Posted on 11/16/2001 1:15:32 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON -- (AP) -- Two former U.S. ambassadors debated the wisdom of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and disagreed on that and on virtually all other Cuba-related issues Wednesday during a during a sometimes prickly discussion.
Dennis Hays, executive vice president of the pro-embargo Cuban-American National Foundation, said the embargo imposed, in 1960 and strengthened in 1962, has been a success when matched against objectives outlined by Secretary of State Dean Rusk 40 years ago.
Hays, a former State Department Cuban affairs expert who served as ambassador to Suriname, said Rusk's goals were to reduce Cuban President Fidel Castro's ability to export subversion, to make clear that communism had no future in the Western Hemisphere and to serve as a drain on the Soviet Union.
He said Rusk's goals have largely been borne out, noting that Soviet subsidies to Cuba over 20 years probably cost Moscow about dlrs 120 billion, which the Kremlin might otherwise have been able to use for survival to avoid its collapse in 1991.
Sally Grooms Cowal, president of the anti-embargo Cuba Policy Foundation and a former ambassador to Trinidad, said the United States has not succeeded in 40 years in bringing democratic reform to Cuba through the embargo.
``That hasn't happened,'' she said. ``Is there a corporation in the United States that would not change its practices if they had been a 40-year failure?''
``America cannot afford to continue a policy that's based on 40 years of failure,'' she said.
Cowal described her organization as ``centrist'' and said she has no illusions about the true nature of Cuba.
``I am not a naive Cuba apologist,'' she said.
The two argued over the significance of an International Trade Commission report that concluded the U.S. embargo was costing the U.S. economy dlrs 1 billion a year. Cowal found that to be a significant sum, and Hays dismissed it as a pittance.
Cuba has been an emotional and contentious foreign policy issue for decades. Only rarely have partisans on opposite sides of the Cuba issue agreed to appear in the same forum.
Wednesday's debate at George Washington University was the first of five.
No she's not naïve, she's a pro-Castro supporter!
More on Ms. Sally Grooms Cowal ----Hardly a "centrist."
(April 22, 2001) HOUSTON (AP) - The former diplomat who housed Elian Gonzalez for the final five weeks of his stay in the United States announced the formation of a group Thursday to promote an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.
Sally Grooms Cowal said her Cuba Policy Foundation believes resumption of trade is the best way to foster reforms on the communist-ruled island.
``The only chance we really have to grow this American economy is growth in our exports and growth in our markets,'' Cowal said.
Cowal served in various diplomatic posts from 1971 through 1994, including as ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago. She also was president of Youth for Understanding, an organization that promotes exchanges involving high school students from the United States and foreign countries. Elian and his father stayed at the organization's estate in Washington before they returned to Cuba.
______________________________
Cowal's group received its initial funding from the ARCA FOUNDATION, a wealthy organization devoted to more contact and fewer trade restrictions with Cuba. Its chairman is SMITH BAGLEY, a grandson of tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds and a major Democratic donor. ******(Remember the two DNC fundraisers with Elian as their trophy?)*******
National security is more important than a few extra dollars of trade. If trade sanctions make our enemies weaker, I'm sure Sally Cowal would be against it.
I sometimes wonder if letting a little American luxury leak into Cuba wouldn't go a lot further toward overthrowing communism there.
Good question. I dare say she does. By doing so it legitimizes their regimes.
Clinton and Reno knew she was the one to guard Elian in D.C. Someone who would turn him over for two DNC fundraisers.
What sort of morals would a person like that have? It goes deeper than $$$$$ for her, it goes to ideology.
All that luxury goes to benefit Castro's regime. After 40 years it will take something like the collapse of the Cuban economy, akin to the fall of the Berlin wall, to free Castro's captives. You can see the mental state the people of the USSR are in after a life under communism. How will shoring up a dictator, who by the way exports terrorism, help the people of Cuba? Castro is free to trade with the rest of the world. It's the communism, not restrictive trade, that has destroyed Cuba.
All what luxury? We don't trade with them.
Forty years of sanctions haven't done a thing to oust Castro. If something isn't working, I'm not sure keeping it up is the answer.
Exactly my point. The tourists who visit pay plenty to bask in the people's paradise, aren't helping the average Cuban, it goes to the communist government. Again, the rest of the world is free to trade with Castro. So why do they live in so much poverty? When they do scrape together some money, this is what happens. ( I'd really like your opinion)-- Cuba Wages Offensive on 'Over-Sized' Houses --(built with "the purpose of self enrichment" and so confiscated)-- ``The day money is the factor behind distribution of the nation's properties is the day we will be divided into social classes. We will not allow that,'' said Juan Contino, who heads the movement of Cuba's state-affiliated neighborhood groups, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR).
