Posted on 03/23/2002 5:37:38 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Jimmy Carter said Friday that he will travel to Cuba sometime this year -- a trip that would make him the highest-ranking former U.S. official to have visited the island since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959.
''We are making plans now and, as we have said, we have been invited to go to Cuba and we intend to go,'' Carter said during an interview with CNN. ``But I'm not prepared at this point to give our goals and the names of people that will go or when we will go because we haven't really made those plans yet.''
The trip could have significant impact on U.S. policy at a time when the Bush administration is under increasing pressure to shift strategies and open up to the Castro regime. While many members of Congress have visited the islands, Carter would be the first former president to travel there since the Cuban revolution.
Carter told CNN that the Bush administration may not like the fact that he's going but likely won't stand in the way. ''I expect to get their tacit approval, not their blessing,'' he said. ``We can't go, obviously, without the permission of the government. My understanding is that they will give that approval.''
REACTION
Cuban Americans reacted swiftly to Carter's announcement.
Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, said his organization welcomes the trip -- if Carter intends to tell Castro to leave power.
Garcia said, however, that if Carter intends to promote better relations with Castro, the influential exile organization would oppose the trip.
''If he is going the way he went to Haiti [in 1994] to tell [Haitian military leader] Gen. Raoul Cedras to leave, then we welcome his trip to Cuba if he is going to tell Fidel Castro to leave,'' Garcia said. ``However, if he's going to give legitimacy to a 43-year-old dictatorship, then I think it would be unfortunate.''
While Carter declined to outline his objectives in Cuba, he indicated to CNN's Judy Woodruff that his intention was to improve relations between Cuba and the United States -- not to deliver an ultimatum to Castro.
Carter indicated support for easing the embargo and allowing U.S. citizens to travel freely to the island, though he spoke strongly in favor of democracy on the island.
VISION FOR ISLAND
''As you probably would remember, when I was president, I departed from my predecessors and unfortunately my successors, in lifting all travel restraints on American citizens to go to Cuba almost immediately when I was president within a few weeks,'' Carter said.
``And I also established interests sections, which is one step short of full diplomatic relationships between Havana and Washington. And those interest sections with staffs representing our countries have never been closed.
``So I think the best way to bring about democratic changes in Cuba is obviously to have maximum commerce and trade and visitation by Americans and others who know freedom and to let the Cuban people know the advantages of freedom. That's the best way to bring about change and not to punish the Cuban people themselves by imposing an embargo on them, which makes Castro seem to be a hero because he is defending his own people against the abuse of Americans.''
You forgot Hillary. I know she's just dying to bask in Castro's presence but politics won't allow it.
Well, I have dealt with every single one of the "arguments" against lifting the embargo more times that I can count. So, as you suggested to me, go find my rebuttals to your claims that lifting the "embargo" would have a positive impact on Cuba then.
And while you are at it, answer my argument that the "embargo" was never about bringing Castro down to begin with, which is why your entire argument is flawed from the git-go.
Might as well been me making that statement.
I genuinely wished I could deny having lived through those times.
While in all fairness what good could possibly be said of Gerald Ford...
A baffoon's, baffoon.
Let's just say, the 70s were some very confused years as far as this nation was concerned.
Jimmy Carter's *leadership*, by far and away & more than any other factor (~including disco), saw to that.
To realize the extraordinary human cost for the Cuban people, read Against All Hope by Armando Valladares. The misery and oppression of the Cuban people for the last 43 years are the result of a Stalinist brutal regime; the embargo had nothing to do with Cuban poverty. It is the communism stupid!
Fatherland or Death! and Socialism or Death! Blood and death are at the core of the Cuban revolution. "Two, three, many Vietnams" and the destruction of the U.S. was Castro's most cherished dream. Che Guevera in his manual for terrorists, resumed Castro's creed when he stated the need to instill in the new man the need of "extremely useful hatred that runs men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines."
AGAINST ALL HOPE: THE STRUGGLE GOES ON
by Agustin Blazquez with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton
Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Armando Valladares – who spent 22 years in Castro’s gulag – authored the powerful 1984 book Against All Hope. Now there is a newly re-issued version. It was presented in a Book Forum on March 15, 2002, at The Heritage Foundation’s Lehrman Auditorium in Washington, DC.
This new version of his best selling memoirs features a new prologue by Mr. Valladares. In it, he recounts his life since his 1982 release from Castro’s prison, which was the result of an international campaign of protests including, at the very end, France’s President Mitterrand personal intervention with Castro to secure his freedom.
