Legal Commentary

President Obama's Cuba Initiative

By Big Tent Democrat

The fact sheet is here. The approach is shrewd. It emphasizes the democracy promotion goal of the policy change and discusses what Cuba is - an authoritarian regime. At the same time, it is important to not overestimate what it is, as Steve Benen seems to:

The hardline restrictions imposed by the Bush administration, which only followed in the footsteps of restrictions imposed by every other modern president . . .

This is simply incorrect. The freest time for US-Cuba relations actually occurred during the Carter Administration. This policy does not match Carter's Cuba policy. It is more like Bill Clinton's. More . . .

In a related story I missed from a few days ago, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) announced its support for a new approach to Cuba:

The leading organization for Cuban exiles here is calling on the White House to expand relations with Cuba’s government, and funnel much more public and private American money to the Cuban people. A 14-page proposal from the group, the Cuban American National Foundation, lays out what the document calls “a break from the past” that would “chart a new direction for U.S.-Cuba policy.”

It is the basis of an ongoing discussion with the Obama administration, White House and foundation officials said, and it amounts to the group’s most significant rejection of a national approach to Cuba that it helped shape and that has been defined by hostility and limited contact with the island.

. . . In a reversal from the group’s founding principles, he said American policy should focus not on sanctions but on proactive policies that direct resources to the island.

. . . Robert Pastor, a professor of international relations at American University, said the document was striking for both its new ideas and its repudiation of policies that the group once favored. “It basically says previous efforts have failed — the embargo didn’t work,” said Mr. Pastor, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser for Latin America. “That, from the Cuban American National Foundation, is a very significant statement.”

I knew the main founder and most prominent member of the CANF, the late Jorge Mas Canosa, and discussed these very issues with him and other parts of the CANF membership in the mid-1990s.

As today, the CANF and Cuban-Americans were reviled openly in progressive circles. Mas Canosa himself won a libel suit against The New Republic when Ann Louise Bardach penned an article labelling him as a "gangster" and "mafioso."

Unfortunately, instead of arguing in good faith and without personal invective, too many progressives insist on treating Fidel Castro as a paragon and those who oppose him as pariahs. It is a ridiculous approach, as stupid as the embargo itself. Luckily, the Obama Administration has rejected the strident approach and is emphasizing its commitment to promoting democracy and human rights in Cuba. It is the right way to build consensus towards the lifting of the embargo and taking more proactive step to promoting democracy in Cuba.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 13, 2009 (boomark / email).