I returned recently from several weeks in Cuba spent at a fascinating time. The Cuban government is in the middle of a gradual series of economic reforms that amount to an overhaul of the inefficient, troubled Cuban economy. The current centrally managed system is becoming one that allows for more freedom of entrepreneurship and private enterprise. I had the privilege of meeting a number of the new entrepreneurs of Cuba – those that have opened bed and breakfast-like operations in a spare bedroom, transformed living rooms into a two-chair hair salon or barbershop, or turned their homes into cafes, bars and restaurants. I also met some of the economists who are at the helm directing the current step-by-step reforms.

In a country where personal freedoms have often been limited – and in many cases continue to be – the moves to expand personal economic freedoms are historic. They are promising. They challenge long-standing status quos, and they point to a future for Cuba that is more open-minded and flexible as a younger generation (finally) takes the reins. I watched a number of American onlookers and visitors puzzle that Washington did not seem to recognize what was happening: freedoms are expanding in Cuba and opinions are changing with generational shifts in Miami – why hasn’t U.S. policy followed suit?

In the course of a discussion with one Cuban economist who was a 40 year veteran of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, he shared an old African proverb: whether the elephant makes love or makes war, the grass always gets trampled. His point was somewhat counter to the lament that many share about the detrimental effect of the U.S. embargo on the island economy, suggesting instead that whatever U.S. policy does, Cubans will – as they always have – resolver.

The word resolvemos evokes something like we’ll figure it out, and it is used liberally in Cuba to refer to the ability to invent, get by, and overcome challenges as they arise. During the “Special Period” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the word became commonplace in Cuban households. It maintains its place today as a staple in the language.

My husband and I spent a few nights of our trip at the home of a young couple in Viñales. On day two, we returned from our explorations to a bathroom teeming with ants. Hundreds were pouring in through a crack beneath the windowsill, and there was nothing I could see attracting them, no clear way to try solving this on my own. I dreaded breaking the news to our hosts.

It was the weekend, so the young man of the house was not far away. When I found him, I started guiltily with: “Tenemos un problema.” We have a problem. I explained the issue, then led him to the bathroom and showed him the scene.

I looked back at his face, expecting to see him upset, perhaps angry with us, and at the very least, worried about an overwhelming ant infestation. He was still smiling. Lo resuelvo, he assured me. And don’t worry; it’s not your fault, he added. I sighed with relief. So this has happened before? I asked. No, he responded brightly. Never.

Resolvemos. We’ll figure it out.

(Photo: photito.files.wordpress.com)

Freedom is fundamentally the possibility of standing on a street corner and shouting “There is no freedom here!” — Yoani Sanchez

Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez is fond of comparing Cubans to little birds in a cage – captives who are given free education, food, and water but who are still not free. Thanks to a new law that ended Cuba’s long-standing exit visa requirement, Cuba’s noisiest and most rebellious bird was able to temporarily fly free from her cage to sing in over a dozen countries – and sing she did.

Yoani achieved international fame and has won multiple international awards for her uncensored portrayal of daily life in present day Cuba and for her advocacy for a radically freer nation.  Her critical portrayal of life in Cuba under the Castro brothers won her fans the world over, not only due to her courage to shine a light on the reality of daily life, but because of her determination to challenge the government’s strangle hold on the Cuban people.

Preaching a message of Cuban solidarity and the inevitability of a democratic Cuba, Yoani charmed the Florida International University (FIU) audience last week with inspiring personal accounts that demonstrate that something great is about to happen in the western hemisphere’s last communist holdout.

I didn’t doubt that the international award winning dissident-blogger would work some magic on the FIU crowd that included Cuban-American political elites like Florida Congressman Diaz-Balart (R) and his brother, former Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart. After all, Yoani had much recent practice honing her message and delivery style during her long tour, however, I was surprised by her sharp intellect and eloquence which captivated the South Florida crowd for over an hour.

Thoughtful and collected, the consistently witty Yoani displayed a commanding understanding of the Cuban socio-political landscape and the actions she deemed necessary to bring about peaceful democratic change on her island-cage. Frequently dipping into her deep reservoir of  colorful anecdotes, she aptly painted a mosaic of  the Cuban socio-political reality emphasizing the major challenges to peaceful change, but always illuminating the opportunities to be capitalized on. She called on all Cubans on the island, and throughout the diaspora, to “become one community again” explaining that only through solidarity can change occur. Illuminating this point, she shared the following analogy at a previous event,

“It’s as if the Cuba inside the island and outside were approaching and watching one another. We look at each other and think it is someone else, but when we get close we see it is our own reflection on the other side. We are the same.”