Dan Fisk, Deputy Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies hosted this event. Fisk is a veteran Washington foreign-policy expert who has served in two presidential administrations and on the House and Senate committees that oversee foreign affairs. He is a leading authority on Latin America and international relations.
In his presentation remarks, Fisk referred to Cuba as a "tropical gulag." He also pointed out the ironic juxtaposition of two images: Al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo compared to the hundreds of political prisoners in Cuban jails. He said, "the real victims" are the "11 million Cuban people."
In reports filed by Cuban independent journalists (who are illegal in Cuba), the pro-democracy groups in Cuba have taken note of the international press coverage and concern for the terrorists held at Guantanamo. But they also notice the lack of concern for the Cubans who are deprived of human rights and suffer frequent arrests, beatings and harassment by Castro’s forces.
Among those assisting at the event were Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, Assistant Secretary for Western Hemispheric Affairs Otto Reich, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at HUD Shannon Sorzano, U.S. Mission to the Organization of American States Bruce Friedman, from the office of Senator Orrin Hatch, Manuel Miranda, the Staff Director of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Relations Yleem Poblete, the Chairman of the Settlement Division at the Justice Department Mauricio Tamargo and Mary O'Grady of The Wall Street Journal.
In this re-issue of Against All Hope, Valladares says in the new prologue, "the government of Cuba and defenders of the Cuban Revolution denied that incidents that I recount ever happened. Castro sympathizers, who were more subtle, said the incidents I described were exaggerations.
"There has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro. While I was on book tours in the mid 1980’s talking about Against All Hope, I encountered many individuals who argued fiercely on behalf of the Castro regime."
In 1986, President Reagan named Armando Valladares Ambassador of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. But at that time, he says, "the thousands of accusations of violations of human rights in Cuba conflicted with the double standard then current at the U.N. Sadly, this body considered crimes according to the ideology of the victims and the murderers. Those who hated the crimes of Pinochet closed their eyes when the same crimes were committed by Castro. The posture of many countries was governed by their hostility against the United States, and they excused Castro out of a reflexive anti-Americanism. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend.) These political games still take place today.
"I have become convinced that hatred toward the U.S. has been a chief reason for Castro’s longevity in power. The old dictator’s proximity to the U.S. and his confrontational attitude have given him undeserved support from the press, governments, politicians and intellectuals of this hemisphere."
What shocked Valladares the most during his tenure at the U.N. was the blatant "double standard of many governments." He cites the examples of Spain under the socialist President Felipe Gonzalez and Mexico.
But it wasn’t until 1988 that a group of U.N. ambassadors were able to visit Cuba for eleven days and was able "to document 137 cases of torture, 7 disappearances, political assassinations and thousands of violations" of human rights. This trip was summarized "in a 400-page report, which was the longest report ever to appear on the agenda of the U.N."
This report provided irrefutable proof of what Valladares was recounting in Against All Hope. But academia and the media successfully passed over both the book and the report.
This 1988 report included "locking political prisoners in refrigerated rooms; blindfolded immersions in pools; intimidation by dogs; firing squad simulations; beatings, forced labor; confinement for years in dungeons called gavetas; the use of loudspeakers with deafening sounds during hunger strikes; degradation of prisoners by forced nudity in punishment cells; withholding water during hunger strikes; forcing prisoners to present themselves in the nude before their families (to force them to accept plans for political rehabilitation); denial of medical assistance for the sick; and forcing those condemned to die to carry their own coffins and dig their own graves prior to being shot."
Armando Valladares experienced and witnessed all that during his 1960-1982 internment in Castro’s gulag.
In his well-received speech at today’s event, Valladares remarked that although for him his memoirs in the horrid Castro’s gulags were behind him, "hundreds and hundreds of political prisoners in Cuba even today languish in the same torture cells where my friends and I were tortured."
He cannot forget the case of the Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, president of a pro-human rights organization "considered illegal by the Cuban government."
Dr. Biscet, who is black, has been arrested many times but on February 25, 2000, he was sentenced to three years. Dr. Biscet has been enduring all kinds of tortures, depravations and denial of medical assistance. He has lost a lot of weight, his health has deteriorated and many fear that he might die in prison. Dr. Biscet is not the only black in Cuban prisons. The black inmate population is a disproportionate 80%.
