Secretary Clinton on Cuba

Secretary Clinton answered a question about Cuba last Friday, where she asserted her “personal belief that the Castros do not want to see an end to the embargo and do not want to see normalization with the United States, because they would then lose all of their excuses for what hasn’t happened in Cuba in the last 50 years.”

This drew a Cuban response in the form of a commentary aired by Radio Reloj, the retro all-news AM station with the constant tick-tock sound in the background. The response said that Secretary Clinton “mixed ignorance and falsehoods,” which we can set aside, and issued an interesting challenge:

“Since the Revolution, according to Hillary Clinton, depends on the excuses that the embargo provides, suspend it for 12 months and then we’ll see what happens.”

Wouldn’t that be interesting.

Secretary Clinton also theorized, as President Clinton used to do, that every time there’s a possible U.S. opening toward Cuba, “you can almost chart how the Castro regime does something to try to stymie it.” At a certain point, that becomes a formula for doing nothing, for putting control of U.S. policy in Havana’s hands, and for avoiding hard questions. Such as: Given the nature of Cuba’s government and its repressive record, what kind of relationship serves U.S. interests – between our governments, and between our societies?

There were two other nuggets.

On Haiti, the United States “actually helped some of the Cuban doctors get medical supplies who were already operating there” after the earthquake.

And she described detainee Alan Gross as “an American who was passing out information and helping elderly Cubans communicate through the Internet.”