In from the cold: the implications of the US's thawing on Cuba

In from the cold: the implications of the US's thawing on Cuba

Michael Deibert | 12/06/2015 9:00 am

Foreign Direct Investment

The relaxing of travel and commercial restrictions between Cuba and the US announced in 2014 has already seen a glut of international companies visiting the island, enthused by the potential of the country. But is the 'new' Cuba all it appears to be? Michael Deibert investigates.


(Read the original article here)

On a recent flight to the Cuban capital of Havana via Grand Cayman, your correspondent observed a plane full of Americans who could not wait to travel to a land that had for years been forbidden to them. High school children, college students, music promoters, entrepreneurs and Cuban émigrés all hummed with excitement as the clouds parted to reveal the blue-green waters of the Caribbean and the island’s tapering coastline below.

Alighting from José Martí International Airport, visitors are greeted with a billboard featuring the face of Mr Martí (Cuba’s independence hero) paired with that of long-time Cuban leader Fidel Castro, while the face of deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez is paired with Latin American liberation icon Simón Bolívar.
And despite the revolutionary slogans that still adorn many walls and signposts in Cuba, and despite five decades of economic mismanagement and absent democracy, Havana remains one of the world’s most beautiful cities, even in its current dilapidated state.

All change

Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which began 56 years of Communist dictatorship that continues to this day, Cuba’s adversarial relationship with the US has been one of the touchstones of regional geopolitics. As guerillas from groups such as the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional from El Salvador travelled to Havana to train, the US poured money into right-wing governments – many with questionable human rights records – to stave off Communist expansion in the region.

However, with Fidel Castro having effectively ceded power to his more pragmatic – though no less authoritarian – brother Raúl in 2006 (Raúl became president in 2008 after having exercised 'acting' decision-making in the previous two years), the changes in Cuba have been rapid and startling.

Since 2008, ordinary Cubans have been allowed to possess mobile phones and DVD players, possessions that had previously been tightly controlled by the government. Beginning in 2010, the Cuban government started to allow foreign investors to lease government land for up to 99 years and granted individual Cubans more control over the island's agricultural and farming sectors, something that had previously been in the hands of the government. In 2012, a new law eliminated the exit permit that for 50 years Cubans had been required to possess in order to travel abroad. Cuba's October 2014 Law on Foreign Investment allows 100% ownership in certain sectors by foreign investors, a radical departure  from previous practice, as well as providing significant tax incentives and increased guarantees. Some 3000 restaurants and 8000 rental rooms are now in private hands.

Contributing heavily to the sense of rapid change, in December 2014, after nearly two years of negotiations, US president Barack Obama and Raúl Castro simultaneously declared that long-standing travel and commercial restrictions the US had placed on dealing with Cuba would be relaxed, and that soon the countries would resume full diplomatic relations with embassies in Washington and Havana (both countries had previously been represented by Interest Sections, which operated below the level of embassies).

In January, Cuba released 53 political prisoners, though the country's human rights groups say other political prisoners remain in jail. At the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April, Mr Obama met Mr Castro, the first time leaders of the two countries had met face to face in five decades.

Gaining a foothold

In response to these developments, in recent months companies such as Pernod Ricard, Carrefour, Total, Alstom and Orange (all from France), as well as Mazda, Mitsubishi Sumitomo and Toyota (all from Japan) have been visiting Cuba in an aggressive push to get a foothold in its potentially huge market.

“Clearly the potential to work soon with the US market is what it is motivating the flow of foreign companies visiting Cuba and trying to find opportunities there,” says Tom Herzfeld of Herzfeld Advisors, a company the specialises in Caribbean Basin investments. “[And] Raúl Castro knows that the support from Venezuela and Russia – mainly when oil prices are the lowest they have been in decades – [only offers] breathing space and he needs to take Cuba from practically zero economic growth to a level assuring stability and sustainability.”

Despite this rapid pace of change, however, and despite how ineffective US policy towards Cuba has proved in dislodging the Castro regime, there are members of the politically powerful Cuban exile community in South Florida, just a few kilometres across the straits from Havana, who remain unimpressed and unconvinced that the new policy of engagement with the US is sincere.

“The Castros need confrontation with the US,” says Armando Valladares, as he sits in his West Miami office. Mr Valladares spent 22 years in Cuban prisons for, among other offences, refusing to put an 'I’m with Fidel' sign on his desk at the Cuban ministry of communications in 1960. Upon his release in 1982, he became a US ambassador to the UN.