Valladares talked about Marta Beatriz Roque, a Cuban independent economist who has already served time in jail for her participation in a 1997 in a socio-economic analysis critical of the Castro regime. Last January 26, 2002, she was arrested for "her refusal to allow government officials to enter her house to spray insecticide."
Martiza Lugo, 40, "has been arrested more than 30 times" for disagreeing with the regime. Lugo was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. on January 11, 2002, with her two children. But her husband, Rafael Ibarra Roque, is serving in jail "the eighth year of a 20 year sentence," for his pro-democracy stand.
He said that the valiant Cuban pro-democracy advocates on the island are taking great risks and in spite of reprisals maintain "their peaceful resistance against the dictatorship by facing Castro’s forces. Amnesty International has documented all of these cases and hundreds of cases of political prisoners. The abandonment of these dissidents, not remembering their names, is to abandon the Cuban people."
Valladares manifested his disagreement with the idea of a "dialogue with Castro." He believes that it’s an illusion that any formula that includes Castro moving toward freedom for the people of Cuba could be anything more than an illusion. "It would be like putting a respectful and humanitarian solution for the Jewish people in the hands of Hitler, or to put the fate of black Americans in the hands of racist extremists.
"Unfortunately, as long as Castro continues in power, the situation won’t change. Castro declared again about three weeks ago for those who want a change, ‘They should sit and wait for the changes, because in Cuba there is nothing to change.’" There you have it, clearer than water.
He criticized Mexico for the February 28, 2002 incident in their embassy in Havana where 21 people sought refuge. (This went unreported by the three major U.S. networks.) He said, "It isn’t new the policy of collaboration of the Mexican governments with the Cuban dictatorship. The embassy of Mexico in Cuba has a long history of returning the politically persecuted to Castro’s police. I remember my fellow inmate Reinaldo Aquit, who escape from the prison and Gilberto Bosque, then ambassador of Mexico, informed against him."
Valladares expressed that he wasn’t surprised by the Mexicans asking Castro’s secret police to evict the asylum seekers. "Since the day President Fox declared that in Cuba there was no dictatorship and denied that Castro was a dictator, I knew that anything could happen.
"The embassy of Mexico in Havana continues as a subsidiary of Castro’s police and his most loyal accomplice. About two weeks ago an international terrorist conference was held in Mexico called by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), with the approval of President Fox. Why is this country that should be an ally of the U.S. and an ally of the Cuban people, instead allied with the Cuban dictator?"
He also mentioned in his speech William Raspberry’s recent visit to Cuba and resulting column in The Washington Post. Raspberry wrote, "I felt free walking the Cuba streets." Valladares asked, "How is it possible that a person of his intellect could go to Cuba and not learn about Cuba, could go to Cuba and drink a pina colada without thinking for a moment, without visiting a prison, without talking to dissidents?"
The dramatic story of Valladares willpower, resistance and survival against all the humiliations, tortures and inhumanities of Castro’s gulag is not the exception but the rule. All who defy Castro’s regime have to go through the same nightmare. Updating and bringing attention to this book in 2002 is applicable for today’s world where a hand full of tyrants have been causing so much harm to millions of innocent people.
Against All Hope, though it opened many eyes to the hidden realities of Castro’s gulag, did not receive enough acceptance in the academic circles in the U.S., among the members of the U.S. media and in Hollywood. When I first read the book, I thought that now Hollywood has a powerful story of epic proportions to bring to the screen. Like the multiple stories they have done about the Holocaust.
But as it usually happens with the cultural and information mass media in the U.S., it is very much controlled by the zeal of the left. They walk the extra mile to cover-up any unflattering portrayal of Castro and all other communist tyrannies
Sixteen years after the release of the 1986 English version of Against All Hope, the continuing struggle for democracy and human rights in Cuba goes on. Hopefully this new release will bring some overdue attention to the ongoing tragedy of Cuba. Hopefully the Castro regime will eventually end up in the garbage can of history. Cubans belong to the human race. They deserve the same freedoms American enjoy and take for granted.
End
Agustin Blazquez Producer/Director of the documentaries COVERING CUBA, COVERING CUBA 2: The Next Generation & the upcoming COVERING CUBA 3: Elian Author with Carlos Wotzkow of the book COVERING AND DISCOVERING
Yes, Castro blames Cuba's shambles of an economy and endless shortages on the embargo, but there isn't a Cuban over the age of 7 who doesn't recognize that as just another of his lies. What has wrecked Cuba's economy is communism, not a lack of trade with America. After all, Castro is free to do business with every other nation on earth.
