Insanity Illustrated - Non-diplomacy and Cuba

There has never been a sane policy toward Cuba, even in pre Castro days. I would be forever grateful to Obama, if he put some sense into the situation.

edgarblythe wrote:

There has never been a sane policy toward Cuba, even in pre Castro days. I would be forever grateful to Obama, if he put some sense into the situation.

The current policy makes quite a lot of sense: allow Soviet missiles on your island and you are banished from Eden, so to speak. I don't think any other policy is required or needed. In other words, there is no need for "change," in my opinion.

"Change" is only needed when the price of something might be $5.50, and one only has a five dollar bill; change of 50 cents would then be perfect.

The current policy makes quite a lot of sense: allow Soviet missiles on your island and you are banished from Eden, so to speak. I don't think any other policy is required or needed. In other words, there is no need for "change," in my opinion.

Our Dissing Castro is no different than our approach to Hamas, we are all for the concept of the people deciding, unless of course the people decide on leaders we don't want them to have. Our rhetoric is proven to be hollow by way of our actions. You can't be a little bit pregnant, you either believe in democracy or you don't.

It's true that these measures are largely symbolic -- on an average salary of about $17 a month, most Cubans can't dream of buying computers, and, in any event, the Cuban government still strictly controls access to the Internet. Likewise, any Cuban who owns a cellphone can't use it without paying the astronomical rates demanded by the government cellphone monopoly.

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It's true that these measures are largely symbolic -- on an average salary of about $17 a month, most Cubans can't dream of buying computers, and, in any event, the Cuban government still strictly controls access to the Internet. Likewise, any Cuban who owns a cellphone can't use it without paying the astronomical rates demanded by the government cellphone monopoly.

What it sounds like is that Cuba could be kept in its present state and used as an eternal reminder, i.e. people who show any interest in communism could be taken on tours of the place and shown how communism actually works. That would almost certainly prevent any recurrences anywhere else in the world.

The Orthodoxy of Hope
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, June 1, 2008; Page B07

Journalists hate quoting journalists. It seems so déclassé. But a fellow scribe recently helped crystallize the biggest problem I have with Barack Obama's foreign policy ideas. So a tip of the hat to Fidel Castro of Havana's Granma newspaper.

The problem: Obama has offered a bold and penetrating diagnosis of the global mess the Bush administration will leave behind. But the candidate's prescriptions do not match his diagnosis in their scope or daring. Either Obama is, for vote-gathering purposes, holding back his true thoughts, or he is bluffing on how severe the need for fundamental change really is.

Castro spotlighted that dichotomy in his column last week. The semi-retired dictator praised Obama as "the most progressive candidate for the U.S. presidency," but he immediately balanced that potentially lethal compliment by attacking the Illinois senator's vow to continue the obsolete, counterproductive U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

The modest, sensible easing of restrictions on travel and currency transfers that Obama did promise in an appearance before the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami this month would produce only "hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable handouts and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism," Castro claimed.


As usual, Castro's point is overdrawn. But it does underline the widening gap between Obama's repeated attacks on "Washington's conventional thinking" as the root of all evil and his reliance on established consensus when he is questioned in detail on Middle East peace, Iran, the U.S. position in its own hemisphere and other key issues.

My point here is not to accuse Obama of more-than-standard political tailoring of positions or to urge him to commit hara-kiri by needlessly taking unpopular stands. The point is that he is largely right in arguing that new thinking is desperately needed in U.S. foreign policy -- but he is failing to show how an Obama presidency would produce and apply such thinking to the policy disasters he decries.

This means he is not using the campaign to gather public support for the specific steps that he will need to take if he is to be a "transformational" president.

The Cuba embargo is an obvious case in point. Is Obama, in what he describes as this "urgent and pivotal moment" in history, seeking a broad mandate for . . . incrementalism? Does he propose to dismantle the embargo invisibly, step by step? Or will he in his first 100 days introduce a bold new hemispheric approach that would help produce the kind of change in Cuba that is long overdue?

