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For Some Cuban Expats, Castro’s Death Means Little

For Some Cuban Expats, Castro’s Death Means Little

For a man who lost so much — his freedom, his homeland and nearly his life — to Fidel Castro, my friend Juan Roque is extraordinarily unmoved by the tyrant’s death.

But that’s Roque’s hallmark: steady vision, calm spirit. It’s a standpoint that more people would be wise to adopt, especially now, as interested parties wait out this uncertain time between Fidel Castro’s death and the possible reversal of the U.S. rapprochement with Cuba under the incoming Trump administration.

Of all the voices chiming in on Castro’s death, Roque’s was the one I sought. We met years ago, when he was an advertising executive at The Kansas City Star. He’s mostly retired now, a grandfather of five living in a suburb of Kansas City.

At 16, Roque was a freedom fighter. He was a youngster brassy enough to alter the birthdate on his passport, convincing the CIA that he was old enough to fight in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He wasn’t, but our intelligence agents didn’t figure it out until it was too late.

Roque was dropped off, along with 1,400 other Cuban exiles, by boat near Cuba. They made it ashore and fought for three days, vastly outnumbered by Castro’s troops. More than 100 of the freedom fighters died before they ran out of ammunition.

Roque, thinking like an indestructible teenager, believed that he could swim 50 miles through shark-infested waters and reach safety. He tried but was captured. He spent the next 20 months in a Cuban jail, subsisting on noodles, bread and water.

The only times he got depressed was when he “made the mistake” of looking out the window and wondering if he’d spend the rest of his life imprisoned.

His mother, part of the underground resistance to Castro, was held in a Cuban jail at the same time. She’d been captured about eight months after sending her son and a daughter to the U.S., not knowing that her son would figure out a way to return. She’d spend 13 years in a Cuban prison.

His stepfather, who had been an adviser to the dictator Castro overthrew, Fulgencio Batista, was also jailed, for eight years. Both parents eventually made it to the United States and are now deceased.

“Nothing good happened to us as a result of Fidel Castro coming to power,” Roque told me. Still, he has long been refreshingly honest about U.S./Cuba relations, despite all that happened to him and his family.

Hatred of Castro can make people lose perspective. It’s one reason why so many, including some who have the ear of President-elect Donald Trump, continue to press for maintaining the embargo. Never mind that the economic blockade accomplished nothing to budge Castro from power — and did much to harm the Cuban people.

It’s a failed policy, although some still mistakenly cast it as a principled stand.

Roque has long favored lifting the embargo, trying to engage carefully, while remaining fully aware of the ongoing humanitarian sins of both Castro brothers. Raul Castro has been in power for nearly a decade now, so the death of Fidel is not the watershed some are celebrating.

“What can possibly happen?” Roque asked. “The Communist Party is still in control.”

Raul is 85 and set to retire from the presidency Feb. 24, 2018. Which is a reason why Roque is a patient man.

At a mere stroke of a pen, President Trump could reverse the executive orders Barack Obama has used to weave connections between the U.S. and Cuba. Those include the permission for businesses to import some Cuban goods, the relaxed regulations on what U.S. travelers can bring back from the island, an opening for U.S. interests to manage hotels in Cuba and for U.S. businesses and individuals to have bank accounts there.

The capitalism genie is out of the bottle. U.S. business interests will not willingly retreat from pursuing opportunities in Cuba.

In fact, the pace of rapprochement did not pause after Castro’s death, not even for his funeral. Two days after his last breath, as Castro’s ashes were ceremoniously making their way across Cuba, Havana was added as yet another Cuban destination reachable by scheduled commercial flights from a number of major U.S. cities.

Eventually, Roque might make a trip back to Cuba himself. He’d like for his beloved wife to see the island. But otherwise, he says, Cuba elicits sadness for him.

Before the revolution, Cuba was prosperous, with a growing middle class, Roque reflects. Castro destroyed that, but Roque refuses to waste the energy mourning it, adding philosophically, “You cannot go through life like that.”