When asked by an audience member what was the hardest part of her existence as the most well-known political dissident on the island she explained, “In the media I am called a mercenary, even a terrorist – my children are exposed to these portrayals of me frequently on T.V. and they feel the heat of being my children in our neighborhood and in school.” Yet, despite threats to her personal safety (Yoani claims she was abducted, and beaten by state security agents in 2009) and the special attention that comes with being a persistently noisy bird,  she continues to spread  her message of a new and “more inclusive Cuba.”

With the conclusion of her first foray outside the cage,  Yoani can look back and appreciate that she has started to win over millions of Cuba watchers, and Cuban exiles living around the world. However, her pro-democracy melodies will have to resonate with the local island birds in a big way for them all to want to sing along with her to demand freedom from their common cage.

Keep singing little bird — keep singing!

After 54 years of leadership by one Castro brother or the other, current Cuban President Raúl Castro announced on Sunday that his current five-year term would be his last — thus providing a firm date for the end of Castro rule in Cuba while holding himself to a standard he has oft-repeated: senior officials should hold office for no more than two five-year terms.

Of course, given the limitations posed by simple aging, the news is not shocking. Raúl will be 86 years old when he steps down. But in the context of the impossibly long and surprisingly resilient tenure of the Castro brothers, which has reached mythical proportions (Is Fidel dead? Is he alive? Is he immortal?), it is notable. We now know when a post-Castro Cuba will exist: 2018.

Perhaps more importantly, the stage is being set broadly for a transfer of power to a younger generation. The new parliament elected 52-year-old Miguel Díaz-Canel to the number two post of First Vice President. In this role he becomes the expected successor to Raúl, and although this will certainly depend upon developments over the next five years, he is the first person born after the 1959 revolution to be elected at this level. And in the parliament he is now in good company: fully 80% of the 612 deputies elected earlier this month were born after the revolution.

Whether Díaz-Canel makes it through the five-year gauntlet or not, the training for a successor to the Castros is underway, and the role will be fraught with challenges. The complex process of economic reform will have witnessed further successes and failures, and broadened the group of private-sector stakeholders concerned with political developments related to their economic rights. There will be, as Anne Louise Bardach calls it, “a charisma deficit” for a successor who does not have the shine of the Castro mantle nor the credibility of having fought in the revolution.

And how will Cubans respond to the next Cuban president? How will Cuban-Americans? How will Washington?

We’re still several years off. Let’s see where the reform process takes Cuba in the meantime.

(Photo credit: AP)

My mother was born in Havana on December 11, 1953, into a solidly middle-class Cuban family. After years of self-driven study and hard work, my grandfather Celestino had been able to launch a successful car import business that allowed him and my grandmother to raise and support a family. They lived on the second story of a duplex right next to the car lot. There were three girls, and my mother was the middle child. Their home was modest but comfortable, as were their lives. My grandmother helped with the books for the business. My grandfather was active in the Rotary Club. The above photo shows my mother with her older sister (my aunt) and parents (my grandparents) in their Sunday best at the Coney Island Park in Havana.

By the end of 1959, the family had left for Miami, then New York City, and finally Los Angeles, where they settled and raised the girls. They left with very little, learned English when they arrived, and struggled to rebuild their lives in a new and foreign country. But they managed.

This March — nearly fifty-four years later — will be the first time that one of them has returned, and it will be my mother. I’ve talked her into making the trip with me, my husband, and my father. As a Cuban-American family, we have the rare ability among U.S. citizens to travel to the island without restriction from the U.S. government. The hassles are many (U.S. credit and debit cards will not be accepted anywhere; charter flights are expensive and inflexible because they corner the tiny market that legally exists; I could go on), but in the end, we are going.

Understandably, my mother is simultaneously thrilled and anxious about the visit. So am I, if I’m perfectly honest about it. In our family, as it would be and is in many others, this is a huge deal.

As we planned our visit, we saw this week that Yoani Sánchez, the well-known Cuban dissident blogger, had received a Cuban passport. After years of denying travel permits to dissidents and other persons of interest on the island, on January 14 a new law went into effect in Cuba. The despised travel permit was eliminated, and the world watched to see how this would affect Cuban citizens. There could be no greater public signal of change than this particular move: within two short weeks, the most globally well-known opponent of the Castro regime was allowed to take advantage of her right to travel — a right that had long been out of reach.

