in an encampment, with two days of orientation and two days of debriefing in San Cristobal. Spanish fluency is required. Volunteers must be in excellent health and able to live in difficult conditions. $550 for 14 days (10 days in encampment) $800 for 24 days (20 days in encampment) $1,050 for 34 days (30 days in encampment) Fees include roundtrip airfare from Mexico City to Chiapas, food, lodging, ground transportation and logistical support from sponsoring organizations in Chiapas and Pastors for Peace.

IFCO NEWS

Visit the island of Cuba and experience a different world only 90 miles off US shores. Stay in a barrio of Havana or travel to various parts of the island.

Through the Work Brigades you can help construct housing or harvest crops. Your itinerary will include half days of work followed by educational programs. Through the Caravans you will help deliver urgently needed humanitarian aid directly to the Cuban people.

Caravanistas will travel through the US helping to educate citizens about the impact of US government policies in Nicaragua and help deliver humanitarian aid directly to the people of Nicaragua. Brigadistas will help construct the first autonomous university on the Atlantic Coast, URACCAN, and learn more about the regional autonomy project

Page 11

### Learn More About Cuba - Travel to the Island with IFCO/Pastors for Peace
*   **December 1 - 11 1995** or
*   **December 27, 1995 - January 5, 1996**

### Challenge the US Blockade of Cuba
**Join the Next US-Cuba Friendship Caravan**
*   **Mini-Caravan: January 24 - February 7, 1996**
*   **National Challenge: Summer 1996**

### Learn More About Nicaragua and the Atlantic Coast Autonomy Process
**Join us on the Next Nicaraguan Caravan: November 8 - December 7 or the Next Nicaraguan Work Brigade: December 7 - 17 or January 5 - 15 1996**

### IFCO/Pastors for Peace also wants to draw your attention to two upcoming special Cuba trips
For more information on these programs, contact our National Office at:
IFCO • 402 W. 145th Street, •New York, NY 10031 •212/926-5757

### The Progressive National Baptist Convention's Presidential Mission to Cuba
*   **November 6 - 16**

Led by Dr. Bennett W. Smith, President of the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC) and Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr., Executive Director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), this delegation will be hosted by the Baptist Fraternity of Cuba, member of the PNBC. Participants will take part in Bible study and theological reflection, meet with Cuban clergy and laity to learn of the current situation of the church in Cuba in this exciting moment of evangelism. Participants will be invited to preach in Cuban churches. Clergy and laity are encouraged to apply for this delegation.

### Dominican Republic/Santiago de Cuba - December 3-10
Application Deadline: November 1

After three days in the Dominican Republic, hosted by the Dominican Committee in Solidarity with Cuba there, the delegation will fly to Santiago de Cuba. There you can attend a symposium on the "Anglo-Caribbean Presence in Cuba", organized by the West Indian Cultural Center in Guantanamo. Or you can visit historical and cultural sites in eastern Cuba, such as the birthplace of the Revolution - including the Cathedral of the Virgin of Cobre, and a visit to the "demilitarized zone" outside the US base at Guantanamo.

Page 12

IFCO NEWS

HWHR was
founded to
respond to the
multiple needs of
Haitians fleeing
the political
turmoil in Haiti
and finding new
lives in Brooklyn.

Advocating for Haitian Refugees

Editors Note: *Nikol Payen is an organizer with the Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWHR), one of the many projects for which IFCO provides technical assistance.*

By Nikol Payen

"Once you've seen what I saw and experienced what I experienced, it becomes somewhat difficult to resume the life you once had", explains Ninaj Raoul, a former fashion stylist and writer who tabled her fashion career to devote her efforts to helping fellow Haitians as Executive Director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWHR), an organization she co-founded.

In March 1992, Ninaj Raoul and Marie Cerat, two Haitian-American women, traveled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as interpreters for the Immigration and Naturalization Services. Upon their return, they saw the need to initiate a program for Haitian refugees who settled in Brooklyn. During a visit to the St. George Welfare Hotel in downtown Brooklyn, where many Haitian parolees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba were living in deplorable conditions, Raoul and Cerat learned of the many needs and concerns woefully unmet by the contracted resettlement agencies; ranging from learning English as a Second Language (ESL), health and counseling services, legal referrals, and immigration consultation, to adaption into the Haitian-American community.

HWHR was founded to respond to the multiple needs of Haitians fleeing the political turmoil in Haiti and finding new lives in Brooklyn. The agency's self-help program emphasizes life management skills through its educational programs. An essential component to HWHR services is preparing refugees to become functional and self-sufficient in their new society.

While ESL and literacy are the primary foci of HWHR, the female-headed organization has made attempts to educate its refugee clientele not only with issues found in traditional classrooms, but those found in the classrooms of life. Some past workshops include AIDS awareness, from Women with AIDS Resource Network (WARN) and the Haitian Women's Program. HWHR, working with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, held a health fair which afforded more than 100 documented and undocumented Haitian immigrants with free health care including eye and ear, gynecological, pediatric and general examinations.

"This is the first time I've been to a doctor in years" confessed an undocumented housewife. Many immigrants have little or no interaction with health care providers due to lack of insurance coverage, while many more shy from state medical programs for fear of deportation. More recently, HWHR in conjunction with the Commission on Human Rights sponsored a workshop designed specifically to present human rights law as it pertains to immigrants. The workshop, conducted in Creole, addressed such key issues as immigration and job and housing discrimination.

Ms. Raoul finds the workshops to be essential because "It is this type of information, in conjunction with the educational aspect of our program, which will realistically equip these individuals with the knowledge they need to become self-sufficient members of society".

IFCO NEWS

Page 13

HWHR provided volunteers on numerous occasions to interpret and counsel with the advocacy team from Yale University's Lowenstein's Human Rights Clinic and the Center for Constitutional Rights to challenge US law when 268 Haitian refugees were prohibited from entering the US due to the HIV exclusion ban.

In June 1992 when Judge Sterling Johnson ruled to allow the remaining 158 Haitian refugees entrance to the States, HWHR's immediate response was to expand the existing program to include services specific to this population. However, many of the HIV-related services remain limited due to the agency's desire to remain focused on ESL and literacy, which unfortunately are still in great need in the Haitian community. HWHR also provides job referrals and helps to increase clients' job marketability through computer classes designed to teach clients basic computer skills.

While relatively small in size, the three-year-old agency has come a long way as many government, non-governmental and other community organizations now actively include HWHR on their client referral list.

The agency has been growing strongly and consistently and has broadened its scope as a result. HWHR is a recent recipient of a North Star Foundation grant to encourage community organizing through its Community Mobilization Project (CMP). In the wake of recent election results the goal of CMP is to strengthen community activism and hopefully deter the anti-immigrant sentiment which has been viciously on the rise within the past several years. HWHR views CMP as an extension to its existing programs, that will afford individuals the chance to become vocal in communal affairs which directly affect them and their families.