Mr Valladares says he believes there is “a double standard” in the world’s approach to Cuba, given that other dictatorships in Latin America’s history, such as that of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, were met with economic sanctions and official censure.

Finding a balance

What is beyond dispute is that Raúl Castro is walking a very fine line, attempting to open up Cuba just enough to give its people some level of comfort that has previously eluded them, while at the same time maintaining tight control of the political system (Cubans have not directly elected a president since 1948). Many observers believe that the Cuban government is looking towards China and, especially, Vietnam as potential models.

Everywhere in Havana today, from the relatively posh neighbourhood of Miaramar with its newly opened eateries and embassies, to the more gritty suburb of Regla, with its famous shrine dedicated to Nuestra Señora de Regla, a Catholic icon closely identified with the Santeria Orisha of Yemayá, there is a hunger for change and a hope for the future. Despite a steady diet of government-controlled news that highlights violence and upheaval elsewhere in Latin America in contrast to the calm island on which they live, Cubans, particularly the younger generation, through the use of flash drives and increasingly frequently interactions with foreigners, have more and more of a knowledge of the outside world. And they are increasingly demanding the right to be able to engage with it.

Hungry for economic change, it would not seem long before Cuba’s citizens begin to press for increased political freedoms, as well. How Cuba’s leaders chose to reconcile these two tensions will define the life of this extraordinary country for years to come.

Thoughts on the passing of Gabriel García Márquez (and Heberto Padilla)

Great writers are not necessarily great human beings. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a rabid anti-semite and Nazi collaborator. Ernest Hemingway after about the age of 40 curdled into a nasty bully. William S. Burroughs spent much of his life as basically a sex tourist with "boys" whose ages can only be speculated at. Gabriel García Márquez was a great writer, but he was also a dictator's tool who, when the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned for his political beliefs (his words alone), sided with Fidel Castro, Mr. Padilla's jailer. Heberto Padilla paid the price for his convictions with jail, a forced grotesque "public confession" straight out of Stalin-era Soviet Union, a lonely exile and finally dying largely unremembered in Alabama. I wonder how many of those floridly praising García Márquez now - not just the man's magnificent writing but also his public image as some sort of pan-Latin American secular prophet - ever imagined what it would have been like to be in Heberto Padilla's position, rotting in prison and having a fellow author, who one would have thought would have been a natural ally, instead supporting your imprisonment as the price to be paid for a tyrant to create his kingdom?

A melancholy anniversary

It was 59 years ago today that Guatemala's democratically-elected president Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup. Among those caught up in the upheaval in Guatemala at the time - and the mass repression against Árbenz's partisans and the left in general - was an Argentine physician named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Guevara subsequently fled to Mexico where he met a Cuban exile there named Fidel Castro...The complicating ironies of history...

Pro-Castro mob attacks spouse of top Cuban blogger

(I am not in the habit of repeating stories that appeared in other venues verbatim on this site, but I believe the ongoing attacks against Yoani Sanchez - whose blog Generación Y I link to on this site - and her husband Reinaldo Escobar by agents of Cuba's ossifying dictatorship warrant it in this case. MD )

Pro-Castro mob attacks spouse of top Cuban blogger

By Will Weissert, Associated Press Writer

Fri Nov 20 2009, 8:38 pm ET

HAVANA – The husband of an acclaimed dissident Cuban blogger was punched and shouted down by a pro-government mob Friday after he challenged the presumed state agents who earlier roughed up his wife to a street corner debate.

As he promised earlier on his blog, Reinaldo Escobar went to the intersection of Havana's 23rd and G avenues for the proposed discussion. On Thursday, Escobar's wife posted President Barack Obama's responses to her written questions on Cuba-U.S. relations on her "Generacion Y" blog.

Escobar was waiting with at least two companions when he got into an argument with another man. What appeared to a prearranged group of government supporters then moved in, screaming obscenities. They hit him and slapped him in the head and pulled his hair and shirt, but never knocked him down.

Soon, Escobar and the others were surrounded by men thought to be state security agents who protected them as they walked about two blocks. All around, Cubans pushed and screamed "Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!" and "Get out worm!" slang for Cuban-American exiles.

At one point, a band organized as part of a nearby street festival joined the mob, marching through flower beds on the median of a boulevard. The music added an odd soundtrack to a tense situation.

After about 10 minutes, Escobar and the others were placed in unmarked cars and driven away.

Ahead of Escobar's arrival Friday, Cuba's Young Communists Union organized a street book fair on the same corner, blocking off traffic.

It was unclear if the security agents who came Friday where the same ones who presumably assaulted his wife, Yoani Sanchez, two weeks earlier. After the incident, Escobar challenged the alleged assailants to a verbal duel.

