[NYTr] Cuba: an object lesson in US misunderstanding

[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.