Irving Louis Horowitz. Published Wednesday, December 6,
2000, in the Miami Herald
When the most venerable and influential institution concerned with U.S.
foreign policy, New York's Council on Foreign Relations, proposes to sustain
indefinitely one of the world's last remaining totalitarian regimes, Fidel
Castro's Cuba, alarms ought to go off regarding the direction of U.S. strategy.
All the more so when the proposals come under the aegis of a bipartisan task
force headed by William Rogers, as- sistant secretary of state for interamerican
affairs (1969- 1973) under Richard Nixon; and Bernard Aronson, assistant
secretary of state (1989-1993) under George H.W. Bush.
As a council member for more than 30 years and a student of Cuban communism
for more than 40, I have a personal interest in the new Aronson-Rogers report,
U.S. Cuban Relations in the 21st Century.
Its conclusion is disquieting. To put an end to decades of hostility between
the United States and Cuba, the council offers a simple solution: Give Castro
everything he wants. The assumption is that if the United States offers "information,
new ideas and fresh perspectives,'' the Castro regime will replace unrelenting
hostility toward the United States with something else. Also, that it will
replace its police-state system with something more benign -- unspecified by
Aronson-Rogers.
One doesn't know which is the more breathtaking: the assumption that a
unilateral change in foreign policy will have an automatic effect on one of the
most intransigent dictatorships of the century, or the idea that Castro is
interested in measures that would reduce the hostility between Washington and
Havana, hostility that has served him so well.
Where in history has it ever been shown that if you throw a life-line to a
dictator, he will do anything other than take it and demand another?
Aronson, Rogers and company propose "baskets'' of wishes, in each one
denying the facts of how the Castro regime operates and what its aims are.
The basket concerned with family reunification and migration posits that
Cuban Americans may visit Cuba, but not that Cubans may freely visit the United
States. While advocating that the ceiling on remittances to relatives of U.S.
citizens be raised, it provides no safeguards that monies will end up in the
hands of ordinary Cubans or escape confiscation (taxation) by Castro.
Operating under the assumption that the free flow of ideas will have
contagious results, the second basket assumes that travel and communication can
be freely increased. But evidence demonstrates that Castro's system consists on
taking foreign travelers for whatever they are worth and clamping down on his
own people's ability to travel and receive (or impart) information.
In the basket pertaining to security matters, Aronson-Rogers veer into
surrealism. Based on the assumption -- fantasy is the word -- that the Castro
regime will ever relinquish control over the military, it posits the integration
of Cuba's armed forces in regional security arrangements.
To put forth as a serious proposal the idea of Cuban participation in
regional security is an example of the suspension of disbelief.
The question that is never correctly posed, or posed at all is how the
United States should deal with the Castro regime. Whatever the sources of
Castro's vision, the fact is that he always has offered a unilateralist policy
posture. There are no permissible trade-offs if U.S. sanctions are to be lifted
and the embargo terminated; no quid pro quo.
Accepting this premise without discussion, Aronson-Rogers may think they
have found a formula for short-term reduction of tensions between Washington and
Havana and within the region. But they have not hit on a formula for long-term
U.S. interests, let alone those of the Cuban people.
In warming relations with the Castro dictatorship, the council's approach
would freeze the situation with the Cuban nation.
Irving Louis Horowitz, Hannah Arendt distinguished professor emeritus at
Rutgers University, is is co-editor of Cuban Communism.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald | 