[NYTr] Cuba: an object lesson in US misunderstanding Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 11:08:08 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit snet by Simon McGuinness The Independent - 02 August 2007 http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2826121.ece Cuba: an object lesson in US misunderstanding Washington's refusal to talk to the Castro brothers makes Havana look judicious and reasonable by Isabel Hilton This year, for the first time ever, Fidel Castro missed his revolution's 26 July anniversary celebrations. But if a year of illness has kept him from public view, it has not brought the political or economic change in Cuba that was the last hope of his ageing enemies in exile. As Cuba passed the first anniversary of his handover of power to his younger brother Raul, there was no disguising the disappointment in Miami or Washington among those who have waited decades for the end of Fidel. There is, if nothing else, a certain consistency in US policy towards Cuba: for nearly 50 years, it has produced results directly opposed to Washington's stated aims. Since Castro's 1959 revolution triumphed, successive US governments have hoped to topple, kill or incapacitate Fidel as a political force and a regional influence. Today, Fidel is still the biggest political fact of life in Cuba, the country is substantially unchanged, and Fidel has a new generation of admirers in Latin America. Yet the lessons of this quite remarkable failure of policy remain stubbornly unlearned in Washington. Over the last half-century there have been moments when Fidel's influence might have waned. But whenever popular discontent, ideological weariness, falling living standards or sheer exasperation broke surface in Cuba, the US came to Fidel's rescue. Bungled assassination attempts, economic strangulation, the Miami Cubans, with their revanchist rhetoric, and their CIA sponsors all reinforced the belief that, however difficult Cubans found life under Fidel, the alternative was worse. If the exhausting decades of poverty and revolutionary sacrifice had meaning, it was as the price of national independence. In Errol Morris's excellent 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara, the then 85-year-old former US Secretary of Defence revealed that it was only after the end of the war in Vietnam War that he realised how badly the US had misunderstood the enemy: the US thought the Vietnamese were fighting for Communism. Far too late, McNamara had understood that they were fighting for national sovereignty, as they had for centuries. Ideologies change more readily than national identities. In all his years at the heart of successive US governments and the defence establishment, privy to intelligence reports and expert opinion, this understanding had eluded McNamara; finally, he had met a North Vietnamese official, who had explained. It is a lesson equally applicable in Havana, and Washington is equally blind to it. Last week, a US State Department spokesman rejected an offer of dialogue from Raul Castro. What Cuba needed, Washington said, was to talk to its internal opposition and to hold free and fair elections, not conditions that the US applies to China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia or any of the illiberal regimes with which it engages in dialogue. Washington's refusal to talk to Havana makes the Castro brothers look judicious and reasonable. In today's Washington, the red carpet is regularly unrolled for Chinese leaders who still describe their political affiliation as Communist. Next time someone from Beijing drops by the White House, US policy-makers could do worse than reflect on the trajectory of the Chinese revolution, from millenarian Maoism to state-led capitalism. It was not war, external hostility or sanctions that transformed the Chinese state, nor was it a domestic uprising that brought property rights, a legal system and the market economy to China. It came from inside the Party after the death of a leader who, like Fidel, used militant ideology as an organising principle for nationalism, and for whom the external threat remained a justification for personal power. The mood music for change was engagement, not confrontation. For nearly 50 years US policy towards Cuba has not been measured by results but determined by internal electoral politics: the votes of the exiles and their sympathisers. The louder they shouted, the better it was for Fidel. In his speech last week, Raul Castro spoke up about Cuba's shortcomings, a hint perhaps of frustration at Fidel's intransigence over even limited market concessions. His brother, meanwhile, in a newspaper article, returned to his familiar theme: that the revolution's greatest achievement was survival in the face of US hostility. In Miami, the truth of that observation marked another year of disappointment. If Washington's Cuba policy was a business, it would have gone bankrupt years ago. Today, in China, Chairman Mao's image dangles from the rear-view mirrors of taxis, a protector deity for travellers. Current generations have only the vaguest idea of how he lived and died and, if they understand his political theory, regard it as a historical curiosity. His real legacy is China's recovered sovereignty. Is there any reason to suppose that the Cubans, free from US pressure, would prove any less pragmatic than the Chinese, or any less willing to confine their revolutionary heroes to the safe historical zone of founding myth? Is it really impossible to imagine how Cuba, given a chance to escape from the militarised model of national struggle, might develop a vigorous and constructive nationalism based, depending on individual preference, on its rich culture, a return to prosperity, its medical sciences or its music? If that lesson could be learned in Washington, perhaps by next year's anniversary, Cuba might begin to look different. * ================================================================= .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org . List Archives: https://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ . 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