Posted on 10/06/2002 10:48:52 PM PDT by Pokey78
At the State Department, swearing-in ceremonies for top officials take place in the Benjamin Franklin Room, an ornate hall on the eighth floor. There, in March, Otto Juan Reich was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Before an audience that included Secretary of State Colin Powell, Senator Jesse Helms, and Ambassador Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, Reich gave a strange and pugnacious speech. He declared Powell "another Titán de Bronce"—Bronze Titan, the nickname of Antonio Maceo, a black leader in the Cuban war for independence from Spain. His grandfather, Reich said, had served in Maceo's army. Reich compared his own perseverance in the face of political opponents to that of the Founding Fathers when they rebelled against the British. Quoting Thomas Jefferson, he swore "eternal hostility" to despots, whether "in Baghdad or Havana." He also used the occasion to announce his engagement to Lourdes Ramos, a "very special lady," who was in the crowd. This came just after he thanked his ex-wife, Connie, who was also present, for the "many sacrifices" she had made for him. Strangest of all were the jokes: Reich complained that some of his critics had asked whether he had the "right temperament" for the post he was assuming. "They said that I can't make rational decisions because of my ideology! Well, they are not saying that anymore, because I had them all arrested this morning!"
The official transcript of the event does not record how big a laugh that quip got. But Reich's pique was understandable. His appointment had been scorned by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who refused even to hold hearings on his nomination and twice returned his name to the White House. Liberal foreign-policy groups had mobilized against him, generating reams of material and harsh press accounts that painted Reich, who was born in Cuba, as an anti-Castro fanatic with a shadowy past. (The Cuban state media denounced him as a "terrorist" and a "mafioso.") The most controversial chapters of Reich's life involved his activities on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras; his disputed connection to a Cuban-American terrorist; and his work as a lobbyist. For nearly a year, Reich had simply taken it, under orders to remain silent, while the post remained empty. Finally, in January, President Bush resorted to what is known as a recess appointment— putting Reich in the job for one year, unconfirmed. Senator Christopher Dodd, of Connecticut, promptly dubbed Reich a "lame duck" and vowed to prevent his reappointment.
Why is the Bush Administration so determined to have Reich in this job, despite the animus he provokes? What, if anything, does this bureaucratic fight mean beyond the Beltway—in Latin America, and for United States interests in the region? What does an Assistant Secretary of State do, anyway?
Some do more than others. Whole periods of a region's history can become known by the American assistant secretary of the time. In southern Africa, for instance, the nineteen-eighties were (among other things) the Age of Crocker, marked by the ceaseless efforts of Chester Crocker to broker peace agreements in Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique. Central Americans, to take another example, will not soon forget the Age of Elliot Abrams. Abrams was unusual because he received a measure of American public attention as he aggressively defended the Reagan Administration's policies (and later pleaded guilty to lying to Congress). Ordinarily, the job is like a one-way mirror. Millions of Latin Americans are well aware of who the United States assistant secretary for their region is, while almost no one in the United States has ever heard the name.
I caught a glimpse of this phenomenon when I went to see Reich in his State Department office this summer. On a table was a recent copy of Newsweek, with Reich' s face on the cover in life-size closeup. I was surprised to see it. Then Reich pointed out that this was the magazine's Latin-American edition. The cover read "BUSH'S POINT MAN: Can This Right-Wing Ideologue Douse the Flames in Colombia and Venezuela?" Reich snorted. "My answer is 'Yes—but can you trust this left-wing magazine to tell you whether he' s doing a good job?' "
Reich is fair-skinned, fair-haired and blue-eyed, and, at fifty-six, still has some of the grappler's physique that must have served him when he wrestled for the University of North Carolina. He was a fourteen-year-old in Havana when the Revolution came, and his family fled north. His English has no trace of Spanish, but, rather, a deracinated American flatness, like an Army kid's. "Diplomatic" is not the first word that comes to mind when one talks to Reich, the top United States diplomat in Latin America. But he is certainly more personable and worldly, more self-aware, than his critics (or his remarks at his swearing-in) would suggest. When I asked if, on a trip to Brazil and Argentina in July, he had heard any complaints about the tariffs on steel imports recently imposed by President Bush, he demanded, squinting in mock suspicion, to know how I knew about that.
