Posted on 07/08/2002 2:46:04 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
HAVANA (Reuters) - U.S. consumer advocate Ralph Nader said on Sunday that the United States ought to lift economic sanctions against Cuba and trade with the communist-run island like it does with China.
"The trade between the United States and Cuba should be the same as it is between the United States and China," the Green Party 2000 presidential candidate told reporters.
Nader arrived in Havana for a three-day visit.
He will dine twice with President Fidel Castro and meet members of the Communist Party hierarchy. He said he would also meet with dissidents seeking democratic reforms under Castro, in power since a 1959 revolution.
Ralph Nader, right, the Green Party's presidential candidate in the 2000 elections, is welcomed by Cuban leader Fidel Castro Sunday July 7, 2002 at the Revolution Palace in Havana, Cuba. Nader arrived here Sunday for a visit that will include two dinners with Fidel Castro and meetings with government opponents. (AP Photo/Jose Goitia/POOL)
Havana is hoping pressure from American business lobbies in the United States will lead to the lifting of a four-decade-old embargo and the end to a ban on Americans traveling to the island.
President Bush, backed by anti-Castro exiles in the United States, has vowed to veto moves to relax the embargo until Cuba opens up to democracy and a market economy.
Nader said Bush was no champion of democracy and accused him of governing in the interests of corporate America.
"Mr. Bush seems to think that elections that are for sale and government that is for sale to the corporate commercial interest conform with democratic processes," he said.
"I think that putting our elections and our government up for sale nullifies the votes of the American people," he said, urging Bush to press for public funding of U.S. elections.
Nader, who won 3 percent of the vote in the 2000 presidential elections, said free trade negotiations in the Americas lacked provisions to protect labor and environmental standards and would only benefit multinational corporations, an anti-globalization view shared by Castro.
Cuba Is Different: Why the China argument" doesn't hold.*** China and later Cuba have both turned to capitalism as a last ditch effort to preserve communism. In China, it has worked. The communist dictatorship across the Pacific is stronger from 25 years of foreign engagement, but it has come at the price of a burgeoning middle class and new freedoms afforded to millions that never existed before Nixon's fateful visit. Without America's trade and investment, however, China's communist dictatorship likely would have already collapsed under its own dead weight.
Knowing that trade has facilitated the continued survival of communism in China, maybe we didn't choose the best path. But hindsight is irrelevant, because you cannot put the baby back in the womb. With China a major trading partner - and growing, a sudden fall of the regime is far from America's interests.
In Cuba, however, we have no existing economic interests, and Castro is an old man. There are a few heir apparents, but Castro's cult of personality is the glue holding the deteriorating machine together. So long as the embargo remains in place, Castro's successor, and with him communism, will fail.
Doing business with Cuba unavoidably props up the regime because of the way Castro has designed the rules of the game. Castro double-dips from joint ventures: first by splitting the profits, and secondly by stealing from the Cuban workers. Foreign companies don't employ Cuban workers; they rent them. Companies must pay Castro for each worker, in cash, and the regime in turn pockets 95 percent, doling out the remaining 5 percent in pesos.
At least in China, those employed by American companies are paid directly by the corporation and usually have the benefit of exposure to American culture and values. Chinese employees of American companies are immediately vaulted into the middle, and often the upper-middle, class. Many of these employees of American corporations make enough money to send their kids to private schools, a freedom that would never be allowed in Castro's brutal society.
More importantly than the different nature of trade with China, though, is the simple geographic fact that Cuba is a stone's throw away from our shores. Our foreign policy has always recognized a distinction between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. Reagan began the push for freedom in Latin America as a move to enhance our national security. Normal trading with Castro, in fact, would be an exception from our policy toward thugs in Latin America.***
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Our special treatment of Cuba is simply motivated by the "special interest" in Miami, and for no other reason.
Anti-communism works for me.
Yes he does - draining votes from the Democratic Party.
Thanks to communism, Cuba - once one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries - is now one of its poorest. Cuban society is ruthlessly regimented by a police state modeled on those of Stalin and Mao. Much of the Cuban population has been forced to flee in successive expulsions since the 1960s.
The response proposed by American liberals? The United States should be nicer to Fidel Castro. Today almost all liberal politicians, pundits and journalists, joined by many in the American business community, claim that ending U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba will promote political freedom and ultimately democracy in Castro's bankrupt police state.
Curiously, the American left made the opposite claim in the 1980s, when it backed the economic sanctions that played a role in ending apartheid in South Africa. And few liberals show interest in easing sanctions on Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Will ending sanctions bring democracy to Cuba? Many European and Latin American nations have been trading for years with Cuba without weakening Castro's control, which, like any tyranny, bases its power on controlling the police and the military, not the economy.
