Odds and ends

·         As the 15^th round of Colombia peace talks proceed in Havana, Juventud Rebelde gives ample coverage to the Colombian government’s complaint that the guerrillas are dragging their feet and trying to add extraneous items to the agreed agenda.  Cuba acts as “guarantor” in the talks.

·         Herald: Panamanian officials say that some of the aircraft engines on the North Korean freighter seized in Panama were “brand new.”  They also say that “friends overseas” tell them that Cuba and North Korea have an arms trade agreement of uncertain scope; that the North Korean crewmen in detention are happy campers (air conditioning, clothes, food, cigarettes, time for soccer every day); and that while the crew have spoken to investigators they have declined to sign statements.

·         An “updating” of Cuba’s criminal justice procedures took effect October 1 and was explained by officials on a Mesa Redonda program.  Relatively minor offenses that had been handled in provincial courts will now be heard in municipal courts.  For certain minor offenses prosecutors will have discretion to impose administrative penalties (fines) rather than go to court to seek a prison sentence, although a defendant can insist on a court trial if he wishes.  The impact seems to be a streamlining and a shift of caseload to lower courts and, depending on how prosecutors use their discretion, lesser penalties for minor criminal offenses.

·         Canadian professor Steven Kimber makes the case for the Cuban Five in the Washington Post.

·         AP on the clash between el exilio and more recent Cuban immigrants.

·         Who’s investing in Cuba?  A smart B-School student figures it out at the bar at the Hotel Nacional.

·         Granma on the art of base stealing through the years.

·         EFE: The family of Oswaldo Paya, now living in Florida, acquires Spanish citizenship.

·         AP: A ceremony in the Colon cemetery in Havana to commemorate the terrorist downing of the Cubana airliner in Barbados in 1976.

·         In the National Interest, a look at the past and the future of Cuba’s intelligence services, “punching above their weight.”  The authors link to this interesting U.S. assessment (pdf): “Cuban Subversive Activities in Latin America, 1959-1968.”

·         In an advice column for Congress, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson owns up to his bumbling in Havana in 2011.

From someone who should know

“In Havana, paradoxically, the FARC are making proposals that are out of proportion both to their strength and to a reality wherein the violence they practice no longer generates power, but rather eliminates it.  They have made more than 200 ‘minimal’ proposals – they want a constituent assembly, changes in the economic model, and deep reforms of the state.  They are negotiating as if they had the support of multitudes and 50,000 combatants at the gates of Bogota, when in reality their only option is to disarm rapidly and to engage in politics.

“In Colombia there is no military stalemate nor is the negotiation between equals.  The FARC leadership is elderly, they are considered terrorists by the international community while Venezuela, Ecuador, and Cuba no longer support armed struggle and instead support peace.  They have gone from having 25,000 men to having 8,000; their military activity is sporadic, irrelevant, and distant from vital centers; they have lost their territorial strongholds; they suffer numerous desertions that they replace by recruiting boys; they have more combatants disarmed than active; their strategic commanders have been eliminated and those that remain inside Colombia are besieged and in danger of dying in combat.

“Time is against the FARC but they negotiate slowly and complain that the government is in a hurry.  However, the correlation of forces favoring the state will continue to improve and the FARC’s situation will continue to worsen.  Prolonging the negotiations under these conditions will onle serve to demoralize the troops.  It is no coincidence that the talks have increased the desertions.  In war no one wants to be the last to die.  For the FARC combatants, the more than 30 leaders who make up the peace delegation are exiles living comfortably and risk-free in Havana, while they could be the last to die in a war that is already condemned to end.”

– Joaquin Villalobos, former Salvadoran FMLN guerrilla commander, in El Pais.  The FMLN fought a decade-long guerrilla war and converted to a political party when a peace agreement was reached in 1992.

Odds and ends

• Granma: Representing Cuba at the Mexican presidential inauguration: “el compañero Miguel Diaz-Canel.

• Trabajadores: A report on a Council of Ministers meeting says that Cuba’s economy is on track to grow 3.1 percent in 2012, lower than expected due to under-performance in the agriculture and construction sectors.  Plans for next year include further development of wholesale supply markets and expansion of self-employment (trabajo por cuenta propia) to add some new lines of work to the list.  Also, a “proposal for conceptualizing the economic model” is being drafted to describe the Cuban economic model once all the reforms approved in 2010 are implemented.

• Café Fuerte: There are now 1.5 million cellular lines in operation in Cuba.

• AP: Cuban authorities are ending a 2000 policy that added a 10 percent surcharge to U.S.-Cuba phone calls, which if memory serves amounted to 24.5 cents per minute.  The surcharge was imposed when frozen Cuban government accounts in the United States were being drained to pay damages awarded to various plaintiffs in court judgments against Cuba.

• At Along the Malecon, Tracey Eaton continues to commit acts of journalism with regard to the USAID Cuba democracy programs; here he reports on $11 million spent on operations in Costa Rica.

• Dallas Morning News: The father of newly elected Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was jailed and tortured by the government of Cuba – that of Batista, against which he fought in the Cuban revolution; he arrived in the United States in 1957.

• Juventud Rebelde answers readers’ questions about the new immigration law, and will answer more next Sunday.

• CNN: The first round of peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels, 11 days long, concluded in Havana and a second round will start this week.  More from BBC.

