Yesterday, speaking with reporters, Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said a) he is seeking a meeting with Raul Castro, b) he thinks formal relations with Cuba are around the corner, and c) knows that talking with world leaders leads to positive change because he's done it.

It is heartening to see a senior Republican Senator, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, recognize that our policy not only must change, but will be changing shortly. Senators Chris Dodd and Max Baucus should welcome Specter's initiatives and, I would argue, seek to join Sen. Specter in Havana.

There is little time to lose. The next president will be faced with few, if any, other issues that will deliver as much global and regional goodwill as changing our failed policy of regime change. I believe the next president would be best served by announcing a decisive change in policy in the inaugural address on January 20, 2009. Failing that, the OAS Summit in Trinidad in April would work as well.

That does not leave much time to get Congress organized. For real change to happen, Congress must hand control of Cuba policy back over to the White House by repealing Helms-Burton legislation. With Senator Specter's leadership on his side of the aisle and Sens. Dodd and Baucus on theirs, the Senate may just be able to move in time to take full strategic advantage of the moment.

I'll talk more about this in later posts, but I just have to juxtapose these statements from the senior senator from Pennsylvania with recent statements made by Senator Joe Lieberman. It is hard to understate the contrast.

While Sen. Specter sees the irrationality of our current policy and the necessity for change, Sen. Lieberman, this week, made good on his promise to seek clemency for a Cuban-American terrorist convicted of an eight-year string of bombing and assassination in New York City and Miami. According to his spokesman, Sen. Lieberman did what he promised, and delivered the petition to the Bush White House.

One Senator understands what is in the National Interest and the other has placed petty politics above homeland security, the rule of law, and the national interest.

First of all, if you're in DC today, stop by our event today entitled "What Nixon Would Do on Cuba," featuring Dmitri Simes, Julia Sweig, Flynt Leverett and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.

Now for my post. Last week we showed in living color the continued dysfunction of Washington's dependence on the Embargo as a source of electoral votes.

This past weekend, however, it was Raul Castro's turn to lean on the embargo for political expediency. The occasion was the annual speech at Moncada Barracks, the site of one of the defining battles of the Castro brothers' insurgency. First, he implicitly admits that the embargo is not in any way isolating the island from the global economy, then he raises the spectre of the Imperial enemy to the north to justify unnecessary military spending.

Here's what Raul said:

We must bear in mind that we are living in the midst of a true world crisis which is not only economic but also associated to climate change, the irrational use of energy and a great number of other problems....

I repeat that the revolution has done and will continue to do anything within its power to continue to advance and to reduce to the minimum the unavoidable consequences of the present international crisis for our people. Yet, we should timely explain to our people the difficulties so that we can be better prepared to face them. We must get used to receiving not only good news.

Cuba, in other words, is fully integrated into the global economy. If it were isolated, Raul would not need to set such low expectations for his people. Indeed, according to the Cuban government, the U.S. is even the country's fifth largest trading partner, behind Venezuela, China, Spain, and Germany. Tourism is up 14.8 percent over last year. Yet the economy is in a shambles. Agriculture is a wreck and they are importing billions in produce. Global integration plus poor economic management is a disaster waiting to happen.

What then, is the rationale for keeping our embargo up? Many pro-embargo activists will state that lifting the embargo will only enrich the regime, which controls trade through a very small number of state-owned enterprises. But those enterprises and their bosses already have access to the other 75% of the world's economy and Raul is warning of disaster.

I argue that the embargo is more useful to Havana than to the Washington. Havana, unaffected by the sanctions, uses the blockade as an excuse to maintain a outsize military and to ramp up nationalism. It is an essential crutch for a Revolution that cannot find a modern, progressive pathway.

So it is no surprise that this is exactly how Raul finished his oratory:

And together with production, we shall continue paying special attention to defense, regardless of the results of the next presidential elections in the United States.

The country is doing well in its defense preparation. On November 2007 we conducted with satisfactory results the Moncada military exercise in the west and center parts of the island. This was done in the eastern territory last June since the decision had been made to postpone it to avoid interfering with the work of recuperation after the intense rainfall at the end of last year.

