Tag: fidel castro
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

With Trump Next Door, Cubans Worry About Life After Castro

With Trump Next Door, Cubans Worry About Life After Castro

By Simon Gardner and Ana Isabel Martinez

HAVANA (Reuters) – From the Bay of Pigs invasion to a historic visit by President Barack Obama to Havana, Cubans have known for generations that whenever the United States turns its face to Cuba, Fidel Castro would be staring right back.

But the death of “El Comandante” has added to worries among Cubans that U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump will slam the door shut on nascent trade and travel ties, undoing two years of detente between the estranged neighbors.

Trump has struck a very different tone from Obama, who reached an agreement two years ago with Castro’s younger brother President Raul Castro to end half a century of hostilities.

Late in his election campaign, Trump sought to reassure the Cuban-American vote in Florida that he was firm in his opposition to the Castros, and pledged that, if elected, he would close down the newly re-opened U.S. embassy in Havana.

Earlier on, in the primaries, he said he thought restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba was fine, but that Obama ought to have cut a better deal.

Having won the presidency, it is hard to know what Trump’s approach to Cuba will be.

After the 90-year-old Castro’s death, Obama called him a “singular figure,” while Trump described the bearded communist revolutionary as a “brutal dictator.”

Castro began his career as a revolutionary by toppling a U.S.-backed government, repelled a CIA-backed counter-revolutionary invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and faced off against President John F. Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis a year later.

During 49 years in office, he crossed swords with ten U.S. presidents. And while he took a lower profile after officially retiring in 2008, Castro never stopped warning Cubans that the American government was not to be trusted.

His younger brother never gave much ground to the Obama administration in terms of liberalizing Cuba’s one party political system.

But many Cubans reckon they could do with their late leader’s charisma and way with words to counter Trump’s bombast.

“With ‘El Comandante’ gone, I am a little fearful of what could happen because of Trump’s way of thinking and acting,” said Yaneisi Lara, a 36-year-old Havana street vendor and flower seller.

“He could set back and block everything that’s been going on, all the things Obama has done, and he did a lot, managing to get the U.S. closer to Cuba,” she said, admitting she would consider moving to the United States herself.

Obama did not succeed in convincing Congress to lift the United States’ tough economic embargo on Cuba, but he personally opposed the sanctions and used executive action to allow more contact and commerce.

The first U.S. commercial flight to Havana in about half a century is due to arrive on Monday.

Trump could easily review such measures. He has not been clear on his position, but has included Mauricio Claver-Carone, a leading advocate for maintaining a tough economic embargo, in his transition team.

Without giving any specifics, 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 Castro.

“Trump is the polar opposite of Obama,” said burly Havana taxi driver Pablo Fernandez Martinez, 39, as he hustled for work.

Life in Cuba remains hard for its educated but underemployed people, but engagement with the United States has brought in more dollars. Martinez fears that could dry up once Trump moves into the White House.

“There will probably be less tourist traffic. That will affect everyone in Cuba, and hit the economy,” said the father-of-one, who earns $100-$120 a week driving for foreigners.

Pedro Machado, 68, is a retired engineer in marine research who now rents out rooms in his airy apartment near Havana’s “Malecon” seafront. Watching television with his wife, Machado is worried that Trump’s angry rhetoric could spell trouble.

“Trump’s policies are very aggressive. We’ll have to see what he actually does. But it certainly looks like bad news for Latin America and for Cuba in particular,” he said.

“My generation benefited from Fidel’s revolution, in terms of education, the poor were helped. Not everything was a bed of roses, but Fidel helped us,” he added “The United States has acted as an empire, and that’s what Trump represents. Given what he has said, the future is not looking great.”

(Additional reporting by Marc Frank; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

IMAGE: A painting of Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro is seen at a factory in Havana, Cuba November 26, 2016. REUTERS/Enrique De La Osa.

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

Castro’s Death Could Change Cuba Reform Dynamic

Castro’s Death Could Change Cuba Reform Dynamic

By Marc Frank and Sarah Marsh

HAVANA (Reuters) – Fidel Castro’s death could give his younger brother, President Raul Castro, more space to pursue economic reforms, but change will also depend on whether U.S. President-elect Donald Trump decides to work with or challenge Cuba’s communist government.

