America's Cuba Policy is the "Edsel" of the US Foreign Policy Portfolio
Latin America policy uber diva Julia Sweig chaired a news-making gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington yesterday morning. It was excellent, and the CFR has audio of the entire event here.
In response to a question I posed to Sweig's panel, Obama administration Summit of the Americas point man Jeffrey Davidow fell back on droopy anachronisms while Foreign Policy magazine blogger and best-selling writer and geostrategic interpreter David Rothkopf hit the ball out of the park with his statement:
"US-Cuba policy is the Edsel of American foreign policy."
The full line-up on Sweig's panel included Jeffrey Davidow, White House Adviser for the Summit of the Americas and former US Ambassador to Mexico; Luis Alberto Moreno, President of the Inter-American Development Bank; and David J. Rothkopf, President and CEO, Garten Rothkopf and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Summit of the Americas, which President Obama is attending, will convene in Trinidad & Tobago from April 17-19.
After Davidow successfully avoided mentioning the word "Cuba" in his primary remarks on the Obama administration's game plan for the Summit of the Americas, the former US Ambassador to Mexico finally offered in his penultimate exhale an acknowledgement that "Cuba might come up" in the meeting.
And then he finished stating that other "flamboyant personalities may 'flambay'" -- a clear nod to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
When I had a chance to pose a question, I pressed Davidow pretty hard on what he tried to avoid.
The exchange between Ambassador Davidow, David Rothkopf, and myself follows below.
What is interesting and disconcerting is that Barack Obama's point guy on this upcoming Summit gave the unreconstructed, neoconservative-friendly, ideologically vapid, 'unchastened by five decades of embargo failure' answer to my question on Cuba.
Has Obama read the brief that his people are preparing for him on Cuba?
Davidow embraced one of the worst single editorials I have read in years in the Washington Post titled "Coddling Cuba."
And Rothkopf did his part to say that on US-Cuba policy, the American position has no clothes -- and has become completely illegitimate in the eyes of the world and undermines America's own, parochial national interests.
Here is the exchange in full between Sweig, Davidow, Rothkopf, and myself:
Council on Foreign Relations - Washington, DC
April 9, 2009Speakers:
Jeffrey Davidow, White House Adviser for the Summit of the Americas
Luis Alberto Moreno, President, Inter-American Development Bank
David J. Rothkopf, President and CEO, Garten RothkopfPresider:
Julia E. Sweig, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign RelationsPartial Transcript of Q&A Exchange
STEVE CLEMONS, Director, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation and Publisher, The Washington Note
I would like to just start with what David Rothkopf said about the Cuban embargo, "the beginning of the end" and ask Ambassador Davidow if you would agree with David's perspective on that, or perhaps his assertion.
It's very odd right now when one looks at Senator Richard Lugar and his statements on Cuba that seem to be running politically left of the President. Brent Scowcroft has said recently that Cuba makes no sense at all as a foreign policy problem. Russia's lack of patronage of Cuba has shown that we can't starve Cuba.
So, part of the question is if Barack Obama is the change agent he said, is Cuba more than Cuba? Is it a place where the steps you take there are so symbolic that they can have echo effects geostrategically on other parts of the world?
Or are we leaving this in the same arena where Senator Martinez and others would like to have it which is we are going to create opportunities for a class of ethnic Americans but not look at the broader geostrategic equation?
JULIA SWEIG, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Ambassador Davidow? It's the "four letter word" - not Peru - that you are asked to address now.
AMBASSADOR JEFFREY DAVIDOW, White House Adviser for the Summit of the Americas
I will try to answer that question. . .
JULIA SWEIG, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign Relations
And other panelists can chime in . . .
AMBASSADOR JEFFREY DAVIDOW
Yes, why don't they!
Look it's obviously a highly contentious issue. From my perspective, a few points to make.
From my perspective, I think it would be unfortunate to lose the opportunity for this hemisphere, at the beginning of the Obama administration, to set down some guidelines and make some progress jointly by getting distracted by the Cuban issue.
