Cuba needs change, not U.S. tourists

By José R. Cárdenas

The debate over U.S. policy towards Cuba heats up this week as the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) holds a hearing Thursday on whether to lift the U.S. travel ban against Fidel Castro's island-prison. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the HFAC, respectively, fired the first salvo with an op-ed in the Miami Herald calling for the unilateral lifting of the "anachronistic" ban, arguing that ordinary Americans can "serve as ambassadors for the democratic values we hold dear," thereby eroding the impediments to change in Cuba.

It is indeed a quaint conceit on the part of many in this country that Americans, just by being Americans, can demonstrate the errors in others' ways and infuse on the recalcitrant and autocratic a sudden appreciation for the commonweal, sparking a dawn of democratic reform and respect for human rights. Sadly, the world doesn't work quite that way and thugs like Castro will not be impressed by the earnestness of American tourists to engender a better Cuba.

Besides, if we are to take our cues from Canadian and European tourists, one wonders whether political agitation can compete with sun, sex, and cigars as the primary motivations for visiting the walled tourist compounds on the Island of Dr. Castro. This doesn't even countenance the motivations of U.S. businessmen, for whom political agitation would be the very last item on their agendas, given that their interests are served by a perceived vision of stability and cozy relations with the incumbent government.

This is not to recognize the moribund state of affairs in Cuba. Senator Lugar and Rep. Berman can hardly be blamed for being frustrated. Anyone who cares about Cuba is frustrated at Fidel Castro's pathological obstinacy and nominal leader and brother Raúl's craven inability to deviate from his brother's uncompromising ideological line.

But bad proposals are worse than none at all. The short of it is the Castro regime simply is more determined to maintain absolute power than the United States is in mercifully terminating its fifty years of misrule. Given that, opening the floodgates to U.S. tourists and businessmen will result in a desperately needed financial windfall and credibility boost that will only strengthen the regime, not undermine it.

Moreover, the debate over the U.S. travel ban and, more broadly, the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba clouds the real issues at hand. Namely, that the real conflict in Cuba is not between the United States and the Castro regime, but between the regime and the Cuban people. This is made abundantly clear in a searing new report by the International Republican Institute on the results of a recent survey conducted discretely among the Cuban people on the island

Conducted this past summer among a total of 432 Cuban adults from across the island, the survey found that Cubans do not need American tourists to tell them that things are rotten in their own country and that change is desperately needed.  Specifically, more than four in five citizens on the island (82 percent) do not believe things are going well, while a vast majority of Cubans would vote for fundamental political change (75 percent) and economic change (86 percent) if given the opportunity.

The survey also found that only 8.8 percent believed the U.S. embargo and "isolation" was the biggest problem in Cuba and only 7.9 percent said they thought ending the embargo would most help improve the economy.  What do Cubans overwhelmingly want? Multi-party elections, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and economic freedoms, including opportunities to own property and run businesses.

Imagine, Cuban citizens came to those conclusions all on their own.

It remains to be seen whether Congress can mobilize the votes to overturn the travel ban (the restrictions were codified under the 1996 Helms-Burton Law), but the prospects seem unlikely. To its credit, the Obama administration has shown no inclination to support such an effort at this time. At the Inter-American Summit last April, the president's words on Cuba were cautious -- and sober. "The Cuban people are not free. And that's our lodestone, our North Star, when it comes to our policy in Cuba," he said. 

He also said his policy would be guided by reciprocity:

What we're looking for is some signal that there are going to be changes in how Cuba operates that assures that political prisoners are released, that people can speak their minds freely, that they can travel, that they can write and attend church and do the things that people throughout the hemisphere can do and take for granted ... And if there is some sense of movement on those fronts in Cuba, then I think we can see a further thawing of relations and further changes.

It is not U.S. policy to be stagnant and unimaginative on Cuba, as critics would have it. President Obama appears intent on continuing the Bush policy of trying to empower Cuban civil society through strategic engagement to operate more independently of the regime's control, although he obviously intends to go much further in opening new avenues to reach the Cuban people. The strategic goal behind such an offensive would be to expand pockets of independence within Cuban civil society and fortify networks among those pockets, putting Cubans who want a different future for their country in touch with other Cubans fed up with the same old struggle and deprivation the regime is only capable of offering.

That Castro's decrepit regime continues to limp along fifty years on understandably confounds many. But that is less an argument for relaxing pressure on the regime than it is an argument to persevere in a cause that is just and right.

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