Why Lift the Travel Ban to Cuba Now? (whacked Wall ST. Urinal article)

[Mika]

I saw a post of Billy' somewhere here in which he pointed out that the wingnuts use this anti American argument in support of the travel ban.

Why Lift the Travel Ban to Cuba Now?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703615104575328953766272336.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Waves of Canadian, European and Latin American visitors haven't changed a thing.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Honduran Supreme Court's decision to order the arrest of Manuel Zelaya, a power-hungry Hugo Chávez acolyte who tried to remain president for life.

It's something to celebrate: Thanks to the bravery of the court and the Congress, which voted to remove him from office, democracy was saved.

Yet a nagging question remains: Why were the Obama administration and key congressional Democrats obsessed, for seven months, with trying to force Honduras to take Mr. Zelaya back? Why did the U.S. pull visas, deny aid, and lead an international campaign to isolate the tiny Central American democracy? To paraphrase many Americans who wrote to me during the stand-off: "Whose side are these guys on anyway?"

Such doubts about the motivations of the party in power in Washington will be hard to ignore this week as the Democrats try to put U.S. Cuba policy back on the legislative agenda. Specifically, Minnesota Democrat Collin Peterson will try to pass a bill in the House Agriculture Committee that would lift the U.S. ban on travel to Cuba without any human-rights concession from Castro.

The end of the Cuba travel ban would mean a bonanza in tourism to the island at a time when Fidel and Raúl are in desperate need of new revenue. But the push to lift the ban has anti-Castro supporters too. They argue that it is isolation that preserves the dictatorship and that a barrage of gringo tourists would weaken the dictatorship.

Proponents of the ban point out that a wave of European, Canadian and Latin American visitors since the mid-1990s hasn't changed a thing. They worry that American sun-seekers will only prop up a dictatorship that is most famous for slave labor, jailing dissidents and sowing revolution in the hemisphere.

With so much risk involved, any policy change will depend heavily on being able to trust the motives of U.S. leaders. Recall that it was Nixon who went to China. That's why efforts to change policy that are being led by the current crop of Democrats make so many Americans uneasy. After all, if Mr. Peterson wants to boost commerce why not push for passage of the Colombia free trade agreement?

Why is he so interested in doing business with a dictator?

The dictatorship is hard up for hard currency. The regime now relies heavily on such measures as sending Cuban doctors to Venezuela in exchange for marked-down oil. But according to a recent Associated Press story, "Cuba's foreign trade plunged by more than a third in 2009," perhaps because Caracas, running out of money itself, is no longer a reliable sugar daddy. A sharp drop in nickel prices hasn't helped, and neither did three hurricanes in 2008, which devastated housing.

Cuba owes sovereign lenders billions of dollars, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and according to a June 23 Reuters report, it is so cash-strapped that it had "froze up to $1 billion in the accounts of 600 foreign suppliers by the start of 2009."

Now there is a serious food shortage. This month the independent media in Cuba reported that a scarcity of rice had the government so worried about civil unrest that it had to send police to accompany deliveries to shops.

This has the regime scrambling. Several sources reported to me that the Roman Catholic cardinal from Havana, Jaime Ortega, was on a secretive trip to Washington last week to lobby for an end to the travel ban. One of his meetings was rumored to be with the State Department's assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela. The State Department declined to tell me if this was true or not.


U.S., Cuba to Hold Immigration Talks
Other sources said that the cardinal reached out to members of Congress, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman and his staffer Peter Quilter. I queried Mr. Berman's office but got no reply. Regular readers of this column know Mr. Quilter's politics. As I reported in April, he traveled with Sen. John Kerry's staffer Fulton Armstrong to Tegucigalpa to warn Hondurans who backed the removal of Mr. Zelaya that they are still in the doghouse.

While Castro relies on the embargo to explain Cuban poverty, he does, it seems, badly need gringo tourism, which he could control. And if Cardinal Ortega has decided to intervene on behalf of the regime's needs, it would not be surprising. He has long been viewed by human-rights advocates—such as former political prisoner Armando Valladares, a practicing Catholic—as more a tool of the regime than a champion of the oppressed. A kinder assessment of the cardinal suggests that he's trying to boost the Church's power on the island. In either case, acting as an emissary to Washington right now would make sense.

But for those interested in Cuban freedom it is bizarre. For the first time in history the Castros are cornered. Yet rather then negotiate from a position of strength, Democrats seem to want to give relief to the dictatorship.

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[Peace Patriot]

1. "Whacked" is not a strong enough word to describe an article in which NOTHING--

not a single assertion--is factual and true.