Cuba is not an issue for discussion at the Summit if one reads the Summit declaration and the documents on all the past year of negotiation. However, having said that, and given what we are reading in the press, it is probable that it will come up in some way.
The one point that I would respond to in Steve's question specifically is, "Is Cuba something larger than itself?" and the answer is 'yes, it is'.
And I think that whatever the reasons have been in the 1960s for initiation of elements of our Cuban policy, the fact is in today's Hemisphere, Cuba is the odd man out.
Keep in mind that this meeting in Trinidad is a meeting of 34 democratic states.
If we had been talking about a meeting of the hemisphere as little as twenty years ago, it would have been cast in a different light.
There has been a remarkable historical transformation in this hemisphere, and a laudable one, toward democratically elected governments.
We may have difficulty with some of the governments that have been democratically elected, of course, but this Summit is a reunion of countries and presidents, every one of which has been elected by their populations.
There is not one government represented at this Summit whose population would willingly accept the kind of restrictions on their civil, political and human rights that are commonplace in Cuba - and that remain commonplace.
So, I think as we talk about Cuba and talk about how we as a government deal with it and so forth, let's keep in mind that it is something larger than itself, it is in a way a memory of that which existed in the past and a caution of what may exist in the future unless we are totally committed to the question of democracy, human rights and representation of people.
And lest you think, and I'm sure some of you do, that I am some sort of ideologue on this, take a look at the lead editorial in today's Washington Post. Maybe you think they are a bunch of ideologues as well, but I think they say it much better than I do.
So, we have been struggling with Cuba as a nation for close to half a century and there is a real focus on what we should be doing, but to answer the question, it is an important place beyond a small island 90 miles off our shore
DAVID J. ROTHKOPF, President and CEO, Garten Rothkopf
If I may make a couple of brief comments on this- and I am unconstrained by affiliation with the United States government right now - so perhaps they will be in a slightly different direction.
The editorial in today's Washington Post was absurd.
The position of the Florida contingent on this is Paleolithic.
The policy is indefensible on any grounds,
The reality is that Cuba may be special, but you have to ask yourself why it's therefore easier to travel to or do business with the Stalinist, nuclear weapon-toting North Koreans, or whether it's more comfortable for us to be totally economically integrated with the Saudi royal family and their depredations, or if we are concerned about human rights, why are we so integrated with and why are we the sole supporter of a government in Afghanistan that has just made rape in marriage legal and denies women the right to go outside without the approval of their husbands?
So this notion that some how democracy alone is the only criteria that we should use in defining the nature of relationship doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and the reality is that only one country that has successfully been isolated by this fifty year embargo, and that is the United States of America.
Our [US-Cuba] policy dates back to the Edsel.
It is the Edsel of American foreign policy.
[END]
David Rothkopf is absolutely right.
Barack Obama has given few indications thus far that he is willing to move a five decade failed relationship forward in a meaningful sense -- with the single exception that he may ironically codify "relaxation" for a class of ethnic Americans in a way that crudely discriminates against all other Americans.
We did not open Vietnam by relaxing travel and remittances for Vietnamese-Americans.
And Obama's team -- for all of the ballyhoo about democracy promotion -- is promoting a policy of the United States government that restricts the American right of free travel anywhere.
I thought that we lived in a real democracy -- and that it was supposed to be Communist governments -- not democracies -- that restricted the travel rights of their citizens.
President Obama is a busy man, but he better take a look at the brief that his team is preparing for him -- otherwise he'll learn too late that he's driving "an Edsel" to the Summit of the Americas.
-- Steve Clemons directs the foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation and publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
Moving Cuba Out of America's "Domestic Policy Box"
Seven U.S. Congressmen are in Havana and met with Cuban President Raul Castro among other leading Cuban politicians.
What I found most interesting in the Associated Press report on their trip was a comment made by Representative Mel Watt about something he had read of Fidel Castro's.
From the AP article:
Lawmakers in both houses of the U.S. Congress have proposed a measure that would prohibit the president from barring Americans from traveling to Cuba except in extreme cases, effectively lifting a travel ban that is a key component of the embargo.
