More on the President's December 17 actions

From the White House: the President’s December 17 statement, a fact sheet, and a background briefing by officials that explains the measures and the secret talks between White House and Cuban officials.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on property claims, an issue whose resolution will one day be part of full economic normalization.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate’s President pro tempore, met twice with Raul Castro in Cuba and pushed the Administration both to resolve the prisoner issues and to fix our policy. His veteran Appropriations Committee advisor, Tim Rieser, held everyone’s feet to the fire and stayed close to Alan Gross, especially after Gross decided to stop receiving visits from U.S. diplomats. Their efforts are profiled in the New York Times and Politico. In November 2013, after the secret U.S.-Cuba talks had begun, Senator Leahy was joined by 65 other Senators in this letter to the President, urging him to take “whatever steps are in the national interest” to achieve Mr. Gross’ release.

Pope Francis pushed both sides to negotiate; Huffington Post reports on this Argentine’s history with Cuba.

President Reagan’s speechwriter Peggy Noonan supports the President’s Cuba actions.

In an incoherent editorial, the Wall Street Journal reiterates its 20-year-old position that the U.S. embargo should be lifted unilaterally but attacks President Obama for doing far less. It welcomes the release of Alan Gross and the U.S. spy, but says that the United States should never “dignify Castro’s regime by sitting down at a negotiating table,” as if such a result could have been obtained in any other way. The paper’s editors themselves received Fidel Castro for a nice, dignified lunch at their own conference table in 1995. I guess that was different, or the late editor Bob Bartley was a commie. The lunch is shown briefly in this video.

Don’t tell Senator Rubio – 81 percent of Americans agree with his view of Fidel Castro, but 63 percent support full diplomatic relations with Cuba and 55 percent want the embargo ended in a new CNN poll.

Recognition

Well, the President certainly knows how to turn the page, and good for him.

In his action last week he abandoned two tenets at the heart of American policy for the past five decades: that it somehow served U.S. interests to withhold full diplomatic relations from Cuba and to pressure that nation through economic sanctions.

In the first instance, his actions match his words: our governments have agreed to negotiate the relatively minor steps needed to establish embassies and to exchange ambassadors.

In the second, there’s a gap. President Obama made clear his view that our policy is wrong at its core: “It does not serve our interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse…we should not allow U.S. sanctions to add to the burden of Cuban citizens that we seek to help.”

Yet when it comes our economic sanctions – which are not the main cause of Cubans’ economic difficulties, but which certainly add to them – he left the core of our policy intact, easing sanctions in limited ways by using only a fraction of his executive authority. It would seem that more action is possible in the next two years.

These actions came at the end of an 18-month negotiation that produced, as the governments presented it, an exchange of three jailed Cuban agents for a Cuban who had spied for the United States, and Cuba’s unilateral release of Alan Gross.

Many Americans have run for their scorecards to figure who won, producing what seems to me to be a sterile discussion that involves not so much two sides of a debate but rather two completely incompatible frames of reference. If you liked the 50-year policy and wanted to preserve it for use as leverage in a negotiation a year or 50 from now, then there is no justification for change absent a regime change in Cuba. If you thought the policy was counterproductive, then correcting it is not a “concession” to anyone; it’s simply a favor to ourselves.

I’m in the latter camp.

I’ll have more to say about the economic impact, the President’s authority, the diplomatic future, and the wonderful debate that the President has unleashed especially among Republicans.

For now, there’s the question of recognition, and the discussion of it reflects how far removed our Cuba policy has been from norms and practices used in the rest of our foreign policy.

Since the Carter Administration, we have recognized Cuba in the sense that we have had diplomatic relations. Our mission in Havana, called an interests section and legally a part of the Swiss embassy, is in our old embassy building, as is the Cubans’ in Washington.

Now we will have full diplomatic relations, which will involve calling it an embassy, changing the sign outside, and eventually making the person in charge a United States Ambassador to Cuba. But recognition occurred long ago.

Diplomatic recognition means that one state recognizes that another controls a national territory and carries out government functions within it – no more. There is no moral or political approval attached to the idea of establishing a Havana embassy, any more than our embassy in Beijing expresses approval of Chinese communism, or the embassy in Riyadh indicates support of Saudi human right practices.

Only in the case of Cuba, amid Senator Rubio’s fainting spells, is it necessary to explain all this.