On the other hand, Operation Caguairán continues to favorably develop; this has enabled us to significantly raise the preparation of our reservists, who complement the regular troops, and of our militia.

At the same time, we have continued the engineering fitting-out of the military theater of operations and the modernization of the weapons and other means as well as the training and upgrading of officers. This year over 2,000 officers graduated; the highest figure in the last ten years.

Simultaneously, conditions are being created to perform with excellence and rigor, in the month of November, the Bastion 2008 Strategic Military Exercise.

What a waste of time and resources.

This event just in from my day job over at the New America Foundation:

Thirty-seven years after Nixon went to China, the next President of the United States has another chance to split a non-threatening communist state away from an aggressive socialist power. Then, like now, there is an opportunity to really change the perception of the United States in the world and shift the conversation.

This event is co-hosted by the New America Foundation and The Nixon Center.

To register for this event, click here.

Start: 07/28/2008 - 12:30pm
End: 07/28/2008 - 2:00pm

New America Foundation
1630 Connecticut Ave, NW 7th Floor
Washington, 20009

Featured speakers

Dimitri K. Simes
President, The Nixon Center
Former Foreign Policy Advisor to Richard Nixon

Flynt Leverett
Senior Fellow, Director, Geopolitics of Energy Initiative, New America Foundation
Former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs, National Security Council

Julia E. Sweig
Rockefeller Senior Fellow & Director Latin America Studies
Council on Foreign Relations

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.)
Former Chief of Staff, Department of State
Pamela C. Harriman Professor, College of William & Mary

Moderator

Steve Clemons
Director New America Foundation/American Strategy Program
Publisher, www.TheWashingtonNote.com

So, today's news out of Havana is that Raul Castro has announced another economic reform: idle state land can now be granted to private farmers or collectives for agricultural production. Here's the story from the BBC and another take from my colleague Phil Peters.

It's another incremental reform that is becoming the Raul era's hallmark. Add them all up, and there is a change going on, but the economy is still not on a good trajectory. Taxis? Cell phones? Hotel rooms? The big one so far really is pegging wages to productivity, but even that is still set by the government, not by a more agile market mechanism.

Contrast that with the real, massive innovation coming out of Cuba, in health care. At home Cuba boasts an incredibly comprehensive and accessible community-based health care system. Abroad, Cuba is exporting both the community-based approach and the doctors and trained medical personnel to make it work for low-income countries. That's revolutionary.

As I've written recently, I think Cuba has a chance to be a real role model for Latin America, as the region tries to figure out how to survive the coming global economic transition from high waste to high efficiency. Indeed, Vice President Machado recently called for much faster changes in this area at the Global Food Crisis Summit in Rome last month.

Global dysfunction is no excuse not to move faster at home. U.S. policy, however, is the dominant reason Cuba cites for not moving faster.

Let's say the U.S. lifts our embargo and guarantees not to invade Cuba. If Cuba were then to reduce its military spending down to British levels, 2.4% of GDP, it would have $715 million extra per year to spend on the next big Cuban revolution. If the Cuban Government were smart, that $715 million could be a down payment for an island-wide renaissance. I'd spend it on a major, national, participatory economic re-development plan.

This would be, in essence, a second, deeper round of his economic dialogues. This time, however, the objective would be to unleash the Cuban economic tiger. South Korea, China and Vietnam have navigated these same waters successfully, but in the context of much more favorable global and domestic economic conditions.

How can Cuba open up private enterprise while regulating markets to ensure social equity? Allow wages to incentivize performance and innovation while maintaining a just and livable minimum wage? Re-develop Cuban cities, towns, and resort communities using the principles of participatory smart growth--making sure communities are developed to fit the needs and aspirations of the community--not the central government? Use progressive taxes on this new economic activity to pay for a new generation of mobility and energy infrastructure? Make Cuban universities and research organizations the envy of Latin America, working on real problems encountered in the second Cuban revolution?

I know it sounds fanciful, given the anachronistic mode in which Havana debates policy. But Raul himself says all reforms must respect Cuban socialism yet Raul just this week re-defined the concept:

Socialism means social justice and equality but equality of rights and opportunities, not salaries. Equality does not mean egalitarism. This is, in the end, another form of exploitation, that of the exploitation of the responsible worker by the one who is not, or even worse, by the slothful.