Looking at these two stories, there is no comparison to be made: The differences could not be more stark between the lives my mother and her family have led in the United States and those of Cubans who remained on the island, including Yoani Sánchez. And yet, it strikes me that travel to and from the island is so thoroughly tied up in deep stresses and anxieties of history, and imperfect and counterproductive laws on both sides.

And it strikes me to watch the changes underway — steady, incomplete, but ongoing.

Our family trip will be one small piece.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Fidel Castro’s long-declining health and the high average age of his successors are well-worn topics in Cuba discussions. As we turn the page on 2012, Cuba watchers and Cubans alike are now discussing the health of the leader of a different country: Venezuela. Hugo Chávez recently suffered still new complications from his cancer surgery, and he has taken a surprising step in naming a successor (his vice president, Nicolas Maduro) should he be unable to carry out his duties as president. Chávez won a new six-year term in October, but if he has to step down during the first four years of his next term, a new election must be called within 30 days.

Experts suggest that a change in leadership in Venezuela could have huge consequences for Cuba. The two countries have a partnership that is rooted deeply in the personal relationship between Chávez and the Castros — particularly Fidel, whom Chávez considers to be a mentor. Business with Venezuela consists of 40 percent of all Cuban trade, and Cuba receives 60 percent of its energy needs on preferential terms from Venezuela. Such a high level of dependency leaves the island vulnerable to the political and economic swings of its partner.

A victory by the opposition in Venezuela would have the greatest impact for Cuba: during the recent campaign, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles told voters that with his election, the distribution of oil to Cuba and other countries at reduced prices or in barter deals would end. But this is an unlikely outcome. In the short term, there are essentially three possible scenarios for the Cuba-Venezuela relationship:

First, Chávez may indeed continue to govern in Venezuela and see the same arrangement with Cuba continue.

Second, Chávez’s health may decline, in which case his hand-selected successor, Nicolas Maduro, would almost certainly win a new election and maintain the special relationship. Maduro has been a close collaborator in the relationship with Cuba and affirmed a line used many times by Chávez himself: that Cuba and Venezuela are two countries as one.

Third is the most unsettling scenario for Havana, but it is also highly unlikely: the Venezuelan opposition could come to power in a new election and change the tenor of the relationship with Cuba, as Capriles promised during the campaign.

However, even if this final scenario ends up being the right one, Havana has some forces working in its favor. In its bilateral deals with Caracas, Havana returns the favor of preferential terms for its energy supply with a steady stream of 30,000-50,000 Cuban technical personnel working in Venezuela as physicians, teachers, and other instructors, many in impoverished areas that depend upon the social services and training they provide. A newly elected opposition — whatever its campaign rhetoric — would be foolish to do anything to endanger the continuity of these services to large swaths of the Venezuelan population. Changes in the relationship between the two countries would therefore have to be gradual and mutually negotiated in order to protect the assets provided by each side to the other, which are of great value to the receiving country.

Still, Cuba in the coming year must continue to prepare for eventual changes to the relationship: such an arrangement cannot continue forever. Diversification of foreign partners will ensure that instability in one will not in turn destabilize the Cuban economy. Diversification of Cuba’s own production will lessen its vulnerability to external price shocks for commodities like nickel. And actively enabling the current economic reforms that have been slowly moving Cuba from a centrally planned economy to a model more friendly toward private enterprise will augment the number of Cubans that are independent of the government payroll.

We can expect to see more on all of these fronts in 2013.

(Photo credit: AP/Ariana Cubillos)

In the recent U.S. election, Cuban-Americans voted for President Obama in record numbers, reflecting in a most convincing way the demographic shift that we have already been watching for years: newer immigrants and younger Cuban-Americans do not prioritize a hard-line U.S. policy toward Cuba, or do not support it at all.

In fact, on November 6, Cuban-American votes split almost evenly between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama: the 48% support for Obama that many exit polls are citing is the highest ever percentage of Cuban-American support for a Democratic presidential candidate, and constitutes a huge increase from the community’s 35% support for Obama in 2008. It also serves to explain why Miami-Dade County — a Cuban-American enclave — was one of the few in the country to produce more votes for Obama this year than in 2008.

This shift holds significance beyond the bounds of the election, however. Hard-line policies toward Cuba continue not because they are productive, nor because they have achieved their ends (regime change remains elusive). They continue for now because certain members of Congress continue to block any changes, and because there has not been sufficient political will to force the issue with the same fervor on the opposite side.