Currently, HWHR is planning to extend its services to an international scope. This will include collecting medical supplies from the States and donating them to various medical clinics in Haiti, who are operating with minimal and inadequate resources. One of the HWHR long term goals is to foster working relationships with Haitians from the various diasporas to address needs pertinent to Haitians from a global perspective.

Keep IFCO NEWS Coming!

Friends, we appreciate all the kind letters and words of encouragement about the new *IFCO NEWS*. We will continue to work to enhance the look and the content of *IFCO NEWS*, but as our mailing list increases so does the cost of producing and mailing the newsletter.

Please let us know that you want to keep *IFCO NEWS* coming by returning this coupon along with your check payable to IFCO to: **IFCO NEWS • 402 W. 145th St. • New York, NY 10031**

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Page 14

IFCO NEWS

(Continued from page 3)

Initially Mumia chose to represent himself. When Judge Albert Sabo complained that he was taking too long to interview prospective jurors, the court appointed a lawyer to replace Mumia. The lawyer, by his own admission, was reluctant and ill-prepared to handle the case. For most of the trial Mumia was not permitted in the court room and not given any kind of transcript of the proceedings. Under the court-appointed attorney, numerous witnesses for the defense were never called - in large part due to the small amount of pretrial monies allocated to the defense for its investigation. The prosecution, on the other hand, had far more resources at its disposal.

Several African-Americans were inexplicably excluded from the jury by the prosecution. An African-American juror who had already been selected was replaced with an older white male who stated that he didn't think he "could be fair to both sides."

**What's Politics Got To Do With It?** No review of Mumia's case would be complete without an examination of his political history and the persecution he received as a result of that history.

**Again, let's look at the facts:** As a youth, Mumia was a political activist. At age 14, he was beaten and arrested for protesting a presidential rally for George Wallace. In 1968, he was a founding member and lieutenant minister of information of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. As a journalist during the 1970s, Mumia published hard-hitting criticism of the Philadelphia Police Department and the Rizzo administration, particularly the 1978 attack on the MOVE organization by more than 600 heavily armed officers.

**It is a fact** that Mumia has been and continues to be a victim of the FBI's notorious Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The FBI began a file on Mumia at the age of 15; it has grown to 700 pages.

**It is a fact** that during the penalty phase of the case, when the jury was to determine a life or death sentence, the prosecutor presented evidence of Mumia's political background and his political beliefs as reported in a newspaper interview when he was just 16 years old — a clear violation of Mumia's constitutional rights.

The US Supreme Court refused to consider Mumia's appeal even though, that same year, the Court decided favorably for a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white racist organization, who complained that the prosecution had improperly used his political association against him in the penalty phase of his trial. Ruling that the First Amendment bars such evidence, the Court reversed his death sentence. Mumia's petition to be joined in this appeal was denied without comment.

**It is a fact** that after having portrayed Mumia as a radical black militant to a nearly all-white jury, the prosecutor argued that it was Mumia's political history and disrespect of the system that caused him to kill the policeman.

**It is a fact that the State of Pennsylvania still intends to kill Mumia Abu-Jamal.**

**The Time to Act is NOW!** Mumia is in a battle for his life and for the rights of anyone who dares to boldly confront injustice. And he is not alone. Hundreds of thousands of people across the globe are standing with him in this fight. We cannot and will not allow the US government to silence Mumia. The fight is now for a new trial. There is no time for delay. Immediate action is needed now. Every second counts.

000

**To demand a new trial contact:**

Governor Thomas Ridge
717/787-2500 Phone
717/783-3369 Fax

Chief Justice Robert Nix
Pennsylvania Supreme Court
215/560-3071 Phone
215/560-6388 Fax

Justice Ralph Cappy
Pennsylvania Supreme Court
215/565-2700 Phone
215/560-6388 Fax

**For more information on the case call IFCO at 212/926-5757.**

IFCO NEWS

(Continued from page 2)

it defines as the civil society in Cuba. Civil society consists of non-governmental organizations in such sectors as church, labor, academia (including student groups), solidarity groups, policy and research organizations and foundations. Through these partnerships, the State Department would promote a democratic transition in Cuba. Democratic and transition are clearly doublespeak. The words sound harmless but US intentions have nothing to do with democracy.

In fact, the US refuses to recognize that Cuba has a democratic system. As we have seen in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, and numerous other countries, promoting a democratic transition is a State Department euphemism for overthrowing the present government and replacing it with one to its liking.

In other words, what the US could not accomplish via assassination attempts, invasions, promotion of social unrest, Radio Marti propaganda, calls for massive sabotage, or through various covert operations, it will now seek through more subtle influences in partnership with NGOs.

Under the Track Two strategy the private sector will become the US's Trojan Horse. What better way for the US to gain access, in the very country it has tried to destroy, than in a new partnership with friendly NGOs, many of whom have a history of providing aid to Cuba? But the NGOs still have to be licensed by the US to deliver aid to Cuba. Indeed, some NGOs may be attracted to Track Two because it may make it easier for them to be licensed.

For 35 years the US has used food and medicine as a weapon, blocking Cuba's access to them. Under Track Two, the US will continue to block Cuba's commercial access to food and medicines but will allow an increase in licensed private shipments.

The key staff person in this operation is none other than Richard Nuccio. Nuccio is a relatively new face in the State Department. However, what many people don't known is that Nuccio was Torricelli's key foreign policy aide, and author of the infamous Torricelli bill. He has close ties to Mas Canosa and the Cuban American National Foundation. Nuccio is now Special Advisor to President Clinton and the Secretary of State for Cuba.

It may appear that Richard Nuccio is less hostile toward Cuba than was his predecessor, Dennis Hays; but his objective appears to be the same, i.e., to engineer social unrest and counter-revolutionary activity in Cuba. While the Hays approach was overt insistence on overthrowing the Cuban Constitution, the Nuccio approach is to recruit Cuba's friends to participate in promoting a democratic transition in Cuba.

It seems that the State Department has realized that the bad cop did not get the job done; so a good cop has been assigned to the case.

The incentive this strategy offers to the NGOs are (1) the sense of importance generated by State Department recognition and (2) the possibility of receiving a license for aid shipments to Cuba. We believe that many NGO's will see this new strategy for what it is and will not enter into this new partnership with the State Department. But it is clear that the Cuba solidarity community would be well served by a frank and critical discussion of Track Two and its implications for Cuba and the future of the Cuba solidarity community.

000

Page 15

Promoting a democratic transition is a State Department euphemism for overthrowing the present government and replacing it with one to its liking.

IFCO NEWS

Page 16

Caravanistas Make a Joyful Sound

Anyone who's travelled on a Friendshipment
caravan has been blessed by the gifted individuals
who have shared their musical talents. On the first
Friendshipment we heard the melodic trio of
violinist Dr. Aaron Moss of Manhattan, Banjo
player Fr. Bill Brisotti of Long Island and Rev.
George Houser of Pomona, NY, on the harmon-
ica. The trio was well-received in the US and
throughout Mexico and Cuba.