Sanchez answered the phone at the couple's apartment moments after Friday's bedlam, but hung up without confirming where her husband was taken. Pro-government "acts of repudiation" against dissidents happen a few times a year. Usually, state security gives opposition activists a ride home after a few minutes to keep things from getting too violent.

"This street is Fidel's!" the mob shouted. They eventually chanted the name of the current president, Raul Castro, who replaced Fidel in February of 2008.

A government press agent came to the aid of an Associated Press Television cameraman after a member of the mob shoved him from behind and grabbed his camera. The culprit later apologized, then was led away by another group of men.

For about 10 minutes after Escobar was gone, the crowd continued to chant "Fidel! Fidel!" for international news cameras. Then it dispersed quietly.

On Nov. 6, Sanchez was walking to a nonviolence march when two men in plainclothes forced her into an unmarked sedan, pulled her hair and kicked her. The incident occurred at the same street corner where Escobar was hit and slapped Friday, and Sanchez says state security agents were involved.

The confrontation was so violent, Sanchez said she thought the men might kill her, but instead they dropped her off near her apartment.

She vowed on her blog to keep writing caustic, often witty criticism of the struggles of daily life on an island where there is no freedom of speech or assembly — and people endure shortages of even basic food.

On Thursday, she posted the U.S. president's answers to her written questions but, like nearly all sites critical of the Cuban government, access is blocked on the island.

In the posted responses, Obama said he isn't interested in "talking for the sake of talking" with Raul Castro and indicated he won't visit the island until the communist government changes its ways.

Escobar has his own blog, which is also blocked on the island.

Cuba tolerates no official opposition to its single-party communist system and dismisses nearly everyone who criticizes its government publicly as paid mercenaries of Washington.

Earlier this year, Time magazine named Sanchez — whose blog gets about 1 million hits a month — one of the world's 100 most influential people. Twice this year, she has been denied permission to leave Cuba to collect international journalism prizes.

(Photo: Reinaldo Escobar, the husband of dissident Cuban blogger Yoanis Sanchez, center, is taking away by unidentified men in Havana, Friday, Nov. 20, 2009. Escobar was punched, slapped and shouted down by government supporters in downtown Havana.)

The Cuba problem

Posted on Sun, Dec. 07, 2008

The Cuba problem

By Michael Deibert

The Miami Herald

The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution.

Daniel P. Erikson. Bloomsbury. 333 pages. $28.

NONFICTION | THE CUBA WARS

(Read the original article here)

As a chronicle of 50 years of failed foreign policy, Daniel P. Erikson's new book should be studied by officials of the incoming Obama administration lest they repeat the folly of past U.S. governments.

The story of how the authoritarian ruler of a Caribbean island of 11 million people bested 10 U.S. presidents and managed to survive all attempts to oust him serves as an object lesson of how wishful thinking is no substitute for a policy based on facts.

For too long, Erikson argues, a coherent strategy in dealing with Cuba has been subsumed in favor of an ill-conceived ''biological solution'' (awaiting the inevitable demise of Fidel Castro) and a well-organized though numerically small bloc of Cuban-American political operators and their supporters in the U.S. Congress.

''While the death of Fidel will remain an extraordinarily significant political moment when it finally occurs, its impact will necessarily be diluted by the simple fact that he is no longer Cuba's president,'' writes Erikson, referring to Castro's February 2008 resignation.

Despite ample warnings of Castro's failing health, such as a well-publicized fainting spell in 2001, the best response U.S. politicians could muster in recent years was to further curtail trade and the travel of American citizens going to Cuba -- the sort of move the Cuban government long practiced on its own people -- and providing shelter to the likes of Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro militant wanted in Venezuela for his alleged involvement in a 1976 airplane bombing that killed 73 people.

Erikson, who serves as senior associate for U.S. policy and director of Caribbean programs for the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C., argues that such a response was hardly robust enough against a surprisingly resilient adversary.

Erikson does a good job of outlining the Cuban government's ability to manipulate international upheaval to its benefit, such as timing a 2003 crackdown on internal dissent, which saw 75 Cubans sentenced to a total of 1,400 years in prison, so that most of the world's attention was occupied with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

If there is any point that Erikson's book truly brings home, though, it is that the intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. policy toward Cuba cuts across the political spectrum. The Communist regime's supporters in Congress reveal themselves to be every bit as close-minded as some of its most strident critics, and neither side is willing to commit to substantive discussions with the other. Anti-Castro Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the South Florida congressman,speaks knowingly of the situation in Cuba and advocates unyielding policies though he has not lived on the island for decades. But Castro's defenders, such as California congresswoman Maxine Waters, turn absurdly mawkish when they consider the demise of the country's one-party, totalitarian state.

