By Manuel Miranda, an international lawyer specializing in
Latin American development. July 2, 2001 12:35 p.m.
National Review
Just about everything President Bush does concerning Hispanics, from ceasing
military training in Vieques to having Mariachis at the White House for Cinco de
Mayo celebrations, is promptly dubbed by Washington pundits as nothing more than
crass "pandering" for future Hispanic votes. Similar punditry was
conspicuously absent during Clinton's eight years of pandering toward blacks.
But dissecting the Hispanic vote requires a surgeon's hands. Some Hispanics,
for example, would consider it a singular privilege to have the U.S. Marines
land in full force on the beaches of their native lands. And so, greater
deftness is needed from journalists seeking to grapple with Hispanic issues.
More talk of "White House pandering" to Florida's Cuban-Americans
will doubtless come in the wake of the nomination of Otto Juan Reich to become
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. The honor his
nomination bestows on the Cuban-American community is hardly insignificant.
For the many newly minted Hispanic-vote experts, Reich's nomination will
present a conundrum.
The question now is whether Senate Democrats take their hard-left
supporters' advice to "bork" Reich. Remarkably, Reich may become the
first presidential nominee openly targeted by left-leaning journalists entirely
for their own reasons. This is already evidenced by the building flurry of
articles that have appeared in the months preceding the announcement of Reich's
nomination.
Borking Reich won't be easy. Reich's is an all-American immigrant success
story and a model of the contributions that Cuban exiles have made to American
freedom. His economic and political knowledge of Latin America and its
development needs may make him the most qualified person ever nominated to the
Western Hemisphere position. This, and Reich's high stature in the
Cuban-American community, is what suggests that Senate Democrats' threatened
opposition, led by 2004 presidential hopefuls Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) and
John Kerry (D., Mass.) may provoke a response from Cuban Americans and other
Reich admirers — all to make the Elian incident look like child's play.
For Cuban Americans, Reich represents their patriotic best and his elevation
represents the long-awaited thank you to Cuban Americans for their patriotism
and success. Blocking Reich may be seen as an attack on that patriotism and
character. Unlike Vieques, a debate over Reich could unite Hispanics of various
national backgrounds against Democrats like no other issue ever has.
A furor over Reich also may bring to the fore Americans' polarized
sentiments toward the Cuban embargo and test our resolve against Communist
totalitarianism. But it also will create the first Democratic 2004 primary among
between Dodd, Kerry, and Joe Lieberman (D., Conn.), as the first two appease the
Left and the latter strives to inherit the political largesse of Cuban Americans
long enjoyed by New Jersey's Robert Torricelli. The issue may even trickle down
to Janet Reno and the coming battle for the Florida governorship.
The son of a Cuban mother and an Austrian-Jewish father who escaped the
Holocaust by migrating to Cuba in 1938 and enlisting with the Free French army
to fight Hitler, Reich and his family would later also escape Castro's tyranny.
In 1960, Reich was only 14 when he was ripped from his Cuban childhood, the
powerful common experience of most Cuban-Americans.
After college, Reich served as an officer in the U.S. Army (Airborne),
including duty in Panama, and went on to work as a Hill staffer while earning a
master's degree in Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. From 1973 to
his first Reagan-administration appointment in 1981, Reich served first in city
and state governments in Florida and then returned to Washington in 1976 to head
David Rockefeller's Council of the Americas.
Reich joined the Reagan State Department in 1981 to serve in the Agency for
International Development and ended in the first Bush administration as
Ambassador to Venezuela, after receiving the State Department's highest
commendations. During the Clinton interregnum, Reich continued public-policy and
private-sector activity that put his interests and strategic lobbying skills to
good use, including roles in the human-rights organization Freedom
House and as director of the Center for a Free Cuba.
But it is Reich's ardent anti-Communist credentials in the Reagan
administration that have provoked leftists here and abroad, including former
Costa Rican president Oscar Arias and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Cuban
Assembly President Alarcon went so far as to link Reich to Nazi fascism by
parodying his name. Senators Dodd and Kerry are in interesting company.
>From 1983 to 1986, Reich served as the first director of the State
Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, tasked with the job of spearheading a
better public image for the anti-Communist struggle in Latin America. The job
also required countering the all-change-is-good, liberal spin in favor of Latin
American socialism in the 1980s that was everywhere from the media, to the
think-tanks, to the Jesuits. Reich played his role with remarkable success. The
ultimate result, a democratic Central America, owes itself to the Reagan policy
that Reich promoted.
Reich aggressively confronted journalists for their slanted coverage,
capitalized on their own weaknesses and poor journalistic practices, and
promoted a message in support of the forces fighting tropical Communism. No
doubt Reich brought an unusually honest manner to his job. In common
Cuban-American parlance, he would tell journalists to their face that they were
Communists, he referred to National Public Radio as "Moscow on the Potomac,"
and so on. He threw similarly colorful taunts at CBS and PBS.
In 1985, such barbs were more than playful metaphors. The Cold War was
raging. If any single initiative of the Reagan years were overzealous, who could
now argue with the ultimate success of Reagan's agenda to stabilize the
Caribbean and Central America?
As Jay Nordlinger concluded in a recent article in the June 24th issue of
National Review, the charges trumped up against Reich are typically exaggerated
or unfounded. In effect, Reich played a role that journalists have now come to
accept as normal in the post-Clinton world. Reich was a spinmeister for the
intense anti-Communism that he shared with Ronald Reagan.
This was a role that Reich took on with as much passion as a Cuban American —
with a life interrupted by tyranny, who had lost his own grandparents to the
Nazi death camps — could muster. This is a passion that some Americans,
like patrician senators, can only read about and, sadly, may never understand.
But most Hispanic Americans do understand, especially in Florida. | 