[Barbara] Lee has said that many of the representatives, who arrived in Cuba on Friday and are scheduled to leave Tuesday, support the travel legislation.
Democratic Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina said Monday that Fidel Castro's column made it "clear that both countries can exist without either dialogue or adversity to each other."
"But wouldn't it be so wonderful," he added, "if we struck a dialogue and found the things that were mutually advantageous and mutually of interest to our two countries and stopped the historical divisions that have separated us (though we are) so close geographically?"
This reminds me of General Brent Scowcroft's comment to me some time ago in a short interview he gave me at the time I was helping to organize a book on US foreign policy by Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius.
Scowcroft said:
My answer on Cuba is Cuba is not a foreign policy question.
Cuba is a domestic issue.
In foreign policy, the embargo makes no sense.
It doesn't do anything.
It's quite clear we can not starve Cuba to death.
We learned that when the Soviet stopped subsidizing Cuba and they didn't collapse.
It's a domestic issue.
I think it's time to realize that we need to move Cuba out of the domestic political box back into the geostrategic context where it belongs.
-- Steve Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
CUBA: Big Changes in Castro's Guard
Something big is up in Havana. So big that some are saying that Fidel Castro has finally moved on to the next world -- though I don't believe this to be the case.
Others are saying that they saw Fidel out in public today on an odd shuffling, walk about, flanked by well armed security guards -- and a trailing Mercedes.
What has happened is that Raul Castro, now President of Cuba, has sacked his brother's closest followers and advisers in government.
Both Vice President Carlos Lage and Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque have been given pink slips. These were Fidel's most obvious heir apparents and his chief ideological spear carriers in the next generation of Cuban political leadership.
This is one of those historical pivot points in normally opaque (often Communist) regimes that will be remembered for generations.
Raul Castro seems fully in control now -- and he's done with ideology.
Raul not only demands pragmatism from his team, he wants a government that "works" and which can function with greater efficiency than the past. This is particularly the case given the grim reality that the global economic crisis is hitting Cuba hard -- as the price of oil has made Venezuela's patronage less robust and global tourism to and investment in Cuba have both taken significant hits in recent months.
Ideology is on feeble legs throughout Cuba despite Senator Bob Menendez's anachronistic screed on the floor of the Senate this afternoon about Cuba's governing villains. Menendez today seemed to be pining for the enemies of the past, so the warped politics of anti-Cuba, anti-Castro compulsive obsessiveness could live another day.
But Menendez is behind the times and has been complicit in undermining American national interests with Cuba for far too long -- and he and others in Cuba who have strangled opportunity for a new course in US-Cuba relations should pay a political price for for their destructive intransigence. Menendez should go check in with his friends at the formerly right wing Cuban American National Foundation who for the most part think that pols like Menendez, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Diaz-Balart brothers in Congress, and their Democratic Party ally Debbie Wassmerman Schulz went way too far in strangling Cuban-American family emergency travel and financial remittances.
We are at one of those significant punctuation points in Cuban history.
We may be at a real moment of opportunity in US-Cuba relations if Obama's team of foreign policy hands can find the guts and smarts to realize that it was wrong during the Bush administration for a Cold War with Cuba to actually get colder over the last ten years -- and to realize that incrementalism only works in times of historical continuity.
As Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Baker, David Abshire, Paul Volcker, Thomas Pickering, George Soros, Bill Joy, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz, Francis Fukuyama, and many others have said -- this is a time of significant "historical discontinuity."
Change is needed and is a smarter, better choice than incrementalism and inertia.
Let's not see a Foreign Affairs article written this next year titled "Who Lost Cuba?"
Cuba matters a great deal -- far beyond its 11 million people and beyond even Latin America. Cuba is the ripest fruit for picking on America's tree of foreign policy options.
Change there can happen at extremely low cost to the United States. And America's approach will telegraph much about exactly what kind of America Barack Obama is trying to usher forth in this next phase of restoring U.S. benign moral, economic and political prestige. . .and power.
