Hard-liners score sorry victory
Progreso Weekly
July 13, 2005
By Max J. Castro
The hard-liners have it, for now. They have won within the executive branch and in the Congress. Ileana, Lincoln, Mario and their brethren can rejoice. To a greater extent under George W. Bush than under any other president, Cuban-American right-wingers have managed to take control of U.S. policy toward Cuba and use it to wage a relentless economic war against the Cuban people.
Yet, a victory in a war in which the victims are the people of your own nation is a sorry victory indeed. It is also a Pyrrhic victory. For it destroyed what remained of the hard-liners’ moral posturing, the talking point that their economic war is aimed against the Cuban government and not the Cuban people. Now that line has zero credibility. What can they say?
Strike a blow against Fidel Castro; ban Cubans in the United States from sending their relatives toothpaste and toilet paper! Strike a blow against communism; prevent families from visiting their loved ones!
It would be humorous if it were not unbearably sad. Recent votes in the U.S. House of Representatives against bills that would have allowed sending personal hygiene items and eased restrictions on travel by Cuban families and U.S. students show two things. They show, first, the moral and political bankruptcy of a political sector that cannot conceive of any way of promoting their project vis-à-vis Cuba except by wielding the economic might of the world’s superpower as a club against the whole Cuban nation. This is a group that seems obsessed with extracting punishment by any means possible, that will go to any length to pursue its vendetta, that has learned little from more than forty-three years of a futile strategy of economic strangulation, and that appears to care nothing about the welfare of the Cuban people or the good opinion of the world.
The other thing recent developments in Congress regarding Cuba policy demonstrate is the power acquired by the hardest line Cuban exile factions under the rule of George W. Bush, Tom Delay, and the Republican right wing. It is the perfect marriage, that of the most reactionary sectors in U.S. politics and in the Cuban-American population. Battered by the death of Jorge Mas Canosa, a multifaceted defeat in the struggle over Elian, and several adverse votes in Congress, Cuban-American hardliners have reorganized, demanded President Bush repay them for their political support, and escalated the economic war against Cuba with a vengeance.
How has this sector, whose views are increasingly unrepresentative of the Cuban-American community (especially the most recent arrivals that have close family ties with people on the island) and even more of U.S. public opinion, gained such power?
They have used deception and dollars. Cuban-American hard-liners in Congress not only represent themselves as speaking for the entire Cuban community in the United States, by providing a platform only to a handful of the most intransigent dissidents in Cuba, they also have tried to create the impression that their views speak for the Cuban people on the island too.
But these dissidents aren’t the hardliners’ main weapon. Their weapon is money, the mother’s milk of American politics. The hardliners have it, few of the Cuban-Americans who oppose them do.
To understand the influence of money, take an amendment sponsored in 2004 and 2005 by Florida Democrat Jim Davis that would ease restrictions on Cuban American travel. Last year, it passed the House by an easy 225-174. This year, it was defeated by a narrow 211-208 vote. What happened?
Of the 42 representatives who got money from the U.S. Cuba Democracy Pac, 7 voted for the Davis amendment, 2 did not vote, and 33 voted against the Davis Amendment.
* Every single new member who got money from the PAC voted against Davis.
* 8 members who voted for Davis in 2004 and subsequently got money from the PAC switched their vote to no this year.
* 5 members who got money, and voted for Davis in 2004, remained yes votes this year.
* All 11 who did not vote for Davis in 2004 and got money, voted no again this year (except Westmoreland who did not vote).
The relation between money and votes is obvious, but politicians get away with it because it’s impossible to prove a causal connection at the individual level. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the 8 members who switched their vote after receiving money were more than enough to determine the outcome. Moreover, of the 419 representatives who voted on the Davis amendment in 2005, 50.35 percent opposed it, while among those receiving money from the PAC, nay voters were 82.5 percent. Money talks, and we still have the best Congress that money can buy, not least in regard to Cuba policy.
For those who oppose hard-line policies, recent defeats are significant but mainly symbolic as were earlier victories in Congress, considering that the Republican leadership managed to torpedo measures that had passed both houses, using the House-Senate conference committee to prevent bills easing the embargo from ever reaching the White House, which itself had threatened a veto.
This generation of hard-line policies is no more likely to succeed than earlier versions, and the entire U.S. strategy of intransigence and strangulation is likely to collapse at some point because of the work of its many opponents in this country as well as its own failure, irrationality and cruelty. While striving for that change, it is important to realize that a new United States policy toward Cuba will require a bigger political reversal than that of a few votes in Congress, and is virtually unthinkable under a messianic administration so closely allied with the most virulent Cuban-American faction.