Firms from China and India will be drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba, but U.S. companies are prohibited from bidding on the contracts, according to a recent report.

Let's just stop for a minute and tell the truth about U.S. Cuba policy. It's dictated by a few hardcore Cuban-Americans, who live principally in Florida, and who pay vast sums of money into the political coffers of such luminaries as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Ray Martinez, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and others.

In return, these congress persons vote for—and, worse, cajole their fellow feckless congresspersons to vote with them—legislation that grants millions of taxpayer dollars to the people in Florida who run the "anti-Castro campaign". This campaign consists principally of these folks putting the money in their pockets and lifting their standard of living. Rarely if ever do they do anything to advance democracy in Cuba. What's wrong with this picture?

Well, for starters, not a lot that anyone would object to these days because this is the way most politics is conducted in America today. Whether it's Iraq, ENRON, U.S. actions to help Katrina victims, or thousands of dollars stored in a congressperson's freezer unit, Washington politicians are not noted for their brainpower, their honesty, or their decency. When you find one who breaks this mold—like Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska—he or she can tolerate only one or two terms in Washington and then they must return to heartland America and take a month or two of resuscitation so as to revive their fundamental feelings about what America ought to be about.

But policy toward Cuba is different.

Cuba is only 90 miles off our coast. It's 11 million people are very talented, possessed like the city-state of Singapore of a lot more brainpower and energy than their island's size would indicate, and incredibly altruistic—the most recent manifestation of which is that they send more than 30,000 of their medical personnel overseas to help impoverished people who otherwise could not afford any medical care.

These really decent people also live on an island where oil exists. Oil on land and oil offshore.

But because of the stupid policy that those old SOBs in Florida have us locked into, American companies cannot offer to recover the oil that Cuba possesses. Instead, China may be doing the drilling. Or Venezuela whose leader, Hugo Chavez, loves the U.S. so much that he bashes us every chance he gets.

What's wrong with THIS picture?

The bottom line here is so simple it makes your head hurt (like President Bush and our Iraq policy).

We need immediately to lift at least that part of the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba that deals with our oil companies so that they can bid on drilling in Cuban territory. Leave the rest of our idiotic policy in place if you want to (America seems incapable of changing it). But since access to oil relates directly to our national security, let's do this little bit immediately.

Since I know that every American with a brain (which is most of them) understands the truth of what I'm saying, why can't we do this?

Because the Cheney-Bush lock on stupidity is impenetrable as long as the separate but equal branch of government known as the Congress refuses to find its courage and reverse this stupidity.

-- Lawrence Wilkerson

Last weekend, when the Latin American Studies Association met in Montreal, I suppose some member of the Bush administration was celebrating somewhere, one of the emptiest political victories this crowd has ever tried to ring up.

However small, this incident reminds us of the declining state of our diplomacy, our loss of influence in the Americas, and a loss of intellectual imagination that afflicts both sides of the political divide here in the United States.

Here's the back story.

The Latin American Studies Association, or "LASA," is the largest professional association for individuals and institutions involved in the study of Latin America. A quarter of its members live outside the United States. Its scholars study everything from democracy and civil society in Mexico, to Chile's use of memorials to heal its society after Pinochet, to the region's increasing rejection of the free market policies that Washington has championed.

Through much of its history, LASA has had its massive conferences here in the United States. Our government welcomed this; not only do conventions attracting thousands of participants spend good money, but academic exchanges are properly understood as expressions and instruments of diplomacy. Good scholars and research help us unlock the mysteries and menaces we see from afar. This has been received wisdom, until recently.

Since 2003, the Bush administration has been systematically excluding scholars from Cuba and preventing them from attending the LASA conferences. In 2003, only about half of the Cuban academics who sought to attend the Dallas conference actually received visas. The following year, none were allowed to go, and this pattern of exclusion has persisted.

LASA finally decided that if the Cubans couldn't attend the conference in the United States that they would stop meeting here. So, it pulled out of an agreement with the City of Boston and moved its thousands of participants and eleven-hundred workshops to Montreal.

When the American Association of University Teachers asked the State Department why it wouldn't allow the Cubans to attend, they were told that Cuban participation "would be detrimental to the interests of the United States."

