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Posted on Thu, Apr. 25, 2002 in
The Miami Herald
Cuban President Fidel Castro's latest diatribes against Mexico and other
Latin American countries that recently voted to demand a United Nations human
rights mission to Cuba may be much more than an effort by the ''maximum leader''
to divert attention from his island's domestic problems.
There is a growing view among U.S. and Latin American diplomats that Castro,
who suffered a political blow last week when seven Latin American countries
sponsored the region's first human rights resolution against Cuba at the United
Nations, may be starting a new cycle of open intervention in Latin American
countries' domestic affairs.
Castro, who had successfully rebuilt Cuba's diplomatic relations with Latin
American countries in the '90s but is now facing a growing mixture of apathy and
criticism from his neighbors, may now be turning to his ''Plan B:'' using Latin
American opposition parties as a political weapon to press governments to
support his 4-decade-old dictatorship.
''He is trying to generate political and public opinion pressures to force
us to reconsider our Cuba policy,'' a top Mexican diplomat told me Wednesday.
''He's playing the domestic political card because he knows that he cannot force
us to backtrack from our pro-human rights policy.'' Granted, Castro has always
played the ''domestic political'' card in Latin America, but in recent years he
had done it more secretly, because he didn't want to antagonize the very
governments he was trying to court.
But now that Latin American countries turned against Cuba at the U.N. Human
Rights Commission and Uruguay became the first country in the Hemisphere in many
years to break relations with Cuba earlier this week, Castro may be opting for a
more overt political intervention in the region.
POLITICAL QUAKE
Consider the political earthquake he provoked in Mexico this week by calling
a press conference in Havana and releasing a secretly taped recording of a
telephone conversation with Fox on March 19, two days before a U.N. summit on
economic development in Monterrey.
According to Castro, the tape proves that Fox had lied to the world by
stating publicly that he had not asked Castro not to attend the summit, nor
pressured him to leave before President Bush's arrival.
In the tape, Fox is heard suggesting Castro to leave town after lunch April
22, the day of Bush's arrival, "so that you create no complications for me
on Friday.''
Castro told the press conference that the tape proved that Fox is ''totally
dependent'' on the United States. It was like touching a major scar in a country
that still resents having lost half of its territory to the United States in the
mid-19th century. In effect, Castro was giving Mexico's opposition a precious
political weapon with
which to attack -- and embarrass -- the Mexican president.
Rosario Robles, president of the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary
Party, called Fox "a liar.''
Another PRD leader, Marti Batres, called Fox's demands on Castro "the
biggest disgrace Mexican foreign policy has ever suffered.''
The PRI, a corruption-plagued authoritarian party that ruled Mexico for 71
years until Fox's election two years ago, charged that Fox's U.N. vote on Cuba
has ruined Mexico's 100-year-long special relationship with Cuba.
SEEKING GREATER SAY
The two opposition parties are making the most of Castro's political
present. The Institutional Revolutionary Party and the PRD, the big losers of
the 2000 elections that brought Fox to power, control two thirds of the Mexican
Congress, and are fighting for a greater congressional say in national and
international affairs.
They have picked Fox's Cuba policy as a test case for their efforts to
increase congressional powers.
The two opposition parties are also positioning themselves for Mexico's 2003
legislative elections, and are attacking Fox's foreign policy because it's the
area in which the Mexican president has made the biggest changes.
Fox has moved Mexico closer to the United States and Europe, and farther
away from Cuba and other bankrupt dictatorships -- something they see as an
affront to Mexico's foreign policy independence.
WILL IT WORK?
Will Castro's new political interventionism work?
I doubt it. The polls in Mexico show that both Fox and Castro came out with
a black eye from this one, but that Castro is likely to come out worse in the
long run. A telephone survey by Radio Imagen on Wednesday showed that 92 percent
of listeners agree with Fox's pro-human rights foreign policy.
And the clearer it becomes that Mexico's public opinion doesn't back Castro,
the more opposition politicians will move on to another issue with which to
attack Fox. Castro may try a new wave of political interventionism in the
region, but he may be too old -- and too discredited -- to rally more than the
usual crowd of old-guard leftist activists around him. | 