It is quite an amazing piece of work. "Alice in Wonderland" as told by the "Red Queen"?

[flamingdem]

2. Cuba's cardinal – and 'miracle' dealmaker - EFE

* Thanks Mika, the Urinal now requires a subscription

I really wonder just how hard it would be for Hillary to express a tad of sincerity towards our neighbors to the South. It really is up to "god" to fix things with Cuba at this point.

Cuba's cardinal – and 'miracle' dealmaker

By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer

HAVANA – When Raul Castro agreed to release 52 political prisoners, thought to be about a third of all the dissidents in Cuban jails, the news made headlines throughout the world.

Here in Cuba – even with the official press blackout – the news spread as quickly, but took quite a different spin.

Instead of making Raul Castro's decision to free the dissidents the center of the story, Cubans are talking much more about the man who brokered the deal – Roman Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega.

Photo by EPA/Alejandro Ernesto

Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega answers questions from the media about the prisoner release deal on Wednesday.

"It's as if the cardinal performed his own type of miracle," said Nuirka Morales, an agronomy professor at Havana's veterinary college. "Ortega accomplished in three short months what everyone else failed to do in seven long years."

After Cuba imprisoned 75 dissidents in March 2003, accusing them of working with Washington to topple the regime, condemnation rolled in from every corner of the globe. From presidents and prime ministers to international bodies like the European Union, both friends and enemies of the Castro government petitioned for their release, but Havana refused to budge.

Until now…

Castro's decision to release the remaining prisoners – some had already been freed on health grounds – was announced Wednesday, following a meeting he held with Ortega and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos. But the real negotiations were launched months ago when the cardinal interceded on behalf of the Ladies in White, a group made up of the mothers and wives of the jailed activists.

Anger over aggressive muzzling
For seven years the Ladies protested every Sunday in a silent march after attending mass. The government largely tolerated the protest and rarely interfered.

But in March, on the seventh anniversary of the jailing, the Ladies changed their tactics and took their protest into different Havana neighborhoods. The government acted quickly: To silence one march, state security agents surrounded the dozen or so women and wrestled them to the ground before forcibly removing them.

All of this was captured by international television cameras and sparked cries of indignation from Cuban exile communities in places such as Miami and Madrid.

Over the next month, the Ladies tried to return to their regular Sunday marches, but tensions with state security continued to escalate.

The third Sunday in April was particularly ugly. As six members of the group left Mass, they were stopped from marching, shoved across the street and cornered into a park adjacent to the church. For more than seven hours, the women were made to stand under a scorching sun as a pro-government mob shouted insults and obscenities.

The cardinal stepped in after that, meeting with officials from the Cuban Communist Party's Central Committee and getting an agreement that the intimidation would stop. Once again, the official Cuban press never reported most of this, but many learned the details through the Internet and word of mouth.

Surprise deal
I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I first heard news of the prisoner release on my Blackberry while getting a manicure. I read the news release from the cardinal's press office to the other customers in the nail salon and before I had even finished, some women were already on the phone spreading the news.

Before the day ended, I must have been asked by at least 50 more people if the news was true. They included a man who sells fruit in my neighborhood, an acquaintance who runs a private day care center in her home, two college kids watching Spain beat Germany in the World Cup, a dentist buying pastries, and even a traffic cop and a customs agent at Havana's International Airport.

People also wondered how the Obama government would receive the news and if Washington would consider the prisoner release as a solid step forward.

When asked, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed the prisoner release as a "positive sign" but tempered her enthusiasm by saying the action was "overdue."

The latter part of Clinton's statement is what worries Nelson and Luis Molina. Like many Cubans, these twin brothers are hoping that the White House might reciprocate; they hope that more steps will be taken by both governments to improve relations between the two countries.

Nelson, an evangelical preacher from Kentucky who travels every month to Cuba to help his brother supply his own ministry in the working class Havana neighborhood of Lawton, argued that, "Obama needs to give credit where credit is due."

He thinks it's a fairly safe bet that "no one in the Cuban government came to this decision with ease."

Nodding his head, his brother suggests that Ortega may be the "true path" to bring other changes to the island. "We need changes that will open the economy and bring in jobs," said Luis Molina.

The role of negotiator may not seem like a good fit for the 73-year-old cardinal who has publicly opposed the Cuban system since he was first ordained as a priest in 1964. (He became the Archbishop of Havana in 1981 and was elevated to cardinal in 1994).

But who better, the Molina brothers ask, than someone with Ortega's background? As a young priest he opted against exile even though soon after returning to Cuba from his religious training in Canada, Ortega was imprisoned for more than a year in a work camp.