Reich said that he had tried to turn the steel tariffs into an argument for South American countries to join the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which is a proposed hemisphere-wide free-trade zone. Washington lectures Latin America constantly about the moral and economic virtues of free trade, so these new tariffs—along with the vast subsidies in this year's farm bill—had been widely condemned as hypocritical. If and when the F.T.A.A. goes into effect, it will be a sort of super-NAFTA, providing, at least in theory, a counterbalance to the European Union, and including thirty-four of the Americas' thirty-five countries—all but Cuba. The Bush Administration has made the F.T.A.A., which was conceived during the Clinton Administration, the main goal of its Latin-American policy. Reich said he had pointed out to the South Americans that our NAFTA partners had been excluded from the steel tariffs. Selling free trade on the ground that it would put countries on the right side of a restrictive tariff didn't quite wash as a matter of economic theory, but, in fairness, Reich did not have much to work with.
We talked about Colombia, where the Bush Administration has authorized a shift of American aid from counter-narcotics programs to military operations against the country's rebels. "We're going to help Colombia in everything that may be necessary to win this war," Reich had told Newsweek earlier. The war, which has been going on for nearly forty years, is regarded as no more winnable than the war in Vietnam was, but this is the United States' policy, and Reich reiterated it to me.
A print on the wall caught my eye: Winston Churchill, in a bow tie, pointing his finger and glaring above the slogan "Deserve Victory." Most of the décor in Reich's office had the same martial, triumphalist tone: a big bronze American eagle swooping; a model of a Harpoon cruise missile. But then I noticed a lovely, framed botanical drawing of a Cuban royal palm. This, I thought, was the emotional undertow that one felt around Reich—the exile's sadness and sense of loss, as well as the kind of rage that is particular to the Cuban exile.
Reich's father was an Austrian Jew. He fled the Nazis in 1938, and was trying to reach the United States when his ship docked in Havana. "He absolutely fell in love with Cuba," Reich said. "He just couldn't believe that a country could be so beautiful." Reich's father married a local woman and went into the furniture business, and Otto was born in 1945. By then, much of his father's family, including his parents, had died in the Holocaust. Otto's mother was Catholic, and he was brought up as a Catholic. Prerevolutionary life in Havana at the Reichs' social level—Otto attended an élite, American-run prep school called the Ruston Academy—sounds, in the accounts of the era which exiles pass around (Ruston graduates have a Web site where they reconnect and reminisce), lushly sweet, like one long, balmy, innocent round of dominoes, studying, swimming, baseball, and strictly supervised romance. Of course, the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship was in its final days then, and political repression was intense. Most of Reich's own family, he told me, was "pro-revolution, anti-Batista." The exception was his father.
"He realized that there were elements in Castro's political speech and actions that reminded him of Hitler," Reich said. "Everybody was telling my father, 'You don't understand. This is not Austria. This is not 1938. This is Cuba. It's 1958. You're wrong.' And he turned out to be the one who was right."
Does Reich really believe that his father was right about Castro and Hitler? "Castro is not Hitler," he said. "But, if Castro had had the power that Hitler had, he would, I think, have carried out similar actions."
Reich suggested that I compare the speech Castro gave at his trial after his first, unsuccessful attack on Batista's forces, in 1953, with the courtroom speech Hitler gave after the Munich beer-hall putsch. They are very similar, he said, and Castro had definitely read "Mein Kampf." (When the Baltimore Orioles played a Cuban baseball team in Havana, in 1999, Reich compared the game to "playing soccer in Auschwitz.")
It was Jeb Bush who proposed to his brother that Otto Reich be made Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Karl Rove, the President's senior political adviser, strongly endorsed the idea, as did the Cuban-American House members from Florida. After the frantically close election that George W. Bush had just won in Florida, Reich's nomination was widely seen as payback to the Miami Cubans. Jeb Bush, meanwhile, is running for reelection as governor of Florida this year, and the support of Cuban-Americans is crucial to his success at the polls.
Otto Reich is not a true Miami Cuban. His family settled in North Carolina, and he has spent most of his career in Washington. He studied at Georgetown after a stint in the Army, and actually lived in Florida only in the nineteen-seventies, when he worked for the city of Miami and for the Florida Department of Commerce. But he has been a dedicated anti-Castro activist all his adult life, and he is deeply connected to the South Florida exile community. His face is also well known—he was co-host, for a time, of CNN International's "Choque de Opiniones," a Spanish-language "Crossfire." (Reich opined "from the right.") During crises, Reich reliably gets out and represents. In April of 2000, for instance, he told Geraldo Rivera's CNBC audience that the Clinton Administration's handling of the Elián Gonzales case was sending "a very dangerous signal to Saddam Hussein and to Milosevic and Kim Jong Il." Last year, when Reich's nomination as assistant secretary got into trouble, Miami's right-wing Spanish-language talk-radio programs took up his cause.
