Posted on 08/18/2015 3:15:51 PM PDT by Dqban22
More tourists wont change Cuba By Ambassador James Cason Miami Herald August 12, 2015
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article30959136.html
On Friday, Secretary John Kerry opens up the new U.S. Embassy in Havana. Unfortunately, he shares many of the misconceptions advanced by former Secretary Hillary Clinton at her recent speech at Florida International University.
Her incursion into the debate on U.S. Cuba policy could have been a teachable moment had she been mindful of her academic audience and the danger of ignoring the facts when trying to justify an abrupt reversal of U.S. foreign policy. Instead she delivered another polemic on lifting what remains of the U.S. embargo.
Cubans, Clinton said, want to buy our goods, read our books. Yes, they do, and for 10 years now Havana has bought annually hundreds of millions of dollars of American foodstuffs on a cash-and-carry basis. As a former chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, I can attest that over the years, we distributed several hundred thousand copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and tens of thousands of books in an effort to break the iron censorship imposed by Castros communist regime.
Promoting freedom just as we did in Eastern Europe, our efforts included shortwave radio broadcasts and distributing thousands of radio receivers.
The White House stood firmly behind American diplomats in Cuba. It did not yield even when the regime expelled a foreign-service officer for giving away copies of George Orwells Animal Farm. Orwells book was published years before Cubas Revolution, and is a quintessential depiction of totalitarianism. Cubans readily grasp the context and, ironically, it was President Bill Clinton who initiated grants to American NGOs to buy and distribute books and radios in the island. President George W. Bush continued the initiative.
What would be new in the 21st Century would be for Raúl Castro to repeal his book bans and cease his censorship, harassment, and imprisonment of writers, broadcasters, readers, and listeners. Little will change until the regime normalizes its relationship with its own people by respecting human rights and earning their consent to be governed by holding free elections.
More tourists wont change Cuba. Millions of Spanish-speaking tourists have visited Cuba and brought no change; neither will English-speaking American tourists.
In all my years in the Foreign Service, tourists never became a major source of support for people struggling to attain freedom. If tourists did have such influence, there would not have been so many 20th-century Latin American dictators.
The administrations new Cuba policy is a reversion to earlier eras before adoption of the Democratic Charter by the Organization of American States when the United States routinely sided with the regions dictators.
Engagement does not require acquiescing to dictators, and the issue today is not engagement versus no engagement. The issue is: What kind of engagement? Sadly, the administration has made numerous concessions to Havana with no quid, pro quo in return.
In her speech, Clinton noted that President Bill Clinton ended his efforts to normalize relations with Cuba when Raúl Castros MiGs destroyed two small Cessnas flying in international airspace. Four men, who were searching for refugees adrift in the Florida Straits, were killed. At the time General Castro was Minister of the Armed Forces.
Mrs. Clinton suggested in her FIU speech that companies doing business in Cuba will push for political reforms. Companies now doing business in Cuba havent and dont. American companies doing business in China, Burma, and other totalitarian states typically become apologists for the regimes lest helping the victims of repression negatively impact their businesses.
What is really needed is for the worlds democracies to condition their economic and political engagement with Cuba to specific internal reforms. That, would be a real new policy.
Second time today.
Tourists flood Cuba every year. It’s only the US that can’t get in (sort of). Cuba is a dump because of the leadership. Tourists who do see Cuba see the sterilized Potemkin Village the Castros want the world to see. All Obama’s policies are going to do is ensure the next successor to the Castros when they go to hell will have more money than ever. Meanwhile, the average Cuban will be living in burned out shanties and, if they’re lucky, riding 1950s Hudsons.
Dang, I did it again.
It’s ‘’tourist’’.
One of Hillary’s good friends, Prof. Johnnetta Cole, was a Castro KGB/DGI asset, if not operative in the Communist Party USA/DGI created “Venceremos Brigade” of the late 1960’s to the present.
See the House Internal Security Committee’s Hearings, ‘The Theory and Practice of Communism in 1972, Venceremos Brigade, Part 2, Oct. 16, 18 & 19, 1972, for all the details.
Cole didn’t enter the picture until after this publication came out, but she was a hardcored communist and remained one for decades, including being on the Board of Advisors of “Marxist Perspectives” in the 1990’s.
Ironically, Cole was made a member of Coca Cola’s Board of Directors, led by a Cuban refugee, most likely because she was president of Spelman College, in Georgia, where Coke is based, but also because she was a friend of Hillary (who had her work on Bill’s presidential transition team).
How much influence Cole had on Hillary’s Cuban position is unknown, but I’ll bet the house it was significant.
Hillary Clinton is as much a Red as is Obama, while Kerry is as much a Communist Dupe as Neville Chamberlain was a Nazi dupe.
The biggest internal threats to America’s survival are Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, aka the “Three Red Assholes of the Apocalypse”.
For the likes of Hillary, I don’t even think that there’s a true ideological agenda (I don’t say the same of her supporters/fellow travellers/etc). Hillary is all about the money and power. She has just found the left to be her preferred conduit.
MORE TOURISTS WON’T CHANGE CUBA
I apologize all freepers for the title error
NEVER FORGET KERRY’S BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN HEROES THAT FOUGHT IN VIETMAN
We remember well what critics of the Vietnam War said about the troops. In his infamous 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry said they had acted in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, that they had raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, and done worse to civilians in the ravaged south.
Kerrys organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), wrote in a September 1970 flyer:
If you had been Vietnamese
We might have burned your house We might have shot your dog
We might have shot you We might have raped your wife and daughter
We might have turned you over to the government for torture
We might have taken souvenirs from your property We might have shot things up a bit
We might have done all these things to you and your whole town
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/222795/slandering-american-soldier-mackubin-thomas-owens
I want more turist on my sandwich.
MOAR TURIST WON CHENGE COOBER
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