So there you have it. It's detrimental to our interests for Cuban scholars to attend a meeting of the most important Latin American studies institution if it occurs on U.S. soil. Who are they kidding?

And what abject hypocrisy!

Look at what the U.S. State Department said, in its 2006 Human Rights report, about the status of academic freedom in Cuba:

The government restricted academic freedom and continued to emphasize the importance of reinforcing revolutionary ideology and discipline. Academics were prohibited from meeting with some diplomats without prior government approval.

I guess it's okay if we do it, huh?

But hypocrisy alone isn't the issue. The Bush folks have the world wrong. They don’t talk to governments with whom they disagree. They scorn intellectuals, academics, and research. They imagine a region that can be divided between supporters of Castro and Chávez and supporters of the U.S. and President Bush. And they can be strikingly disengaged from the declining currency of American power and the waning support for our policies and ideas.

The LASA conference was titled "After the Washington Consensus," and what better emblem of our disengagement than to see such a vibrant academic exchange taking place in Canada, because our policy of excluding Cubans forced LASA to meet elsewhere.

And so a conversation -- no, a thousand conversations -- that should have occurred inside the United States was instead exiled to Canada. Boy did that serve Fidel Castro and the Cubans right! (I hope the author of the visa policy got the laugh he wanted.)

The day after I got home from Canada, the Financial Times ran a scolding column by Nancy Soderberg, our former U.N. Ambassador and a Clinton-era security advisor, and it was a reminder to me that the Bush administration has no monopoly on this kind of foolishness.

The column was addressed to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Argentina's first lady, and the leading candidate to succeed her husband as their nation’s president after the balloting that will occur on October 28th. Among Ms. Soderberg's demands were that Argentina reject Hugo Chávez and pay more respect to the kinds of economic policies that are denounced by opponents of neo-liberalism and the Washington consensus.

It might have been nice to let the Argentine people vote first. But assuming the front-running Senator Fernandez does win the election, Ms. Soderberg's advice, premature and presumptuous, was still wrong, for two compelling reasons.

It's simple and straightforward to divide the region into "responsible" and "irresponsible" camps, between Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro adherents and haters. But Latin America, like life and reality, is far more complicated than that.

The countries of the region negotiate separate trade arrangements with each other, they have agreements and arguments with each other, and they pursue their own national interests completely outside the false framework (you're either for us or against us) that President Bush has constructed and which Ms. Soderberg adopted as her own. Argentina will undoubtedly follow its own course, and it should.

Second, who in the region does she think is actually listening to us? US policymakers can shout themselves hoarse telling governments what to do and telling publics who to elect, and we have seen how fruitless this advice can be.

Regional governments, especially those with active lefts, cannot afford to be viewed as "lackeys" of Washington, and citizens are largely indifferent to admonitions from the outside, as voters have proved in the last several years in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Nicaragua, when they took opposite tacks from those advocated by President Chávez or the US Department of State. In other words, they are acting like democracies, something we should applaud and not discourage.

It was discouraging to see a prominent Democratic security expert parroting the administration's view of the region. Small wonder that admirers of the United States like former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark openly talk, as he did at the LASA meeting in Montreal, about our country's declining credentials in the hemisphere.

LASA got the message. They're apparently expecting no big changes in our government's policy of rejecting Cuban scholars for visas no matter who gets elected President. Their next meeting, scheduled for June 2009, will take place in Rio de Janeiro. Good for Brazil, but detrimental to American interests, I think.

--Sarah Stephens

(All photos: Havana, 2005 by Marc PoKempner)

An astute pundit named Rufus Miles observed that 'where you stand depends on where you sit'. In last Friday's simpleton roast of Cuban health care on ABC’s 20/20, the standers were mostly sitting in Miami, and the rest were sitting in Langley. (For the full dose see transcript or video ). In fact, the CIA turned out to be the only second opinion John Stossel sought for the whole story.

It was a sample of what I call “retro-reporting”--a McCarthy era piece against voodoo communism—no kidding, the video actually has sinister Soviet soldiers marching against a red-flagged Lenin backdrop. But the trouble is that it’s supposed to be real 2007 journalism. On health care, no less.