-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
Lugar Calls for a "Return to Realism" on Cuba
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar, a long time realist and serious strategic thinker about America's national security challenges, has just popped the bubble of those who have used Cuba for decades in their ineffective ideological crusades.
Lugar's team is releasing on Monday a new 'committee print' titled "CHANGING CUBA POLICY -- IN THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL INTEREST." (pdf here)
For US-Cuba policy junkies, the report is pretty breathtaking in its indictment of decades of American failure in trying to adjust Cuba's national government's behavior via sanctions and an embargo.
In his opening missive in the document, Senator Lugar states:
Economic sanctions are a legitimate tool of U.S. foreign policy, and they have sometimes achieved their aims, as in the case of apartheid South Africa.
After 47 years, however, the unilateral embargo on Cuba has failed to achieve its stated purpose of "bringing democracy to the Cuban people," while it may have been used as a foil by the regime to demand further sacrifices from Cuba's impoverished population.
The current U.S. policy has many passionate defenders, and their criticism of the Castro regime is justified. Nevertheless, we must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.
This report is important because it builds on questions that Richard Lugar asked in writing of Hillary Clinton during her Senate confirmation hearings. I noted then that buried in the many questions submitted by Lugar was an implied message to the administration that he would not accept any more illusions that the status quo in the relationship was working.
In response, Hillary Clinton promised a full administration review of US-Cuba policy which Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Tom Shannon is leading now. What is also interesting is that someone close to Shannon and those potentially contributing to this policy review told me it would be important for the administration "to hear from Congress."
Lugar has now provided much ammunition in his powerful commentary on the need for US-Cuba policy to change, using what was essentially a trip report by Senate Foreign Relations Committee senior staff member Carl Meacham as a vehicle to convey his views. Meacham traveled to Cuba as part of a staff delegation in January 2009, organized by the non-partisan Lexington Institute.
Key findings of the report include that the Cuban regime has become fully institutionalized; positive developments are occurring in Cuba but should not be mistaken as structural reform; that popular dissatisfaction with Cuba's economic situation is the regime's vulnerability; and the regime appears to be open to some bilateral dialogue and cooperation.
The report endorses the rather minimal steps already promised by Obama on relaxing restrictions on "Cuban-American" travel and financial remittances to family members -- but then pushes forward on many other fronts with a sopisticated and methodical review of other steps the administration should consider, most of which are possible even within the confines of the Congressionally-imposed embargo.
This is a brilliant piece of policy and political craftsmanship.
I call it the "slippery slope strategy" in which Lugar is shining a big spotlight on the inadequacy and failure of US-Cuba policy that for too long has been held in place by domestic constituencies who were working at odds with the American national interest. Lugar is pushing buttons and nudging Obama's team into put itself forward constructively -- and with these steps, it becomes easier to see the broader embargo as a serious anachronism and a mistake that needs remedy.
US-Cuba policy is the only place in the world where the nearly extinct Cold War actually got colder -- and it's time this relationship thawed.
In her piece on this not yet released report today, Washington Post national security correspondent Karen DeYoung finishes with:
In his letter to senators, Lugar noted that Obama's election and the replacement of President Fidel Castro with his brother Raúl have generated debate important to U.S. security interests, "broader U.S.-Latin-American relations, and global perceptions of U.S. foreign policy."
"Despite uncertainty about Cuba's mid-term political future," Lugar wrote, "it is clear that the recent leadership changes have created an opportunity for the United States to reevaluate a complex relationship marked by misunderstanding, suspicion, and open hostility."
Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel once told me at a cocktail party that we were working together to make "realism the new liberal ideology."
It has been working, and Richard Lugar has just done his team on the Minority side -- as well as his colleagues Committee Chairman John Kerry and Senator Christopher Dodd, who has long set the "gold standard" in US-Cuba policy legislation and proposals -- a great favor by pushing this report into our national debate.
It's time that we stopped letting other national leaders, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, colonize the affections and interests of Cuban citizens who are actually interested -- like the rest of the world -- in whether Obama has the guts and vision to generate some meaningful strategic shifts for the United States.