On Friendships two and three we were graced
by David Welsh from California, the author of the
now infamous "Let the Little Yellow School Bus
Go". On the third caravan he penned a song calling
for the release of the satellite dish sung to the tune
of "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow".

On Friendshipment four we were serenaded by
David and Cuban-American guitarist and
balladeer Javier Hernandez-Miyares of New York
City. We were also endowed by the genius of
African-drummer Jahruba Lambeth from Okla-
homa City, and lyrical songtress, Pat Humphries
of New York State. These are just some of the
caravanistas who have shared their gifts with us.

Now you can enjoy the melodic sounds of Pat Humphries
and help IFCO at the same time. When you purchase a tape
or CD of Pat's latest album "Same Rain", IFCO earns half
the proceeds! The twelve-track album features many of
Pat's songs including "Common Thread", "Swimming to
the Other Side", and "Never Turning Back".

Yes! I want to listen to great music and help IFCO.

Please send me: ___ tapes @ $10 each ___ CDs @ $15 each

Name

Address

---

City ____ State ____ Zip ____

Please return this coupon along with your check
payable to IFCO and earmarked "music" to:
IFCO • 402 W. 145th St. • New York, NY 10031

Federal employees can now support IFCO through the National Black United Federation of Charities, a member of the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). Please contribute to IFCO by designating Code # 1618 on your CFC form.

IFCO
402 W. 145th Street
New York, NY 10031

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PAID
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The Interreligious Foundation for
Community Organization (IFCO) is an
ecumenical agency whose mission is to
help forward the struggles of oppressed
people for justice and self-determination.

IFCO NEWS is a quarterly publication
that highlights the work of IFCO and
creative grassroots organizing efforts
nationwide. For more information write:

Gail Walker •IFCO NEWS
402 W. 145th St. New York, NY 10031
212/926-5757 212/926-5842 (fax)
ifco@igc.apc.org (email)

Layout & Design by Lucia Bruno

# An Alternative U.S. Policy Toward Cuba

This policy alternative below represents the work of academic experts on U.S.-Cuba relations working with Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America (PACCA), an association of scholars and policymakers dedicated to promoting human and democratic alternatives to current U.S. policy toward the region. This booklet sets forth the rationale for a new U.S. policy

toward Cuba and explores the critical issues dividing the two countries. Some of the material in this booklet is drawn from the PACCA book *From Confrontation to Negotiation: U.S. Relations with Cuba*, written by Philip Brenner and published by Westview Press. See the back cover for further information on this book.

## I. Restore relations and negotiate bilateral issues.

1. Reestablish full diplomatic relations.

2. Begin negotiations to settle U.S. claims for compensation for expropriated property and Cuban claims for damage as a result of U.S. actions.

3. Resume trade and economic relations between the two countries.

4. Negotiate bilateral issues, including radio interference problems, medium wave broadcasts from one country to the other, maritime border disputes, violations of air space, handling of acts of sabotage and hijacking, and security and sovereignty concerns related to the U.S. Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.

7. Halt aid to UNITA in accordance with U.N. Resolution 435, which calls for the independence of Namibia and an end to attacks on Angola. Open exploratory discussions with Cuba and Angola on the implementation of UN Resolution 435 and the eventual withdrawal of Cuban military forces from Angola.

8. Open discussions with Cuba with the aim of reintegrating it into inter-American forums such as the Organization of American States; seek Cuba's inclusion in regional development efforts for the Caribbean, and include Cuba in hemispheric efforts to seek joint solutions to the debt and other economic and social development problems.

## II. Work to resolve regional and global security issues.

5. Open discussions on mutual security concerns, such as the Soviet presence in Cuba and U.S. military exercises in the Caribbean, with the aim of signing a document committing all parties to strengthening international peace and security as established in the U.N. Charter and other international agreements.

6. Open exploratory discussions with Cuba on mutual commitment to, and compliance with, the provisions of the Central American Peace agreement forbidding foreign aid to irregular forces and the use of one Central American nation as a base for waging war on another. Discuss the prospects of a security accord among the Central American nations leading to the withdrawal of all foreign military personnel, an end to military maneuvers, the freezing of arms acquisitions, and mutual reductions in military forces.

## III. Work for reconciliation between the United States and Cuba.

9. Lift economic sanctions against Cuba that have the effect of denying U.S. citizens the right to free trade in ideas, including restrictions on travel and the free flow of information.

10. Permanently halt the use of the McCarran-Walter Act to deny visas to Cuban citizens who wish to participate in educational and cultural exchanges in the United States.

11. Foster the development of educational, cultural and tourist exchange programs between the United States and Cuba designed to share skills and promote understanding between the peoples of the two countries.

12. Initiate discussions with Cuba on the rights of communication and travel for Cuban-Americans and Cubans wishing to visit their relatives for family and humanitarian reasons. Work to improve telephone services and establish direct mail service.

# Introduction

1

Cuba lies only 90 miles off the Florida coast, yet for 25 years travel, trade, and communication between the United States and Cuba have been cut off or severely restricted. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with Cuba, which makes it difficult to discuss the issues that divide the two nations.

Since the early 1960's, the United States has sought to isolate Cuba in retaliation for its domestic and foreign policies. Twenty-five years later, there is little evidence that this policy has had any success in changing Cuban behavior. There is increasing evidence that a policy of negotiation — working toward agreements based on international law — could resolve a number of thorny issues and benefit both countries.

Refusal to establish diplomatic relations with Cuba has put the United States out of step with most of its Latin American allies. In the early 1960's Washington persuaded most of these countries to isolate Havana diplomatically, expelling Cuba from the Organization of American States (OAS). But in recent years most of these countries have restored ties, and today all but a handful of nations in this hemisphere have exchanged ambassadors with Cuba. In November 1987 the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela — representing 80 percent of all Latin Americans — called for Cuba's readmission to the Organization of American States (OAS).

## A Troubled Relationship

U.S.-Cuban relations have been troubled for many decades. Long before the Cuban revolution, before there were East-West frictions, the two countries were enmeshed in the tension between rich and poor countries that we now call the North-South conflict. When Cuban patriots were about to throw off four centuries of Spanish colonial rule in 1898, the McKinley administration declared war on Spain, dispatching troops who remained once the Spanish were defeated.

U.S. forces did not leave Cuba until a clause was inserted in the country's new constitution that gave Washington the right to intervene militarily in Cuban affairs, which it did from 1906 to 1909, in 1912, from 1917 to 1922, and in 1933. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration helped bring into being

the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. U.S. investors acquired vast amounts of land in Cuba and came to dominate the economy. The country became popular with U.S. tourists. Most Cubans, however, lived in poverty with no political rights.

