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Sleights of Mind Emilio Adolfo Rivero Recent events in Cuba and South America reaffirm that greed and self-interest can trump reason and talent. Calls of victory have met both Raul Castro’s ascension to power and the short-lived Colombia-Ecuador crises in South America, with winners and losers distinguished by degrees of acumen. In the U.S., Raul Castro has been hailed as pragmatic and realistic. He has been championed as an organizer and a reformer. Some of his apologists, though, are American politicians whose states, principal beneficiaries of U.S. agricultural subsidies, count the Castroist regime as a valued customer. These states want to expand their Cuban interests. Their elected representatives are protecting vested economic interests by shilling for Raul Castro. No less glowing is the praise heard overseas for the new regime. The Spanish government recently negotiated the release of four Cuban political prisoners; coincident with this event was the call from Spain demanding an end to the American embargo. A visit to Havana by the Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, and his announcement of a possible visit by Pope Benedict XVI, coincided with the Vatican’s petitioning for the lifting of American sanctions. The Vatican and Spain, bound at the hip for centuries, might be moved by pious concerns. But the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations would release financial credits to the Island, thus collateralizing past, and future, loans to Cuba with guarantees from the American Treasury. American taxpayers would do well to keep this in mind, along with the Castroist regime’s historical indifference to debt repayment. Other countries have similar motives. China has several intelligence-gathering bases in Cuba. Russia has yet to recover sizable loans made to the Castroist regime. Canada has heavy investments in the Island, as does the Paris Club, whose members have yet to collect on monies lent to the Castroists. The American embargo arouses considerably louder multinational outrage than the decades of narco-trafficking, money-laundering, kidnapping and killing by Castroist-sponsored and other allied groups in South America. No international effort has been made to free the Colombian people from these threats, even as they increase explosively behind Hugo Chavez’ support. As Chavez, a Castroist tool awash in petrodollars, wages his subversive campaign across the whole hemisphere, politicians decry economic sanctions against Cuba. The U.S. has lacked the diplomatic savvy to confront the realities in Cuba and South America. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have pursued policies predicated on the assumption that destabilizing the Castroist regime would lead to a bloody civil war with a frightening toll of casualties. Cuban Americans would then pressure Washington for military intervention and America would be overwhelmed by a massive exodus to its shores. Yes, Castroist rule is condemnable, but the alternative would be horrific. Apparently, civil service pundits disdain arithmetic. First, they ignore the absence of factions in Cuba that might trigger a civil war. Second, they fail to consider that seven years of Batista’s rule, and the violence it provoked, accounted for less than two thousand dead on all sides. Under Castro, more than fifty thousand have drowned in the Florida straits trying to flee Cuba, thousands have been executed and tens of thousands condemned to long-term imprisonment. Third, forecasting a massive exodus to America fails to consider one crucial fact: there are no boats in Cuba for it. The tens of thousands of Cubans who entered the United States from Camarioca and Mariel arrived not by Cuban boats, but by a flotilla of US vessels. Finally, any pressure for military intervention could be deflected easily by hints at support for this or that group seeking to form a transitional government. Irrational fears of what might happen should the Castroist regime fall are best replaced by realistic assessments of what the regime has been doing for decades. What might an American President do? When forced to act, statesmen rightly agonize over the limits of intelligence information. Assessments might be distorted because crucial facts remain unknown. With core interests at stake, unbiased judgments based on sound facts are nerve-racking. The rule of garbage in-garbage out can play out dramatically, and embarrassingly, on the world stage. While miscalculated actions can stem from bad intelligence, blunders and missteps may have other causes. Any executive can recognize that giving directions and having directions followed are two different things. The entrenched bureaucracy that has forged our Cuban and Latin American policy for too many years might best be promoted, reassigned, or offered retirement. Others could then be found to do a job that remains undone.
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