Derailing US-Cuba Relations Won't Work Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit THE MIAMI HERALD - May 14, 2002 http://www.miami.com/herald/ Derailing US-Cuba Relations Won't Work by Max Castro maxcastro@hotmail.com According to Webster's New World Dictionary of the American language, a deus ex machina is, "in ancient Greek and Roman plays, a deity brought in by stage machinery to intervene in the action." From this original meaning are derived some broader definitions: "Any character or happening artificially, suddenly or improbably introduced to resolve a situation; anyone who unexpectedly intervenes to change the course of events." For a long time, Cubans, particularly Cuban exiles, have been awaiting a deus ex machina. In Cuban history, the role has been traditionally played by the United States. It has tried unsuccessfully to change the course of events begun in 1959 by invasion, assassination, embargo, broadcasting, human-rights advocacy, support of the opposition and even occasional diplomacy. As a deus ex machina, the Pope turned out to be a flop as well, at least for those who expected immediate change. Now comes Jimmy Carter, the first U.S. president to visit Cuba in more than 70 years. Already there are those who are casting the former president in the deus ex machina role. Carter, of course, will not be able to single-handedly change the Cuban political and economic system. Cubans will have to resolve things themselves. But to thrust Carter in such an impossible role is to set up his real mission for failure. That mission is to undermine the current hard-line U.S. policy toward Cuba and, simultaneously, to use the moral capital gained thereby to push the Cuban government for a gradual opening of political space and an improvement in human rights on the island. Because of his stature as a former president and statesman, Carter's visit is the high point of a long process of creeping normalization between ever-broader sectors of American society (including many Republican and most Democratic members of Congress, several governors and significant business and farm interests) and the Cuban government. Because they have the effect of reducing the perception of threat, visits to Cuba and meetings between prominent Americans and Cuban officials amount to a kind of psychological normalization, easing the way for political normalization. Part and parcel of this trend also has been a change in U.S. public opinion away from support of the embargo and toward normalization of diplomatic relations. Even among Cuban Americans in Miami, attitudes have been changing. Recent polls show half or more of Cuban Americans join the vast majority of all Americans in favoring unrestricted travel to Cuba. That's a very significant development. The Cuban economy is increasingly driven by tourism. The travel ban arguably is the linchpin of the entire embargo policy; without it, the embargo will probably unravel. The trend toward normalization has been resisted fiercely by key players who support the current policy. These include the Bush administration, the Republican leadership in the House and the most powerful Cuban-American organizations. It's in this light that one might read the recent charge by State Department arms control chief John R. Bolton that Cuba is developing biological weapons. The U.S. government admitted the accusation is based on old evidence it has not made available for scrutiny. Why would the administration choose precisely that moment, the eve of Carter's Cuba trip, to make such a serious charge? Might it be to take the wind out of Carter's sails and undermine the entire normalization movement? In the era of anthrax terrorism, could there be a more-effective way to raise the perception of threat among the American people? Will it work? That remains to be seen, but the irony is that those who want to derail normalization are likely to make the very changes they seek that much more difficult. Copyright (c) 2002 Miami Herald source - JosePertierra@aol.com ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmed-05.15.02-03:46:41-3501