Reich first went to work for the Reagan Administration at the Agency for International Development, in 1981. As the civil war in Nicaragua heated up, he moved to the State Department, where, from 1983 to 1986, he headed a Contra-support program that operated out of an outfit called the Office of Public Diplomacy. The office arranged speeches and recommended books to school libraries, but it also leaked false stories to the press—that, for instance, the Sandinista government was receiving Soviet MIG fighters, or was involved in drug trafficking. A declassified memo from one of Reich's aides to Patrick Buchanan, the White House communications director, boasted about the office's "White Propaganda" operations, including op-ed pieces prepared by its staff, signed by Contra leaders or academics, and placed in major newspapers. (Reich's spokesman denied this.) The office employed Army psychological-warfare specialists, and worked closely with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, at the National Security Council.
When legitimate stories from Central America displeased Reich, he would confront journalists. He visited CBS News in April, 1984, after the network broadcast a documentary about El Salvador which Reich's boss, Secretary of State George Shultz, considered—as he put it in a memo to his boss, President Reagan—"favorable to the guerrillas and distorting of U.S. and El Salvadoran government goals and tactics." Reich met with the CBS diplomatic correspondent and the Washington bureau chief. "This is one example of what the Office of Public Diplomacy has been doing," Shultz reported to Reagan. "It has been repeated dozens of times over the past few months."
In 1985, Reich demanded a meeting with the senior staff of National Public Radio—which he had taken to calling National People's Radio, or, sometimes, Moscow on the Potomac—after a report about a Contra slaughter of civilians. As Bill Buzenberg, the NPR foreign-affairs correspondent, recalled the meeting, Reich bragged that he had "gotten others to change some of their reporters in the field because of a perceived bias." He warned the journalists that his office would be monitoring NPR's broadcasts. Buzenberg later suggested that Reich's attempt to intimidate people at NPR had been effective. He recounted in a speech how an editor had asked him, with regard to one of his stories, "What would Otto Reich think?"
After a tense luncheon at the home of a diplomat in Managua, attended by Reich and John Lantigua, a Washington Post stringer, and Morris Thompson, of Newsday, an item appeared in the newsletter of the conservative press-watchdog group Accuracy in Media (AIM), calling Lantigua "Johnny Sandinista" and claiming that the Nicaraguan government was supplying him and other reporters with "trusted Sandinista females." New York magazine later reported that Reich had been interviewed for the AIM story. Reich told New York that he had heard from "defectors from the Sandinista government" that "it isn't only women" who were supplied. (Thompson is gay.) "This thing is sordid," Reich told New York. It also seems to have been untrue. Reich's office, asked for comment last week, denied that he had been the source of the AIM story.
A 1987 report by the United States Comptroller General, produced in the course of the Iran-Contra investigation, concluded that Reich's office had "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities." When Reich's spokesman was asked about this finding, he replied that it was "based solely on the inaccurate and exaggerated claims of a member of Ambassador Reich's staff." The spokesman added that Reich had worked closely with the State Department's legal adviser "to ensure that all office activities were legal and appropriate."
The Office of Public Diplomacy was shut down in 1987. By then, however, Reich had been appointed Ambassador to Venezuela, and he was away from Washington during most of the exposure and shakeout of the Iran-Contra scandal, after which fourteen Administration officials were indicted on various charges.
In Venezuela, however, there was the case of Orlando Bosch. Bosch was a Cuban exile, a former pediatrician who had served time in prison in the United States for conspiring to plant mines on foreign vessels and for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter docked in the port of Miami. In 1976, Bosch was arrested in Venezuela and convicted of masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airliner. All seventy-three people aboard were killed. Bosch was still in jail in Venezuela when Reich arrived.