Even the Obama administration’s modest policy changes — increasing opportunities for “people-to-people” travel to Cuba and expanding the rights of Cuban-Americans to travel and send remittances to the island — were met with hostility by these actors. House Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen worked during the presidential campaign to make sure that Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential candidate who in the past had expressed his distaste for the embargo and unproductive U.S. policy toward Cuba, came around quickly to the hard-line stance.

Indeed, in 2002, Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “The embargo doesn’t work. It is a failed policy… I think it’s become more of a crutch for Castro to use to repress his people. All the problems he has, he blames the American embargo.” In another interview in 2008, he asked: “if we’re going to have free trade with China, why not Cuba?” But a statement from Representative Ros-Lehtinen when Ryan joined the Romney campaign stated that Ryan had spent time with Cuban-American representatives in order to learn “the true nature of the Castro regime, and unlike the Obama-Biden administration, which has appeased and emboldened the Castro regime, the Cuba policy of a Romney-Ryan administration will be clear: no accommodation, no appeasement. A Romney-Ryan administration will place maximum sanctions pressure on the regime and support the brave pro-democracy movement on the island.”

Representative Ros-Lehtinen’s majority Cuban-American support on maintaining that kind of policy is waning. That shift will not necessarily ease pressure from Cuban-American members of Congress, nor diminish their ability to block changes to Cuba policy. But it lessens their mandate to do so, and their credibility as representatives of the community’s opinions.

For now, policy remains static. Last week, the UN General Assembly went through its annual ritual of voting to condemn the U.S. embargo of Cuba; the United States was joined by Israel and Palau as the three countries in the world voting against the UN resolution. A record 188 nations voted in favor of the condemnation.

But Cuba is on the front page of the New York Times. The topic? Easing the embargo.

The tide is moving in favor of change.

(Photo credit: New York Times)

This morning Cubans awoke to learn in the daily Granma newspaper that after years of discussion and rumors, the carta blanca policy that requires Cubans to receive permission to travel from Cuba for any length of time will be rescinded. As of January 14, when this new policy goes into effect, Cuban citizens will need only a passport and a visa from a destination country in order to travel abroad. The biggest roadblock to such travel has long been the required exit permit: permission is hard to come by and often arbitrarily denied, and the cost of the permit itself is largely out of reach.

The importance of this government announcement cannot be exaggerated. It is the most significant migration reform in half a century, and the language in the announcement left the door open for further changes in the future: “In due course, other measures related to the migratory issue will be adopted that will certainly help in the consolidation of the efforts being made by the Revolution towards the full normalization of Cuba’s relations with its emigrants.”

There are still open questions. How will this impact Cubans currently living abroad? Will the specifications regarding “preserving the human capital created by the Revolution from the theft of talents practiced by the powerful nations” prevent most (some? many?) Cubans from taking advantage of this new freedom? And how will this new policy actually manifest itself in practice?

Skeptics range from Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a regularly vehement pro-embargo voice, to Elizardo Sanchez, a Cuban dissident living on the island who is head of the independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. And if this is a guise, then their critiques are valid.

However, the reasons for a Castro government to create a smoke screen on this issue are few. The uptick in public and international regard for Cuba’s respect of freedoms and human rights will be quite brief if results are not realized after January 14. The state has set a clear date for implementation, and has thus invited international observation and scrutiny on the follow-through. The excitement on the island, as well, could quickly give way to increased discontent if this very public promise does not now bear fruit.

The Cuban government does not need a disillusioned populace next year, nor does it particularly need a cautiously optimistic international community at the moment, so why try to “fool the world,” as Ros-Lehtinen put it? Washington will not be adjusting policies in the very short term before we see what this looks like in practice (and certainly not in advance of the presidential election), and many other nations trade and invest in Cuba without seeing these kinds of reform. What Cuba does need is a generally improved, more efficient, and more friendly economic and political system that is more widely supported among its populace, its émigrés, and its partners abroad. This kind of reform has long been red-flagged as one key part in a series of policy changes on the island.

What this means, then, is that in addition to the economic reforms we’ve seen over the past several years, we are finally seeing the kind of political reforms related to individual freedoms that global actors have been clamoring for, and upon which the Obama administration has made any changes in Cuba policy contingent. We cannot expect a flood of other reforms in the immediate term, but we can acknowledge this step and encourage it.

(Photo credit: Tony Hisgett)

Perhaps the biggest underlying tension among Cuba watchers is on the issue of whether things (policies) on the island are changing for the better, or whether they remain upsettingly the same as they have for half of a century. A comprehensive view, of course, would acknowledge that both phenomena exist. And a realistic observer would recognize that one cannot expect everything to change at once: countries are complex, and a socialist country in particular has a bloated state bureaucracy that moves slowly.

Cuba faces some of the same challenges it has for years. How does one encourage workers to innovate and increase productivity when there are no material incentives for doing so? How can the country smoothly transition from a centrally-controlled Communist country to whatever it is becoming as it incorporates means for expanding the private sector? How does one effectively manage the country’s use of two currencies and mitigate the polarizing effect this can have in terms of income disparities for individuals with access to only one of those two currencies?

And there are other challenges facing the country which keep it on rather fragile footing. Attracting foreign investment remains a challenge when foreigners cannot be confident that their investments will be completely safe, given past experience in Cuba and other nations, like Venezuela. The Chinese are doing a fair amount of business in Cuba these days, including in oil, and economic independence via a major oil discovery remains a hope for Havana: but thus far, all wells have come up dry or disappointing. And of course, there is the U.S. embargo.

Despite all, Cuba’s economic growth in the first half of 2012 came in at a respectable 2.1%: better growth than was seen in the United States, in fact. Cuba is trading actively with partners like Venezuela, China, Spain, Brazil and Canada, and even with the United States in select industries that meet regulations imposed around the broader embargo.

As in Myanmar, where reforms are proceeding at a somewhat quicker (or at least more publicly visible) pace, the progress is imperfect. It is piecemeal. And it is not complete. In Myanmar, many political detainees remain imprisoned, and clashes between Burmese military and local insurgent groups continue. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the country at the end of last year to applaud its progress on a number of other fronts — establishment of the National Human Rights Commission, general amnesties of more than 200 political prisoners, institution of new labour laws that allow labour unions and strikes, relaxation of press censorship, and regulations of currency practices — and since then, Washington has relaxed sanctions and steadily reestablished diplomatic relations in a way that has allowed the United States to re-engage and be an active part of the reforms and transitions taking place.

All this regarding a country with little strategic interest for the United States given its geographic location half way around the world. Cuba, too, released many of the individuals identified as political prisoners by the international community. Other reforms have involved expanding the personal economic rights available to Cubans.

Huge issues still exist. Activists are regularly imprisoned for speaking out. Private sector entrepreneurs face a range of bureaucratic and supply challenges. But there is an opening during the current transition to make many more changes that the international community has asked to see but not often actively engaged to assist in moving forward.

We’ve seen it happen with Myanmar: surely there is room for similar processes of re-engagement with Cuba, at least after November 6, as it moves through its own transition period.

(Photo credit: globalpost.com)

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will spend this weekend campaigning in Florida, long a power player in the realm of swing states. Representative Ryan’s success there will depend mainly upon his appeal to two voting groups: seniors and Hispanics. This includes the Cuban-American community.

Following the announcement of Ryan as Romney’s running mate and a media flurry to delve the depths of who Ryan is and what policies can be expected of him, it quickly became clear that by bringing on Paul Ryan, the Romney campaign sought to clearly define the presidential race as a referendum on economic issues – the debt, financial regulation, taxes, the budget. Ryan did not have much in the way of foreign policy experience, it seemed.

But in fact, Ryan has a track record on Cuba that will largely frustrate an otherwise dependably Republican Cuban-American base in Florida: he has been an opponent of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, standing up against the standard party line on the issue. The liberal journalist Jim Fallows (of the Atlantic) even goes so far as to call him “brave” on Cuba policy. Yet as a congressional representative from the Midwest, where trade with Cuba directly benefits the agricultural sector, taking such a stand is far easier to do than it is when standing before a Cuban-American voting bloc.

… Or Cuban-American colleagues, it turns out. In 2002, Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “The embargo doesn’t work. It is a failed policy. It was probably justified when the Soviet Union existed and posed a threat through Cuba. I think it’s become more of a crutch for Castro to use to repress his people. All the problems he has, he blames the American embargo.” In another interview in 2008, he asked: “if we’re going to have free trade with China, why not Cuba?” But a statement from Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen now says that Ryan more recently spent time with Cuban-American representatives in order to learn “the true nature of the Castro regime, and unlike the Obama-Biden administration, which has appeased and emboldened the Castro regime, the Cuba policy of a Romney-Ryan administration will be clear: no accommodation, no appeasement. A Romney-Ryan administration will place maximum sanctions pressure on the regime and support the brave pro-democracy movement on the island.”

