Andres Oppenheimer. Published Thursday, July 27, 2000, in the Miami Herald.
Events at home and abroad pose an excellent opportunity to resurrect a long-forgotten idea: gradually to replace unilateral U.S. trade sanctions on Cuba with multilateral U.S., European and Latin American demands for democratization on the island.
The July 20 vote by the House of Representatives -- led by Republican lawmakers -- to ease the four-decade-old trade sanctions on the island has led to fears that a flood of U.S. tourists and goods to Cuba would reward repression in the hemisphere's worst dictatorship.
If the House measure survives in the Senate, the message for dictators would be: Hang on long enough, and eventually U.S. business lobbies will defeat pro-democracy activists in Washington. Suppressing fundamental rights for a day will make you a tyrant, but doing it for 40 years will turn you
into an elder statesman respected for determination.
Furthermore, questions arise about the logic behind U.S. congressional moves.
How can Congress lift sanctions against Cuba, which hasn't allowed a single independent newspaper in 40 years and bans all nongovernment political parties, while at the same time voting for sanctions against Peru, a 10-year-old authoritarian democracy where opposition newspapers and political
parties are at least legal?
If U.S. trade sanctions against Cuba are to be lifted, this argument goes, it should be done gradually, while putting in place a joint plan with the European Union and other Latin American democracies to demand from Cuba what they recently demanded from Peru.
Under hemispheric agreements for the collective defense of democracy, the 34-country Organization of American States recently imposed a series of concrete demands on President Alberto Fujimori of Peru, following his seriously flawed election to a third term.
Among other things, the OAS is asking that Fujimori guarantee ``access to the media by all political parties,'' and creation of an election-monitoring institution whose members ``enjoy the confidence of all political actors.''
In Cuba's case, Western democracies could ask for much more basic things, such as the right of individuals to hold peaceful meetings, or to circulate their mimeographed publications. Of course, Castro would never agree, but he -- not the United States -- would then be seen as the culprit.
``It's a brilliant idea,'' says Ambler Moss, a former U.S. ambassador who heads the University of Miami's North-South Center. ``Rather than unilaterally backing off from the sanctions, why not use what seems inevitable according to the will of the Congress to engage other countries in an effort
to move Cuba toward democracy?''
Until now, other countries refused even to consider multilateral pressure while the United States kept its embargo.
But now that the U.S. travel and trade restrictions are being eroded, and with the recent election in Mexico of pro-democracy activist Vicente Fox, things could change. My bet is that the next U.S. president will seek to move Cuba policy toward the multilateral arena, as has been the U.S. norm
with other recent crises in the hemisphere.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald |