Bill Richardson endorsing Barack Obama for President

This is an ideal opportunity for President Obama to change the parameters on Cuba. Visits by three Catholic bishops and Governor Bill Richardson have set the stage.

The only effective opponent of improving relations, Senator Bob Menendez, is back home in New Jersey, no doubt concerned that the state legal director of his last campaign is among several mayors arrested for corruption.

When Congress comes back next month, Obama will be necessarily preoccupied with both serious and extremist challenges to badly needed reform of our health system.

As reported by Associated Press:

Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston said Obama's election presents a rare opportunity to bridge an "immense psychological distance" that has marred relations and end an economic policy the church says punishes Cuban citizens.

"There were other opportunities that were lost," (Bishop) Wenski said. "And it's important we do not lose the opportunity this time." ...

Wenski said the delegation came away from the Interests Section meeting with the impression that U.S. policy toward Cuba is under review and that "their approach seems to be piece by piece." He urged a quicker pace after "50 years of lack of confidence on both sides."

"That's a lot of history to overcome," Wenski added. "We would hope that both sides listen to their better angels."

Richardson’s goal, like the very successful trip in July by Governor Mike Beebe of Arkansas, could be no more than advancement of his state’s ample agricultural and cultural agenda with Cuba. However, a serious past and future prospect for the position of Secretary of State, with a well established record in Cuba and elsewhere for resolving thorny prisoner-related problems, might do far more.

In 1996 Richardson secured the release of three Cuban political prisoners during talks with Fidel Castro. The current visit could begin a process that leads to real reciprocity, as already put on the table by Raul Castro, an exchange of gestures leading to the release of prisoners considered political by the other country.

The only real obstacle may be whether Cuba is willing to give released prisoners the option of remaining in the country instead of migration with their families. The former seems less problematic as the US Interests Section comes to act more like our embassies elsewhere (and allied nations' embassies in Cuba) rather than as an incubator and promoter of government opponents.

Even if the public results of his trip are not so dramatic, Richardson could well win the release of a few prisoners on compassionate grounds. This would provide President Obama the political space to finally finish the job on non-tourist travel.

Four months after the announcement of Cuban-American travel, even that incomplete reform has not been implemented by new regulations from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Technically Cuban Americans are still limited to one visit per year. OFAC has offered the option of routine approval for additional visits, but we don’t know how many are going to the trouble of applying. New regulations covering all non-tourist travel have apparently been vetted by concerned agencies. Are they simply awaiting the proper political moment for roll out?

OFAC is being liberal in issuance of specific licenses, and not making any effort to go after individual violators, a logical transitional stance. Some 270 participants in the Pastors for Peace and Venceremos Brigade travel challenges returned to the US without incident on August 3d, having carried out, respectively, their twentieth and fortieth annual acts of civil disobedience by making unlicensed visits to Cuba. They would have been covered by a general license for humanitarian travel.

Although Richardson never went beyond calling for family travel when he was a candidate for President, a speech on February 8, 2007, linked the “release of political prisonersâ€Â with “normalization of relationsâ€Â, and he observed

“People-to-people contacts strengthen nations.â€Â

He went further in an April 16, 2008 speech at New Mexico State University on “The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy: Impacts on New Mexico and Beyondâ€Â

We must not neglect our own hemisphere. That means we also need to rethink our
relationship with Cuba. The embargo doesn’t work. We need to remove the embargo,
but get something in return -- some democratic reforms or release of some political
prisoners. The way you bring change to Cuba is to open it up to students, to commerce,
to travel and to family visits.

John McAuliff
Fund for Reconciliation and Development

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Resource:

Newsletter of the Travel Industry Network on Cuba announcing Cuba programs at the Trade Show in Las Vegas, September 13-15.