In 1959 a revolution overthrew the Batista dictatorship and set about transforming Cuban society. Relations with the United States soured when the new Cuban government, seeking to redistribute wealth, nationalized lands and other key U.S. investments. The Eisenhower administration began making plans for direct intervention, training an army of anti-government Cuban exiles, much as it had in 1954 when it overthrew the reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for military and economic aid. In 1961 the United States sent its exile army to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs, but the Cuban people disappointed U.S. planners by rallying to defeat the invaders.

In 1962 Cuba was transformed from an annoyance to a threat. The Soviet Union began sending medium-range nuclear missiles to Cuba and building launch facilities. Washington challenged Moscow to remove them, and after several nervous days — the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war — the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles.

As part of the agreement to end the missile crisis, Washington promised not to attack Cuba militarily. But in the ensuing years it did everything else. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations moved to isolate Cuba diplomatically and economically, persuading U.S. allies to join Washington in cutting off trade and diplomatic relations. Meanwhile the Central Intelligence Agency carried out economic sabotage within Cuba and plotted to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro.

U.S.-Cuban relations became hostage to tensions between the United States and Soviet Union. In the 1970's, when Cuba provided military assistance to the governments of Ethiopia, Angola, Grenada, and Nicaragua, Washington charged that Havana was acting as a tool of the Soviets, and declared that relations would not be restored until Cuba stopped providing such aid.

The Carter administration made human rights a central issue in its dealings with Cuba. A major concern was the release of political prisoners, most of them Batista supporters and government

2

opponents jailed since the early 1960's. There
have been allegations of maltreatment and torture
of some of these prisoners.

Since the late 1970's, mainly as a result of Car-
ter's efforts to normalize relations, Cuba has re-
leased several thousand detainees. Between 400
and 800 remain behind bars. Release of prisoners
has been linked to immigration agreements, be-
cause the Cuban government prefers to release
some prisoners only if another country will accept
them.

A problem in the discussion of human rights
between Washington and Havana has been that
the two countries stress different aspects of the
issue. Cuba emphasizes social and economic
rights, and points to its success in eliminating
poverty and extending health care and education
to its entire population. The United States stresses
political rights, and denounces Cuban restrictions
of civil liberties and political freedoms.

The appropriate role of U.S. policy in promot-
ing human rights in Cuba and other countries re-
mains a matter of debate, but few argue that the
United States should withhold normal diplomatic
relations solely on human rights grounds. As a
means of promoting human rights abroad, current
U.S. law does provide that bilateral assistance and
trade preferences be conditioned on the recip-
ients' observance of internationally-recognized hu-
man rights.

A Changing World

As the 1980's come to a close, it is becoming
clear that policies created thirty years ago no long-
er work, if they ever did. The world can no longer
be easily divided into East and West, between
those countries aligned with the United States and
those aligned with the Soviet Union. Rather, long-
standing divisions between the industrialized,
wealthy countries of the North and the pre-
dominantly agrarian, poor countries of the South
are becoming increasingly important. Over the last
ten years Cuba has played an important role in
the Non-Aligned Movement that includes over 100
third world countries, which it chaired from 1979
to 1982.

A central North-South issue concerns the
mounting debts owed by Third World nations to
banks in the industrialized countries. For many
Third World countries, particularly in Latin Amer-

ica, debt payments eat up a large proportion of
export earnings, forcing cuts in social spending.
The debt burden, combined with falling prices for
their exports, has caused an economic deteriora-
tion for most of Latin America. In some cases as
much as two decades of economic development
has been lost, with poverty returning to 1960's
levels. Cuba has played an active role in the Latin
American debate over the debt crisis and its pro-
posal for a moratorium on debt payments has
been given a respectful hearing.

Ideological tensions have also lessened between
Cuba and the rest of Latin America as Havana has
reduced its support for leftist insurgencies, and
right-wing military regimes in South America have
given way to elected civilian governments. In
1982, during the war between Argentina and Great
Britain over the Malvinas/Falkland islands, Cuba
joined most Latin American nations in supporting
Argentina, while the United States backed the Brit-
ish. The recent call by Latin nations for Cuba's
readmission to the OAS is an example of the de-
gree to which East-West differences have suc-
cumbed to common interests on such issues as
the debt.

Time for a New Policy

The United States has been able to restore rela-
tions with countries, like China, that it had long
refused to recognize, and has recently eased Cold-
War tensions with the Soviets. But U.S.-Cuban rela-
tions remain frozen in animosity. Such U.S. allies
(and NATO members) as Canada and Spain have
been able to negotiate differences with Havana,
but U.S. policy remains confrontational.

Within the United States there is broad interest
in a re-examination of relations with Cuba. Opin-
ion polls show that a majority of the public favors
better ties, and exchanges between scholars and
religious people have opened up avenues of com-
munication. Among the Cuban-American commu-
nity, while hostility toward the Cuban government
remains widespread, there is considerable senti-
ment for improved relations that would facilitate
travel and communication between the United
States and their homeland. When the travel ban
was lifted in 1979 over 100,000 Cuban-Americans
visited relatives on the island.

A punitive policy that dates from the early
1960's appropriate for a changing world in the

late 1980's and beyond? Are the conflicts between
the United States and Cuba so great that they can-
not be resolved through negotiation? Should the
United States keep trying to punish Cuba by
embargoing trade, banning travel, and withholding
diplomatic relations? A sober review of the issues

outstanding between the two countries suggests
that this is not the case. As the following discus-
sion of the major points of conflict demonstrates,
these issues could be productively addressed by
an alternative policy, such as that proposed by
PACCA, based on negotiation and respect for inter-
national law.

Multilateral Issues

Cuba's activist foreign policy, and its close rela-
tions with the Soviet Union, have been the major
declared concerns of U.S. Cuba policy. Cuba con-
tends that as a sovereign nation it has the right to
pursue its own foreign policy with other sover-
eign nations. A review of the situations in South-
ern Africa and Central America, specifically Cuban
assistance to the governments of Angola and
Nicaragua, suggests that in both cases a resolution
can be reached through a regional peace settle-
ment. Cuba regards its own relationship with the
Soviet Union as non-negotiable, but an agreement
between Washington and Moscow already bars any
offensive Soviet military presence in Cuba.

1. Cuba in Southern Africa

In October 1975 Cuba sent thousands of troops
to Angola to help that country's government de-
fend itself against attacks from South Africa, which
occupies neighboring Namibia in violation of U.N.
Security Council Resolution 435. South Africa pro-
vides extensive military aid to an anti-government
Angolan force called UNITA, and the South African
army has frequently invaded Angola, at times hold-
ing large areas of that country.

In recent years the situation has been further
complicated by the Reagan administration's deci-
sion to provide military assistance to the UNITA
forces, effectively making Washington a military
ally of South Africa in its war against the Angolan
government.

