When Fidel Castro attended the United Nations 50th anniversary festivities last October, he was welcomed to the United States as an honored guest by a number of journalists and Democratic members of Congress.
Dan Rather and Bernard Shaw conducted major interviews with Castro on CBS and CNN respectively, lending him an undue air of credibility as a senior statesman. Shaw's October 22 interview typified the media's fawning treatment, given free rein to propagate rationalizations for and lies about his autocratic rule. Castro told a national audience:
"Actually, according to our way of thinking, we believe that the multi-party system is not what is more convenient for our country now, because we cannot divide our country. We cannot fragment our people. We need to keep it united. We cannot divide it in 100 pieces....In Cuba, we do not have the presidentialist system. President Clinton has much more power than I do, and in general, the Latin American presidents are more powerful than I am....I do not have personal ambitions, that I simply discharge my duties, the ones that have been imposed on me."
That same Sunday night, Castro also spoke at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem where despite having called Castro a despot on the House floor, Rep. Charles Rangel welcomed him warmly. The next day Rep. Jose Serrano hosted a gathering in Castro's honor at Jimmy's Bronx Cafe, where he was again greeted with an ostentatious embrace by Rep. Rangel, who sat next to him throughout dinner. Rep. Nydia Velazquez also enthusiastically took part in this tribute to Castro in the Bronx.
Castro's welcome and the accompanying calls for a lifting sanctions as a means of promoting Cuba's liberalization reflects acute amnesia about Castro's heinous legacy. Clinging to power over a bankrupt and imprisoned island, the Castro regime remains one of the world's last relics of communism and the only one in the Western Hemisphere where for 37 years, he has promoted Marxism-Leninism. Today he is attempting to extend the life of his dictatorship by a massive "fire sale" of Cuban national assets and property stolen from U.S. citizens, while continuing to forcibly suppress the Cuban people's aspirations for freedom and democracy.
While the Soviet Union existed, Castro was its faithful servant--acting as its surrogate in Latin America and Africa, and providing military bases for Soviet submarines and aircraft. He provided refuge to and profited from drug trafficking. (Several former and current high-ranking officials of Castro's government are under indictment in U. S. courts). Castro's pathological hatred of the United States even brought the world to the brink of nuclear war when he encouraged the Soviets to position ballistic missiles aimed at the U.S. on Cuban soil.
Castro's hostility toward the U.S. predates his takeover of Cuba. In 1957, two years before his revolution succeeded in deposing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Castro wrote to his closest confidant that after the revolt in Cuba was over, his "real battle"--the one against the United States-- would begin.
Over the past 37 years, Castro has shown an unflagging appetite for this battle. His support of subversion is responsible for the deaths of literally tens of thousands of innocent civilians all over Latin America as a result of his support for subversion. He trained, armed and financed terrorists and guerrilla armies from Guatemala to Chile, while in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Castro's support of the communist Sandinistas and Salvadoran FMLN prolonged those countries' civil wars by several years.
Since Castro came to power in 1959, not one single country in Latin America has escaped the scourge of violence traceable to Havana. Castro-financed urban terrorism created havoc and delayed the liberalization of military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, and rural guerrillas supported by Castro before his recent cash shortage still operate in Colombia and Peru. Nor did he limit himself to the Western Hemisphere. At one point, Castro fielded Cuban armies and military advisors in fourteen African countries, all in support of the Soviet Union or local communist political and military groups--most notably the 65,000 troops (at a peak) he sent to back the Marxist MPLA government in Angola.
In recent years, Castro's adventurism has abated as his country's own crippled economy has faltered further. Yet his malicious intent remains. If Castro could cause more mischief--as in the era when he was graced with a Kremlin "expense account"--he would.
After seizing power, Castro moved quickly and ruthlessly to eliminate all traces of democracy and freedom in Cuba. Not one single institution of a free civil society was allowed to survive -- not one free or independent newspaper, school, labor union, private business, or civic organization. He has executed thousands of political enemies, imprisoned tens of thousands more, and drove hundreds of thousands to flee the island in terror and poverty. 1.3 million Cuban emigres have settled in the United States and, with their 1.5 million children, have become productive and law-abiding citizens of this country, creating employment for themselves and hundreds of thousands of other Americans. For three decades though, Castro derided these exiles as "worms" and "scum."
With the communist edifice he has created collapsing around him, Castro now claims to want both U. S. business (including the exiles whose freedoms and livelihood he destroyed) and other foreign capitalists to help his regime survive. Yet Castro is steadfastly opposed to any meaningful change. He continues to condemn democracy as "garbage" and private enterprise as a threat to "revolution."
At the same time, Castro has sought to tap the overseas free market for investment to replace the lost Soviet subsidy--and in doing so has cultivated an image as a reformer. The image, though, is an illusion and the "reforms" he has permitted are little more than ways of trapping foreign capital in his Marxist web. Castro refuses to allow Cubans to own property or to engage in any but the most meaningless business activity. The "reforms" severely limit new privately-held restaurants in the number of workers they can hire and the slim amount of profit they can keep after the state takes its hefty cut. The "reforms" allow Cubans outside of Cuba to invest capital, but not those within Cuba. Foreign enterprises operating in Cuba may not select and compensate employees directly; they must pay the state to do it in order that the Castro regime governing in the name of workers in fact maintains a firm grip on workers and all currency which might flow to them.