"let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven't always done what we should have on that front. Even as we meet here today, America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies. We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not."
President Obama in Moscow 7/7/09

"as you know, we are engaged in discussions with the Government of Cuba about matters that we believe are important - migration, for example. But we have made it very clear that we could not do much more in dealing with Cuba unless Cuba changes. The political prisoners need to be released. Free and fair elections need to be held... So we are opening up dialogue with Cuba, but we are very clear that we want to see some fundamental changes within the Cuban regime."
Secretary Clinton interview with Globovision 7/7/09

If the President's words in Moscow are applied to relations with Cuba, and the US manifests the spirit of "mutual respect" he so eloquently advanced in earlier visits to Turkey and France, the conflict between the US and Cuba is all but over.

However, as Secretary Clinton's interview reflects, some officials seem determined to fly the tattered flag of conditionality. They insisted Cuba respond to authorization of family travel disproportionately by freeing political prisoners and moving toward approved forms of democracy before the US took any other positive steps. They opposed Cuba regaining its seat in the OAS without such internal changes. Nor, they insist, will the embargo be lifted until this happens (a sentiment unfortunately found in Obama's own campaign oriented language).

Practical steps are passed over in favor of hoary hostile rhetoric. Spokespersons ignore Cuba's repeated offer of reciprocal gestures to end imprisonments each side considers political. Denunciations of discriminatory fees for the exchange of dollars are preferred to ending Bush imposed constraints on Cuba's international financial transactions which prompted the 10% surcharge.

Old language and concepts survive, embodying paternalistic and interventionist attitudes that have plagued US relations with Cuba for more than a century. Conditionality is not only a problem in principle, violating national sovereignty, but is counterproductive when Cuba's independence from the US has been the focal point of its revolution. Those who advocate it either intend that nothing change, or are ignorant of history.

In part, conditionality is due to political advisers who give priority to accommodating Senator Bob Menendez (D, NJ), no matter how damaging his behavior is to broader Administration agendas. Menendez cost the Administration days of politically damaging delay in passage of the omnibus appropriations bill, put an anonymous hold on key science appointments, frustrated announcement of non-tourist travel, threatened the OAS budget (prompting a misleading Clinton spin of the OAS decision to end Cuba's suspension), and reportedly opposes confirmation of fellow-Cuban American Carlos Pascual as ambassador to Mexico. (Pascual's sin is co-leading with Vicki Huddleston the broad based Brookings Institution project which produced the first creative road map for normalizing relations.)

In part, growing unease focuses on the role of the NSC's key staff member for Latin America, Dan Restrepo. It seems he either has been tasked to pacify old guard Cuban Americans, or has become their agent in the White House. His words have often and gratuitously poisoned the atmosphere, notably in background briefings given for the Cuban American travel announcement, the Summit of the Americas and the OAS Assembly in Honduras. Restrepo uses language about Cuba which is either tone deaf or deliberately provocative, undermining other efforts to overcome fifty years of suspicion and conflict.

Heading in a different direction has been Tom Shannon whose final months as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs confirmed professionalism and regional understanding obscured during his tenure under George Bush. Not least among his accomplishments was the appointment of Jonathan Farrar as head of the US Interests Section in Havana, bringing for the first time since Vicki Huddleston the potential of serious diplomacy on the ground.

A significant change under the aegis of Shannon and Farrar is that Cuban academics, artists and religious leaders are receiving visas again to come to the US. Farrar also brought to Cuba for the first time a non-political Community College scholarship program which is in the normal portfolio of US embassies. (An illustration of the different tone between Shannon and Restrepo on the OAS Assembly can be seen here.)

An important meeting between Cuba and the US was held in New York this week. The public focus was resumption of twice yearly migration talks ended for political reasons by the Bush administration in 2004. The topic is consequential (see excellent article by Nick Miroff here). However both countries had in mind a broader agenda. How far they got largely depended on resolution of the contradiction of mutual respect and conditionality.

When the President focuses personally on Cuba, as he did at the Summit of the Americas, the recognition of reality and openness to a new US role in the world that inspired his supporters, reflects favorably on this most emotionally loaded but yet most resolvable of problems.

--John McAuliff

Adapted from the July newsletter of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development which can be seen here.