Until recently the two sides were far apart. An-
gola said it had the right to ask Cuba for assis-
tance to defend itself, and demanded that South
Africa leave Namibia and stop backing UNITA as a
precondition for sending the Cubans home. The
Reagan administration and the South African gov-

ernment insisted that Cuban troops leave Angola
before South Africa withdrew from Namibia.

In February 1988 Angola and Cuba agreed to
pull all Cuban forces from Angola if a com-
prehensive regional settlement could be reached
ending South African occupation of Namibia. This
advance, described as a "breakthrough" by U.S.
officials, emerged from talks between a U.S. envoy
and Angolan officials, with Cuban participation.

3

# Chronology

**1500s:** Spanish colonize Cuba

**1898:** U.S. forces enter Cuban War of Independence; Spain concedes defeat in three months; U.S. establishes military government

**1901:** "Platt Amendment" allowing U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs incorporated in new Cuban constitution; U.S. forces leave

**1906-1909:** U.S. forces occupy Cuba to "restore order"

**1912:** U.S. forces intervene to "protect American interests"

**1917-1922:** U.S. forces stationed in Cuba to "protect American interests"

**1933-1934:** Following overthrow of Machado dictatorship, U.S. ambassador Sumner Welles forces the creation of a government acceptable to Washington, as U.S. naval forces sail near Havana

**1952:** Fulgencio Batista takes power by military coup

**July 26, 1953:** Fidel Castro leads attack on Moncada barracks, beginning armed opposition to Batista dictatorship

**January 1959:** Batista flees; revolutionary forces enter Havana

**May 1959:** Agrarian reform law nationalizes one third of the arable land in Cuba

**January 1960:** Soviet Foreign Minister Anastas Mikoyan visits Cuba and signs trade agreement

**March 1960:** Eisenhower approves planning for Bay of Pigs invasion

**June 1960:** U.S. oil companies, urged by State Department, refuse to refine Soviet crude oil at Cuban refineries; Cuba nationalizes refineries

**July 1960:** Washington suspends Cuban sugar quota, blocking 80 percent of Cuban exports to United States. Soviet Union agrees to buy Cuban sugar

**August 1960:** Cuba nationalizes $1 billion worth of private U.S. investment; Washington imposes trade embargo

**January 1961:** Washington breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba

**April 1961:** CIA-sponsored invasion force of 1200 exiles lands at Bay of Pigs and is defeated within 72 hours

**January 1962:** OAS expels Cuba

**October 1962:** Soviets send nuclear missiles to Cuba, Washington threatens force to remove them, Soviets pull missiles out in exchange for U.S. pledge not to attack Cuba

**1962-1968:** CIA organizes paramilitary attacks against Cuba, including assassination plots against Cuban leaders

**July 1964:** OAS votes to require all members to cut diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba; only Mexico refuses

**October 1965:** Boatlift from Camariorca brings 3,000 Cubans to United States

**September 1970:** Washington warns Moscow to stop building nuclear submarine base at Cienfuegos, Cuba

**July 1975:** After a number of countries (Peru, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Argentina, Panama, Chile, and Venezuela) broke the 1964 OAS sanction and established relations with

4

## Statistical Profile

**Population** — 10 million, growing 0.9%, 65% urban, 35% rural

**Area** — 114,524 square kilometers, 44,218 square miles (about the size of Pennsylvania)

**Literacy** — 95%

**School attendance by age groups:**

<table><tr><td>6 to 11</td><td>100%</td></tr><tr><td>12 to 17</td><td>83%</td></tr><tr><td>18 to 23</td><td>30%</td></tr></table>

**Life expectancy** — 73 years (Caribbean average — 65)

**Infant mortality** (per thousand live births) — 18.5 (Caribbean average — 74)

**Physicians per 1,000 people** — 1.75

**Hospital beds per 1,000 people** — 4.9

**Sources:** Statistical Abstract of Latin America, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Population Reference Bureau

Cuba, an OAS majority — including United States — votes to lift diplomatic and economic sanctions. Washington opts to retain its own trade embargo, but allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to trade with Cuba.

**November 1975:** At the request of the new Angolan government, Cuba sends combat troops to help Angola repulse an invasion by South African forces launched October 23 1975; eventually 30,000 troops are sent.

**December 1975:** U.S. President Gerald Ford says Cuban involvement in Angola precludes possibility of restoring relations and breaks off secret negotiations underway since 1974

**October 1976:** Bomb on Cubana Airlines plane kills 73 people. Luis Posada Carriles, Cuban exile and former CIA employee, arrested for bombing in Venezuela

**March 1977:** Carter administration lifts ban on travel to Cuba

**December 1977:** Cuban troops sent to Ethiopia at government's request, derailing process of normalizing relations begun by the Carter administration

**November-December 1978:** Dialogue between members of the Cuban-American community and Cuban government leads to release of 3,600 political prisoners and agreements on travel and emigration.

**April 1979:** Grenada restores diplomatic relations with Cuba, subsequently establishes close political and economic ties

**July 1979:** Revolutionary Nicaraguan government restores relations with Cuba; subsequently establishes political ties and receives military advice in war with U.S.-backed contras

**April 1980:** Cuba announces that anyone wishing to leave can be picked up at port of Mariel. Over five months 120,000 leave.

**April 1982:** Reagan administration re-imposes ban on travel to Cuba

**January 1983:** Bolivia restores diplomatic relations with Cuba

**October 1983:** United States invades Grenada. There are 636 Cuban construction workers and 43 military advisers; 24 are killed, 57 wounded, and 642 captured

**December 1984:** Washington and Havana reach agreement under which Cuba receives 2,746 "excludables" who arrived during Mariel exodus, while United States permits immigration of up to 20,000 Cubans annually

**May 1985:** United States begins anti-government propaganda broadcasts to Cuba over Radio Marti; Cuba suspends immigration agreement

**October 1985:** Reagan administration bans travel by Cuban officials to United States

**October 1985:** Uruguay restores diplomatic relations with Cuba

**June 1986:** Brazil restores diplomatic relations with Cuba

**November 1987:** Eight Latin American nations call for Cuban readmission to OAS

**November 1987:** Cuban-U.S. immigration agreement restored; Cuban detainees in United States riot

**February 1988:** Angola agrees to send all Cuban troops home as part of a comprehensive Southern Africa peace settlement under negotiation

5

6

## 2. Central America

Havana's past assistance to revolutionary movements in Latin America has long put it at odds with U.S. policy. Since the Sandinista revolution in 1979 Cuba has been close to Nicaragua, sending several hundred military advisers. The Reagan administration accuses Cuba of providing training and material support for the leftist insurgency in El Salvador and guerrillas in other Central American nations.

As in Angola, Cuba claims the right to offer military assistance to governments that request it, pointing to the threat to Nicaragua posed by the U.S.-backed contra forces. The United States also maintains well over a thousand troops in neighboring Honduras and regularly brings in thousands more for large-scale military exercises.