The American policy of non-recognition, followed by three decades of less-than-full diplomatic relations, is a vestige of the 1960’s and 1970’s when nearly all the American Republics, as the term went, broke diplomatic relations with the socialist government in Cuba in order to isolate it. (Canada and Mexico were the exceptions.) At long last, President Obama is abandoning the idiotic pretense that we can isolate Cuba all by ourselves.

The Cubans, it should be noted, are not gloating because they understand all the above. And in the specifics of this case, they know that the President’s posture is far from approving. We still have the embargo, the Helms-Burton law and the democracy programs that it authorizes, and the promise of continued human rights criticism.

The symbolism of establishing an embassy has far more to do with the United States than with the Cuban revolution. In reality, it simply provides a higher-level channel through which to deliver our messages. If, as seems the case, President Obama will use that channel to develop stronger communication and cooperation, then that will be the change that counts.

USAID's junior covert action officers ride again

Thanks to new reporting from the Associated Press, and thanks to cooperation from whoever is providing documents on U.S. government programs in Cuba, we now know of another failed adventure of USAID’s covert action that began in 2009: an attempt to steer Cuban hip-hop into creating “youth networks for social change” and that would constitute a political challenge to the Cuban government.

The operation was run by Xavier Utset, who worked for USAID contractor Creative Associates in an office in Costa Rica. The idea was to replicate a Serbian social movement from a decade before that involved youth, music, and anti-Milosevic politics. A Serbian music promoter was hired to work with Cuban rappers. Funding was done through a Panamanian shell company headed by a lawyer in Liechtenstein. The promoter, Rajko Bozic, got to work in Cuba, presenting himself to Cuban artists as someone who works in alternative media and marketing. In the course of the program, only one Cuban was told that the U.S. government was behind it.

Pity the USAID spokesman who has to issue statements like this, from yesterday: “Any assertions that our work is secret or covert are simply false.”

Covert action is defined in U.S. law as “activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” Which is precisely what USAID has been doing.

But to accept that it’s covert action involves more than semantics. It would imply USAID having to run programs competently, starting with assessments of feasibility that would fall apart as soon as its cast of amateurs were revealed. It would imply coordination, such as stopping Alan Gross from traveling to Cuba with satellite equipment in December 2009, just one month after the Serb Bozic was detained as he entered Cuba with “all of Best Buy on his back,” as a contractor described it to AP. And it would imply a leadership that takes responsibility for operatives who get in trouble rather than issuing drivel like this or this.

A few more points:

This program was conceived and funded during the Bush Administration and carried out at the beginning of President Obama’s first term. The Obama people seem not to have taken stock of USAID’s operations in Cuba. That non-decision now looms as a big decision with important foreign policy consequences and one man in jail.

This program collapsed in part because, like Alan Gross, its operatives traveled to Cuba with laptops that were the equivalent of their filing cabinets, giving Cuban intelligence access to their contracts, program documents, and U.S. government affiliation. This is what I mean by “amateur.” And as with the Alan Gross and ZunZuneo projects, the money was one hundred percent wasted.

Through this operation, USAID harmed civil society in Cuba. It gave Cuban security services reason to increase vigilance on hip-hop and other aspects of genuine civil society because they were being targeted by a foreign government’s political programs. The main target, the rappers Los Aldeanos, no longer live in Cuba. USAID compromised an independent Cuban music festival and tried to influence covertly the concert organized by the Colombian artist Juanes. The Cuban confidant now works at a Papa John’s in Miami.

It is profoundly disrespectful to Cuban citizens to enlist their participation in U.S. programs without disclosing the U.S. role or purpose, and it’s patronizing for USAID to claim it’s for their protection. In the case of the rappers Los Aldeanos, their training was intended “to focus them a little more on their role as agents of social mobilization,” the program manager said. This mentality views Cuban civil society as ours to shape, with the Cubans involved having no right to know our role.

If you wonder why the U.S. government would go to such lengths, the answer is that for all its talk about the effectiveness of Cuba’s dissidents, the assessment in private was different. Utset himself published in 2008 an analysis that credited the dissidents’ ability “to exert influence on the state of relations between the Cuban government and the international community” but doubted their ability “to build a broad-based movement and influence State-society relations.” The dissidents “have been largely unable to establish strong connections with the broader population and successfully appeal for its active engagement,” he wrote.

In other words, it was determined that the Cuban people needed a big push and lots of training from the United States to put themselves on the path to self-determination.

Coverage of other USAID adventures is here and here.