Cuba is the lowest hanging ripe fruit on America's tree of foreign policy options. Change is easy there -- and overdue.
-- Steve Clemons
Ed. Note: Photo above on the right side is of former Senator Birch Bayh, Senator Richard Lugar, New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Director Steve Clemons, and Washington College C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience Director Adam Goodheart at a November 12, 2007 Senatorial Colloquy at Washington College. The top photo of Senator Lugar was also taken at the same Washington College Senate Colloquy.
America's Wrong-Headedness on Cuba
When I find myself nodding in agreement with about 75% of what Jorge Mas Santos, the Chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, is saying in a critique of George W. Bush's wrong-headed US-Cuba policy, I know the world is changing and sense that South Florida politics may be undergoing a sea change.
I don't agree with Mas' views on regime change in Cuba, but this essay blasts John McCain for status quo-ism and embraces Obama's "flexibility" in thinking through how to turn away from failed policies.
And Sarah Stephens, Director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, has an outstanding piece out today on the human costs of the anachronistic, failed, but painful embargo which most of the world strongly criticizes.
Here is a piece of her Huffington Post essay:
UN Members are now digesting a report compiled by the Secretary-General that measures the impact of our sanctions in chilling detail.
The embargo hurts Cuba's health care system. Last year, it forced Cuban children with heart conditions to wait for needed operations because a US-based firm, Boston Scientific, has refused - as it must, under U.S. law - to sell needed devices to Cuba's William Soler Pediatric Hospital. It prevented the purchase of spare parts for diagnostic equipment used in cancer detection, and delayed the delivery of 3 million syringes for vaccinations against communicable diseases. It forced Cuban medical authorities to buy antiretroviral drugs from secondary suppliers in grey markets, at significantly higher prices - straining an already thin public health budget.
The embargo also takes food off the table in Cuban homes, by blocking the government's access to imported seeds, fertilizers, and spare parts for farm machinery, and by imposing exotic payment rules that add tens of millions of dollars to its bill for importing food from overseas.
In other words, the sanctions we aim at Cuba's government actually hit and hurt the health and diet of the Cuban people instead.
But the embargo is more than a bilateral matter between Cuba's government and ours. US law reaches companies and countries across the globe in an effort to bend their policy to our will, rallying the rest of the world to Cuba's side
Brazil calls our policy a violation of international law. Mexico condemns the embargo as an abandonment of diplomacy. Colombia, our closest ally in the region, says of the US embargo "this kind of action should stop." The European Union, now negotiating directly with Cuba on human rights, objects to the extra-territorial reach of our sanctions. China calls on us to negotiate our differences directly with Cuba. Russia - without a trace of irony - refers to the embargo as "a remnant of the cold war."
It is no wonder that last year's sanctions vote went against America 184-4. Only Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands stood with us. Every one of our European allies, Canada, Japan and Australia, and nearly all of Latin America (save El Salvador, which was absent) deserted us. It will happen again this year. Already, close to one-hundred fifty countries filed statements with the Secretary General for this year's debate that bear witness to our isolation.
The funny thing about Israel voting with us on the embargo is that Israeli interests are managing citrus groves in Cuba.
-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
The View of a Hurricane From Your Window (or Boat)
This is what Hurricane Ike looks like in Baracoa, Eastern Cuba. This pic was sent in by my friend and Havana Note co-editor Gail Reed, who is Director of MEDICC.
For those interested in helping out victims in need in Cuba -- who took a direct hit from Hurricane Gustav a few days before Ike hit -- check out this informative letter from Sarah Stephens at the Center for Democracy in the Americas.
In her informative, compelling letter, Stephens points to seven places that can help get aid to Cubans in need:
Natural disasters and humanitarian relief are always good opportunities to change the game on political situations that make no sense -- like the embargo or even the Cuban resistance to the terms of offered American government aid.
But even this disaster is a missed opportunity for the governments involved which makes it even more important for others who care to help.