The Contadora group (Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia) has proposed a regional settlement requiring withdrawal of all foreign military personnel from the Central America and a cessation of foreign assistance to insurgent forces. Cuba has repeatedly stated its willingness to abide by such an agreement, under which it would recall military advisers from Nicaragua and halt any assistance to insurgent groups. Such a settlement would also compel the United States to stop support for the Nicaraguan contras and withdraw U.S. military personnel from Honduras and El Salvador.

Cuba has also expressed support for the Central American peace plan signed in August 1987 by the five Central American Presidents, which calls for further negotiations on security issues within the Contadora framework.

## 3. Relations with the Soviet Union

The October 1962 Missile Crisis led to a U.S.-Soviet accord barring the Soviets from placing nuclear and other offensive weapons in Cuba, in return for a U.S. pledge not to attack the island. In 1970 the U.S.-Soviet agreement was extended, excluding Soviet nuclear submarines from Cuba. In 1979, the Carter administration accepted Moscow's assurances that the 2,600 Soviet troops stationed in Cuba constitute a training unit without an offensive capability.

Today the Soviets have facilities on the ground and on Cuban-based aircraft to monitor radio transmissions from the United States, and maintain, in addition to the 2,600 troops, about 2,000 military advisers, according to official U.S. estimates.

Cuba, in refusing to make its relationship with the Soviet Union a matter for negotiation, points to U.N. Charter provisions that allow governments to ask other countries for military assistance for defensive purposes.

## Public Opinion

"How would you feel about the U.S. entering into negotiations with Cuba looking toward reestablishing diplomatic and economic relations and exchanging ambassadors?"

Source: Gallup Poll, 1986

# Bilateral Issues

7

Most of the bilateral issues between the United States and Cuba date to the initial deterioration of relations in the 1960's. Negotiated solutions would not require that either side compromise vital interests.

## 1. Unsettled Claims

Conflict between the United States and the revolutionary Cuban government began not over military issues, but over the treatment of U.S. investments in Cuba. Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba was the Latin American country with the second-highest amount of U.S. investment. Much of the country's agricultural land was owned by U.S. investors who used it to grow export crops, while many Cubans went hungry and basic foods were imported. Most industry was also foreign-owned.

The new Cuban government sought to end foreign control of the island's economy, and to redtribute farmland as a way to alleviate poverty. Foreign-owned lands were rapidly nationalized and turned over to peasant farmers.

These reforms brought Havana into conflict with Washington. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration encouraged U.S. oil companies to close their refineries to Soviet oil; in response Cuba nationalized the refineries. Washington reentalized by blocking Cuban sugar exports to the United States. Shortly thereafter, Washington formally broke diplomatic relations.

U.S. claims against Cuba for expropriated property amount to $1.85 billion, totalling over $5 billion with accrued interest. Cuba has counterclaims against the United States for losses resulting from the U.S. covert war against Cuba and the embargo. Havana has said it would be willing to discuss this issue with the United States, as it has with other countries. Following bilateral negotiations, Cuba has repaid claimants from Canada, Switzerland, France and Spain.

## 2. The U.S. Economic Embargo of Cuba

The U.S. economic embargo, formally instituted on February 6, 1962, was designed to destabilize Cuba. The United States persuaded the countries of the Organization of American States, with the

exception of Mexico, to end commerce with Cuba, and U.S. banks pressed international lending agencies and financial institutions of other Western countries to withhold credit.

The embargo hurt. Cuba had sent 71 percent of its exports to the United States, and depended on the United States for 64 percent of its imports. Most remaining trade had been with U.S. allies. Cuba could not easily find replacement parts for U.S.-made machinery or vehicles, and had to find new markets for its products. Its only option was to forge trading links with the Soviet Union and its allies. By the 1970's Cuba had largely recovered from the most damaging effects of the embargo, although there are still some medicines which Cuba cannot obtain.

Cuba's economic isolation in the hemisphere began to ease in the mid-1970's when the OAS voted to lift the economic and diplomatic embargo. During this period, the United States also relaxed some provisions of the ban, permitting foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba. Cuba now does business with many U.S. allies throughout the world.

But the Reagan administration's renewed hostility toward Cuba has led to a tightening of the embargo. The administration, claiming that Cuba promotes subversion abroad, contends that the embargo denies it hard currency that would be used to support overseas activities.

In the 1960's Cuba termed the embargo an act of aggression, and demanded that it be lifted before beginning talks on other issues. Today, having largely adapted, Havana no longer conditions talks on lifting the trade ban.

Resuming commerce between the two countries would be an important part of restoring relations, although it is unlikely that trade would return to the levels of the 1950's because Cuba has little hard currency and there is a limited U.S. market for its exports. But tourism would revive, and given the two countries' proximity, there would be opportunities for trade.

## 3. Terrorism

The defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion did not spell the end to U.S.-linked attacks on Cuba. Many of the right-wing Cuban exiles whom the United States trained remained on the payroll of U.S. in-

8

intelligence agencies; others free-lanced. The result was a campaign of sabotage within Cuba, and assassinations and bombings against Cuban targets outside the country. These terrorist groups have attacked U.S. citizens and companies that deal with Cuba, committing acts of violence in the United States.

Early in the Carter administration, during a thaw in relations with Cuba, U.S. law enforcement agencies tried to curb the activities of right-wing terrorists. In 1978 the FBI shared some information with Cuban authorities about this segment of the exile community, but cooperation ceased during the Reagan years.

The United States denies any connection with right-wing Cuban terrorists. The Reagan administration makes the counter-claim that Cuba promotes international terrorism.

During the 1970's, after a spate of hijackings of U.S. aircraft to Cuba, the two countries reached an agreement for the return of hijackers to the United States. This accord, and the history of cooperation between law-enforcement agencies of the two countries in the late 1970's, suggests that in a climate of better relations the two countries could work jointly to stop terrorism.

## 4. Migration

Cuba's population is ten million; another million Cubans live in the United States, and most of them have relatives on the island. Cuban immigration to the United States has been a recurrent issue in U.S./Cuba relations. Each country has used migration policies to put pressure on the other.

The result has been inconsistency. The United States, for example, has reduced the number of Cubans allowed to legally immigrate, while accepting those who leave Cuba illegally. If legal channels are closed, people who want to leave Cuba are likely to do so unlawfully.

The Cuban government has often changed the procedures by which Cuban citizens can legally leave. Unrestricted emigration has been allowed twice, when Cuban-Americans were allowed to pick up relatives and friends at the ports of Camariorca in 1965, and Mariel in 1980. Over 120,000 Cubans came to the United States during the Mariel boatlift, including some recently-released criminals and mental patients, many of

whom were re-imprisoned when they landed in the United States. The United States denied refugee status to the detained immigrants and to all Mariel immigrants arrested for even minor crimes since 1981. By 1987 some 7,000 were detained indefinitely in various centers.

