Report skips over depths of Cuba’s dictatorship
The Miami Herald| Wednesday, May 21, 2008
By Frank Calzon
In a 77-page report just released, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations presents a hodge-podge of recommendations to America’s 44th president — whomever he or she may be — in order to confront ”a critical opportunity to reframe and redirect U.S. relations” with Latin America. The report is based on an economists’ worldview of the hemisphere, which emphasizes improving access to market opportunities in Latin America, tax reforms, streamlining business regulations and U.S. economic interests. Almost nowhere to be found are the words ”freedom,” ”liberty” and “democracy.”
Among the recommendations for the new administration are calls for convening international conferences, a ”public-private summit” and other boilerplate suggestions. Others are simply the type of pie in the sky that often is the result of reports prepared by committees. In the case of emigration, the reports read: “The task force urges the next administration and Congress to negotiate and approve comprehensive immigration reform in 2009. Viable immigration policy must: improve border security and management; address the unauthorized work force already here; ensure employer security verification and responsibilities; and expand a flexible worker program to meet changing U.S. economic demands.”
The next president does not need a task force to identify those goals about which there already is something close to a national consensus. The devil, as usual, is in the details. What is the priority among the various goals, and who, how and for how much are those goals to be implemented? These questions are largely unanswered.
The report prescribes several courses of action for Latin American governments. It says that they ”must establish the institutional infrastructure necessary to boost public revenues if they are to confront social and economic problems successfully,” but it generally gives short shrift to the democratic process and to the need for democratic mechanisms such as those instituted in the ”Democratic Charter.” This accord signed by all democratic nations in the hemisphere is designed to ‘’strengthen and uphold” democratic institutions, yet it is mentioned only once, and that in order to criticize the alleged U.S. endorsement of a military coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
The report mentions the word ”business” 19 times, the word ”markets” 32 times, while it mentions ”freedom” one time, and ”elections” five times. In its 77 pages about the United States and Latin America the words ”freedom of the press,” ”political parties” and ”liberty” do not appear.
In the case of Cuba, the harshest military dictatorship in the region, the report credits Gen. Raúl Castro’s regime with implementing ”a number of measures designed to enhance the quality of people’s lives and personal freedom.” About the U.S. trade embargo the report recommends the ”repeal of the 1996 Helms-Burton Law” and to “initiate a series of steps, with the aim of lifting the embargo against Cuba.”
Absent from the report is that Cuba, whatever the regime says to its foreign apologists, remains a cruel dictatorship where there is no freedom of the press, where the right to strike and labor unions are prohibited, where most economic activity by private individuals, which is taken for granted around the world, is severely punished; and where as recently as late April, as reported by the international media, about 10 women dressed in white who gathered peacefully at a park to present a petition to the authorities were roughed up and arrested by some 100 government thugs and security officers.
Their group, the Ladies in White, mothers, sisters and daughters of Cuban political prisoners, was given the Sakharov Award by the European Parliament in 2005. After their detention in Havana, The Washington Post called attention to the ”apologists” of the Castro regime, who have renewed their calls for a lifting of the U.S. trade embargo . . . [while] unsurprisingly such Cuba buffs haven’t had much to say about [the Ladies in White].”
The report by the Council on Foreign Relations, while giving the benefit of the doubt to the almost 50-year-old Havana regime, fails to mention the women.
Frank Calzón is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C.