As it happened, Bosch was retried and acquitted six weeks after Reich got to Venezuela. Once Bosch was released, he tried to get a visa to the United States. Reich has always denied taking any special interest in the case. In the diplomatic cables he sent to Washington, according to his spokesman, Reich wrote that he had informed the Venezuelan government that Bosch was not welcome in the United States. But he also appended, in cables that have been declassified, some unusual notes to Bosch's applications, passing on, for instance, a report that a Cuban assassination team had entered Venezuela with Bosch as its target, and that Bosch's friends would be able to extract him from the country at a few hours' notice. Bosch, however, did not wait for a visa. In February, 1988, he boarded a plane to Miami, tried to enter the country illegally, and was arrested at the airport.
The Justice Department, which had connected Bosch with more than thirty acts of sabotage and violence, wanted to deport him. To many Cuban exiles, however, Bosch was a hero—the Miami City Commission had even declared a Dr. Orlando Bosch Day, in 1983—and there was an intense public campaign to have him freed. Jeb Bush was a prominent figure in the campaign, and in 1990 the first President Bush, ignoring a Justice Department recommendation, ordered Bosch released. Today, Bosch lives freely in Miami.
Reich played no role in the campaign to free Bosch. But, fairly or not, he continued to be associated with the case, both by his critics and by some of Bosch's supporters. In 1987, Bosch reportedly expressed his thanks to his "compatriot" Reich. (Reich called the report "Cuban-Soviet disinformation.") Last year, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee submitted a written question to Reich, asking, "Do you consider Orlando Bosch a terrorist?" He replied, "I do not have sufficient knowledge of Mr. Bosch's criminal activities to pass judgment on his legal status."
Reich became a corporate lobbyist in the nineteen-nineties. One of his clients, Lockheed Martin, sought his help in selling F-16 fighter jets to Chile. This deal, now nearing completion, represents the end of a twenty-year ban on the sale of advanced weaponry to Latin America. Another Reich client was Bacardi, the rum company, which is controlled by a Cuban-American family that lost substantial property after the Revolution. Bacardi wanted to strip Cuba of international trademark protection so that it could use a well-known Cuban brand name. (My wife was involved, as an attorney, in some of the extensive litigation against Bacardi.) The company achieved its aims, in 1996, when the Helms-Burton Act became law.
During Reich's confirmation travails, his opponents argued that his one true animating passion, Cuba, would interfere with his ability to deal with the rest of the hemisphere. Yet Reich's views on Cuban policy are publicly no different from those of the Bush White House, a circumstance that should have made the issue moot. Some of Reich's non-Miami friends, notably those on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, came to his defense. They accused the Democrats who were blocking the nomination of wanting to fight Cold War policy battles again, probably because Ronald Reagan (and, by extension, Reich) had been proved right by history. Three former Secretaries of State, all Republicans, wrote a letter urging the Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings and approve Reich. The Democrats refused to budge. "Otto Reich is not qualified for the post," Senator Dodd insisted in a letter to the Journal.
In Latin America, however, it was the coup in Venezuela last April that seemed to harden misgivings about Reich. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leftist President, had been a growing irritant to Washington—visiting Libya and Iraq, slowing negotiations for the F.T.A.A., criticizing the American campaign in Afghanistan, and, of greatest concern to anti-Castro activists, selling discounted oil to Cuba. Chávez had made many powerful enemies inside Venezuela as well, and on April 11th he was removed in a coup. A businessman named Pedro Carmona was installed as President. More alarming than the coup itself, to many of Venezuela's neighbors, was the suggestion that Washington was behind the coup. For it soon emerged that there had been a great deal of contact between the coup plotters and the United States Embassy in Caracas beforehand, and urgent calls between the plotters and Reich's office afterward. Within hours of the coup, Reich summoned a number of Latin-American ambassadors to his office and, according to the Times, told them that Chávez had in fact resigned; he urged them to support the new government. The State Department hailed the "change of government." (So did the editors of the Times.)
The problem was that Chávez had not resigned. Carmona, the new President, tried to dissolve the country's parliament and its highest court, and support for his administration, such as it was, vanished. Within days, Chávez was back in power. The United States hastily endorsed a resolution, issued earlier by the Organization of American States, deploring the coup. When I asked Reich about the United States' role in the coup, he told me firmly, "There was no U.S. role."
The political damage was done, though. For many Latin Americans, the thinness of Washington's commitment to democracy in the region had been revealed. In a region that has suffered greatly under military regimes, many of them United States-backed, this was a profound disappointment. In countries that were already under stress, like Argentina, the implications were more serious. "Many people here watched it with a fair amount of fear," Alan Cibils, an economist in Buenos Aires, said. "People feared that this might be the writing on the wall."
