[NYTr] TIME on Obama's Cuban-American Strategy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[TIME's Tim Padget just wrote a column telling people to relax about
Hugo Chavez's proposals for Constitutional reform (See: "TIME on Hugo
Chavez: Don't Get Your Panties in a Twise" - August 17, 2007
https://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070820/066987.html

Now he's analyzing the facts of life in GusanoLand and explaining that
the old days of Castro-bashing by the entedeluvian Congressional Cuban
Mafia are well behind the times when it comes to Cuban-American
voters' sentiment. 

Tried to get the URL for this from TIME Rag's website but they are
experiencing "problems" and perhaps it's not posted yet. I couldn't
find it anywhere.-NY Transfer]


sent by Jane Franklin

TIME Aug 22, * Correction Appended Aug 23, 2007
http://www.time.com

Will Obama's Stance on Cuba Hurt?

By Tim Padgett/ Miami

Conventional political wisdom in the bellwether state of Florida has
always focused on Cuban-Americans, especially those influential exiles
who take a hard line against any U.S. engagement with Fidel Castro's
Cuba. Cross them, says the presidential candidate handbook, and say
adios to the Sunshine State's 27 electoral votes.

So why would Barack Obama — who is scraping to keep up with Hillary
Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination — ignore that
seemingly golden rule? Why, in a Tuesday op-ed piece in the Miami
Herald, would he challenge the Cuban-American elders and call for
dismantling President Bush's hefty restrictions on Cuban-Americans
making visits and sending money to relatives in Cuba?

Maybe it's because Obama knows a new conventional wisdom may well be
taking shape in the state — one that could actually make his
declarations this week an asset when Florida holds its primary election
next January. "A democratic opening in Cuba is, and should be, the
foremost objective of our policy," Obama wrote in the Herald. But while
making that standard declaration, he also argued that "Cuban-American
connections to family in Cuba are not only a basic right in
humanitarian terms, but also our best tool for helping to foster the
beginnings of grassroots democracy on the island." As a result, he
said, "I will grant Cuban-Americans unrestricted rights to visit family
and send remittances to the island."

The restrictions — widely viewed as a thank-you to the hardline exile
bloc that helped Bush win Florida in 2000 — allow Cuban-Americans to
visit the island for only 14 days every three years and limit
remittances to $1,200 per year. "It's almost as if you have to decide
ahead of time when a relative is going to die," says Miami immigration
attorney Magda Montiel Davis, a Cuban-American moderate who says she is
now voting for Obama after reading his Herald article. Bush and
hard-line leaders insist the policy helps keep U.S. dollars out of
Castro's hands. But "it has also made [Cubans living in Cuba] more
dependent on the Castro regime," Obama argued in the Herald, "and
isolated them from the transformative message carried there by
Cuban-Americans."

In response to Obama's statement, Hillary Clinton continued her recent 
attacks on his perceived foreign policy naivete, insisting that "until
it is clear what type of policies might come with a new [Cuban]
government, we cannot talk about changes in the U.S. policies toward
Cuba." But by playing that safe card in Florida, Clinton may have
allowed herself to be "outmaneuvered by Obama on this one," says one
Cuban-American leader who asked not to be identified, pointing to a
recent Florida International University poll showing that more than 55%
of Cuban-Americans in Miami favor unrestricted travel to Cuba.

That survey, say academics like Rafael Lima, a University of Miami 
communications professor and the son of an exile once imprisoned by
Castro, reflects the growing number of younger, more moderate
Cuban-American voters in South Florida — and the waning clout of the
older, more conservative generation. Unlike their elders, the younger
generation believes that the 45-year-old economic embargo against Cuba
has utterly failed to dislodge its communist leader. As a result, Obama
could now galvanize those moderates, who Lima says "have been waiting
for a viable presidential candidate to wave their banner for once."

Not that Miami's Cuban-American community has an overwhelming number of 
registered Democrats to woo in the first place. The exiles have 
traditionally voted Republican ever since they abandoned President John
F. Kennedy because of his botched direction of the Bay of Pigs invasion
in 1961. But Miami Democrats like Elena Freyre, a Cuban-American art
gallery owner in Little Havana, say they've been trying to tell
Democratic candidates to stop parroting the hard-line position.
"Obama's people were the first who ever said to me on the phone, ?Wait,
let me get a pen and write that down,'" says Freyre. "He's the first to
have the cojones to say Bush's policy is wrong, and I think it's going
to wake up a lot of moderate Cuban-American voters."

At the same time, Obama's stance could help him garner a larger share
of the state's non-Cuban Democrats (especially non-Cuban Latinos), who
were repulsed by hard-line exile politics during the Elian Gonzalez
fiasco. And as for the general election, even many hard-line voters
have changed their mind about Bush's travel and remittance policy.

Obama will get a better idea of how his position is playing out when he 
takes the stage Saturday for a Miami Democratic fundraiser at the
Miami-Dade County Auditorium — located in the hard-line bastion of
Little Havana. He and Clinton will also get a chance to square off on
Cuba policy on Sept. 9 during a scheduled Democratic presidential
debate at the University of Miami. The responses at both events should
be a good gauge of whether the rules in Florida are really ready to be
broken.

[* The original version of this story inaccurately stated that the
Democratic presidential debate at the University of Miami was scheduled
for Sept. 30. It is scheduled for Sept. 9.]