The switch could have caused some whiplash if it were not so completely predictable from a campaign standpoint. There’s little political capital gained on a Republican ticket from taking an anti-embargo stance, and there’s a critical voting base that would be turned off by it. Meanwhile, there’s nothing politically risky for Republicans about sticking to the hard-line stance on Cuba.

In the end, it’s not likely that any of this will matter much once the campaign is over, even if the Romney-Ryan team wins. Romney is not likely to bother reversing Obama administration changes to travel and remittances, which have been received mostly positively by the American public, and Ryan has no reason (nor past precedent) to push for such a reversal. There are too many global challenges that will take precedence over attention to Cuba policy, as they always do.

But for now, and for this weekend, Romney and Ryan had better stick to script.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Ask a self-employed Cuban how she came to possess the goods she is selling, and she might tell you that they came from “Roberto.”

The euphemism indicates that the goods are stolen, and given the scarcity of many products and the unreliability of state retail stores in Cuba, many new entrepreneurs in Cuba are struggling to cobble together their businesses and turning to alternative — and under-the-table — economic strategies. In fact, the channel of goods coming into the country from family, friends, and mules is estimated to have ballooned recently to more than $1 billion per year. This should be no surprise to the state since Cubans lack access to a wholesale market by design. But these informal imports, currently running under the radar, are about to face a 100 percent tax that will go into effect in September.

In the course of the ongoing economic overhaul by the Cuban state, new challenges are indeed arising every step of the way. The path in this case is easy to trace.

1. The Cuban government lays off workers from the public sector in order to eliminate its inefficiencies and encourage a private sector to develop.
2. The country does not have the mechanisms to support a new private sector, however, so those new entrepreneurs are forced to get creative. They start acquiring more goods through informal channels in order to maintain their supply.
3. In this (true) scenario, the Cuban state misses out on any kind of revenue from those “imports”. So the government slaps a 100 percent tax on this kind of trade, which looks more like an effort to stifle the informal trade altogether than an attempt to get in on the spoils.

The problem is that Cuban small business owners will be left in a lurch if this is not coupled with the natural counterweight policy — that is, creating a clear way for entrepreneurs to get the goods they need through official channels — which would allow the Cuban state to earn some revenue from the private sector trade while still generating viable conditions for small businesses in the private sector to operate.

I suspect that sounds too much like capitalism.

But with 387,000 Cubans now self-employed (out of a total island population of 11 million) and a state goal to add another 240,000 private-sector jobs this year, policies that make the lives of private sector entrepreneurs and employees more difficult seem counterintuitive.

The Cuban National Assembly is set to meet on Monday. Here’s hoping we see a good plan.

(Photo: Nerci, Cuenta Propista and Artisan, Habana Vieja; credit Arch Ritter, Nov. 2008)

Mariela Castro’s U.S. tour continued this week with a visit to the United Nations, a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and a public presentation at the New York Public Library. The East Coast stopover followed a busy agenda in San Francisco last week, and has upset those who say that Castro used the visit to “bash” the United States, others who found her comments regarding President Obama (that she would vote for him if she could) overly controversial, and of course, those who believe that she should never have been granted a U.S. visa for the visit in the first place.

But in reality, the visit appears to have gone quite well, and is deserving of some kudos.

The beauty of free speech in a country like the United States is that Mariela Castro is allowed to visit and share beliefs with which many people agree — say, regarding the rights and equality of LGBT persons — as well as beliefs with which many people disagree — for instance, that the current political system in Cuba is open, fair, and democratic, as she stated Tuesday evening. Those who listen and participate in an exchange with her are able to formulate their own opinions, and should be allowed that privilege.

David da Silva Cornell, an international business attorney based in Miami, appeared to provide the most reasonable treatment of the issues around this visit in a Huffington Post article this week. He repeated Moshe Dayan’s famous quote “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” and added: “Refusing even to engage in dialogue with those with whom one disagrees never seems to yield results.”

In his opinion piece, da Silva Cornell called upon Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) and Castro’s co-panelist for the New York Public Library session on Tuesday, to challenge Castro by raising the connection of LGBT rights to the larger context of universal human and civil rights that are so limited in Cuba. And sure enough, Carey did. She asked Castro on Tuesday evening whether she would anticipate expanding her push for LGBT rights to “people with different religious or political views.”

The fact that Carey did not receive much of a reply matters little. What is important is the clear difference in certain convictions between Carey and Castro as interlocutors, and the peaceful exchange of ideas nonetheless.