And make no mistake: Doing business with Cuba means doing business with Castro. There is no private property in Cuba, no private enterprise, no private employers. Foreign investors must deal with the government. They cannot hire Cuban workers directly; a government agency chooses their workers for them. The investors pay Castro - in hard currency - for each worker; Castro in turn pays the workers a fraction of that amount - in all-but-worthless pesos.
So long as Cuba's dictator maintains his stranglehold on every aspect of Cuban life, ending the embargo would be counterproductive. It would do nothing to end the far more restrictive embargo that Castro imposes on the Cuban nation. It would give him the propaganda victory and the US dollars he craves, but it would do little to bring liberty or hope to ordinary Cuban citizens.
Every president since JFK has extended the Cuban embargo; to lift it in exchange for nothing - no free elections, no civil liberties - would be a betrayal of the very people we want to help. ''Tiende tu mano a Cuba,'' says Paya when I ask what he thinks of American policy, ''pero primero pide que le desaten las manos a los cubanos.'' Extend your hands to Cuba - but first unshackle ours.
In Taiwan, an angry mob of thousands of students went so far as to attack a U.S. motorcade, slightly injuring Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, head of the U.S. mission. While at the U.S. Embassy in Taipei, Ambassador Leonard Unger stood silently as the flags of both nations were simultaneously lowered and ties severed. There hasn't been a U.S. ambassador in Taipei since, and if one should decide to go back anytime soon, he had better first find a place to live.
We read in the Taipei Update that the former U.S. ambassador's residence has now been designated a "historical landmark," reopening this summer as the "Taipei House," a space for public exhibitions. The building came under the custody of the Taipei city government in 1997 when it became clear the U.S. wasn't coming back. John Tkacik, the Heritage Foundation's Chinese authority, told us Friday that he hasn't heard from Mr. Unger since running into him about a year ago. Mr. Tkacik recalls the termination of ties with Taiwan - when Mr. Unger walked away from the embassy "with the flag under his arm," so to speak - as "a period of intense uncertainty and low morale" among the U.S. Embassy staff.****
I am not interested in the mistakes of history, why repeat them. It will take courage for a president to change our policy since they will have to explain to the refugees that the interests of both countries lay in a new direction and not repeating past mistakes. Bush is the right person for the job.
I don't look to Canadian and European lack of influence in Cuba as a model and I wonder why you try to validate your argument by doing so. Curious.
I guess it's time for our GOP ex-presidents to start getting back into the limelight.
Let's see, Ford is too liberal, Reagan too sick, and Bush too classy. I guess it's only failed Democrat Presidents who can't deal with their failure who have to continue to seek the limelight.
The entire world USED to trade with Cuba, or rather with a dictator whose stated policy (publicly ststed BTW) is to NOT PAY the foreign debt of those countries that he deems "oppresors", one of those countries is the US.
In light of the fact that International trade has been going on in Cuba for years without significant change, in spite of the well-documented record of non-payment on his his foreign debt, in spite of his statements of solidarity with countries that are sworn enemies of the US( May 21, 2001 Castro declares that Cuba and Iraq will bring the US to its knees), in spite of his record of human rights abuses, in spite of the theft of property belonging to US citizens (if I steal your car, and you don't catch me until the car is too old to be worth anything, will you lend me your car again?), in spite of the billions of dollars in bad debt that he has accumulated over the past years, what reason could you possibly have to want to trade with Castro?
You say that the "embargo" hasn't worked? How many billions of dollars is Castro defaulting on with US creditors?
Freedom Advocacy Promoting freedom and human rights around the world, beginning with Cuba.
I'll make this point for the last time. Trading with Canada or Europe is not the same as with the US. For differences in these countries read other posts, I have no interest in providing a tutorial.
The indebtedness of Cuba is not a deal breaker. We have worked with countries in bad situations before, especially when our goal is to help foster improvements in that country.
The thing that makes the least sense is to countinue on a course that puts us in the least powerful position vis a vis the problem.
May he choke on the smoke of a Cuban "El Liberdad" while walking the hallowed ground of the Zapata Peninsula...
Oh that's right! Castro WILL pay the US! (wink, wink...)
Now, be a little honest and answer ONE question. Why do you keep promoting the lie that the embargo was put in place to bring Castro down?
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