Our man in Havana

An American citizen working on a USAID contract was arrested in Cuba December 5, according to press reports citing U.S. officials and a statement from the USAID contractor (see post below). Here are reports from the New York Times, Miami Herald, Washington Post, and Fox News.

So far, no comment from the Cuban government.

According to the Times, he had entered Cuba on a tourist visa and was distributing “cell phones, laptops, and other communications equipment.”

The Post cited a source who says he was “working with local organizations that were trying to connect with each other and get connected to the Internet and connect with their affinity groups in the U.S.” The same source said it’s “a bit of a mystery” why this person was arrested.

Mystery?

I would say this poor fellow walked into an accident waiting to happen.

There are three issues here.

First is the objective of the program: “Hastening Transition to Democracy in Cuba,” as described in this 2008 USAID document. Opinions of that objective divide roughly along these lines: great idea, bad idea, none of our business. Plus this variant: impossible for us to achieve regardless of the merits. As ever, the comments section is open if you want to have at it.

Second is the issue of the Cuban government’s perception of the program and its stated objective. Havana tends to see it as part of an off-and-on, 50-year U.S. effort to effect regime change, and their security/intelligence apparatus is on the case. Given Cuban officials’ long memories and their greater-than-average sensitivity about anything involving sovereignty, they tend to lump the current program in with the embargo, the Bay of Pigs, and a long list of covert and overt efforts to overthrow their socialist government. The fact that President Bush has gone and President Obama is now in charge doesn’t matter one whit. You may think these perceptions are wrong, or exaggerated, or illegitimate because you think the government itself is illegitimate, but I don’t think there’s any dispute that this is how Havana sees the program.

Which leads to the third set of issues, which are operational. It’s one thing to run civil society programs in countries where the local government is unopposed, it’s quite another to do so in a communist country that perceives the program as a national security threat. The USAID program’s connections to Cuban dissidents – real or invented – were the basis for the Cuban government’s jailing of 75 dissidents in 2003. USAID explained in December 2003:

In March 1999, the Cuban Government passed legislation which would impose 8 to 20 year prison sentences on any Cuban citizen found to be collaborating with activities funded through Section 109 of the LIBERTAD Act [the Helms-Burton law, whose Section 109 is the basis for the USAID program]. In March 2003, the Cuban Government arrested and sentenced to long prison terms Cuban citizens the Cuban Government accused of collaboration with Section 109 activities. Individual Cuban citizens and Cuban NGOs as well as U.S. individuals and organizations participating in the program…must be fully apprised of the implications of the March 2003 Cuban Government crackdown. The Cuban Government utilizes the harshest measures to repress the flow of accurate information on democracy, human rights and free enterprise to, from, and within Cuba.

In other words, it’s a risky program to carry out, both for USAID grantees and the recipients of the aid. That’s why USAID has been very stingy with information about the program, and it’s why the program has looked like an odd hybrid of overt and covert activity.

Which brings us to the poor fellow in a Cuban jail today. I’ll call him Mr. Smith.

In 2006, the State Department offered to make Cuba grants from its Human Rights and Democracy Fund for this purpose:

Break the information blockade by employing high tech communication devices to facilitate communications between activists on the island, foster a nascent civil society, and improve the dissemination of information to and from the island, especially by increasing the communication of democracy and human rights messages. Low-tech projects that serve the same purposes in a creative manner will also be considered.

Sounds like Smith was working on a program under that grant, or something like it. For more on the program, see USAID requests for proposals from 2003 and 2008 and a job announcement from January 2009.

The Washington Post article points out that “a Cuban citizen or a foreign visitor can be arrested for nearly anything under the claim of ‘dangerousness.’” That’s very true; the offense of peligrosidad predelictiva in the Cuban criminal code enables the police to arrest people based on no more than an officer’s judgment that they are up to no good. (Roughly translated: dangerousness with a propensity to commit crime.)

But my guess is that such a charge would not figure into Smith’s case. Experts on Cuban law can weigh in, but my guess is that if he indeed entered on a tourist visa he could have a legal problem there, and if authorities choose to apply laws like the one USAID cited above – sort of like failure to register as a foreign agent in our criminal code – he’s got another problem. In other words, a Cuban prosecutor would probably say Mr. Smith is already way beyond predelictiva.

Maybe he entered Cuba as a tourist with baggage full of communications equipment. Maybe he picked up the equipment at the U.S. Interests Section. (The State Department reported in 2007 that in some months, 75 percent of diplomatic pouch shipments are USAID materials.)

Either way, this story was not destined to end well, as Val Prieto surmises at Babalu. One has to wonder how this mission was supposed to work, and what kind of warnings and instructions Smith got from his employer as he set off on his mission.

Where does it go from here? Cuba will continue to be condemned for being a rare country that arrests people for handing out cell phones and laptops. U.S. diplomats will try to visit Smith in jail, and will probably argue that his activities were benign, even beneficial to Cuba, and don’t merit arrest. Cuban officials will probably respond that they don’t arrest Cuban Americans and others who bring cell phones and laptops to Cubans every day. Further, they will decide what’s beneficial to Cuba, thank you very much, and Smith’s offense is that he was conducting political activity for a foreign government, which is against Cuban law. In all that, American diplomats will hear an echo of their own explanation about why the famous Cuban Five are in U.S. jails.

A friend tells me (unconfirmed) that USAID grantees have curtailed trips to Cuba. The Obama Administration may well review the USAID program and how it is supposed to work.

As for Mr. Smith, it seems that his release will depend on an extraordinary exercise of prosecutorial discretion, or a diplomatic gesture or arrangement, or all three.