IMAGE: Cuba’s President Fidel Castro gestures during a tour of Paris in this March 15, 1995 file photo. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/Files

How Will Castro’s Death Shape Trump’s Cuba Policy?

How Will Castro’s Death Shape Trump’s Cuba Policy?

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday that his administration would “do all it can” once he takes office on Jan. 20 to help increase freedom and prosperity for Cuban people after the death of Fidel Castro.

But his initial reaction to Castro’s death sidestepped whether the incoming president would make good on a threat made late in his White House campaign to reverse President Barack Obama’s moves to open relations with the Cold War adversary.

Obama used his executive powers on a series of steps to ease trade, travel and financial restrictions against Cuba, arguing it was time to try diplomacy after the half-century-long economic embargo against Cuba had failed to shake the regime.

Trump’s first statement on Cuba policy since the Nov. 8 election, issued from his Palm Beach, Florida, resort where he and his family were spending the weekend after the Thanksgiving holiday, did not address whether he would roll back Obama’s measures because of concerns about religious and political freedom in Cub

“Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty,” Trump said in the statement.

“While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve,” he said.

Trump has just begun to fill out the top ranks of his national security team, and has not yet named his top diplomat – the secretary of state – who will play a major role in formulating policy on Cuba.

He last week named Mauricio Claver-Carone, a political lobbyist who has strongly criticized Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba and supports maintaining the U.S. embargo against the island, to his transition team at the U.S. Treasury Department.

The agency is responsible for enforcing U.S. trade and travel restrictions on Cuba. Claver-Carone is director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee.

Claver-Carone was not immediately available for comment on Saturday.

Trump’s initial statement was viewed by some to mark a softening from his rhetoric on Cuba policy late in the campaign, one U.S. intelligence official told Reuters, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“This may be one place where his business interests prod him to take a more pragmatic course, even if that angers the hard-core, anti-Castro elements of both parties,” the official told Reuters.

A second U.S. official noted the foreign policy advisers Trump has named thus far are not known to have any particular interest in Cuba. That may mean Trump’s economic team will have more sway over Cuba policy, which could lead to a more pragmatic approach, the second official said.

An aggressive policy by Trump would close off lucrative opportunities to U.S. businesses and hand them to European or Asian firms, and would hurt companies like American Airlines , due to start commercial flights to Havana on Monday for the first time in half a century.

WHAT WILL TRUMP DO?

Trump – a New York businessman and former reality TV star with an unconventional approach to politics – started his campaign saying he was open to lifting the long-standing embargo on trade with Cuba.

In January, he said on Fox News that he was in favor of “opening it up” with Cuba, but wanted a better “deal” than Obama had made, comments he repeated in a debate with Republican rivals in March.

“I would want to make a strong, solid, good deal because right now, everything is in Cuba’s favor,” Trump said in March, saying he would “probably have the embassy closed” in Havana until a new deal was made.

When Obama visited Cuba later that month, Trump said in an interview with CNN that he “probably” would continue to normalize economic and diplomatic relations with Cuba, and would even open a Trump hotel in Cuba if the conditions were right.

“I think Cuba has certain potential, and I think it’s OK to bring Cuba into the fold, but you have to make a much better deal,” he said, noting he was worried Cuba would sue the United States for reparations for damage caused by its decades-long embargo on Cuba.

Cuba policy was not part of a major foreign policy address Trump delivered in April. After he secured his party’s nomination, his position shifted to a more traditional Republican position.

At a Miami rally in September, Trump said he would roll back Obama’s Cuban policy reforms unless Cuban leaders allowed religious freedom and freed political prisoners.

“The next president can reverse them, and that I will do unless the Castro regime meets our demands,” Trump told supporters.

His vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, also took a hard line. “Let me make you a promise,” Pence said in Miami just days before the election. “When Donald Trump is president of the United States, we will repeal Obama’s executive orders on Cuba.”

On Saturday, Pence tweeted: “The tyrant Castro is dead. New hope dawns. We will stand with the oppressed Cuban people for a free and democratic Cuba. Viva Cuba Libre!”

