The Washington Post. September 12, 2000
Cuban Official Denied Visit to Washington
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer. Page A24
The State Department yesterday denied a senior Cuban lawmaker permission to travel from New York to Washington to meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon had traveled to New York to attend last week's U.N. Millennium Summit, and was planning to participate in the opening of the caucus's annual convention, which will begin Wednesday. He also was scheduled to speak at a forum sponsored by the
Inter-American Dialogue today in Washington.
Under current U.S. policy, Cuban officials of cabinet rank and above cannot obtain U.S. visas unless they are attending meetings of international organizations. Cuban officials who visit the U.N. are usually not allowed to travel more than 25 miles from New York.
A State Department official confirmed that Alarcon had been denied permission to come to Washington and said the decision was in keeping with that long-standing policy.
"I'm very disappointed," Alarcon said in a telephone interview yesterday from New York. "We have had what could be described as a longstanding relationship with the Black Caucus. I think we have a common interest to maintain this dialogue."
Members of the Black Caucus, including chairman James Clyburn (D-S.C.), visited Cuba this summer and discussed embarking on a public health project in which Cuban doctors would come to underserved areas in the United States and African American medical students would study in Cuba.
Alarcon, who served as Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations, said he was planning to announce in Washington that his government had reserved 250 spaces for black students in Cuba's medical schools.
Clyburn said he was "not surprised at all" that Alarcon had been blocked from visiting but said he was pleased the Clinton administration was even willing to consider the request.
"Who knows, maybe next time we'll get it done," Clyburn said. "As the old saying goes, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' We'll try again."
But Inter-American Dialogue President Peter Hakim questioned why the United States would bar Alarcon from coming to Washington at the same time it was beginning to liberalize its policy toward Cuba.
"This is an opportunity for an informed Washington audience to hear from one of the most senior officials of the government and form their own opinion," Hakim said. "That's what America's about, isn't it?"
Alarcon said that while a bipartisan group of lawmakers had been pushing to expand trade with his country, those efforts had not made much of a difference in U.S. diplomatic policy.
"To me, it's not very easy to perceive any liberalization," he said. "I've been denied visas two times in two weeks."
The Face of Cuba's New Guard
By Scott Wilson. Washington Post Foreign Service; Page A22
HAVANA –– If the Cuban government is so unpopular among its people, Felipe Perez Roque was saying, how could he be doing this?
Moments earlier, the young Cuban foreign minister had stepped from behind the wheel of his cramped Russian-made sedan and onto the narrow bustling streets of Old Havana, not an assistant or bodyguard in sight. It was as if Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright suddenly slipped out of her
office for an impromptu stroll alone through Georgetown, ducking into stores and peering into open apartment doorways to say hello.
"The United States is going to win the gold medal in baseball, aren't they?" Perez Roque joked--for the benefit of three American visitors--with a shirtless boy on a makeshift scooter, who answered with a wide-eyed stare. He waved to people gazing down from wrought-iron balconies,
stopped a family on vacation from the eastern province of Las Tunas to chat and gulped a small mojito--the potent Cuban rum drink--at a corner bar.
"I can walk the streets of Cuba, like all of our ministers, because we are here with authority," Perez Roque said. "That is not the result of repression. You may disagree with the leaders of this country, but we are here with authority, moral authority."
More than a million Cuban exiles--and unknown numbers inside the Communist-run country of 11 million--would disagree with the stocky, 35-year-old minister with a buzz cut. That is, if those outside the island even recognized him. With one of the newest faces in Cuba's leadership, Perez Roque has
become a key player in managing Cuba's relations with the United States at perhaps their most uncertain moment in years.
The Old Havana walking tour last month could be viewed as a bit of diplomatic stagecraft, an attempt to put a good-natured gloss on a Cuban government frequently condemned by the United States as a stultifying dictatorship. Indeed, Perez Roque's high spirits contrasted with his unyielding
position earlier during a two-hour interview that captured what the few outsiders who know him say is a mixture of personal charm and party-line orthodoxy that has made him among Fidel Castro's closest aides.
In the elegant Foreign Ministry, Perez Roque barely paused for breath as he criticized the "untenable" U.S. economic embargo and immigration policy while dismissing the Cuban exile community in Florida as washed up for mishandling the Elian Gonzalez episode. Referring to a recent
statement by Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore that he hopes the Castro regime will fall during his administration, Perez Roque said plainly:
"Mr. Gore is relatively young, but he can be added to the list of presidents who have retired without seeing it."
