Center for International Policy

As printed in
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 29, 2002

In reaching out to Cuba, Carter can bring reform

By Wayne Smith

The usual cast of characters -- the hard-line exiles and their ultraconservative allies -- will of course criticize former President Carter for going to Cuba. They are opposed to any kind of dialogue or engagement with Cuba so long as Fidel Castro leads that island nation.

But I, for one, am very glad that Carter is going. His opening to Cuba back in the late 1970s produced more positive change than anything else before or since. Thousands of political prisoners were released.

Cuban-Americans were for the first time allowed to return to visit their families. Today, something like 125,000 a year go back. And some degree of normal communications between the two countries began in 1977, to the great benefit of the Cuban people.

From the thousands of political prisoners in the 1970s, there are now only some 250 left in Cuba. And how many have been released as the result of anything the Bush administration has done? Exactly none.

I would expect no miracles from the Carter trip. He is certainly not going as the representative of the Bush administration, which seems utterly determined not only to maintain an inflexible hard line toward Cuba but also to tighten it even further.

But in terms of encouraging the Cuban government in the direction of reforms, Carter is likely to accomplish more through dialogue than the Bush administration has done through its totally obsolete and counterproductive efforts to isolate and choke the economy through an absurd embargo -- an embargo that hasn't worked in more than 40 years and certainly won't work now. It won't be hard to accomplish more, for the Bush administration has accomplished absolutely nothing.

Some of Carter's critics have said it was Carter's attempt at detente with Castro that encouraged Castro to send troops to Africa in the 1970s -- their suggestion obviously being that efforts to treat Castro reasonably only encourage aggressive responses on his part.

The problem with this reasoning is that Cuba started sending troops to Africa in 1975, two years before Carter took office. If anyone's policies led to the initial Cuban troop interventions in Africa, it was those of Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford, not Carter.

As has now been thoroughly documented in a book by Piero Gleijeses of Johns Hopkins University, those two gentlemen encouraged the racist South African regime to intervene in the Angolan civil war.

That is what drew the Cuban response. Carter was in effect left to deal with the mess initiated by Ford and Kissinger.

There are those who say Carter's visit will demoralize Cuban dissidents. On the contrary, most agree with Carter, for while calling for reforms on the island and greater respect for civil liberties, most of them oppose efforts to isolate Cuba. As Elizardo Sanchez, Cuba's leading human rights activist, has often put it, "Your embargo is an impediment to the kind of change we want to see here."

When I was in Cuba recently with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), we met with four Cuban dissidents representing a coalition called Todos Unidos (All United). They all called for a lifting of the embargo and an end to the travel ban. And all, by the way, expressed delight over the Carter visit.

Some of Carter's critics complain that he is going to Cuba just as "Castro is sick and losing his grip." In other words they are suggesting, Carter's trip may bolster a man who otherwise would fall or die within months.

But one finds that kind of thinking only among the fanatically anti-Castro exiles in Miami and among those who have never traveled to Cuba and never met Castro.

A democrat he isn't, but he certainly isn't on the ropes. Back in the summer, he fainted about two hours into a speech given under a hot sun. But who wouldn't have?

I have had occasion to see Castro in action several times over the past two years, and, while of course a heart attack can take anyone without warning, I can only say that he seems to be in remarkably good health for a man his age.

Nor are there any signs of splits in the ranks or dissension that might spell real political trouble for him. No, he is by no means losing his grip.

Cuba is changing. It is moving slowly toward a more mixed economy and even more slowly toward a more open society.

Castro needs to accelerate the pace, to be sure, even though his heart may not be in it. The point is that engagement is more likely to encourage Cuba in the direction of reforms than unrelenting confrontation. Indeed, the latter, as Cuban dissident Elizardo Sanchez says, impedes the process.

For so long as the United States is threatening Cuba and trying to choke it economically, the Cuban government will react defensively, calling for internal discipline and for all patriotic Cubans to rally against the external threat.

Reducing tensions and beginning a dialogue would gain us far more. Carter's visit points in the right direction.