Certainly, the Chávez incident only confirmed apprehensions in Latin America about Reich's appointment. Oscar Arias, a former President of Costa Rica, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to end the wars in Central America, had written a widely circulated plea to President Bush to reconsider his choice of Reich. Arias's essay, which was first published in the Los Angeles Times, revisited the controversial incidents from Reich's career; he wrote, for example, that the F-16 sale would produce "the last thing this hemisphere needs—an arms race." Arias's broader concern was that Reich represented a return to militarism, to bullying behavior by the United States, after more than a decade of kinder, gentler policy.
This fear is probably unfounded. George W. Bush came into office pledging to make Latin America a top foreign-policy priority (he called this "the century of the Americas"), seeming not to know or care much personally about most other parts of the world. September 11th has reordered his priorities, of course, and, if anything, Latin Americans have felt more forgotten than coerced by his Administration. Although Reich is just one of a number of players from the old Reagan Central America team to have been reëmployed by this Administration—Elliot Abrams is back in the White House, serving on the National Security Council; John Negroponte, who was Ambassador to Honduras, is now Ambassador to the United Nations; John Poindexter, who was Reagan's national-security adviser, is now heading a Pentagon counterterrorism office—Bush's policy toward Latin America is, in essence, a continuation of the Clinton policy. Market access is its great objective, the F.T.A.A. its concrete goal.
Progress toward the F.T.A.A. has been slowed, however, by growing disenchantment in Latin America with the philosophy of free trade, or neoliberalismo. In the past generation, hardly any progress has been made against poverty in most of the region, despite painful economic reforms. The middle class has suffered even in politically transformed nations such as Mexico. Left-wing political parties are on the rise. In Brazil, which has South America's largest economy, the leading candidate for President—the first round of elections will be held on October 6th—is a Socialist ex-steelworker named Luiz Inacio da Silva, popularly known as Lula, who opposes the F.T.A.A. If Lula, who is an admirer of Fidel Castro, does become President, the entire South American jigsaw puzzle may abruptly rearrange itself.
Reich prefers to describe the current resurgence of protest movements in the region as populism, not leftism, but that doesn't mean he's oblivious to its causes. He was an election observer in Venezuela in 1998, when Hugo Chávez won the Presidency, and afterward he told the Wall Street Journal, "Chávez won because he was able to articulate and channel the frustrations of Venezuelans resulting from a series of mistakes by the nation's political elite. This should be a wake-up call to the elite of Latin America to pay more attention to economic and social progress."
Still, Reich makes a poor salesman for free trade. As Argentina's economy collapses, he rebukes Argentineans for not implementing the free-market policies that the United States has recommended. He tends to view Latin-American governments as irresponsible and immature. He also has a disconcerting habit of pointing to El Salvador as an example of a country that has properly implemented the reforms the United States wants to see. El Salvador may be growing, according to some macroeconomic indicators, but it is heavily dependent on remittances sent by émigrés working in the United States. Moreover, the country is a social and physical ruin, a place where the United States helped finance a Cold War battle that killed a hundred thousand Salvadorans.
Then, there is Cuba—Reich's idée fixe, but also the great hole in our foreign-policy dogma, which says that free trade and open markets foster democracy and prosperity. If that is true, our neighbors (and many other countries) ask, why do we maintain a near-total ban on trade with Cuba? The answer, of course, is to be found among the roughly one and a quarter million Cuban-Americans, particularly those in South Florida.
"Our problem is that Communism doesn't exist anymore," Joe Garcia, the executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, told me. The C.A.N.F. has been the most powerful political lobby among Cuban exiles for twenty years, and Garcia was trying to account for the deficit of American public sympathy which the community feels today. "The Florida Straits is the Berlin Wall," he said. "Eastern Europeans get it. They got it in the ass for forty years, so they get it."
"Depressed" is the word you hear when you ask Miami Cubans about the state of anti-Castro politics. After the Soviet Union collapsed, hopes ran high that the Castro regime could not last much longer. People started making plans—if not to move back, then at least to visit, see long-lost relatives, maybe buy a vacation condo. Some of the more prominent exiles were positioning themselves to control new markets, perhaps even to return to power on the island. But Castro, of course, has hung on. In the long view, it now seems, more than ever, that there was a civil war in Cuba in the nineteen-fifties, with winners and losers, and that the losers came to America.
