The Damas de Blanco, off the reservation

The White House held another videoconference last week, this time with several of the Damas de Blanco in Havana talking with First Lady Laura Bush and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

The White House issued a brief statement. Secretary Gutierrez was on Radio Marti (story and audio here). He said the conversation was “unforgettable,” covering the situation in Cuba after the hurricanes, the U.S. offers of aid, economic and human rights issues, and prison conditions.

Neither the Radio Marti story nor the White House statement mentioned that the Cuban women asked that the Bush Administration suspend its sanctions “that affect the sending of direct aid,” as El Nuevo Herald paraphrased the words of Laura Pollan, who participated in the videoconference. In response, according to Pollan, “They stated that they were going to analyze it [the request]. Hopefully, the penury and suffering would be less that way…We explained to Mrs. Bush that there is widespread desperation.” El Nuevo’s story didn’t make clear whether Pollan was asking for the suspension of the Administration’s family sanctions, or something broader. A brief English summary is here.

Good for these women for raising this issue with Mrs. Bush, who is probably the only person in Washington who could possibly have an impact.

One can’t say the same for our Secretary of Commerce, who has been on these videoconferences before, and has heard the same kind of request, before the hurricanes. Still, he said last month, “What we are hearing from Cubans in Cuba is they don’t need money because there’s nothing to buy.”

The impact of Ike and Gustav in Cuba may be fading from the news, but Cubans still suffer. What governments should do in a case like this is to put politics aside and send help. President Bush put humanitarian concerns above politics when he offered aid to Cuba, and Cuba did the opposite when it turned that offer down. Still, the United States is standing in the way of direct, effective aid by maintaining sanctions against families – their visits, their cash assistance, even the contents of their gift parcels – that are truly draconian at a time when crops, food supplies, and housing have been wrecked from one end of the island to another.

Once again, the question arises: If we praise the dissidents as future leaders of Cuba and spend millions to support them each year, why can’t we heed their simple request now to ease suffering after a natural disaster?

Finally, a note about Radio Marti. From the story and audio on the Marti website, one would never know that the Damas de Blanco discussed U.S. policy, which is newsworthy by anyone’s standard, and doubly so because it would seem to be the only area of the conversation where there was a difference of opinion and a discussion of possible policy change. If Marti’s broadcasts have included Pollan’s statements, that would be great to know. If not, then it’s an omission that reinforces the idea that Marti is a government radio station with a political slant.

[White House photo.]

Odds and ends

• Secretary Gutierrez, for no apparent reason, issues a statement about the “Cuban Regime’s Failure” to accept U.S. aid offers. I think the Administration’s offers were made in good faith, and I think Cuba’s rejection was wrong. But if there’s the slightest chance that the aid could flow, how does a statement like this help?

• The Center for Democracy in the Americas has a 6-minute video of an interview its staff conducted with a resident of Vinales, Pinar del Rio, which was hit by both Ike and Gustav. He describes the damage to farms and crops, his attitude about getting back to work to pick up the pieces, and the recollection of his 96-year-old father-in-law about the hurricane of ’44. With English subtitles.

• Western Union cut its fee for wiring remittances to Cuba to $14.99, through November 14. The company’s release doesn’t say what the price was before this temporary discount, but when the service started it cost $29.

Odds and ends

• Man of Two Havanas, the film about Max Lesnik by his daughter Vivian Lesnik Weisman, will screen in Miami this week. Herald story here, my note on the film here.

• Cuban Vice President Machado Ventura is in New York, heading the Cuban delegation to the UN General Assembly. Cuban preview here (ACN), Herald coverage of a Harlem rally here.

• Secretary Gutierrez goes to Harvard.

• The Cupet-PDVSA joint venture considers reactivating the pipeline from the Cienfuegos refinery to the Matanzas supertanker terminal, Oil & Gas Journal reports.

• This column by Deroy Murdock is about the U.S. economy, a little off topic, but it makes you think that when it comes to building socialism, maybe we have more in common with Cuba than we thought. And while I’m at it, there’s this comment from Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in an AFP roundup of Latin American opinion of the U.S. financial crisis; Lula said he sees “with sadness that important banks that came by giving opinions, saying what we should or should not do, measuring country risk, recommending to investors whether Brazil was trustworthy or not, are calling their creditors…[what these banks determined] was not the free movement of capital, generating jobs and wealth, but rather speculation…they turned some sectors of the financial system into a casino and they lost at the roulette wheel…”

Secretary Gutierrez strikes again

From Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, speaking to reporters in Miami yesterday:

“What we are hearing from Cubans in Cuba is they don't need money because there's nothing to buy.”