''I like him and consider him a friend,'' Waters says of Castro, admitting that she is ''not psychologically prepared'' to consider the possibility of the Cuban leader shuffling off this mortal coil.

The Cuba Wars has its weaknesses. James Cason, the Bush administration's feisty chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 2002 until 2005, holds forth over many pages, but the insight we get about Cuba's ruling clutch of aging autocrats comes mostly from second-hand allegories and their public statements, which more often than not slide into mothballed revolutionary histrionics. There is also some regrettable sloppiness on detail: The patois dialect spoken in Jamaica is referred to as ''Creole,'' and a famous image by the photographer Robert Capa of a Loyalist fighter falling in combat during the Spanish Civil War is erroneously referred to as depicting ``a journalist.''

Still, The Cuba Wars provides a valuable glimpse inside the U.S. decision-making process with regards to one of its oldest and seemingly most intractable international disputes. When Erikson writes that his book was composed with the hope of making policymakers take ''a hard look at the reality as it is, not as we would like it to be,'' one can only hope that the incoming administration takes those as words to live by, not only for Cuba but also for foreign-policy pursuits far beyond its palm-fringed shores.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Distilling the ties between Bacardi and Cuba

Posted on Sun, Sep. 14, 2008

Distilling the ties between Bacardi and Cuba

By Michael Deibert

The Miami Herald

BACARDI AND THE LONG FIGHT FOR CUBA.
Tom Gjelten. Viking. 480 pages. $27.95.

(Read the original article here)

When a Catalan merchant named Facundo Bacardi purchased an underperforming rum distillery in Santiago de Cuba in 1862, he likely could little have imagined how vast his business venture would one day become, nor how intertwined its rise would be with the fate of a nation.

The story of Facundo and his descendants is the focus of the new book by National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten, who seeks in his narrative to view much of Cuba's history through the microcosm of a single sprawling, occasionally squabbling Cuban family. He is largely successful in painting an engaging portrait of a vibrant though often tragic national trajectory.

Gjelten writes that what made the family-held company unique was its ''intertwining of nationalist and capitalist identities.'' These dual strands never coalesce with greater passion than in Emilio Bacardi, Facundo's son and the dominant figure in the first half of the book. Twice imprisoned by the Spanish and subsequently Santiago de Cuba's first Cuban-born mayor and a national senator, Emilio represents perhaps the greatest flowering of these complementary identities. A fine portrait is likewise drawn of the corrupt playground Cuba became under presidents Ramón Grau San Martin and Fulgencio Batista.

Gjelten does not paint the island in stark primary colors of good and evil, instead portraying a Cuba of imperfect patriots, conflicted loyalties and sometimes disastrous rebellions. Fidel Castro's ill-advised nationalization of businesses finally succeeds in driving the Bacardis out in a melancholy coda to a business identity that always seemed inextricably linked with the soil on which it was founded.

The book has some shortcomings, as Gjelten appears to have gotten a little too close to his subject and thereby lost some of the objectivity that is so important in such a definitive undertaking. The Bacardi family is almost always portrayed as selfless, while the company's workers are often portrayed as difficult and opportunistic, though Gjelten does make a point of expounding upon the stark inequalities between Cuba's rural poor and urban elite.

The family squabbles that mark the narrative once the Bacardis move to the United States prove nowhere near as engaging as the chronicle of revolution, politics and commerce that precedes it, though the company's ability to get a pro-Bacardi amendment inserted into the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 1999 vividly illustrates how powerful corporations can bend legislation to suit their interests.

One is left with the sense that Cuba was a nation of missed opportunities. The original Bacardi credo of responsible civic engagement, one that the powerful in both Cuba and the United States could do well to remember, is perhaps best summed by lines that Emilio Bacardi penned following the start of the U.S. occupation of Cuba at the close of the 19th century: ``The obligation of those in authority is to be at the service of those who suffer. It is not for those who suffer to be at the disposition of those who command.''

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Fidel's view

My review of Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, as told by Fidel Castro to Ignacio Ramonet, is the lead book review in today's Miami Herald. As Herald links tend to become defunct after a few week's time, following tradition, I am reposting the review in its entirety here. To read the original review, please click on the link below.
MD

AUTOBIOGRAPHY | FIDEL CASTRO: MY LIFE

Fidel's view

The lack of hard-nosed questioning by the interviewer disappoints, but the drama of the dictator's life remains.