Here's one example of new thinking he should pursue: The United States should apply to relations with hemispheric neighbors many of the lessons of the European Union and its half-century of economic and political integration. A functioning American Union that pools sovereignty is a goal worth introducing now. But that quest cannot start by tearing down the North American Free Trade Agreement and other hemispheric trade accords. A President Obama has to be willing to sit down with the prime minister of Canada and the president of Mexico without preconditions, such as demands for treaty renegotiations.

On the Middle East, Obama puts Israel first and foremost in U.S. policy and encourages the Palestinians to adopt the two-state solution that was first officially proposed by, well, President Bush. He rules out all contact with Hamas as does, well, President Bush.

On Iran, Obama would let direct negotiations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government begin without Tehran first suspending uranium enrichment. That would be a procedural change in U.S. policy, but probably not a productive one. In any event, the incentives and sanctions that Obama would use to get Iran to abandon nuclear power are largely the same ones now on offer by the Europeans and, well, President Bush.

The lack of new, specific and substantive foreign policy changes offered by either Obama or by John McCain -- the subject of a future column -- accounts for the two campaigns spinning their wheels so furiously over whether a president should talk directly to dictators. This is a duel of symbols, meant by Obama's supporters to show how stuck McCain is to Bush's "disdain for diplomacy" and by McCain's forces to show how naive Obama is, and details be damned.

Both candidates deserve better than this as a foreign policy "debate." After drawing sharply contrasting positions on Iraq, Obama and McCain have shaded the rest of the world in the hues of Washington orthodoxies. That may be a ticket to winning. But it is also a ticket to ineffective governance.

[email protected]

"Denial of Food and Medicine:
The Impact Of The U.S. Embargo
On The Health And Nutrition In Cuba"
-An Executive Summary-
American Association for World Health Report
Summary of Findings
March 1997

After a year-long investigation, the American Association for World Health has determined that the U.S. embargo of Cuba has dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of large numbers of ordinary Cuban citizens. As documented by the attached report, it is our expert medical opinion that the U.S. embargo has caused a significant rise in suffering-and even deaths-in Cuba. For several decades the U.S. embargo has imposed significant financial burdens on the Cuban health care system. But since 1992 the number of unmet medical needs patients going without essential drugs or doctors performing medical procedures without adequate equipment-has sharply accelerated. This trend is directly linked to the fact that in 1992 the U.S. trade embargo-one of the most stringent embargoes of its kind, prohibiting the sale of food and sharply restricting the sale of medicines and medical equipment-was further tightened by the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act.

http://www.cubasolidarity.net/aawh.html

Is the US embargo a form of genocide?

To answer this question, we must define what is meant by genocide. According to Oxford English Dictionary, genocide is "the mass extermination of human beings, esp. of a particular race or nation." Under international law, however, the legal definition is given in Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention and covers a much wider range of crimes. Article 2 states:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Under the terms of the Convention, while the crime of genocide still includes killing members of a national group, it also includes, for example, "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group," which does not necessarily involve any killing at all.

Item (c), seems to be the most relevant in the case of the US embargo on Cuba. It does not require proof that any deaths be directly attributable to the embargo. Only that the perpetrator deliberately inflicted on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about -- as opposed to actually bringing about -- the group's physical destruction in whole or in part. This is relatively easy to prove.

http://members.allstream.net/~dchris/CubaFAQ137.html

Two, the idea of somebody from a normal country taking a "pleasant vacation" in a place where people earn $17 a month is asinine.

Two points here....

One, if communism actually worked, ...

KIBBUTZ

The kibbutz (Hebrew word for "communal settlement") is a unique rural community; a society dedicated to mutual aid and social justice; a socioeconomic system based on the principle of joint ownership of property, equality and cooperation of production, consumption and education; the fulfillment of the idea "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"; a home for those who have chosen it.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/kibbutz.html

Admittedly, I was wrong, but hey, I make a habit of it. Granted having one percent of the people living in kibbutzes in a country like Israel probably won't be enough to sink the country...