Despite his age and inexperience in government, Perez Roque has perhaps more access to Castro than any other Cuban official except Raul Castro, the president's brother, military chief and presumed successor. After rising through Communist youth groups and serving as Castro's aide-de-camp, Perez
Roque became one of the first Cubans born after the 1959 revolution to serve as a minister and sit on Cuba's Council of State.
He jokes that he has "two jobs and one salary," referring to his full daily schedule as foreign minister and subsequent long evenings with Cuba's seldom sleeping leader.
Julia Sweig, a Cuba analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations who has met Perez Roque, said she was "deeply skeptical" when Castro named him foreign minister 16 months ago. Since then, though, Sweig has come to see him as highly competent and ideologically typical of the next
generation of Cuban leadership being groomed by Castro to carry on his changing socialist revolution.
"He's more than just a channel to Castro, somebody we have to learn about because he's going to be around for a while," Sweig said. "These are people who are very, very pure. What you see is what you get. That transition is taking place everywhere except the very top level. When
Fidel and Raul go, the transition will already have taken place. And Felipe is a perfect example of this group--pure ideologically, committed."
But Jaime Suchlicki, head of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, said Perez Roque has no real constituency but Castro. "I don't think he has any future in the structure," he said. "He doesn't command any troops, for example. I don't see him as
a player."
Suchlicki contrasted Perez Roque with his predecessor, Roberto Robaina, another young up-and-comer until he was fired last year and virtually disappeared from public view. Robaina favored the incremental opening of Cuba's socialist system to small-scale market economics and helped lead the
charge for foreign investment in Cuba. Some diplomats and scholars concluded that he was undone by his high profile in a system that frowns on competitive personalities and his coziness with big European investors.
Perez Roque's rise started in the same way as that of many younger leaders in Cuba--in a Communist youth group. Born to parents who worked in a small provincial hotel, he became a leader of the Federation of University Students in the early 1990s and reportedly caught Castro's attention by
coining a slogan of revolutionary loyalty: "He who does not jump to attention is a Yankee."
After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Havana, he became Castro's private secretary, scheduling appointments, handling public petitions addressed to the Cuban president and traveling with him on missions abroad. For all his responsibilities, Perez Roque
and his wife, a cancer researcher, and their two young children still share an apartment with his in-laws because of a severe housing shortage in the capital.
An avid student of U.S. public opinion, Perez Roque is occasionally amused by it. At the start of an interview last month, soon after the Democratic National Convention, he discussed the "kiss that changed the world," his description of Al and Tipper Gore's 11-second televised kiss. "I
have read that this has had a tremendous impact on public opinion there," he said.
But his tone changed sharply when he turned to U.S. policy toward Cuba, which he and other senior officials here believe has lost the support of the American public since the Elian Gonzalez episode. He said the case of the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor, now back at school in his home town of
Cardenas, was a "divine inspiration" for showing that "U.S. policy toward Cuba has been kidnapped by the same people [the Miami exiles] who took the child."
During an animated hour-long lecture that touched on the perceived unfairness of U.S. immigration, trade and drug-interdiction policy, he said the U.S. approach of trying to isolate Cuba is "not logical from an international standpoint. It is untenable from an ethical standpoint. And it is
inexplicable from a political standpoint.
"What do we want? We want to see the end of the current Cuban policy," he said. "We want the end of the embargo. We want to have normal relations with the United States. And we believe it is possible to have respectful relations with the United States."
As Congress takes up negotiations over legislation to allow the sale of food and medicine to Cuba, Perez Roque urged the legislators to lift the ban on American tourism to Cuba and take other "measured steps" toward normalizing relations. Although European and Canadian tourists fill
Havana and nearby beach resorts, American tourists--who travel here in violation of U.S. law--are relatively few. He dismissed suggestions that millions of American tourists would have a political effect on the Cuban government's socialist ideals, saying, "That is a challenge we would like to
face."
Perez Roque is perhaps at his most diplomatic, however, on the subject of life after Castro. Citing several young provincial leaders, ministers and industrial managers, he said: "There has already been a tangible transfer of power [to the next generation], and that has been done by Fidel.
"Among ourselves, there are no conversations about that issue," Perez Roque added, "that do not include the presence and involvement of Fidel."
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