-- Steve Clemons
Council on Foreign Relations Group Calls For END to Cuba Embargo
The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a zinger report on Latin America. It's just fantastic, and I have to admit that I rarely find myself doing jumping jacks and running around my block in Dupont Circle in Washington after reading a CFR Task Force report. But I am.
I think that the 96-page document is stacked full of sensible thinking and proposals that on each and every page fundamentally reject the kind of self-destructive pugnacious nationalism that former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms and his chief acolyte John Bolton have helped institutionalize.
It's just so good. The report is titled U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality and can be downloaded as a pdf here.
I fear that CFR President and former Bush Administration senior foreign policy official Richard Haass is going to be really uncomfortable with the effusive enthusiasm that I have for the strategic intelligence of this Task Force's work, but this is the kind of thinking we need across the entire geostrategic map -- particularly on the Middle East.
The Cuba proposals are a case in point -- and in the words of one person close to the effort, the group decided to go for "the full Monty" in advocating a complete break with current, failed embargo policy of the U.S.
The Task Force chaired by former Clinton Administration US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and former four-star Army General James T. Hill endorsed the following changes to US-Cuba policy:
1. Permit freer travel to and facilitate trade with Cuba. The White House should repeal the 2004 restrictions placed on Cuban-American family travel and
remittances.2. Reinstate and liberalize the thirteen categories of licensed people-to-people "purposeful travel" for other Americans, instituted by the Clinton administration in preparation for the 1998 Papal Visit to Havana.
3. Hold talks on issues of mutual concern to both parties, such as migration, human smuggling, drug trafficking, public health, the future of the Guantanamo naval base, and on environmentally sustainable resource management, especially as Cuba, with a number of foreign oil companies, begins deep water exploration for potentially significant reserves.
4. Work more effectively with partners in the western hemisphere and in Europe to press Cuba on its human rights record and for more democratic reform.
5. Mindful of the last one hundred years of U.S.-Cuba relations, assure Cubans on the island that the United States will pursue a respectful arm's-length relationship with a democratic Cuba.
6. Repeal the 1996 Helms-Burton law, which removed most of the executive branch's authority to eliminate economic sanctions. While moving to repeal the law, the U.S. Congress should pass legislative measures, as it has with agricultural sales, designed to liberalize trade with and travel to Cuba, while supporting opportunities to strengthen democratic institutions there.
This report throughout impresses me -- and I am only bummed that I wasn't a member of this particular CFR group, as others I have participated in haven't come anywhere near the clarity and potential impact of this.
Something is changing in Washington, and it could be for the better. One just doesn't see papers of this sort too frequently emanating from institutions populated by many who know that they may face Senate confirmation hearings in the future.
The membership roster of the CFR Study Group on Latin America included former US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and General James T. Hill as mentioned but also Inter-American Dialogue President Peter Hakim, futurist and strategist (and New America Foundation board member) Francis Fukuyama, National Security Network czar Rand Beers, AOL founder James Kimsey, former Republican Congressman and German Marshall Fund Senior Fellow Jim Kolbe, author and strategist David Rothkopf, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Julia Sweig, among others. Special kudos to Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Shannon O'Neil who directed the independent task force.
-- Steve Clemons
Brent Scowcroft: US-Cuba Embargo Makes No Sense
During a taping session for a new book I am involved with titled America and the World featuring the Washington Post's David Ignatius interviewing former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, I asked Brent Scowcroft whether he thought the US embargo of Cuba made any sense.
His answer was blunt. He said in foreign policy terms, "no" and implied that US-Cuba policy was a domestic issue, somewhat disdainfully in my view.
Watch the tape above, but this is what Brent Scowcroft said:
My answer on Cuba is Cuba is not a foreign policy question.
Cuba is a domestic issue.
In foreign policy, the embargo makes no sense.
It doesn't do anything.
It's quite clear we can not starve Cuba to death.
We learned that when the Soviet stopped subsidizing Cuba and they didn't collapse.
It's a domestic issue.
-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
Call a Doctor! Florida has Fidel-o-phobia
Even in retirement, Fidel Castro exerts outsized influence over our country’s political life. Even now, he may affect the access Floridians have to health care.