Predictably, Cuba's human rights record remains as bad as ever. Given the extent of his repressive apparatus, Castro has refused to permit the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur (investigator) to visit the island. But even without on-site visits, the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Commission has been presented with such massive evidence of repression that it has condemned Cuba's government as one of the world's worst violators of human rights, placing the Castro regime on a par with those of Romania under Ceausescu, Afghanistan under the Soviet puppet government, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
With Cuba's economy and social fabric thus destroyed, it is no wonder that whenever the average Cuban has an opportunity, he chooses to escape. In recent years, tens of thousands of ordinary men and women have taken to flimsy rafts and make-shift boats -- some constructed from house doors -- in the hope of surviving the Florida Straits and reaching freedom in the U.S. True to his Leninist roots, Castro has cynically exploited these desperate rafters to exact concessions from the Clinton Administration, which has naively allowed itself to be manipulated by this master of deceit.
Indeed, while the Castro regime reels from the effects of unprecedented economic collapse, and struggles to keep a lid on independent groups demanding respect for basic human rights, the Clinton Administration seems determined to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory by throwing a life-line to the Western Hemisphere's last communist autocrat.
The Clinton Administration has steadfastly opposed efforts to place conditions on Cuba's entry into international lending institutions and has renounced the right of U.S. citizens to sue foreign investors using their confiscated property in Cuba. After signing an immigration deal with the Cuban Government on the anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Clinton Administration has abandoned pledges to publicize Cuba's human rights abuses and to press for international cooperation in opposing Castro's persecution of his own citizens.
Administration officials routinely license visits to Cuba by U.S. groups promoting business as usual with the Castro regime. A classic case of such an ill-conceived visit is the delegation Rep. Joe Moakley (D-MA) led January 16-19, 1996. With the help of Clinton Administration officials at the State Department, this group of businessmen seeking commercial opportunities in Cuba included enough humanitarian activists to skirt the letter of the Cuba Democracy Act--while clearly violating its spirit.
Many liberals and a few misguided conservatives propose "coaxing" Castro toward political liberalization through trade. But, as Robert Kagan aptly wrote in The Weekly Standard, "The only problem with this new approach, however, is that it rests on the assumption that Fidel Castro is an idiot....Indeed, by almost any measure he is one of the shrewdest and most resilient dictators of our time."
For Castro, access to trade and capital provides a means of breathing life into Cuba's moribund economic system without loosening by a single notch his political control over the lives of Cubans. It is no accident, as the Marxist-Leninists themselves say, that Castro looks to Communist China as his model, and that five short weeks after his trip to New York, he effusively embraced it during a ten day visit to China.
How should the U.S. treat this brutal if antiquated tyrant in the twilight years of his power? No policy that fails to recognize the unchanging goals of Castro's regime can succeed in bringing freedom to the Cuban people. Rather than fold in the face of escalating Cuban demands, U.S. policy should return to its core principles--the preservation of U.S. security and economic interests, and the cultivation of freedom where it is now denied. To remain true to its own values and avoid strengthening Castro, U.S. policy should include the following elements:
Enunciation, in unmistakable terms, of an unmistakable message to Castro that any attempt to repeat the mass exodus of August 1994 would be considered an act of aggression against the United States.
An international diplomatic and information campaign to publicize the continuing denial of freedom in Cuba. This should include vigorously condemning at the United Nations and other international fora (such as the International Labor Organization) the continued denial of the most basic rights of the individual, as recognized in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, to which Cuba is a signatory. The Clinton Administration's emissary to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, has not made a single speech to the U.N. General Assembly or Security Council about the pathetic state of human rights in Cuba.
Active support for Cuban dissidents inside the island and requests of our allies who have normal diplomatic relations with Castro to use whatever influence they may have to press for the elimination of the repressive apparatus as a condition for their continued presence on the island.
Recognition that reinstating trade with Cuba is not a necessary prerequisite for getting more information to the citizens of Cuba. By providing Cuban non-governmental organizations with information hardware (fax machines, copiers, and print supplies), the United States can help break Castro's truth blockade and promote freedom of ideas on the island. Similar efforts helped break the grip of communism in Eastern Europe. The United States should intensify the broadcast of radio and television news and information to the people of Cuba through Radio and TV Marti and other sources.
The denial of entry visas to foreign individuals or corporate representatives involved in the confiscation or unauthorized use of the property of a U.S. national. The United States should also block Cuban entry into international financial institutions until Cuban leaders demonstrate a commitment to free markets and democracy on the island. And it should establish specific conditions for U.S. emergency assistance to a transitional regime in Cuba and allow a democratic Cuban leadership to gain access to U.S. trade, aid, and loan guarantees.
Many of these measures are included in H.R. 927, the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity [LIBERTAD] Act. (Characteristically, the Clinton Administration has sought to water down key provisions of the bill, which would increase pressures against the Castro regime and reaffirm support for the Cuban people, protect the property rights of U.S. citizens regarding Cuba, and deny Castro access to U.S. taxpayer funds through multilateral development banks.)
Without massive subsidies from Moscow, Castro's grip on power has been severely weakened. If the U.S. is to hasten the end of communism in our hemisphere, it must resist the platitudes of a ruthless dictator and deny him the means of perpetuating his rule. Castro has been weakened; only by the pressure on him will we be able to help the Cuban people achieve their dream of life after Castro.