The CDRs are encouraged to keep a lookout for property ''irregularities'' and make denunciations where appropriate. ``We are the good neighbors, those who have to go out and warn people 'you're making a gigantic house','' Contino said.
The housing offensive has spread terror among the numerous Cubans who have in recent times carried out home extensions or ''permutas'', or used their houses for illegal purposes.
``They've destroyed my life. They say my house is 'over-sized' and I don't know where this is going to end,'' said one Cuban resident, whose repairs brought threatening inspectors' visits. ``They take my house away, I have nowhere to go.''
Tell me, how will the U.S. joining the rest the the world in subsidizing trade with Castro, help the average Cuban? (That is who you care about, isn't it?)
No, I don't particularly care about the average Cuban. (Do you, honestly?)
Sanctions don't work. They certainly don't hurt the Castros or Saddams or Kadaffis of the world. In fact, they arguably give authoritarian rulers more power by giving them absolute godlike control of all resources.
I assume our strategy is to choke off the necessities and make people hungry and discontented enough to revolt. It's a quaint notion, but as far as I know it has never happened. Not in modern times as a result of our machinations, anyway. The rulers go on building palaces and armies, the people go on starving and we're the ones who catch public relations holy hell for it. In Cuba - where, as you point out, other nations trade freely - sanctions have been even more useless. We've done nothing but make them a David to our Goliath.
Sending Levi's and Pepsi to disagreeable nations might not help overthrow their governments. But it might. Public yearning after a Western lifestyle undoubtedly played a part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. In any case, what we're doing doesn't seem to be having any effect at all.
There is nothing we can do to ease their plight if the average Cuban will not benefit. So, I do not propose to help Casto or his communist dictatorship.
And yes, I do care about the average Cuban. Have you read this?
Jay Nordlinger: Who Cares About Cuba? "Human rights cannot exist without God."
[Excerpt] Robert Conquest points out that Western defenders of the Soviet Union were "always more anti-American than they were pro-Soviet"; so it is in the case of Cuba. Jeane Kirkpatrick finds it astonishing that "some of our elites are actually proud of their indifference to Cuba's victims, or China's, or Burma's. It is in bad taste, intellectually, to give much thought to these victims." And "frankly, there is something perverse about the hostility to anti-Communists." We saw in the Elian affair, she says, that Cubans in the United States are close to a pariah community…….
Snip
Valladares has a ready answer to this business of "good things," (Casto's done) given with patience and weariness: Say these things have been accomplished (which is laughable, but leave that aside). Could they not have been accomplished without torturing people? Without imprisoning them? Without denying them all rights? Is material well-being incompatible with human freedom? Besides which, few people go out of their way to stress the material achievements of other dictators; autobahns and so forth. The likes of Jose Serrano do not pause to acknowledge Chile's economic explosion. And then there is the matter of Castro's sheer longevity as dictator. Says Valladares, "I was talking to an American, A Democrat, the other day. I said to him, 'How would you like it if Richard Nixon got to be president for over forty years?' The man almost shrieked in horror." …………
Snip
The oppositionists and their supports are extraordinarily, even disturbingly, grateful for any sincere attention they receive. They are accustomed to being snubbed or defamed. Another exile writes, "Prisoners cling to newspaper articles about human rights in Cuba as their only hope against being abandoned and forgotten. The sense of helplessness, that no one is listening, that no one cares, is what kills their souls. I've known many such people, including within my own family."
Back in the Reagan years, Jeane Kirkpatrick became a heroine in the Soviet Union for the simple act of naming names on the floor of the U.N.: naming the names of prisoners, citing their cases, inquiring after their fates. Later, in Moscow, she met Andrei Sakharov, who exclaimed, "Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski! I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag." And why was that? Because she had named those names, giving men and women in the cells a measure of hope. Kirkpatrick says now, "This much I have learned: It is very, very important to say the names, to speak them. It's important to go on taking account as one becomes aware of the prisoners and the torture they undergo. It's terribly important to talk about it, write about it, go on TV about it." A tyrannical regime depends on silence, darkness. "One of their goals is to make their opponents vanish. They want not only to imprison them, they want no one to have heard of them, no one to know who or where they are. So to just that extent, it's tremendously important that we pay attention." [End Excerpt]
Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet Gonzalez , Rene Montes de Oca Martija, Jose Orlando Gonzalez Bridon, Vladimiro Roca, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, Maritza Lugo Fernandez abd Bernardo Arevalo Padron, there are thousands of others and it is important to say their names.