I guess he’s unaware of appeals that dissidents such as Martha Beatriz Roque and Oswaldo Paya, both representing their organizations, made to President Bush in the wake of the hurricanes. Or the appeal that Roque made in May to President Bush in a videoconference from Havana, in which Gutierrez participated.

Can we listen?

Hector Palacios, a Cuban dissident released from jail and allowed to travel abroad last fall for medical treatment, tells AP that he plans to return to Cuba next month along with his wife Gisela Delgado, leader of the independent libraries in Cuba.

Mr. Palacios was in Washington last month; he was here on the day that President Bush declared to be a global day of solidarity with Cuban dissidents, but he did not attend the White House ceremony. Here and elsewhere in his travels, his message boils down to a few basic points: the Cuban government is out of options, the opposition is strong and well positioned, and the United States would do well to change some of its policies toward Cuba.

Here’s what he told AFP May 30 (my translation):

“Without dialogue, there is no peaceful change,” he opined, before pointing out “a series of points that have to disappear from the embargo,” in his opinion. “First, that Cubans [Cuban Americans] may travel to their country any time they wish, that they may send their family what they want to send, and also that U.S. citizens may visit us…”

This comment comes on the heels of Martha Beatriz Roque’s direct appeal to President Bush, in a videoconference early last month, to end restrictions on family travel and remittances. Previously, Roque had been a steadfast supporter of President Bush’s policies.

Vladimiro Roca, another dissident leader, told EFE last week that Senator Obama’s position on Cuba policy:

“…breaks the ... state of siege that it tries to maintain to justify repression and narrow-mindedness…On the other hand, McCain would help the hard line…to maintain the approach that they are beseiged by the greatest power in the world.”

Then there was this article from Oscar Espinosa Chepe who, like Palacios, was arrested in 2003 as part of the group of 75 and is provisionally out of jail for health reasons. The article appeared last month in Spain’s El Pais (but the link there is dead). An excerpt (my translation):

“Democratic countries that wish to help the Cuban people should recognize the existence of a new situation that calls for new thinking. The policy of isolating Cuba and favoring confrontation, practiced for decades by U.S. authorities, should be replaced by mechanisms of contacts, fundamentally with [Cuban] society, without excluding eventual meetings with the Cuban government, as done by the Nixon and Reagan Administrations with the Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe, China, and Vietnam, and now attempted with North Korea. The goal would be to contribute to creating a less tense atmosphere, where it would be difficult for the hardliners to obtain alibis to cultivate false nationalism and to block changes…Immediate steps could be taken such as permitting Cuban Americans to visit the island and help their family and friends economically without restriction…[this step] would make people who receive assistance more independent of the totalitarian state…It would also be very valuable to promote exchanges between the American and Cuban people in all spheres, including cultural, academic, scientific, and sports.”

It is not new for Chepe to oppose U.S. sanctions, but it is new for Palacios, Roque, and Roca to do so.

And it’s not surprising to see these opinions being expressed out loud; President Bush’s term is nearing its end, and in my experience at least, Cubans on the street are not fans of American sanctions. They already have a government, after all, that builds barriers between them and the outside world – and they don’t like the idea that other governments would join in that effort.

Yesterday Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez spoke to dissidents by phone (to whom, his statement doesn’t specify).

The same question comes to mind as in the Bush videoconference: Our leaders talk to the dissidents, but do they listen?

Secretary Gutierrez' amateur hour

When the Herald asked Secretary Gutierrez’ spokeswoman to explain his new allegation that Cuba “funds anti-American terrorist activities around the world” – a charge that isn’t contained in the State Department’s terrorism report – she talked about other things instead.

Maybe he just made it up.

Or maybe someone on his staff made it up for him.

At Babalu they have published a comment by a Gutierrez aide who takes issue with a recent column by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, where Robinson criticized U.S. policy against Cuba as ineffective. The aide, Jorge Ponce, questions Robinson’s patriotism, calling him an “advocate of anything and anyone who is or pretends to be anti-Yankee,” and saying Robinson has a “longstanding honeymoon with the Castros.”

“I don't know about Eugene, but I'm all about God Bless America,” he concludes.

What class.