Cuba

The Associated Press is reporting today that Cuba's representative in Geneva, Juan Antonio Fernandez Palacios, accused Human Rights Watch of being "mercenaries" of the U.S. Government. First of all, this is nonsense. Human Rights Watch is in the front lines of challenging the U.S. government's detention, rendition, trial and torture policies. In addition, as Human Rights Watch makes clear, they take no money from any government. The sad truth is that the world has long-established standards for human rights and Cuba does not abide by those standards. So this is a tactic, but of what strategy?...

With the Organization of American States diplomatic maneuvering around the exclusion of Cuba hitting the Washington Post today, it seems like a good time to cut through all the inside baseball and get right to the real important message: Latin America has made Cuba its cause celebre, and the analogy is to Palestine.

In other words, if the United States wants to do business with the region and to lead the region, it is time for the Obama administration to deliver change they can believe in and the threshold is set high: ending the embargo on Cuba.

The Palestine analogy is early, but we have three very good data points on which to base it...

The best way to bury a story in Washington is to announce it late on a Friday before a holiday weekend. And that is just what the Obama administration did last week when it announced that the U.S. requested, in a letter delivered to the Cuban Interests Section Friday afternoon, the Cuban government join in restarting migration talks...

Latin America policy uber diva Julia Sweig chaired a news-making gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington yesterday morning. It was excellent, and the CFR has audio of the entire event here. In response to a question I posed to Sweig's panel, Obama administration Summit of the Americas point man Jeffrey Davidow fell back on droopy anachronisms while Foreign Policy magazine blogger and best-selling writer and geostrategic interpreter David Rothkopf hit the ball out of the park with his statement: "US-Cuba policy is the Edsel of American foreign policy."

Seven U.S. Congressmen are in Havana and met with Cuban President Raul Castro among other leading Cuban politicians. What I found most interesting in the Associated Press report on their trip was a comment made by Representative Mel Watt about something he had read of Fidel Castro's...

Reps. Lee and Rush discuss U.S. policy towards Cuba in Havana (photo: Reuters)

Politics is theater, so they say. This weekend's visit of a delegation of Congressional Black Caucus members to Cuba to meet with high-level Cuban officials, demonstrates this principle in spades. At both a formal press conference in Havana and at an impromptu presser at the statue honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the CBC delegation has been out in front setting down markers that demonstrate, if nothing else, that the mood in Washington towards changing our policy in Cuba has changed dramatically...

Reps. Delahunt, Flake, and McGovern (photo credit: The Washington Post) 

It's been a bad few weeks for Senator Menendez.

First Senator Lugar releases a report calling for a sea change in U.S.-Cuba relations. Then the Congress passes and the president signs legislation easing travel restrictions on Cuban Americans and easing the payment process for agricultural exports to Cuba. Then, this week, Senators Dorgan and Enzi announce their legislation to end the travel ban to Cuba so that all Americans can travel freely to the island...

Raul Castro meets Trinidadian Prime Minister Patrick Manning. Trinidad hosts this month's Summit of the Americas. 

There was much speculation in the past weeks about what was driving the major housecleaning of Cuban ministry heads last month. Some saw the move as a paranoid effort to centralize control. Some saw it as a militarization of the Cuban government.

This report from Reuters' Cuba correspondent Marc Frank seems to me to reveal the real reason: bureaucratic efficiency...

Senators Harkin, Dorgan, and Lugar

"It's sort of all over but the shouting, whether our country should maintain this embargo." --Senator Byron Dorgan

On the front page of The Washington Post today is an article by Karen DeYoung, entitled, "Momentum Grows for Relaxing U.S. Policy on Cuba." The article announces the unveiling this week of bipartisan legislation to end the ban on travel to Cuba for all Americans.

It's a party-line blurring fight. Senators Byron Dorgan (D) and Richard Lugar (R) and their House colleagues Reps. William Delahunt (D) and Jeff Flake (R) are lined up against Sen. Robert Menendez (D) and long-time House hard liners the Diaz-Balart brothers (R) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D). What it represents, however, is the first steps of a broad coalition of Members who are standing up to at long last to assert the national interest over the pecuniary interest of a small but well-monied and vocal clique that has held sway over Cuba policy for decades...