They're doing well here, most of them, economically and educationally, and they're proud of this and eager to assimilate. Community support for Otto Reich stems as much from that pride as it does from his politics. Ninoska Pérez Castellón, a conservative Miami radio host, told me, "For Cubans, it was a great thing when Otto was named ambassador. He may have been the first Cuban to reach that height."
For decades, the C.A.N.F. had been dominated by its founder, Jorge Mas Canosa, who also seemed to dominate every politician he set his sights on. When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he opposed the embargo until he went to Miami and met Mas Canosa. Clinton emerged from that meeting with a large check and a new position. There was a bill before Congress at the time that would tighten the embargo. The first President Bush was planning to veto the bill because it contained infringements on executive power. Clinton started attacking the President for being soft on Castro, and Bush quickly signed the legislation.
Mas Canosa died in 1997. His son, Jorge Mas Santos, now heads the C.A.N.F., and things have not been the same. The turning point was the Elián Gonzales affair, when the federal government decided that the boy, whose mother had drowned during their attempt to reach Florida, should return to Cuba with his father. "We're still a victim of the massive evil on the other side," Joe Garcia said. "But America has moved on. We were unanimous: no parent would want his child back in hell. But the issue was framed against us very effectively—by Clinton. It's about a father and a son. That was a bear. We couldn't communicate our side effectively."
The political activism of wealthy Cubans, who donate heavily to both major parties, is usually ascribed to their fervent interest in Cuban policy, but the truth is that many of them work in areas, such as banking or construction, that are closely regulated by or otherwise dependent on government; it has simply been good business practice for them to make politically powerful friends. Indeed, the outsized influence that Cuban-Americans have had on American politics is probably more a function of their financial clout than of the votes they deliver. (Certainly Jeb Bush—Jebcito, to his Cuban constituents—knows both ends of the equation well. Armando Codina, a Cuban-American construction magnate, brought Jeb into his business back when the future Governor was getting his start in Miami—and George H. W. Bush was Vice-President. Jeb was reportedly a good salesman, but people in Miami say, "Codina made Jeb a rich man.")
Another long-standing assumption about Cuban-American political attitudes is that they will change with the generations. That is proving to be both true and not true. Polls find that younger Cuban-Americans favor cultural exchange with the island, and they are certainly less obsessed with Castro than their parents are. But there is still a large majority—up to eighty per cent—who are against lifting the embargo as long as Castro is in power. Also, rather stunningly, sixty-three per cent tell pollsters that they would support a United States invasion of Cuba.
It is still possible to sit in the Versailles, a big gleaming bakery and restaurant on Calle Ocho, the main drag of Miami's Little Havana, and imagine that some of the elderly men huddled at tables over boliche and huevos habaneros—or maybe some of those out at the streetside tables nursing coffees, smoking hand-rolled cigars, and fiercely talking politics in thick Cuban Spanish—are doing more than dreaming about the old days. In a town where radio is far more politically influential than print or television, the largest outlet is Radio Mambí—a twenty-four-hour Spanish-language hard-line talk-radio station. Radio Mambí is run by an exile named Armando Pérez-Roura, who also hosts its most popular show. Pérez-Roura was Batista's official radio spokesman in the fifties and is much feared in South Florida for his ability to deliver not only votes but also angry street protesters from among his faithful listeners. Pérez-Roura is in many ways a dinosaur—he has never learned English, and is not an American citizen—but he still manages to add a threatening tone to public discourse in Miami. Although he has been known to make anti-Semitic remarks on the air, his was the most powerful voice demanding, last year, that the Bushes stand behind Otto Reich.
The Bush dynasty clearly respects Pérez-Roura's power. Jeb is a regular guest on his show, and, just days before the 2000 Presidential election, Pérez-Roura introduced George W. at a rally in Miami, invoking the name Elián Gonzales. He also went on to play a role in the Presidential ballot recount.