Stossel goes on to accuse “communist regimes” of hiding facts, yet it’s Stossel who proves no facts of his own, content with phantom sources “doctors tell us”, “a Venezuelan woman”. Or else disgruntled Miami, with its 45-year baggage. He posts seamy photos from unabashedly biased sources, with no proof of where they were taken or when. In fact, no reporting for the story was ever done inside Cuba—just some B-roll showing healthy babies (sic?).

Not to mention the absence of Cuban health officials. In fact, Stossel portrays it as just another communist plot when the UN and World Health Organization publish statistics from Cuban health authorities. Are we supposed to take this seriously?

ABC News—shame on you--gets away with it because of a fatal twist in US foreign policy: most Americans are banned from travel to Cuba by our own government. So we join the ranks of the vulnerable, and have no choice but to swallow Stossel whole.

God forbid that Michael Moore’s movie and its reference to Cuba might make us stop to think that we could and should have better health care in America. Stossel would prefer we keep on stepping, and when it comes to Cuba, be just scared enough to cross the street altogether.

Because health care in our country is in trouble.

Take a look at the state of Florida itself. It should make any human rights-loving Cuban-American turn their crosshairs around. This summer, the Health Council of South Florida released Miami-Dade County’s 2007 Community Health Report Card: access to health care got a pretty scary “F”. So did the rate of uninsured (28.6% total, more for Hispanics and blacks); as well as overweight/obese adults at 60.6% and babies born with low birth weights at 9%. (But the news was not all bad: lower death rates for strokes, hepatitis rates, and reduced domestic violence all got an “A”.)

Access to health care is just where Cuba excels. Despite its poverty, as I pointed out in the Huffington Post recently, Cuba makes health care available to all its citizens,

scoring comparably with the U.S. on many health indicators at a fraction of the cost. In fact, a Gallup Poll conducted last December revealed that 96% of Cuban citizens said they had regular access to health care, no matter who they were or what their income. That's a pretty high score for any poll. And it was Gallup, not Fidel Castro.

Which brings me full circle to Stossel once again. I’ve spent nearly two decades in Cuba covering health care, and just as important, being a patient in regular Cuban hospitals and clinics.

So here are some facts you didn’t get from Stossel:

 Cuban health statistics are as good as it gets. One reason you can tell is because not all of them are glowing: maternal mortality is still a problem in Cuba, as is increased threat from diabetes. This and other data are publicly available. Moreover, organizations like the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), which maintain permanent offices in Havana and regularly send evaluation teams to Cuba, have issued positive reports after firsthand assessments from visits to provinces across the country.

 On Cuban hospitals and “elites”: Sure, Cuban hospitals are dilapidated, and after the economic nosedive of the 90s, they’re just now getting the repairs and remodeling they need. Yes, Michael Moore’s 911 responders went to one of the already-refurbished facilities—but it’s the hospital that also serves 156,000 people living in one of Havana’s most overcrowded neighborhoods, not a hospital built for government elites.

 On the claim that Cuban women are subjected to “a widespread practice of forced abortions when there might be indications of problems with the fetus” (ABC’s website summary):

This is patently false. By law in Cuba, abortion is accessible and free. However, for years, abortion rates have been going down in Cuba, not up. When congenital malformations occur during pregnancy, women are informed of the situation and their options in order to make a personal decision. At the same time, entire facilities like the Children’s Heart Center in Havana and a national network of special schools are dedicated to children who are born with congenital problems.

 In this context, it’s more than ironic that ABC has never reported on the US embargo on Cuba that prevents the Heart Center from directly purchasing a medication vital to keeping blue babies alive—blue babies who had problems in the womb, but who were born and treated thanks to the Center.

The bottom line is: as we look for serious reform to reshape our own health care, it would do us good if ABC took off the Cold War blinders, and instead made an honest attempt to draw lessons from experiences in Cuba and elsewhere. And in so doing, 20-20 producers might have brought us another story: just a few weeks ago, YM Biosciences-USA received a license from the Treasury Department to test a Cuban cancer vaccine in American children victimized by inoperable brain cancer. But then again, what a network chooses not to cover says volumes.

-- Gail Reed

I attended a briefing by Leonard Weinglass (he of the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers fame, of the Amy Carter tribulations, and other famous efforts to achieve justice against at times huge odds) at Howard University's Law School on Wednesday, 12 September. I was stunned by what counselor Weinglass revealed.