Demonstration against Supreme Court inaction on the Cuban 5 at USINT in Havana

Two recent events have demonstrated that key leaders in Cuba and the US are determined to create a new more rational relationship where differences are accepted if not approved (as with other nations that have non-American values and systems of government).

At the same time, both countries contain powerful forces that are psychologically and politically committed to the status quo. Whether they are fearful of losing the current and potential power the present impasse affords them or of giving opportunities to still hostile adversaries, they must be patiently listened to and then ignored for relations to improve.

Most recently, the President of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, expressed profound disappointment that the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of the Cuban 5 (spies to us, national heroes to them) but made clear this would not derail efforts to improve bilateral relations.

in Havana, the head of Cuba's parliament said the Supreme Court's decision won't jeopardize negotiations with Washington, even though the Cuban government considers the denied appeal ``a great insult.''

Similarly US officials have confirmed that the case of alleged espionage by Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers will not short-circuit diplomatic progress, despite predictable exploitation of the incident by opponents of change.

''I'm surprised State is still pushing for a hasty reinstatement of the talks,'' Florida Sen. Mel Martinez said. ``There are legitimate concerns about the extent of the recent espionage uncovered by the FBI. What's the rush to conduct talks with the Cuban regime when we still don't have a full damage assessment of the regime's covert efforts?''

However, I must admit to personal frustration with the overcautious approach on both sides to available practical and substantive steps forward.

The US has liberalized considerably its policy of granting visas for Cubans to come here for academic, cultural and professional reasons but oddly still refuses to remove Bush era bureaucratic obstacles to similar trips by Americans to Cuba.

Cuba readily issues visas to Americans for tourism through travel agents and at airport counters but not for more meaningful “officialâ€Â encounters. (The latter visa is virtually indispensable for meetings with persons in the state sector, including professors, professional counterparts and government administrators.)

Cuba could also afford to be a bit more generous with exit visas, especially for students admitted to non-political US educational programs. (Hopefully when Congress with Presidential support ends all travel restrictions for Americans, Cuba will respond by terminating the requirement of a ‘white cardâ€Â for departing Cubans.)

Most amenable to influence by the American people is the Obama administration’s postponement of granting licenses for unrestricted travel for educational, religious, humanitarian, cultural, sports and other people-to-people visits.

It has been more than two months since the President reaped overwhelming domestic and international approval by ordering unlimited travel and remittances for Cuban Americans. Yet the implementation regulations have still not been issued by OFAC. Nor have we seen the educational travel that key foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough embraced on behalf of candidate Obama at the NAFSA conference in Washington a year ago, foreclosing summer and fall programs.

A growing number of Americans are voting with their feet and ignoring illegitimate and unenforceable travel restrictions. Pastors for Peace, the Venceremos Brigade and the US/Cuba Labor Exchange will return from Cuba in early August, having once again undertaken public civil disobedience for humanitarian or solidarity reasons. These are important symbolic actions, but are a drop in the bucket of unlicensed travel which is estimated to be around 40,000 persons a year.

The Obama administration finally needs to decide whether it or Senator Bob Menendez is in charge of Cuba policy. Menendez channels on Cuba the reactionary Republican Jesse Helms, rather than the progressive Democrat he is on other issues. He notoriously held up the supplemental appropriations bill for days, a politically costly tantrum that alienated Senate colleagues and the Administration, because of minor Cuba family and agricultural export provisions.

Menendez is also reported to have blocked educational and other non-tourist provisions from the announcement of family remittances and travel. His threat to cut US funding to the OAS pushed the Secretary of State into a potentially embarrassing misinterpretation of the OAS Cuba resolution. He held up confirmation of two key science advisers and apparently is against the appointment of Cuban American Carlos Pascual to be ambassador to Mexico. (Pascual’s sin was co-chairing a Brookings Institution project that proposed a creative road map for relations with Cuba.)

A certain amount of impatience is now deserved, especially from Obama supporters, who expected far more than they have gotten to date on change with Cuba.

