Washington Post, 23 May 2001, A33

Playing Into Castro’s Hands

by Andrew Reding

Sometimes one’s enemies can be one’s best friends. That’s what Cuban President Fidel Castro must be thinking as Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) introduce legislation to allocate $100 million in aid to Cuban opposition groups, with the objective of fostering democracy in Cuba.

What can they be thinking? Castro has parlayed 42 years of hostility and intervention from Washington into an unshakable lifelong hold on power in Cuba. He has stared down nine U.S. presidents — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton — and is working on his 10th. He has outlasted his Kremlin patrons, and even Mexico’s durable system of one-party rule.

How does he do it? By deflecting attention from the failures of socialism to the undeniable fact that Washington can’t seem to let go of the legacy of the Platt Amendment. That legislation, passed by Congress and inserted in the Cuban constitution in 1901, authorized the United States to intervene in Cuba to preserve Cuban independence. Though it was formally abrogated in 1934, its spirit has endured — in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA attempts to assassinate Castro, the failed TV Marti effort to beam anti-Castro television programming to Cuba, the ban on trade with Cuba, the Helms-Burton bill penalizing foreign companies for trading with Cuba and now the Helms-Lieberman bill.

All this does is keep stoking the hot embers of Cuban nationalism. Helms and Lieberman say they are modeling their bill on the aid provided to the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s. But they’re overlooking the most essential point: Poland is on the Russian border, and Poles have always resented Russian imperial pretensions. Cuba is just offshore from Florida, and Cubans have traditionally been wary of U.S. designs for political and economic domination of their island. What may work for Poland is almost certain to have the opposite effect in Cuba.

Worst of all, it is likely to do real harm to Cuba’s fledgling democratic movement. Should Congress approve the bill, few of the funds are likely to end up in the hands of designees. In Castro’s police state, little goes unnoticed. The very attempt to finance the movement from abroad, and especially from Washington, will be used to undermine the moral authority of the Cuban opposition.

Once again, Castro will use it to reestablish his credentials as prime bulwark of Cuban sovereignty. Witness his masterful handling of the repatriation of Elian Gonzalez, the poster boy of the Miami Cuban community whom Castro molded into a symbol of nationalism and family values. Now, as that memory begins to recede, he can thank Helms and Lieberman for providing him an even more valuable opportunity to tar his domestic opponents as tools of foreign interests.

Helms is perhaps enough of a partisan to not fully appreciate the logic of his own actions. To an ideologue, purity of intention is often more important than results. But Lieberman is more of a centrist pragmatist. It is hard to believe he hasn’t figured out the likely effect of passage of his bill on prospects for Cuban democracy. So what is his motive? Could it be that he plans to run for president in 2004 and, conscious of what happened to the Democratic ticket in Florida in 2000, wants to curry favor with the Cuban American National Foundation? Good politics no doubt, but hardly a sign of statesmanship.

What irony. Castro’s authoritarian rule depends in large measure on American democracy for its continued sustenance — all because the logic of domestic constituency politics is at cross-purposes with the genuine interests of American foreign policy.

If Washington really wanted to put the screws on Castro’s regime, all it would have to do is abandon its efforts to consciously determine Cuba’s future. Forty-two years of such efforts have not worked anyway. And without them, Castro’s dictatorial and economically stressful rule would eventually be left naked and vulnerable, shorn of the cloak of nationalist legitimacy.

The writer is director and senior fellow for hemispheric affairs of the Americas Project of the World Policy Institute. He is also an associate editor for Pacific News Service.

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