Posted on Sun, Jan. 27, 2008

BY MICHAEL DEIBERT

The Miami Herald

(Read the original review here)

FIDEL CASTRO: MY LIFE: A Spoken Autobiography.

Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet. Andrew Hurley, translator. Scribner. 724 pages. $40.

Deeply flawed but still fascinating, Cuban leader Fidel Castro's sprawling attempt at autobiography -- as told to Ignacio Ramonet, the editor of the left-wing French monthly Le Monde diplomatique -- represents perhaps the most sustained document yet extant of Castro's vision of himself and the nation he has ruled for almost 50 years.

The product of more than 100 hours of interviews conducted in Havana between 2003 and 2005, the book opens with an introduction by Ramonet that lets the reader know that any semblance of a vigorous interrogation in the book's 700-plus page Q&A format will not be in the offing.

Cuba is ''part of the vast offensive against neoliberalism and globalization'' in which ''the vindication of the figure of Fidel Castro (has) never been so strong,'' Ramonet writes before announcing that, at any rate, he never intended to be too confrontational in the questions put to his subject.

Fortunately, with a life rich in drama and with a subject as skilled in the nuances of sustained public speaking as Castro, there is still plenty here of interest.

Castro's accounts of his incipient rebel movement's disastrous attack on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953 (an attempt to oust the dictator Fulgencio Batista that resulted in the deaths of around 70 of the 160 men fighting and in Castro's imprisonment) and his later account of the guerrilla war against Batista's troops in the mountains of eastern Cuba make for riveting reading. Likewise, Castro's long ruminations on the person and legacy of the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara (whom Castro describes as having had ``a presence so strong, so powerful, so intense that you can't manage to conceive that [he is] dead''), and his dealings with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis, add a welcome new personal dimension to already well-documented historical events.

In Castro's view of the world, whether admitting to supplying weapons to Algerian independence leader Ahmed Ben Bella's FLN in 1961 or to El Salvador's FMLN rebels in the 1970s, or in his fits of pique against the Soviet Union (''They negotiated everything without consulting us,'' he says bitterly and probably accurately), he speaks of a vision of Cuba as a global player in some of the great political struggles of the second half of the 20th century. Clearly, Castro seems to be saying, Cuba had an historical role to play in global liberation movements from Africa to Latin America, and the country under his leadership didn't shrink from its responsibility.

In the face of his garrulous subject, though, Ramonet appears to have a hard-time prioritizing different aspects of the book's narrative. Guevara's death during a guerrilla campaign in Bolivia warrants an entire chapter, but then again, Ramonet appears to think, so does former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's largely inconsequential 2002 visit to the island.

Diffuseness is not the book's Achilles heel, however, which instead comes from the over-awed nature of the questioner himself. Castro has a rather prickly attitude toward criticism, so it's likely that, with a less star-struck interviewer, this book might not exist at all. But it is hard not to be bothered by Ramonet's credulity, which often veers dangerously close to hagiography.

Castro's claims regarding Cuba's human rights record go unchallenged by undue mention of his government's systematic imprisonment of such writers as Reinaldo Arenas and Raúl Rivero, or human rights activists such as Oscar Elías Biscet (currently serving a 25-year sentence in a Cuban jail). Castro's explanation of the 1989 show trial and execution on drug trafficking and treason charges of Arnaldo Ochoa, a general whose independence and popularity were said to be viewed as a threat by the Cuban leader, rings brutally hollow, and Ramonet blithely allows the opportunity for a more rigorous examination of one of the most shadowy elements of recent Cuban history to slip away.

Similarly, some of Castro's more outlandish statements, such as that Batista's government (however wretched and violent) was guilty of ''genocide'' and that the United States supplied nuclear weapons to the apartheid regime in South Africa -- a charge for which no evidence at all exists -- are unquestioningly accepted. While lauding the country's progress in health care and education, Ramonet appears supremely unbothered that Castro leads a tightly controlled single-party state where public criticism of the government and its leader are strictly prohibido.

One concludes that, with more ambition and more objectivity, and by supplementing his unparalleled access to Cuba's leader with interviews from other sources pivotal in his history, personal and political, Ramonet could have well come up with a touchstone work of biography. Unfortunately, though, with its uncritical tone and unquestioning, doctrinaire approach, Fidel Castro, while interesting for the window it gives us into the thoughts and analysis of one of the 20th century's most important and iconic political figures, leaves the opportunity for the definitive portrait of this complex world figure yet to be written.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.