How can this be? To teach Castro a lesson, a state legislator is fighting to ban American doctors, educated in Cuba, from practicing medicine in Florida, and already a committee has acted to move this proposal forward.
This story, about a small and largely symbolic issue, speaks volumes about how Fidel-o-phobia can cause even our most well-meaning public officials to do the strangest and most self-defeating things.
Nearly a decade ago, President Castro founded the Latin American School of Medicine, also called “ELAM,†where foreign students are given a medical education for free. They come largely from developing countries’ poor and indigenous communities where medical care is desperately needed, and they are encouraged to return to those communities to practice. ELAM is a classic example of Cuba’s application of soft-power in its international diplomacy.
Over a hundred American studentsâ€â€mainly from minority communities-- are now enrolled there. Who are these students? They are whip smart, highly motivated kids, desperate to become physicians, yet unable to afford a medical education in the United States, or unwilling to shoulder the $200,000 debt that now hits the average US medical student the day after graduation.
So, they go to Cuba, learn Spanish (coming home bilingual), take bridging courses in sciences if necessary and spend six years being trained as physicians in Cuba alongside students from 28 other countries. After which, the hope is, they will return to the United States and practice medicine in some of the thousands of our country’s under-served communities.
Is a Cuban medical education any good? According to experts we’ve consulted, the answer is yes. Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan, a former U.S. Assistant Surgeon General, says Cuban medical education is well-respected and that Cuba’s achievement in scaling up physician training is an important example for other countries. The first US graduate has already passed his medical boards and is in his first year of residency in New York City. With the latest class, a total of 17 will have graduated by this summer.
Enter Rep. Eddy Gonzalez.
His bill, HB 685, which was passed by the Healthcare Council, and will now go to a floor vote, will strictly prohibit any of these American medical students currently enrolled at ELAM from practicing medicine in Florida.
According to the Federation of State Medical Boards, this would make Florida the first state in the nation to ban all physicians who graduated from any school in a particular country.
Even though Rep. Gonzalez has called facets of Cuba’s health care system "state of the art," he says that students educated in Cuba, whose government he despises, “do not possess the basic judgment and character required for the ethical practice of medicine in Florida."
Rep. Gonzalez vastly underestimates the idealism and the devotion to medicine possessed by these doctors, and nothing in his legislation will change the Cuban system. What it will do is stop Florida from getting young, talented physicians to practice where they are surely needed.
Dr. Karl Altenburger, president of the Florida Medical Association, calls the state’s doctor shortage severe. He’s said that young doctors don’t want to come to Florida to practice; the state lacks internships, residency programs, and fellowships. The average age of doctors in Florida is 51 and a quarter of the state’s physicians are over 60.
Florida, the fourth most populous state, is ranked 20th in its number of active physicians by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Tad Fisher, executive Vice President of the Florida Academy of Family Physicians, said that Florida needs an additional 12,000 primary care physicians by 2020 to meet its health care needs.
And there are plenty of underserved people in Gonzalez’s home district: the Health Council of South Florida’s Miami-Dade County’s 2007 Community Health Report Card gave “access to health care†a pretty scary “Fâ€Â.
Florida acknowledges these problems and advertises on the internet to recruit physicians to treat patients in the state who don’t have adequate access to doctors. It even offers waivers to attract foreign-born, foreign educated physicians to serve. But American students educated in Cuba? They need not apply.
When Floridians come down with Fidel-o-phobia, they torment each other (and the rest of us) just to show Castro up. More often than not, we end up with silly ideas like this which hurt us, not him. Now that Fidel’s retired, we should stop dancing at the end of his string, look squarely at our own interests, and decide for ourselves the right way to pursue our nation’s ideals.
-- Sarah Stephens and Gail Reed
Gail Reed M.S., is a journalist who serves as International Director of Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC). Sarah Stephens is Director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas.
ON DAY ONE: Open Travel to Cuba
Some thoughts on what the next American president should do "On Day One":
This is part of a fascinating public policy outreach project organized by the Better World Campaign. There are lots of other offerings as well. . .
-- Steve Clemons