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UNITED NATIONS -- For the eighth year in a row, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to lift the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. While the tally of 157 to 2 with eight abstentions was the largest sum so far, the resolution, while not legally binding, clearly illustrates the fragility of Washington's ongoing sanctions against the Castro regime.
One could reasonably assume that this resolution, opposed only by the USA and Israel with the abstention of a few European countries, does not limelight the success of Washington's Cuba policy.
Shortly thereafter Cuba hosted the Ibero/American Economic Summit in Havana. The confab provided the picture perfect propaganda setting for Fidel Castro to once again spout his economic theories and conspiracies ad nauseam to an slightly self-conscious diplomatic audience. Though 21 countries participated, to their credit the Presidents of Costa Rica and Nicaragua boycotted the Summit in direct protest to Castro's political dictatorship.
King Juan Carlos of Spain, visiting the streets of Old Havana, once a jewel in the Spanish colonial crown, was spontaneously greeted with chants of Viva Espana!, clearly not part of the orchestrated political libretto.
As importantly during the Summit, visiting Prime Ministers of Spain and Portugal and the Foreign Ministers of Mexico and Nicaragua, significantly went beyond protocol to meet with political dissidents. The discussions focused overdue attention on the tragic reality that Cuba remains a totalitarian dictatorship in a region of growing political pluralism.
Traditionally many Latin American lands instinctively identified with Castro not out of any genuine political admiration but rather a subliminal solidarity of "us against the gringos," read the U.S. While this in the past played politically well in places like Mexico, today even such close American friends as Canada, Spain and Italy are prime trading partners with Cuba. Quite plainly, the long standing American embargo on Cuba--which allows Castro to play the role of David vs Goliath--is not working.
While Washington moralizes about the need to isolate the creaky Castro regime in Havana, we rush to open the Great Wall of China as to redouble our trade (or should I say trade deficit) with the world's largest dictatorship and keep pumping the intravenous of international debt relief to Russia while Moscow pursues a dirty war in Chechnya.
The point is that Castro's Cuba neither merits nor deserves respectability by default but demands a pro active and creative U.S. policy. Rather than demonizing Castro and thus reinforcing his grip on the Cuban people the U.S. would be better to allow a more creative approach. Contact with Cuban-American visitors, for example, is far more destabilizing to Castro than an artificial wall of sanctions seen as vindictive relics of the Cold War.
Last year's Papal visit to Cuba by Pope John Paul II planted subtle seeds of resistance throughout the island; the sprouts of religious freedoms and democracy have begun to grow but can as easily be snuffed out by the secret police. This is obvious.
Likewise recent appeals by noted East European political figures such as Vlaclav Havel or Lech Walesa, themselves former dissidents, stress the need for a genuine political opening. Cuba remains the only communist dictatorship in the hemisphere, a political dinosaur in a region of growing pluralism and economic prosperity.
With the U.S. Presidential election less than a year away, there's little possibility now of recalibrating Washington's policies towards Havana. Yet all candidates should frame their Cuba policy plank as less reactive and more proactive--for both American interests and those of the long-suffering Cuban people .
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues who writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