Among those Americans not from Cuba who can be bothered to think about the embargo, it has become, according to polls, increasingly unpopular. People reason that it is not working, and that our hostility just allows Castro to hang on to power. For true believers in free trade, the embargo is, moreover, a heresy. Charlene Barshefsky, the United States Trade Representative under Clinton, told the Boston Globe, as she was leaving office, that "our Cuba policy is lunacy." American farmers, looking for new export markets, have turned against it, as have their representatives in Congress, most of whom are Republicans. And the agricultural and pharmaceutical interests that want to see the embargo lifted have deeper pockets, ultimately, than even the South Florida Cubans. (In late September, a delegation of Midwestern politicians and businessmen went to Havana for an agricultural trade fair, and Otto Reich managed to offend everyone involved by warning the Americans, including Jesse Ventura, the governor of Minnesota, not to indulge in "sexual tourism" in Cuba. Ventura demanded an apology from the White House.) Legislation to relax the embargo has been passing in Congress by increasingly large margins. Still, President Bush, making good on his vows to Cuban-Americans, vetoes each bill, which is front-page news in the Miami Herald and, at best, wire-service fare elsewhere in the country.
With Cuba, as with so many things, it seems that the President is most intent on learning from his father's political mistakes. When the South Florida Cubans thought the first President Bush was going soft on Castro, he lost support. That won't happen again, particularly with Otto Reich on the case. Reich was great friends with Jorge Mas Canosa, and the current leadership at the C.A.N.F. believes he is doing a fine job. Joe Garcia, of the C.A.N.F., told me, "Otto was the guy who was supposed to hold the plug there"—in Washington—"on Cuba." Whether Reich continues to be that guy will probably depend on the Republicans' ability to regain control of the Senate in the November elections.
After Reich's nomination, the Cuban media produced a series of stories about his connections to the "terrorist mafia" of Miami exiles. Then, late last year, Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the Cuban National Assembly, told an interviewer that he considered Reich a "magnificent" choice for the job. "Otto Reich is the ideal undersecretary for a failed U.S. foreign policy in Latin America," Alarcón said. "I'm not worried in the least. The United States is who should be worried." Alarcón went on, "Otto Reich is more amusing to us than anything else. He is going to be concerned not only with Cuba but with the whole continent. Perfect. Letting him help destroy U.S. relations with Latin America strikes us as a brilliant idea."
The truth is, Reich told me, Latin-American governments deplore our Cuban policy only in public. Privately, "They say, 'We agree with you on Cuba. We just differ on the means.' They all want Castro to leave. They want us to do it. They don't want to have to do it. They're afraid of Castro. Believe me, they've told me." When a resolution condemning Cuba's human-rights abuses came up at a United Nations commission, he said, "The Vice-President of a major country told me, 'You know we cannot support this resolution, because you know what Fidel Castro has done in my country, and you know what he's capable of doing. He's killed, he's kidnapped. He supports terrorists.' "
Once, in the nineteen-seventies, Reich said, "Colombia and Cuba were vying for the same seat on the U.N. Security Council, and Colombia wouldn't back off," so Castro "had the brother of the President kidnapped" by leftist Colombian guerrillas. Reich added that Castro also had the brother of another President of Colombia kidnapped, for a different reason, and both incidents unfolded in exactly the same way. "First, Castro offers to negotiate. 'I'll try to intercede with those bad people. We had relations with them, and we still know them.' " Eventually, Reich told me, both victims surfaced in Havana, and were handed back to their families. The Presidents got the message. In the case of the Security Council spat, Reich said, "Colombia withdrew its candidacy, and Cuba got the seat." (In fact, Colombia and Cuba both withdrew, and Mexico got the seat. The first of these kidnappings didn't take place, in any event, until four years afterward. In both cases, the victims turned up in Colombia, not in Havana.) Reich studied me, as if to see whether I really understood. "This guy's a thug," he said. "It's like 'The Godfather.' They act the same way, except he runs a country, instead of just a family."
Reich conceded that Latin-American leaders might have other reasons for opposing our Cuban policy. "Latin Americans have always had what they consider to be this policy of nonintervention," he said. "Since we have been the big kid on the block, they have felt that there has been safety in numbers. By uniting behind this policy of nonintervention, they would protect themselves. On the other hand, we are also the one country that everybody calls whenever there's trouble, and we have in fact used our power in the region many times to defend a lot of those countries."
Reich went on to say that our policy toward Cuba today is identical to our policy toward El Salvador in the nineteen-eighties. Now, in most people's memory, we were bankrolling and "advising" the Salvadoran Army, one of the most murderous militaries on earth, in the nineteen-eighties. So I had trouble seeing the connection. But I began to sense why governments in Latin America have complained that Reich is not properly focussed on their bilateral relations with the United States: Reich was already off on another riff about why Castro is afraid of radios being distributed in Cuba.
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