If a strategy goes forty years without showing the intended result, it's probably not a very good plan.
A good point to make to Castro.
Our "strategy" should continue to be not recognizing and assisting him in his enslavement of the Cuban people. Perhaps we are discussing two different things.
Kindly explain to me how trading with a communist government helps the people trapped in that system?
Kindly explain to me how not trading with a communist government helps the people trapped in that system?
Can't tell you? Who suggested helping Castro? I thought you were better than to put words in someone else's mouth in debate. I simply considered the reverse of your question more significant than your question.
First, you don't trade with governments (or Castro, which is the same thing in this case). You certainly don't let your government trade with their government. Not good capitalism, that. I'm suggesting our government simply step back from formal legal sanctions on businesspeople and let things take their course.
Remember, we're no longer in a position to be "contaminated" by the Cuban point of view (when was the last time someone hijacked a plane to Castroland?). They are very much in a position to be "contaminated" by us (that boat people thing only goes in one direction, doesn't it?).
Maybe nothing comes of it (in which case, no harm done), but I bet trade would immediately spring up between Miami and Havana - probably black market on the Cuban side. I seriously doubt their rum and cigars would do a fraction of the damage to American capitalists than our bluejeans and Big Macs would do to Cuban communists.
At least, it seems a better shot to me than "acknowledging their suffering" and waiting for Castro to die peacefully in bed of old age.
Who's the person we're trading with in Cuba if not the government?
Remember, we're no longer in a position to be "contaminated" by the Cuban point of view (when was the last time someone hijacked a plane to Castroland?). They are very much in a position to be "contaminated" by us (that boat people thing only goes in one direction, doesn't it?).
You must be joking, right? We just arrested a Senior Pentagon Analyst and charged her with espionage for spying for Castro.
Playing patty-cake with communists doesn't stop them from moving forward to enslave more people.
Maybe nothing comes of it (in which case, no harm done), but I bet trade would immediately spring up between Miami and Havana - probably black market on the Cuban side.
Again I point you to the article LINKED at Post #7 (Didn't get your comments on it.)-- Cubans watching Cubans for any "self enrichment."They are turned in and the "extras" are given to those reporting the "infractions."
I seriously doubt their rum and cigars would do a fraction of the damage to American capitalists than our bluejeans and Big Macs would do to Cuban communists.
Who do you think owns the rum and cigar businesses. It's Castro. (Are Americans the only ones who smoke cigars and drink rum?) Where are all the profits realized from the rest of the world free to trade with Castro? Hmmmmm. Why hasn't that helped the Cuban people? Hmmmmmm? It hasn't, it has only helped the dictator.
Do you know what a black market is?
You must be joking, right?
No. Are you? Do you seriously think American culture is so fragile that we can't risk contact with Cuba for fear of communist revolution? You know that whole US-vs-soviet-union domino theory thing? It's over. We won.
Again I point you to the article LINKED at Post #7 (Didn't get your comments on it.)
I followed the LINK but I'm not sure why you think that's so important. Yes, Cubans are encouraged to turn each other in for breaking the rules. It's not a nice place. Soviets were encouraged to do the same. I don't know how long that help keeped the communists in power in Russia, but it wasn't forever.
Did you notice the part about "With the worst of the economic crisis of the 1990s over, and the passing of some liberalization measures such as the opening to tourism and the authorization of a tiny private sector, a small part of Cuba's 11 million population has gained significantly in wealth"? And the part about the thriving black market housing trade? Do you think these things are making Cuba more communist? The fact that their government is cracking down on this prosperity answers that question.
Hmmmmm. Why hasn't that helped the Cuban people? Hmmmmmm?
Sounds to me like they are being helped, however slowly and inadequately, by the little taste of capitalism they've had.
Hmmmmmmm.
Now you say if we trade with the Cuban black market this will help. (Are we going to float products in on inner tubes?) Help who? If we start to subsidize Casto's government we will be endorsing Casto, we will be legitimizing communism as a form of government acceptable to us and paving the path for his communist successor.
Let the rest of the world do that if they wish. Oh they do!
Well, let's see how that improves the lot of the average Cuban. Tick tock--tick tock--tick tock--tick tock......
Anything yet?
I don't know. Shall we give it forty-two years before we declare it a failure?
Thanks for the dialogue.
So did I. To advocate spreading a little capitalism into Cuba would be a strange way to defend communism.
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