PRESSURE FROM REPUBLICANS

Trump will face pressure to reverse Obama’s orders on Cuba from a bloc of mostly Republican Cuban-American lawmakers that has worked to keep tight restrictions on trade and travel with Cuba for years.

They believe Cuba’s government is still too repressive to ease economic and travel restrictions.

“The dictator has died, but the dictatorship has not,” said U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Cuban-American who ran against Trump to be the Republican presidential candidate.

“The future of Cuba ultimately remains in the hands of the Cuban people, and now more than ever Congress and the new administration must stand with them against their brutal rulers and support their struggle for freedom and basic human rights.”

But some Republicans want to continue with Obama’s opening. U.S. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a leading Republican anti-embargo voice, said on Saturday that “more frequent and consequential ties between Cubans and Americans” would more likely boost income and sap the strength of the Castro government.

Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor, who represents a Tampa, Florida, district with a significant Cuban population, said she thinks Castro’s death could make it easier for the Trump administration to change its Cuba stance.

“While Fidel Castro was alive, there was an emotional impediment for greater engagement” from the Cuban exile community in Miami, Castor told Reuters. “That emotional impediment now is gone,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Fla., and Idrees Ali, Patricia Zengerle, Matt Spetalnick and John Walcott in Washington; Editing by Bill Rigby and Jonathan Oatis)

IMAGE: A fan waves a Cuban flag outside of the Ciudad Deportiva de la Habana sports complex where the Rolling Stones’ free outdoor concert will take place today, Havana, March 25, 2016. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

Lobbyists For Farmers Active Against Cuban Embargo

Lobbyists For Farmers Active Against Cuban Embargo

By Alan Bjerga and Bennett Roth, Bloomberg News (TNS)

In the first quarter of 2015, the number of organizations lobbying the federal government about the Cuban embargo doubled from the previous three months. Senate records show that after President Barack Obama announced the normalization of diplomatic relations with Havana, dozens of organizations — like Marriott International, Royal Caribbean Cruises and Major League Baseball — rushed to send representatives to talk to members of Congress about repealing sanctions enacted against Fidel Castro’s communist regime by President John F. Kennedy in 1962.

They were late to the party. Farmers have lobbied against the embargo since before 2000, when Congress passed legislation allowing humanitarian exports of agriculture and medicine. U.S. farming accounted for nearly half of all entities lobbying on Cuba from 2003-05. When hostility from the George W. Bush administration dried up exports, farmers continued their quest to end the embargo.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that Cuba could be worth $1.1 billion to American farmers. “We have a natural advantage with our proximity, and we have excellent products,” said Justin Flaten, president of JM Grain in Great Falls, Mont., who started selling to Cuba 10 years ago. “It’s a great market for us. We should be in it.”

Flaten first sold pinto beans and peas to Cuba after his first business visit, in 2005. It wasn’t easy. Financing had to be through a French bank, and shipping problems sometimes resulted in his his crops sitting for days in Port Everglades, Fla., waiting for payments. The frustrations soured his taste for Cuba trade, he said. He last sold lentils to Alimport, Cuba’s state-owned agricultural purchaser, in 2010.

In June, Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who sponsored what became the 2000 legislation that let farmers sell to Cuba, introduced a bill with Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, to lift the embargo. The legislation would preserve a ban on government funds being used to promote trade. “The embargo hasn’t worked because it’s unilateral,” Moran said. “Cuba can still buy from our competitors.”

Not all farmers favor a quick rollback of sanctions. Janell Hendren, national affairs coordinator for the Gainesville-based Florida Farm Bureau Federation, said normalized trade would mean imports as well as exports. Farming in Cuba is highly subsidized, creating potentially unfair trade, she said. “We could be at a huge competitive disadvantage” on citrus fruit and vegetable crops. “We’re not anxious to have these problems.”

Florida’s farm interests are up against major U.S. players. Deere, soybean processor Bunge North America, and several state farm bureaus are in favor of opening Cuba trade, according to lobbying records. Cargill, the world’s biggest agribusiness, is bankrolling the U.S. Agriculture Coalition for Cuba, a consortium of commodity growers, farm lenders, and exporters.