As a military officer for 31 years, I occasionally encountered Cuba. In exercises, I recall vividly that when we wargamed "the Cuba scenario" what happened was that the U.S. Navy, the FBI, the Florida State Police, the Coast Guard, and a host of other folks got involved not in invading Cuba, but in preventing a group of Cuban-Americans in Florida from doing so. I might add that such actions violated U.S. law and so, in the exercises—which were in my view very realistic—we spent our time attempting to stop several hundred small boats, loaded with automatic weapons, explosives, and lots of Cuban-Americans, from getting to Cuba. So, I was acquainted with some of the vagaries of U.S. Cuba policy.

At Howard University last week, I learned the truth about yet another vagary—"The Cuban Five." Here's a quick backgrounder.

Because the Cuban government had come to much the same conclusion as the U.S. military and did not want to be invaded by a bunch of Cuban-Americans from Florida, it decided to send five Cubans to Florida to spy on this "invasion group". (And what I haven't mentioned is that this group of Floridians is considered to be a group of terrorists by Cuban authorities. Why? Because over the past few years this group has allegedly carried out terrorist acts in Cuba and killed by some counts over 3,000 Cubans. One of these acts was to bring down a Cuban airliner with 76 souls on board, all of whom perished.)

When these five Cubans began reporting back to Havana about what they were discovering in Florida, the picture became very clear. In short, Cuban authorities were convinced that their country did indeed have much to worry about.

So, in Havana the thought was, let's give this evidence our five "spies" have gathered to the U.S. FBI. Surely, the FBI will then understand what the U.S. military already understands, i.e., the threat to peace in the Straits of Florida is in Florida not in Cuba. And so Havana did just that. It gave to the FBI the evidence its five men had gathered in southern Florida.

What did the FBI do? Well, here is the crux of the matter. The FBI turned the evidence over to the U.S. Government and it, in turn, used the evidence not to investigate and, if necessary, arrest and prosecute the law-breaking Cuban-Americans and their supporters in southern Florida, but to arrest and eventually imprison for life the five men who "spied" on these fine, loyal Floridians.

When the case came to trial, a change of venue was warranted and asked for because no Miami court was going to give the Cuban Five a fair trial, since the city is largely in the hands of some of the very Cuban-Americans and their supporters who've allegedly perpetrated these atrocities on the Cuban people and are prepared to invade the island. But the change of venue motion was denied. And of course the five were convicted.

But on appeal, in a decision by three of the judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the trial's results were thrown out—as of course they should have been on the denial of the change of venue motion alone. The Five returned to Cuba and their families, right?

No, because in a full meeting of the 11th Circuit Court with all 12 members present, the ruling of the three members was reversed and The Five went back to jail, where they have been now for nine years.

The case is being reviewed yet again even as I write. That is one of the reasons that Leonard Weinglass gave the briefing at Howard University that I attended. He wanted to inform us of this apparently egregious miscarriage of justice and solicit our support in getting the decision reversed.

If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, it is hard to believe that this case ever happened in the first place—unless, of course, one contemplates the real power of this group of Cuban-Americans in Florida and the hold they exercise over the U.S. Government.

But this case sort of takes the cake: to punish with life sentences men who came here to determine how and when their country was going to be attacked by people breaking U.S. law. These men were unarmed, not intent on any physical damage to the United States, and were motivated to protect their fellow citizens from invasion and repeated attacks by Cuban-Americans living in Florida.

And we have to ask also, just how is it that we have become a safe haven for alleged terrorists? How is it that we—the United States of America—may rate a place on our own list of states that sponsor terrorism?

If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, this case is truly the bottom of the pit. I had great trouble believing it, but I had nothing with which to refute Mr. Weinglass' superbly delivered presentation. But more than that was my four years inside the Bush Administration. You see, I know the depths to which our government is capable of sinking. Torture. Lies. False intelligence. Tyranny. Is the continued failure to resolve fairly this case against the Cuban Five, even though it began in the second Clinton administration, really so unbelievable when cast against the characters of the current administration?

Talk to your congressman or woman, please. This is a travesty. And, by the way, if you can disprove any of what Mr. Weinglass contends, fire away. America has many disastrous actions chalked up to its discredit at the moment, so to be disabused of one of such heavy import would be a gift from the gods.

--Lawrence Wilkerson