The periodic swings in migration policies have made it difficult for Cuban-Americans to maintain contact with relatives. At times, Havana has demanded prohibitive tariffs for travel, and at other times has not allowed visits with relatives at all.

The Cold War has all but choked off communication between the Cuban-American community and relatives on the island. It is difficult to send letters, medicine, and packages. The embargo prevents the use of modern telecommunications facilities, making telephone communication difficult.

In 1984 the United States and Cuba signed an Immigration Treaty in which Cuba consented to take back some of the undesirable Mariel immigrants and the United States agreed to accept some 20,000 Cubans each year. But in 1985 the United States began propaganda broadcasts to Cuba through Radio Marti, prompting Havana to cancel the treaty and clamp down on travel to the island by Cuban-Americans. The lack of a consistent policy and the political use of this issue by both countries contributed to the October 1987 riots by Mariel immigrants following the announcement that the 1984 Immigration Treaty would be reinstated.

The record shows that immigration issues can be resolved if they are not made hostage to other bilateral concerns. The recent progress on this issue is a hopeful sign.

A related issue has been the use of the McCarran-Walter Act (which allows the United States to exclude foreigners on ideological grounds) to prevent prominent Cubans from visiting the United States. At the end of 1987 the U.S. Congress voted to suspend those provisions for one year pending a complete overhaul of the act.

## 5. Broadcasting

During the 1960's and early 1970's the United States broadcast clandestine propaganda to Cuba; on a few occasions Cuba also broadcast to the United States. By the end of the seventies, how-

ever, the United States had abandoned most of these propaganda efforts.

But in the 1980's the radio wars have resumed. Early in the first Reagan administration, the Federal Communications Commission allowed right-wing commercial radio stations in Miami to increase their power so that they could be better heard in Cuba.

In May 1985, the Reagan administration established a radio station, as part of the Voice of America, to beam propaganda into Cuba. Radio Marti's medium wave broadcasts violate international regulations that AM frequencies cannot be used for broadcasting to another country.

The United States claims that Cubans have the right to hear dissenting views. Cuba objects vehemently to Radio Marti's anti-government tone; the station's backers have stated clearly that they hope it will encourage rebellion. Recently Radio Marti's supporters have pushed for a television station to send anti-government propaganda into Cuba, which would violate international regulations that bar television broadcasts to another country without that country's permission.

Cuba has threatened to retaliate by making medium wave broadcasts to the United States, which would interfere with U.S. radio stations and cost U.S. stations enormous advertising revenues. But recently, Havana has said that it would accept Radio Marti if Washington would assign it an AM frequency for broadcasts to the United States.

As long as radio plays a role in efforts to undermine the Cuban government it will be impossible to resolve broadcasting questions. But if already-

existing international broadcasting agreements are respected there should be little difficulty in resolving these issues.

## 6. Guantanamo

The Platt Amendment, which the United States forced Cuba to incorporate in its constitution in 1903, required the island to sell or lease land to the United States for a naval facility. The agreement was modified in 1934, giving Cuba ultimate sovereignty over the land where the base is sited but granting the United States an indefinite lease. The Guantanamo Naval Base is the oldest U.S. military installation outside the United States. It has been used as headquarters for several Caribbean naval exercises in the 1980's; some 6,000 U.S. military personnel are based there.

Cuba contends that the base threatens its security and national sovereignty, and argues that the 1903 and 1934 agreements were obtained by coercion and are invalid. The Cuban government refuses to cash annual U.S. rent checks.

The United States already has an enormous military presence in the Caribbean with bases in Florida and Puerto Rico. The Guantanamo base is now used mainly for training and most analysts do not consider it important to U.S. security. Talks over the base would help remove a major irritant in relations between the two countries. Some observers have urged "creative solutions" such as using the base for an international hospital or some other humanitarian facility.

9

A PACCA Book From Westview Press:

From Confrontation to Negotiation

U.S. Relations with Cuba

Philip Brenner

*From Confrontation to Negotiation* explores the history of U.S.-Cuba relations and examines the outstanding issues between the two countries. The book sets forth both the factors shaping Cuban policy and the domestic context of U.S. policy toward Cuba, and presents alternatives.

"In this excellent review of U.S.-Cuba relations, Philip Brenner provides a devastating critique of the policy the U.S. has followed toward that island nation for almost thirty years, a policy that Dr. Brenner points out has long since outlived any usefulness it may have had."

— Wayne Smith
Former Chief of U.S. Interests Section in Havana

"An astute, pragmatic prescription for dealing with United States security interests with respect to Cuba. Based on an insightful exploration of U.S.-Cuba relations dating back to the 19th Century...a book that both policy-makers and the general public need to read."

— Margaret Crahan
Occidental College

"Shows a scholarly objectivity and clarity of purpose unusual for books on this subject."

— Joseph Murphy
Chancellor, The City University of New York

"This clearly written account of U.S. relations with Cuba is certain to become a valuable resource for those seeking to understand the complex nature of that relationship."

— Senator Claiborne Pell
Chairman, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

POLICY ALTERNATIVES
FOR THE CARIBBEAN AND
CENTRAL AMERICA

Suite 2, 1506 19th Street N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 332-6333

Ordering information

To order *From Confrontation to Negotiation* contact your local bookstore, the publisher, or the Central America Resource Center. Price: $7.95 paperbound, $23.95 hardcover. Available from Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, CO 80301. Add $2.50 shipping for first copy, $0.75 for the second copy, $0.50 for each additional copy. Bulk discounts are available to organizations.

This book and all other PACCA books are also available from the Central America Resource Center, P.O. Box 2327, Austin, TX 78768. To the $7.95 cover price add $1.25 shipping for the first copy, $0.50 for each additional copy. Write for a complete list of publications.

ISBN 0-8133-7507-X

21

PACCA's Alternative U.S. Policy Toward Cuba

After 28 years of confrontation, the time has come for a new U.S. policy toward Cuba, based on negotiated solutions to bilateral issues and respect for self-determination and international law.

Moreover, a policy that bans most travel and limits educational and cultural exchanges represents an unnecessary infringement on the rights of U.S. citizens to unrestricted travel and access to information. The recent restoration of the U.S.-Cuban immigration treaty should be a symbol of good faith and mark the beginning of a process of establishing normal relations between the two countries.

The following are crucial elements of a new U.S. policy toward Cuba:

4. Negotiate bilateral issues, including radio interference problems, medium wave broadcasts from one country to the other, maritime border disputes, violations of air space, handling of acts of sabotage and hijacking, and security and sovereignty concerns related to the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

5. Open discussions on mutual security concerns, such as the Soviet presence in Cuba and U.S. military exercises in the Caribbean, with the aim of signing a document committing all parties to strengthen international peace and security as established in the U.N. Charter and other international agreements.