Why, then, would trade with the United States bring Castro down? Trade with China has not weakened the grip on power of the Chinese communist party. Indeed, foreign trade and investment may strengthen the power of dictatorships such as Castro's and China's, by easing the economic pain that communist elites have inflicted on their captive subjects. In any event, new infusions of cash are likely to end up in the bank accounts of well-connected Cuban officials.
The illogic and inconsistency of the American left can be seen in the equally disturbing double standard in the contrast between liberal perceptions of the former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic and Castro.***
Ralph should climb into his Corvair and take a vacation in Nicaragua.
Castro's Cuba Bad for Business*** The experience of foreign investors in Cuba is replete with horror stories. In 1995, when the "liberalizing" law was passed, the Cuban government unilaterally canceled Spanish utility company Endesa's investments in hotels. Mexico's Grupo Domos found itself arbitrarily slapped with enormous back-tax penalties, and Canada's First Key Project Technologies' proposal to build a $350 million power plant was stolen by the Cuban government and shopped around elsewhere.
Cuba last year devalued its currency by 18 percent and fell behind in debt payments of $500 million to private banks and firms in France, Spain, Japan, Canada, Chile and Venezuela. (This does not include the repayment of government trade credits to France for the last four years and the principal on foreign debt of $35 billion.) With export prices down in nickel, sugar and tobacco, along with a fall in tourism and remittances from abroad, Cuba will remain an economic basket case. Doing business in countries that violate labor rights is not considered good business practice.
In Cuba, workers in foreign joint ventures are paid $400 to $500 a month, except that the Cuban government contracts the workers and pays them 400 to 500 pesos, or $20 a month, instead. Exploitation of child labor is officially tolerated, and it is commonplace to find children as young as 8 who are working. Finally, liberalizing exports to Cuba will produce a revenue windfall for customs brokerages, wholesale, distribution and retail stores -- all government-operated. This will provide increased money for Mr. Castro's intelligence and security services and neighborhood vigilante organizations, further postponing democracy and economic freedom in Cuba.
There are a score of countries in the Caribbean Basin that embrace free markets, political democracy and institutional reforms, thereby offering far greater opportunities than Cuba.***
Cuba is a minimal threat to us directly, and their influence in the rest of the Western Hemisphere is now marginal because their patrons, the Soviet Union, are no more.
So why do we beat Cuba like a drum, and embrace China--a DIRECT THREAT to U.S. security and interests--like they're our bestest buddies?
ANSWER: Because there isn't a small but vocal group of anti-PRC activists, as there is for Cuba. That's the sole reason: Politics.
I would like to see consistency. Either we cut off both or we embrace both. U.S. interests and security need to be No. 1, not votes in south Florida.
He's also going to die in just a little while. When he does, it may well mean the end of that great Socialist experiment of his.
Castro has less influence in Latin America now than he EVER has. Chavez is a PARIAH, having only a plurality of support--if that--in his own country.
But let's say you're right, and we shouldn't trade with our enemies. In that case, let's be consistent and cut off all trade with Communist China as well
I must take exception with this logic. If a consitutency is vocal and active and elects representatives that represent them in government, the system is working. If we deny them that achievement to appease those who don't work as hard to command the same respect and loyalty of their representatives, it would be wrong.
That's all it takes.
Venezuelan coup d'etat*** If the Americas are not again to be put in a position of having to restore in democracy's name a leader who in many ways has worked against democracy, the charter's standards should be refined and expanded beyond the mere focus on elections. There is a good reason why the charter focuses on elections. There is a consensus on what constitutes a free and fair election so that standards can be relatively precise and evenly applied. But standards for free and fair elections are not the last word. There are other norms and standards that could be similarly developed that would strengthen democratic practice and could be formulated with precision. Mr. Chavez used the device of a referendum to extend his term of office and also to lift the ban on Venezuela's presidents holding consecutive terms of office.
The possibility of a creeping "auto-coup," as employed by Alberto Fujimori in Peru 10 years ago, was evident. It should be unacceptable, as a general norm, for constitutional or electoral changes to directly benefit the incumbent in this way. To give the incumbent such an advantage is self-dealing, subverting the rule of law - and the guarantees and expectations that are at the heart of the democratic bargain between the electors and the elected. Such referenda cannot meet the standards for a free and fair election. It would have been a violation of democratic norms (as well as a violation of the U.S. Constitution) had President Clinton, or Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower, proposed a constitutional amendment to lift the two-term limit on U.S. presidents so that they could stay in office. Globally, the growing phenomena of leaders, whether democratically elected or not (as in Pakistan), extending their terms of office through referenda has a stultifying effect on democratic development because it is, in essence, undemocratic.***
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