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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
How do you think the Bush administration will handle this shift, given the importance of Florida to national politics?
Somebody who is very close to this White House said to me at a party recently, "OK, you're the expert on Cuba: What do I tell this administration about how to get rid of this turkey?" How do we get rid of this embargo and get it over with?
This is from an ideologue on the right. This is before the 2002 election in October. And I said, if I were George Bush and I were thinking about this, I guess I would do whatever I had to do to get my brother elected and hold on to my base for the next election. Then I would cut them loose.
Because if you don't cut loose on this embargo, you're hemorrhaging every day. Every day you're losing people in the Senate and the House. If they keep going against this, they're going to drag this turkey to the next election. And how much time and how much capital and how much money do you want to use to hold on to this thing that there's no support for among the general population, or our allies? There's even an erosion of support every day in South Florida.
Let me be clear: I'm not against embargoes. I think sometimes embargoes work. We have to thank an embargo for the shift in South Africa that gave the disenfranchised the right to vote. Sometimes embargoes work. I think you can give an embargo around 10 years; if you're really patient, you give it 15 to 20 years. You don't give an embargo or any policy 43 years without meeting your goals or at least some of your goals. All we keep doing is tightening it and we're getting less and less and less.
At some point you say, this is insane, we're not achieving anything. The U.S. has to step back and say, OK, we lost, he won, how do we shift this? There has to be strategic, cool-headed thinking about how to bring democratic reform to Cuba and not about achieving vengeance and getting a pound of flesh.
But given the circumstances, do you think it will ever happen? Do you think we'll see an end to the embargo, say before the next election?
They've got their hands really filled with North Korea and Iraq. How can they waste capital and time on Latin America and Cuba?
I think what they'll do is give lip service to the [old guard]. They'll say, "Oh God, in our heart we feel for you," and they'll keep pushing them to the side, giving a wink and a nod to the Republican free-traders who are the majority and who just in principle want to trade with Cuba. They'll let them put together a veto-proof thing and they're going to attach it to some bill and be over with it. Remember, it was Kissinger in 1976 -- a Republican -- who was ready to toss our Cuba policy out.
What do you predict for the next decade in Cuba?
The central player remains Fidel Castro. But Fidel Castro is nothing if not a survivor. He's eaten 10 American presidents for breakfast. He's chewing on his 10th president. He will give ground only based on what he needs to give ground. He can only save his bacon with tourism. And the nature of tourism is that you have to let foreigners come in. So he has to graduate tolerance and openness -- a loosening of the belt.
0n the other hand, I must say, I thought I'd seen and heard it all in Cuba. But when Jimmy Carter left after that big speech and everyone knows about Varela and suddenly Fidel Castro smashes through that referendum to make [socialism] permanent: That was such spectacularly bad behavior even by his standards. I just thought, the sheer insult to Carter! I just thought he would wait awhile and do it in a less obvious way. It just showed that he so desperately needed to show who was in charge.
I remember the first time I met Fidel Castro, I said to him, why don't you do something like Holland and Sweden and just do some kind of socialism? You lost the Russians; why not can the hardcore communism? You don't have the money to pay for it anyway, so make it a mixed economy, which of course it is now.
But he's afraid of losing control. What he lives and breathes is the fear of what happened to Gorbachev, who he -- actually in the film I just saw ["Comandante," Oliver Stone's new documentary] -- describes as this well-intentioned man who destroyed his country. That's what he believes; that perestroika before glasnost is what doomed Russia. He was in there until the bitter end trying to convince Gorbachev not to open it up.
The collapse of Russia haunts Fidel Castro. It just made him become more convinced that he couldn't yield. But as we see, he yields every day, as needed.
When I first started doing this 10 years ago, all the smart people, the really smart disenchanted nomenklatura, the dissidents, all said, you don't understand: It's really simple, Fidel can't stay in power without the embargo. I said, don't be ridiculous, all he does is rant every day about the imperialistas. And they said, you don't understand.
And then sure enough, as I tried to show in my book, at every critical juncture, he pulled the plug on ending it. Just look at it: Who is the winner from the U.S. embargo? There's only one winner here, and it's him.
What about after Castro? What do you think will happen?
I don't see anyone having an appetite for bloodshed. The only people who have an appetite for bloodshed are a few people in Miami. And the thing about them is, it's never going to be their blood. I think it's very interesting that Lincoln Diaz-Balart criticizes Oswaldo Payá for selling out to the regime, but he's not willing to be in Cuba and go to prison. I love how they like to criticize people from their nice homes in Miami -- people who have been in solitary confinement. It's amazing to me. The hubris! They're sitting there in Miami Beach and criticizing people who have really made a difference, like Elizardo Sanchez, who spent 11 years in prison. It's outrageous.