--John McAuliff

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Action Resources

Tens of thousand of people have signed the Orbitz travel petition to the President and Congress. It takes less than a minute here

The Office of Public Engagement needs to receive messages on its web site from lots more of us that the President must allow non-tourist travel without further delay and support legislation to end all restrictions.

A travel flyer can be downloaded here for local printing and distribution.

Eduardo Verdugo, AP

"SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras, Jun 3 (IPS) - After heated debate, the 39th General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) decided Wednesday to lift its 47-year suspension of Cuba, without conditions...

Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas, one of the main architects of Wednesday´s resolution, said that "as of now, Cuba´s participation in the OAS will be reinstated by means of dialogue on Cuba´s request and in the framework of the democratic practices that govern the OAS."

"(A)s the host country for this assembly, we are pleased with the amends made to the island nation. We have begun to build a new history in our relations, of tolerance, respect, solidarity, the self-determination of nations and the right to organize ourselves," said Rodas. "

When Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon addressed the OAS Assembly on Wednesday afternoon after it had adopted by acclamation its historic resolution to end Cuba's suspension (text here), he received the longest and warmest applause for a government representative's comment, 30 seconds. That happened because his words were those of a statesman and a partner.

However, subsequent expressions by US officials threaten to undo his breakthrough in US-Latin American relations.

The OAS was faced with very different approaches going into the Assembly. The US was willing to see Cuba's 1962 suspension an ed but only on the condition that to resume participation Cuba be obligated to meet US goals for democracy and political prisoners. Virtually all other member countries simply wanted to let Cuba resume its active membership without creating new and unprecedented conditions.

The diplomatic compromise was to end completely the 1962 suspension and leave ambiguous what would happen if Cuba decided it wanted to come back.

Having watched on streaming video the extraordinary excitement and satisfaction of the Assembly delegations, I was startled by the official statement from the Secretary of State:

"I am pleased that everyone came to agree that Cuba cannot simply take its seat and that we must put Cuba’s participation to a determination down the road – if it ever chooses to seek reentry."

US media coverage also seemed to have missed the substance and spirit of what took place. The likely source was a telephone press briefing held on short notice by Shannon and National Security Council official Dan Restrepo.

Washington's new position seemed to be not only trying to put the best face on a compromise upsetting to Cuban American hardliners, but also to frame the decision in such a way as to make it less likely that Cuba would respond favorably. While that may make sense in the hermetic kingdom of the Beltway, it gave Havana an opportunity to celebrate the undoing of an historic wrong and take a pass at least initially on re-engagement, as Ricardo Alarcon quickly did.

In the briefing Restrepo goaded Cuba that the Assembly had made it a supplicant and spun a bizarre rewrite of history:

"The process begins with what is a difficult decision for a Cuban Government that has spent 40 years railing against an institution because of its defense of democracy and individual human rights. They would have to swallow that to ask to get into the organization."

Shannon took the same position in more diplomatic terms:

"the resolution makes very clear that the process by which Cuba must follow in order to reenter the OAS, requires first that Cuba request permission. Secondly, that it enter into a dialogue with the relevant organs of the OAS, and that that dialogue and the decision rendered by the OAS must be in accord with the practices, purposes, and principles of the OAS. And the resolution makes very clear that the fundamental instruments and documents in the OAS, like the Inter-American Democratic Charter, will be the guiding documents as the OAS engages with Cuba."

However their words are alien to the spirit of the Assembly as expressed in speeches after the vote of acclamation. Nor are their interpretations justified by the actual text as read by the chair of the Assembly, Foreign Minister of Honduras Patricia Rodas:

"the General Assembly... resolves

1) that resolution 6 adopted on January 31st 1962, at the 8th meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs which excluded the government of Cuba from its participation in the Inter-American system hereby ceases to have effect in the Organization of American States. (55 seconds of standing ovation)

2) that the participation of the Republic of Cuba in the OAS will be the result of a process of dialogue initiated at the request of the government of Cuba and in accordance with the practices and purposes and principles of the OAS" (15 seconds of applause)

The content of clause 1 clearly means that Cuba is no longer suspended. Logically, since it never lost its membership, it is now legally entitled to resume it. The content of clause 2 simply describes the mechanics of how that will happen. Cuba first has to decide it wants to resume its seat and say so, i.e. no one is forcing it to reenter the organization. The process of actually retaking its seat will then be discussed. A dialogue is not an application. No further decision or vote is mentioned. Being in accord with "practices and purposes and principles" is not a list of preconditions.