(Photo credit: www.abc.es)

Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, will be in California this week. Traveling on a U.S. visa to attend a conference of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), she appears to have made it through the same State Department review that denied visas to eleven seemingly less contentious scholars hoping to join the same conference. Some of those turned down are prominent Cubans who have been allowed U.S. visas in the past, including Rafael Hernández, the editor of the Cuban intellectual journal Temas, who has taught at both Harvard and Columbia universities. Forty other Cubans were granted visas with Castro and will join the LASA conference; twenty-five more are under review.

The convoluted issue of travel in the US-Cuba relationship remains a most consuming question for citizens and media alike, and the complications arise on all sides. U.S. citizens, of course, enjoy expanded rights to visit Cuba for “people-to-people” exchanges under Obama administration regulations, but the rules are specific and the agendas pre-approved, which means that opportunities are still quite narrow. Meanwhile, Cuban citizens hoping to travel anywhere abroad are subject to government controls, including application for an expensive exit visa that is out of reach for many — not only because of price, but because of various unspoken rules that result in denial of permission or years of wait. And, as in the case of the eighty Cuban scholars hoping to attend the LASA conference this week, a number of Cubans that proceed through the visa process with the U.S. government find that the ultimate decision seems to be arbitrary, contradicting, and nontransparent.

On the face of it, this latest twist in the travel narrative is as confusing as any other, and media, scholars, and Congressional representatives have wrestled with it over the past few days. Why would the administration allow the daughter of the Cuban President to travel to the United States? Does Castro’s visa allowance represent a change in U.S. policy?

But the issue must be viewed through a different lens. The U.S. line of rhetoric has long been in favor of respecting dissenting opinions, freedom of speech, and open exchange of ideas: it is a constant trope in Washington’s advocacy for change in Cuba. The basis for changed regulations for Americans traveling to Cuba was the value of people-to-people exchanges, and a flow of ideas and culture between the United States and Cuba. Allowing Castro to attend the LASA conference makes sense in that context, particularly because her role in Cuba is more nuanced than her family connections: she may be the daughter of a Castro and a member of the Communist Party (the only political party in Cuba), but as the Director for the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), she is the most prominent and outspoken gay rights activist on the island. Her work has been pivotal in the many reforms that have been enacted on the island in favor of recognition and acceptance of LGBT human rights, and has resulted in pioneering legislation, including allowance for transgendered individuals to receive sex reassignment surgery without charge (as a health care provision), and to change their legal gender. Human rights are Mariela Castro’s passion, and politics is not: she recently openly congratulated U.S. President Barack Obama on his expression of personal support for marriage equality, encouraging the world to take note of his words.

During her visit to Northern California, Castro will speak at San Francisco General Hospital on Cuba’s policies toward transgender people. She will meet with various members of San Francisco’s LGBT community at a meeting Wednesday evening. On Thursday morning, she will lead a panel at the LASA conference.

Mariela Castro’s visa, then, seems to be the part of this story that is consistent with existing policy and rhetoric around human rights, people-to-people exchanges, and largely non-political engagement with Cuba. But consistent application of that policy and rhetoric would have meant granting visas to the other Cuban scholars that had hoped to attend the LASA conference. Castro’s visa has been the focus, but it is not the troubling part of the sequence of events. Why deny visas to scholars that have enjoyed the right to travel to the United States in the past, on the claimed grounds that their presence would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States”? That is the question that remains to be answered.

The award-winning Cuban blogger and writer Yoani Sanchez published an op-ed today in The New York Times called “The Dream of Leaving Cuba,” in which she describes the inability of many Cubans to gain the necessary permission to travel abroad. She is one of those Cubans. In fact, she has been denied the “white card” (carta blanca) 19 times since 2008.

Sanchez relates her most recent denial last year, and includes in the narrative a concurrent thread, as she received news of the violent beating and resulting death of a fellow dissident, Juan Wilfredo Soto, in the very same afternoon in May 2011. She ends her piece with the words: “I could only conclude that in Cuba, nothing has changed. We remain in the grip of the same limitations, caught between the high walls of ideological sectarianism and the tight shackles of travel restrictions.”