Raul understands that the economy has to change, but he does not yet seem to have a vision for the next era of the revolution. Regardless, economic change has to come faster than Raul is presently orchestrating. With global commodity prices, as Raul himself noted, threatening his economic reforms, Cuba needs more innovation, not less.

As I wrote yesterday, we have have a real strategic interest in getting Cuba on our side. To do that, we should be having these kinds of blue-sky conversations with the Cuban leadership. We won't until the next president changes our failed policy.

My New America colleague, Andres Martinez, former op-ed editor at the LA Times, is the author of the blog, Stumped, the Washington Post's advice column on all things political. It's a great creature that is part blog, part Dear Abby.

Earlier this week, he picked up a question from a reader who just could not make sense of U.S. Cuba Policy. Check it out:

Dear Stumped,

Why do we have an embargo against communist Cuba, while we outsource our manufacturing base to communist China?

Signed,

"Dez"

Dear Dez,

Here's the short answer: No sound reasoning explains Washington's schizophrenia in dealing with Havana and Beijing.

When it comes to China, the foreign policy of the United States is predicated on a belief that the more you engage a totalitarian communist nation -- through trade, regional diplomacy, investment, tourism, educational exchanges and simply by smothering it with American culture -- the more likely it is that democracy and individual rights will take hold in that nation. The theory is that the regime's tight-fisted control of everyday life will be eroded by outside influences.

When it comes to Cuba, however, the foreign policy of the United States is predicated on a belief that the more you isolate a totalitarian communist nation -- cutting it off diplomatically, imposing a trade embargo and preventing people from traveling back and forth -- the more likely it is that democracy and individual rights will develop in that nation. The theory is that the regime's tight-fisted control of everyday life will decay because of the lack of outside influences.

Got that?

And it just gets better. Read the whole column here.

Could Cuba do to developing world sustainability what it has already done to developing world health care?

That question struck me as I read my colleague Phil Peters' recent post on the latest economic reform by the government of Raul Castro, the issuing of licenses for private transportation services in rural areas. The article says the Cuban government is recognizing that there is, in essence a gap in public services--rural transportation--that a market mechanism can effectively fill.

Odds are, however, that the grey market will deliver a variety of low-efficiency cars and vans just like I've used a thousand times while working in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. They are typically pollution-spewing, pedestrian-threatening, and economically addictive, given the current pricing of transportation options.

But with gas prices soaring, notwithstanding the supplementary assistance of Hugo Chavez, Cuba could do a lot better for itself and for its image abroad, if it took a bolder move.

If Cuba is looking for a big goal, I'd recommend ending the use of oil as a transportation fuel in 10 years and converting the country to fully electric transportation, public and private. To do this, Cuba would have to integrate urban planning, infrastructure investment, and renewable generation, but Cuba already has the community-level organization, the access to international trade and, most importantly, the Caribbean sun and wind to be able to deliver the goods.

The effect would be a boon for the Cuban people. Besides the wave of jobs that would be created, and the improved mobility and reduction in pollution, the sense of pride in leading the world in how to address sustainability questions would be a shot in the arm. If the government really does believe its revolutionary rhetoric, community-based participation in urban redevelopment could demonstrate to the developing world that local priorities can supersede and perhaps harness foreign investment when it comes to infrastructure planning. It would also be, in effect, a real form of local democracy.

Just like community-based health-care, a sustainable Cuba would be a beacon to a developing world reeling from high oil prices and a desperate need for good-paying jobs and thriving domestic economies. There is a lot of interest in the four-billion person market at the bottom of the global economic pyramid, and Cuba could really take a leadership role in giving those 4 billion people the opportunity to take more control over their economic futures.

After the U.S. embargo comes down, it will be much harder for Castro or any Cuban government to think really big. But while the pace of reform has been surprising given past performance, it has not inspired the nation or set it on a sustainable path. A bold national initiative, started now, would do these things. It would also stimulate the economy and provide cover for bigger economic reforms, like breaking up the Cuban military's internal economic empires.