6. Open exploratory discussions with Cuba on mutual commitment to, and compliance with, the provisions of the Central American peace agreement forbidding foreign aid to irregular forces and the use of one Central American nation as a base for waging war on another. Discuss the prospects for a security accord among the Central American nations leading to the withdrawal of all foreign military personnel, an end to military maneuvers, the freezing of arms acquisitions, and mutual reductions in military forces.

7. Halt aid to UNITA in accordance with U.N. Resolution 435, which calls for the independence of Namibia and an end to attacks on Angola. Open exploratory discussions with Cuba and Angola on the implementation of U.N. Resolution 435 and the eventual withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola.

8. Open discussions with Cuba with the aim of reintegrating it into Inter-American forums such as the Organization of American States; seek Cuba's inclusion in regional development efforts for the Caribbean; and include Cuba in hemispheric efforts to seek joint solutions to the debt and other economic and social development problems.

11. Foster educational, cultural and tourist exchange programs between the United States and Cuba to share skills and promote understanding between the two countries.

If you are prepared to endorse this policy alternative, please complete and return the form below:

Name (please write legibly) Institution Address

PACCA Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America

Suite 2, 1506 19th St. NW Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 332-6333

Partial List Of Endorsers of PACCA's Alternative U.S. Policy Toward Cuba

Luz Del Alba Acevedo, University of Illinois, Chicago

Beverly Allen, Stanford University

Ricardo Anzaldúa, Harvard Law School

Robert Armstrong, Domestic Roots of U.S. Foreign Policy Project

Robert F. Arnove, Indiana University

Rudy Arredondo, Hispanic Chairman, Maryland Rainbow Coalition

José Arrom, Yale University

Silvia Arrom, Indiana University

Max Azicri, University of Pennsylvania

David Ayon, University of California, San Diego

Emilio Bejel, University of Florida

Carolee Bengelsdorf, Hampshire College

Jules Benjamin, University of California, Los Angeles

Douglas Bennett, Temple University

Larry Bennett, DePaul University

Phillip Berryman, American Friends Service Committee

George Black, *The Nation*

Jan Knippers Black, University of New Mexico

Morris Blachman, University of South Carolina

William Bollinger, Interamerican Research Center

John Booth, North Texas State University

Donald W. Bray, California State University, Los Angeles

Marjorie Bray, California State University, Los Angeles

Philip Brenner, American University

Roger Burbach, Center for the Study of the Americas

Alberto Camarillo, Stanford University

Martin Carnoy, Stanford University

Charles Carreras, Ramapo College

Norma Chinchilla, California State University, Long Beach

Joshua Cohen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Joseph Collins, Institute for Food and Development Policy

Michael Conroy, University of Texas, Austin

Margaret Crahan, Occidental College

Theo R. Crevenna, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Jose Cuellar, Stanford University

Natalia Delgado, Commissioner, Chicago Transit Authority

Carmen Diana Deere, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Mariano Diaz-Miranda, University of Rhode Island

James Dietz, California State University, Fullerton

Martin Diskin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Elizabeth Dore, Middlebury College

Jorge Duany, University of Florida

Susan Eckstein, Boston University

Michael Erisman, Mercyhurst College

Debra Evenson, DePaul Law School

Daniel Faber, University of California, Santa Cruz

Richard Fagen, Stanford University

Thomas Farer, University of New Mexico

Milton Fisk, Indiana University

Jan Flora, Kansas State University

Guillermo Flores, Associate Director, Inter-University Program on Latino Research

Eleanor French, DePaul University

Mark Fried, North American Congress on Latin America

Hank Frundt, Ramapo College

Dennis Gilbert, Hamilton College

Eva Gold, NARMIC, American Friends Service Committee

Manuel Gomez, President, Cuban American Committee

Xabier Gorostiaga, Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales

Nora Hamilton, University of Southern California

Timothy Harding, California State University, Los Angeles

Donald Harris, Stanford University

Dianne W. Hart, Oregon State University

Harold Hinds Jr., University of Minnesota, Morris

Raul Hinojosa, Stanford University

Maria Cristina Herrera, Instituto de Estudios Cubanos

Jack W. Hopkins, Indiana University

Milton Jamail, University of Texas, Austin

Andres Jimenez, University of California, Berkeley

Michael Jimenez, Princeton University

Terry Karl, Stanford University

Eldon Kenworthy, Cornell University

Walter LaFeber, Cornell University

Saul Landau, Institute for Policy Studies

Fabrice E. Lehoucq, Duke University

Sandra Levinson, Center for Cuban Studies

William LeoGrande, American University

Jerry Lopez, Stanford University

Sheryl Lugrus, Northern Arizona University

Nita Rous Manitzas, Center for Cuban Studies

Beatriz Manz, Wellesley College

Sandra McGee, University of Texas, El Paso

Cecilia de Mello, University of California, Berkeley

Kevin J. Middlebrook, Indiana University

Hubert Miller, Pan American University

Valerie Miller, OXFAM America

Tommie Sue Montgomery, Agnes Scott College

José A. Moreno, University of Pittsburgh

Richard M. Morse, Wilson Center, The Smithsonian Institution

Carlos Munoz, University of California, Berkeley

Joseph Murphy, City University of New York

Muriel Nazzari, Indiana University

John Neagle, University of New Mexico

John Spicer Nichols, Pennsylvania State University

James O'Connor, University of California, Santa Cruz

Manuel Pastor, Occidental College

Nancy F. Patchett, California State University, Los Angeles

Marifell Perez-Stable, State University of New York, Old Westbury

Walter Petry, Fairfield University

Mary Pratt, Stanford University

Yolanda Prieto, Ramapo College

Gary Prevost, St. John's University, Collegeville

David Ransel, Indiana University

Pedro Rodriguez, Executive Director, Guadalupe Cultural Center

Renato Rosaldo, Stanford University

Jonathan Rosenberg, University of California, Los Angeles

Helen Safa, University of Florida

Russell O. Salmon, Indiana University

Sara Santana, Columbia University

Lars Schoultz, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Kenneth Sharpe, Swarthmore College

Philip Shepherd, Florida International University

Carol Smith, Duke University

Wayne Smith, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Rose Spalding, DePaul University

Al Stepan, Columbia University

Alex Stepick, Florida International University

K. Lynn Stoner, Arizona State University

Peggy Stork, University of California, Santa Cruz

María A. Torres, DePaul University

Robert Trudeau, Providence College

Nelson P. Valdes, University of New Mexico

Armando Valdez, Associate Director, Stanford Center for Chicano Research

Pravin Varaiya, University of California, Berkeley

Steven Volk, Oberlin College

Thomas Walker, Ohio University, Miami

Hilbourne Watson, Howard University

John Weeks, American University

Robert E. White, International Center for Development Policy

Andrew Zimballist, Smith College

*Institutions listed for identification purposes only.*