State sponsor of peace talks (II)

The peace talks between Colombia’s government and the FARC guerrillas will start in Oslo this week after 31 FARC members, with capture orders against them lifted by the government, flew from Colombia to Havana last weekend, then on to Norway (La Republica).  The FARC was founded 48 years ago and Colombia’s is the longest-running guerrilla war in the Americas.

A press conference is scheduled Wednesday.  The Oslo meetings are to finalize the agenda and ground rules, and negotiations will begin formally next month in Havana (El Colombiano).  There have been contacts between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrillas geared toward getting that group to join peace negotiations too.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has declared that he will not enter a cease fire, will not grant a territorial safe haven to the guerrillas, expects the talks to take “months, not years,” and will end the talks if they appear to be going nowhere.  Last month, Santos thanked the Cuban and Norwegian governments for their support in this process, saying: “Without their presence it would not have been possible to come to this point.”  Cuba and Norway will serve as “hosts and guarantors” in the talks, he said, while Venezuela and Chile will be “companions.”

The FARC has adopted a defiant public tone (see this BBC interview with a timeline of the conflict), although FARC negotiator Marco León Calarcá spoke more seriously in a two-part interview with La Jornada (here and here).  Calarcá said the FARC position is “realistic,” seeking “possibilities to live and in that context to engage in politics, to be in opposition without this implying necessarily being a military target.” 

In other words, the key for the FARC is to be able to stop fighting and to engage safely in opposition politics.  That implies negotiating a ceasefire, integration of FARC fighters into civilian life, and whatever political and security guarantees are needed to give both parties confidence that the negotiated arrangements will work. 

Success or failure will belong to the Colombians, but Cuba has a key role and has taken on a serious and interesting challenge.  The fact that Havana enjoys the confidence of a very old, faltering Marxist insurgency and a center-right, free-market democracy that is close to Washington is a big vote of confidence in Cuban diplomacy and a sign of its prominence in the hemisphere, even in the post-Fidel era.  One can imagine that Cuba’s key contribution could come when the FARC reaches crunch time and has to decide whether to take the leap into civilian life and politics – which it will surely call a transition to another form of struggle. 

U.S. interests are in play – humanitarian, security, anti-drugs, and anti-terrorism interests in a country where our taxpayers have spent $3.5 billion in aid since 2008.

The U.S. government designates the FARC as a “foreign terrorist organization” whose “tactics include bombings, murder, mortar attacks, kidnapping, extortion, and hijacking, as well as guerrilla and conventional military action against Colombian political, military, and economic targets,” with ties to drug traffickers, and whose operations occur both in Colombia and in “neighboring countries.”

An end to the conflict and the dismantlement of the FARC military capacity would result in the removal of that terrorist designation from the FARC or its successor political organization.  Such an achievement would add one more absurdity to Washington’s continued designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.”

More: Financial Times puts these issues in a regional context, the Cuban government’s only public statement on the talks last September, and the White House’s September statement welcoming news of the talks.

Santos: Colombia peace talks begin next month

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced (text here) that talks between his government and the FARC guerrillas will begin in October in Oslo and then move to Havana.  The “framework agreement” is the result of six months of talks in Havana, which built upon “channels that the previous government had established,” he said (AP, El Tiempo).

Santos said the talks will proceed without a ceasefire or concessions of territory, as occurred in an earlier attempt at negotiation.  They will cover rural development and access to land; guarantees for the exercise of political opposition and citizen participation; end of the armed conflict; drug trafficking; and the rights of victims.

Santos thanked the Cuban and Norwegian governments for their support, saying: “Without their presence it would not have been possible to come to this point.”  Cuba and Norway will serve as “hosts and guarantors” in the talks, he said, while Venezuela and Chile will be “companions.”

Odds and ends

·         El Tiempo: Colombian President Santos will speak about the talks with FARC rebels aimed at ending that country’s five-decade-old conflicto.  One hour later, the FARC will hold a press conference in Havana, AP reports.

·         FT: In London, an ambitious plan to restore and expand the ballet school at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in western Havana.

·         Washington Post: In North Korea, they are allowing farmers to sell their surplus on the open market.  Imagine that.

·         AP: New customs duties are now in effect and some travelers are getting clobbered.  An earlier AP look ahead on the possible impact on entrepreneurs here.

State sponsor of peace talks

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said last night that “exploratory conversations” have been held with FARC guerrillas about peace negotiations, and he held the door open to participation by ELN guerrillas too.  The negotiations would aim to end the hemisphere’s longest-running guerrilla war.  See stories from Reuters and El Tiempo (Bogota).

The news broke yesterday when the Venezuelan network Telesur reported that an agreement had been signed in Havana to get peace talks started, following discussions in Havana between the Colombian government and the FARC with participation by Cuban, Venezuelan, and Norwegian diplomats. 

Santos said he would soon provide more detailed information.  He said that peace talks would be guided by three principles: learning from past errors, gearing talks to end the conflict and not to prolong it, and maintaining military presence and operations in “every centimeter” of Colombian territory.

Havana has long hosted contacts between the Colombian government and guerrillas, and Cuban diplomacy now appears set to assist in actual negotiations.

The presence of Colombian guerrillas in Havana has long been cited in the U.S. reports that name Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.”  The report issued last July says this: “Press reporting indicated that the Cuban government provided medical care and political assistance to the FARC.  There was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training for either ETA or the FARC.”

The Reuters report cited above cites Colombian officials saying that President Obama is informed about these possible negotiations and supports them.