The US seems to be relying on this paragraph in the preamble,

"The General Assembly, recognizing the shared interest in the full participation of all the member states, guided by the purposes and principles of the OAS, embodied in the Charter of the organization and its other fundamental instruments related to security, democracy, self-determination, non-intervention, human rights and development"

Note that language does not set conditions. It makes "full participation" the primary goal. The list of "purposes and principles" are characterized as "guides", i.e. values. Similarly, security, self-determination and non-intervention could be guides advanced by Cuba and the rest of the membership of the OAS against the US embargo and prolonged strategy of regime change. Cuba's less than ideal approach to democracy and human rights would not be inherently disqualifying unless the US was similarly judged in reference to the other guides.

Restrepo waxed self-righteous

"for Cuba to return to the organization, the organization has to agree that Cuba is abiding by the same rules that everybody else is abiding by".

Cuba's practice of harsh imprisonment without sufficient objective legal due process is hardly unique on an island that includes the Guantanamo prison camp. And if the US can choose which parts to abide by of even the primary constitutional Charter, Cuba certainly has the right to do the same with the content of a secondary instrument, the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

The point is not to make a lawyer's argument for Cuba's eligibility. This is a political decision. Every other member of the OAS wants to return to the status quo before the despised 1962 suspension, to bring Cuba back in as a full functioning member without posing political obstacles which they know it will refuse. The US tried to use OAS participation as one more vehicle for pressuring Cuba to make changes. Many other countries favor those same changes and have no problem with their inclusion as goals in principle, but no one else agrees to imposing them, knowing that is a tired and ineffective strategy.

Washington ducked the bullet of either facing a vote, where it would have been completely isolated, or of alienating the Hemisphere by blocking a consensus. However, underlying sentiments remain the same. If and when Cuba decides it wants to take its legitimate seat at the OAS, there is no reason to believe Washington will be able to force or win a vote to stop it. Note that Minister Rodas spoke of, "the framework of the democratic practices that govern the OAS" not the domestic political systems of its members.

Bloomberg.com offered an unusual regional insight that may be predictive:

Cuba will rejoin the Organization of American States after “a lot of emotionâ€Â passes, said Ruben Blades, tourism minister in Panama, a member of the Washington- based group.

“There is a lot of emotion right now in the world,â€Â Blades, also a six-time Grammy Award winning singer, said in an interview in New York. “So it’s a matter of processing. Eventually we will see a different scenario in Cuba as we have seen everywhere else.â€Â

CNN reported that Miami's extremist wing was not appeased by the US spin of the OAS compromise:

"Today we witnessed an example of the Obama administration's absolute diplomatic incompetence and its unrestricted appeasement of the enemies of the United States," Cuban-American U.S. Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Florida, and Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Florida, said in a joint statement. "The OAS is a putrid embarrassment."

Dan Erickson of the Inter-American Dialogue summed up the situation well for the Guardian,

"The vote sends a powerful signal to the Obama administration that the path of moderate, incremental change in US policy towards Cuba is depleting America's political capital in the region at an alarming rate."

--John McAuliff

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Articles giving a non-US spin to the OAS, the text of the OAS resolution and the US draft, the text of Clinton, Shannon and Restrepo statements are posted here

To see streaming videos of the plenary session that dealt with the Cuba resolution, go here or here (This is the original feed, so most of the speeches are in Spanish. On request to director@ffrd.org, I can send a download of part of the English feed which included translations.}

The lobbyist in Washington for Cuban American hard liners, Mauricio Claver-Carone, comes to a similar conclusion that the OAS resolution effectively allows Cuba to resume membership whenever it wishes.