Castro at 70: Helms-Burton

• Never has U.S. policy been so isolated, nor Havana been more connected to the international community

• Clinton Administration's Cuba policy engulfed by double standards, flip flops, hypocrisy, political opportunism and sheer amateurism

Fidel Castro at 70 is now convinced that with a current 10% growth rate, and with international dignitaries from Washington's closest allies arriving almost daily in Havana, where they pay homage to Cuba's political reforms and economic successes, the tide is now in his favor. Cuba which, after the demise of the Soviet bloc in 1991, came perilously close to bankruptcy, has now decisively turned the corner and has every prospect of emerging as one of the third world's great success stories. What must have been particularly gratifying to the Cuban leader was that this has been accomplished in spite of the unremitting hostility of a succession of U.S. administrations, most notably the Clinton White House. Castro's sheer survival over the years, when some of his greatest adversaries, like Richard Nixon, went down in disgrace, is largely due to the fact that Washington has been locked into an almost four-decade policy which has never worked, and today, as practiced by the Clinton administration, is entirely dysfunctional. The administration's Cuba policy represents one of its greatest foreign policy failures and one that best shows its flim-flam approach to world hot spots, and the superficiality of its so-called solutions.

While the Helms-Burton anti-Castro legislation, which Clinton originally opposed, is undoubtedly beginning to hurt the Cuban economy, it also has brought down upon the White House an unpredicated as well as unwelcomed deluge of criticism from every direction and from almost every nation in the world, including the European Union, Japan, and the Organization of American States, as well as those mechanisms representing the third world.

The White House has come forth with a defense of its policies which is so weak, so contrived, and so irrational that it is an embarassment to hear it explained, as Deputy National Security Advisor Berger did over a national talk radio program last week. Surely the adiministration now must realize that no credible person or institution believes that U.S.-Cuba policy is anything but an example of pure political pandering on the part of President Clinton to win the approval of the Cuban-American leadership in Florida and New Jersey, in order to secure those two states' electoral votes.

But the cost of this political jiggling is very high. Not only have the Clinton Administration's foreign policy credentials been tarnished over its support of such lose-lose legislation as Helms-Burton, but Castro is fully capable of retaliation by pulling an October surprise--just before November's presidential election--by cancelling Cuba's 1994-95 immigration accord with Washington which could unleash an unprecedented deluge of Cuban refugees coming to this country. This could duplicate for the Clinton re-election campaign the political disaster suffered by the Carter re-election campaign of 1980 when Castro permitted over 100,000 Cuban refugees to flee from the port of Mariel for Florida, visiting upon the Georgia Democrat the political wrath of American voters for allowing so many refugees to come to this country at a time, like now, when new immigrants were unpopular with U.S. citizens.

Almost on a daily basis, Washington is violating the immigration accord by handing out political asylum status to would-be Cuban refugees who, like defecting Olympic athletes, are motivated more by the lure of wealth than freedom. Since Cuba never received an adequate quid pro quo for saving Clinton's political neck by entering into the immigration accord, the White House must realize that its ceaseless attacks against Havana could earn it a choleric reaction by Castro and a decision to lift the embargo against those Cubans wanting to leave the island.

Fortunately for Clinton, the Dole campaign will not take advantage of the weakness and vulnerability of Clinton's Cuba stand, because if anything, it has an even more extremist position on the issue.

 

Compiled by Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs