After Obama’s thaw, bad year for Cuban citizens

After Obama's thaw, bad year for Cuban citizens
By Charles Lane
The Washington Post
Published: December 17, 2015

Much has changed in Cuba since President Barack Obama and the island's
dictator, Raul Castro, announced their rapprochement a year ago.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into Cuban government
coffers, due to more U.S. tourism and remittances. Havana has negotiated
a generous U.S.-tolerated debt restructuring with Western creditors. You
can't walk down the street in Havana, it seems, without bumping into a
would-be U.S. investor. And, of course, the stars and stripes wave over
a reopened U.S. Embassy in Havana. When it comes to the elementary
freedoms that the Castro regime has denied its people since 1959,
though, results are scant.

"This year has been a bad year for us," democratic activist Antonio G.
Rodiles told Washington Post editors Tuesday. Rodiles cited a "huge
increase in arbitrary arrests," as well as his own savage beating by
regime thugs in July.

"Raul Castro has been legitimized and recognized by the majority of the
governments of the planet, and played a leading part in a Summit of the
Americas, amid flashing cameras and meetings with Barack Obama," writes
independent blogger Yoani Sanchez. "Inside the country, he has not
wanted to give even the slightest recognition to his critics, against
whom he has continued arrests, mob actions and painful character
assassination."

As for freer telecommunications, there are a few new open-air WiFi hot
spots, exorbitantly priced and officially monitored, Sanchez notes.
Meanwhile, Washington trumpets a deal to restore snail-mail service
between the U.S. and Cuba — on a date to be announced. This is what
happens when a magical-thinking president runs up against a communist
octogenarian who inherited Cuba from his brother Fidel — and aspires to
pass it on to his son, the current intelligence chief, and son-in-law,
the tourism industry boss.

"Our central premise," Obama explained to Yahoo News this week, "has
always been for a small country 90 miles off the shores of Miami, that
if they are suddenly exposed to the world and America and opened up to
our information and our culture and our visitors and our businesses,
invariably they are going to change."

If Obama can figure that out, so can Castro; the dictator has every
incentive to limit U.S.-Cuban interactions to those he can contain and
control, which is what he has done so far. (By the way, Havana is 229
miles from Miami.) When Yahoo News asked Obama to list "concessions"
Castro had made, he couldn't name one.

Obama wants Congress to lift the rest of the embargo, in part to
eliminate one of Castro's last propaganda excuses. Anticipating that,
Castro has declared that, even if the embargo ends, "normalization" as
he defines it would hinge on more U.S. concessions, including a handover
of the naval base at Guatanamo Bay.

U.S. engagement probably won't "work" in Cuba any more than isolation
did; and Cuba is not analogous to China, to which it's often compared.

There was no real alternative to trade and engagement with a
geopolitical giant such as China, human rights notwithstanding. Tiny,
impoverished Cuba offers no strategic compensation for legitimizing its
dictatorship through business as usual — not even the agreement to
protect whitetip sharks and other marine life Washington and Havana so
excitedly unveiled. We could have let the regime stew in its repressive
juices, or presented it a "road map" linking changes in U.S. policy to
irreversible democratic reforms in Cuba. Let Havana explain why denying
free elections for 57 years — 57! — matters more than trade.

Belatedly, Obama is injecting a note of conditionality, telling Yahoo
News he won't visit the island in 2016 unless he's free to meet
dissidents. That would be a welcome contrast to Pope Francis' itinerary,
which included a sit-down with Fidel Castro, but not with dissidents —
some of whom were arrested in front of the pontiff.

We'll see how hard a bargain Obama drives. Would he demand a meeting
with Rodiles, who's among the activists Raul Castro dislikes most — yet
who says U.S. diplomats have snubbed him since the embassy reopened?

Would Obama insist on a live TV speech, as Jimmy Carter did in 2002? Or
would he settle for a closed-door sit-down with two activists, like the
one he held at the Summit of the Americas — and that he cited to Yahoo
News as a "precedent."

Meanwhile, 45,000 Cubans fled the island for the U.S. this year, partly
due to rumors of more restrictive U.S. immigration policies, partly
because of what Sanchez calls the "conditioned reflex to escape a
hopeless existence."

"Our original theory on this was not that we were going to see immediate
changes or loosening of the control of the Castro regime, but rather
that, over time, you'd lay the predicates for substantial
transformation," Obama told Yahoo News.

He has all the time in the world to try his theory — before leaving
office a year from now. Cubans are tired of waiting.

Charles Lane is a member of The Washington Post's editorial board.

Source: After Obama's thaw, bad year for Cuban citizens - Opinion -
Stripes -
http://www.stripes.com/opinion/after-obama-s-thaw-bad-year-for-cuban-citizens-1.384703