Farmers may provide the muscle Obama, or his successor, needs to push a final deal through. “When I saw him say it’s time for a new approach, I thought, that’s exactly what I thought when I went to Cuba,” Flaten said. “There are droves of young people there who just want an opportunity. If you want to end the communist regime, you help give it to them.”

(c)2015 Bloomberg News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

AFP Photo/Yuri Cortez

Cuba Diplomacy: Behind Right-Wing Outrage, An Intellectual Void

Cuba Diplomacy: Behind Right-Wing Outrage, An Intellectual Void

Listen carefully to the Republican leaders and presidential hopefuls roaring with outrage over President Obama’s courageous decision to normalize relations with Cuba; listen very carefully, because no matter how long or how closely you listen to them, there is one thing you will surely never hear.

You will never hear a new idea – or any plausible idea – about bringing liberty, democracy, and prosperity to the suffering Cuban people.

Instead, the furious denunciations of the president’s initiative from his adversaries reveal only an intellectual void on Capitol Hill, where the imperatives remain partisan and cynical. Everyone paying attention has known for decades that the frozen relationship between the United States and Cuba has accomplished nothing – except possibly the prolongation of the Castro regime, which has long considered the embargo a plausible excuse for its own economic failures – and viewed the United States as a politically convenient enemy.

Anyone who has visited the island knows that the Cubans wish nothing more than to see the embargo lifted, because they know it has done nothing to advance their liberty or prosperity – just the opposite.

As former president Bill Clinton likes to say, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. (He wanted to normalize relations as president, but the Cuban government clearly didn’t.) The U.S. government has been doing the same thing in Cuba for 54 years, yet the Republicans still don’t think that was long enough. They haven’t explained how or why – or when – their policy will achieve a different result.

Opponents of change have also failed to justify why treating Cuba so differently from other – and in various respects, worse – authoritarian regimes with which we maintain not only vigorous diplomatic relations but massive trading partnerships and even military cooperation. The conduct of those governments is arguably more repressive in important respects; there is, for instance, less religious freedom in China or Saudi Arabia than Pope Francis found in Cuba.

To browse human rights findings from the State Department’s annual reports or the online files maintained by groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International is to find at least a dozen countries with atrocious human rights records, from Chad to Turkmenistan. But the United States maintains diplomatic and trade relations with all of them.

Indeed, Republican leaders and businessmen – notably including members of the Bush family – have profited handsomely from investment in countries like China and Saudi Arabia for many years, with scarcely a peep about human rights violations in those places. It is impossible to forget how the first President Bush toasted the Chinese regime, immediately following the massacre in Tiananmen Square – and how his opportunistic family members showed up in Beijing and Shanghai, looking for a deal.

With the liberation of more than 50 political prisoners – along with USAID worker Allen Gross and an unnamed American spy – the Cubans have suddenly improved their human rights performance, while the Chinese continue to inflict horrendous repression and even torture on Tibetans, Uighurs, and Han Chinese who dare to dissent. (Many of our leading Republicans don’t object to torture, of course, unless it is perpetrated in foreign countries. Sometimes.)

House Speaker John Boehner accused the president of making “another mindless concession to a dictatorship.” What seems entirely mindless, however, is his insistence that we dare not abandon an unworkable and destructive strategy. No boycott observed and enforced by one country alone – even a powerful country like the United States – is ever going to prevail.

That is among the reasons why international human rights organizations, always the most consistent and implacable critics of Castro’s abuses, have long advocated engagement rather than embargo. As Human Rights Watch notes on web pages devoted to detailing those abuses, U.S. policy has imposed “indiscriminate hardship on the Cuban people” since 1961, “and has done nothing to improve the country’s human rights.”

Not long after the president concluded his historic speech – among the most lucid, logical, and inspiring he has delivered in his second term – a spokeswoman for Amnesty International called his new approach “the best opportunity in half [a] century for human rights change in Cuba.”

Designed to quarantine the Cuban government, the policy that failed for five decades has only succeeded in isolating the United States from the rest of the world. Its end is long overdue.