Raul Castro has introduced market-oriented reforms in recent years, but the pace of change has been slowed, many Cubans say, by Fidel Castro’s continued influence over an old guard that mistrusts both markets and warming ties with Washington.

Two years ago, the more pragmatic, younger Castro engineered a detente with the old enemy that has seen commercial flights, dollar remittances and American tourists all flow into the cash-strapped Caribbean island.

Those advances could easily be reversed if Trump sticks to the harder line he took at the end of his election campaign, when he vowed to close the U.S. embassy, opened last year after half a century, and to renegotiate President Barack Obama’s agreement to normalize relations with Cuba.

But Castro’s death could also be an opportunity for Trump to keep up an engagement with Cuba that is popular with voters and U.S. businesses.

With Fidel Castro now dead at 90 and the 85-year-old Raul Castro promising to retire in early 2018, working with Cuba becomes easier on a symbolic level.

Trump had not mentioned Cuba since his election and in his first responses to the overnight news from Cuba, he gave little sense of which way he will go.

“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 a statement.

Richard Feinberg, a former national security adviser to U.S. President Bill Clinton, said it is now less likely that Trump will reverse Obama’s opening to the island.

“The passing of Fidel Castro removes the object of hatred, fear and revenge of many Cuban-Americans, bringing to an end what has been one of history’s longest grudge matches, opening the gates for the reconciliation of the deeply divided Cuban family,” he said.

“It is in the U.S. national interest to compete with China and Russia for influence in Cuba and the broader Caribbean, and to see Cuba as a natural ally in counter terrorism,” said Feinberg, author of a book on the Cuban economy.

In the short term, Cuba may see from its government an orchestrated outpouring of support for Castro’s undiluted idea of communism.

The first sign of that was a government campaign launched on Saturday to have millions of Cubans sign a pledge to be faithful to Castro’s revolution, “as an expression of the will to perpetuate his ideas and our socialism”.

Even years after stepping down from the presidency, Castro remained a buttress for the old guard among Cuba’s political hierarchy and bureaucracy who are not convinced by Raul Castro’s measures leading Cuba slowly toward a socialist economy with a strong role for private businesses.

Over time that influence will fade, potentially making it easier for reformers in Raul Castro’s government and in the future.

“It removes a court of final appeal for the conservatives while giving hope to the usually younger reformers in the party for more rapid future economic change,” said David Jessop, a UK-based business consultant on Caribbean affairs.

TRANSITION

The inner workings of the Cuban power structure have always been tough to read, and not everyone believes Fidel Castro was behind a recent backtracking on market reforms, such as allowing farmers to sell products at market prices or permitting private imports and exports.

Mid-level bureaucrats fearful of losing power in the system are often seen as a major reason economic reforms have not been rolled out at the pace announced by Raul Castro in a 2011 policy paper.

“He was fully retired, so his passing is not likely to alter the course of Raul’s economic modernization program,” said William LeoGrande, co-author of a book on U.S.-Cuba relations.

“Of course, there are bureaucrats still in office who share Fidel’s ideological hostility to markets. They have been and will continue to be an obstacle to change.”

Trump may decide that Castro’s demise is an opportunity to pressure the communist government into making concessions, such as freeing political dissidents or preferential access for U.S. products and services.

“President-elect Trump may simplistically see a chance to restart an adversarial relationship … to prove he is the strong man he said he is,” said Paul Hare, a former British ambassador to Cuba.

Cuba has relied heavily on Venezuela for economic help, but a deep economic and political crisis at home means Venezuela cannot provide the same volumes of subsidized oil that Cuba is accustomed to.

Closer relations with the United States have helped, and backsliding on the thaw could further weaken Cuba’s economy, already battered by low commodity prices.

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

“Fidel’s death is yet another reason to continue the policies of the last two years. Change is here to stay in Cuba and the U.S. can either be a part of it or sit on the sidelines in the next four years,” said Jason Marczak at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

(Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Kieran Murray and Jonathan Oatis)

IMAGE: President Fidel Castro addresses the audience as president of the Non-Aligned Movement at the United Nations in New York, October 12, 1979.  REUTERS/Prensa Latina