I was rather surprised to see her piece end there. Nothing has changed? That certainly is not the argument I and others have been making about what has been going on in Cuba recently. And part of the hope in making the counter-argument (everything in Cuba is changing!) is that change in Cuba will spur an update to the U.S. position toward Cuba: the Obama administration has countless times indicated that it is looking for more demonstrable reforms in Cuba if U.S. policy toward Cuba is to adjust. The embargo, which Sanchez, too, vocally opposes, has little chance of coming down if the Obama administration cannot point to something Cuba has done to deserve it: the seemingly straight-forward argument that the embargo has so clearly failed to achieve its objectives in its half-century of life — or that the embargo harms the Cuban people more than it harms the regime, or even that the embargo enables the Castro regime to continue to blame weaknesses in the Cuban system on repression of the island by the United States — does not appear to have received enough traction in the administration. They have asked for more proof of real, measurable changes occurring on the island.

There is, of course, a great difference between the kind of economic reforms we’ve seen and the political reform hoped for by Washington. Calls for democracy and free elections are not welcomed or tolerated. A one-party political system, where the Communist Party is the only legal option, remains in place. In fact, Raúl has made it clear that the economic reforms are meant to preserve the political system, and to make socialism “sustainable and irreversible.” And as Sanchez points out, many Cubans are still confined to the island without the right to travel abroad, and others endure harassment and worse for dissenting views.

But individual freedoms are expanding. A private sector is emerging as more freedoms are allowed to non-state economic actors. Cubans can now technically buy and sell homes and cars, and use hotels previously reserved for foreign tourists, although they are limited in these endeavors by a meager income. Taxis, restaurants, hair salons, and other small business have greater autonomy to determine their own prices, manage their revenues, and expand their businesses to fulfill demand. Dissident prisoners (130 or so) have been released from the jails that held them for years.

The difference between economic reforms and political reforms is important, and there are many Cubans that still have not felt the effects of any of the economic reforms yet enacted. But there is no question that under Raúl, the rules have changed more drastically than in entire decades prior. And we would do better to encourage these reforms, rather than ignore them.

(Photo credit: Getty Images)

This weekend’s Summit of the Americas may not include representation from Cuba, but Cuba is by no means absent from the Summit. In fact, general policy toward the island appeared to be the most significant issue dividing the Hemisphere in advance of this weekend’s meetings: Latin American nations saw Cuba’s continued exclusion from the Summit as counterproductive, while the United States insisted that as long as Cuba continued to fail to meet the democratic requirements of the Organization of American States, its leaders could not be involved in any of the Organization’s events (including the Summit of the Americas). With diplomatic aplomb, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos solved the issue by proposing to make Cuba’s future participation a topic for discussion at the Summit.

So Raúl Castro will not be in Cartagena, but the nations of the Hemisphere will discuss whether he could be invited in the future. And the leaders of the countries of ALBA that were threatening not to show up to the Summit actually agreed to attend following this resolution (all except Rafael Correa of Ecuador). The way is paved for the United States to maintain its opposition respectfully, while stepping aside to allow future policy to be determined by the apparent consensus of most all other countries in the Hemisphere.

Is that what will happen? Not yet, certainly. The meeting of foreign ministers that considered a proposal to invite Cuba to future Summits ended after the United States and Canada delivered their veto.

But the conversation did not end there, and it appears to be coming to a head, as ALBA countries have drawn the line on excluding Cuba. Bolivia’s Foreign Minister, David Choquehuanca, has stated: “This is the last Summit of the Americas unless Cuba is allowed to take part.” The foreign ministers of Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay have all declined to sign the Summit’s final declaration unless the United States and Canada remove their veto of future Cuban participation. And the most moderate, conservative Latin American nations are taking a stand, as well. President Santos of Colombia and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil have both agreed that there should be no more Americas Summits without Cuba included. President Santos opened the Summit today with a critique of Cuba’s absence, saying that the exclusion was an anachronism of the Cold War. He is a well-respected leader, and a strong ally, of course, of the United States.

Will the United States and Canada test the resolve of all of these leaders and maintain their veto? Or will they take advantage of this opportunity to step aside and accede to the majority consensus in a Hemisphere demanding exactly this kind of signal from its northern partners?

As President Obama noted, media tends to sweep over the progress made at these kinds of summits in favor of focusing on the “flashier” controversies. He’s right: there are a wide range of issues upon which the nations of the Hemisphere are finding means to cooperate during these meetings, under the theme of “Connecting the Americas: Partners for Prosperity” — from expanding access to information and communication technology for development to bolstering middle class populations. It would certainly be a shame to overshadow all of that by remaining stubborn on the Cuba issue.

(Photo credit: Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press)

On a visit to the Western Hemisphere last week from Rome, Pope Benedict XVI stopped first in Mexico, a country whose population is 80-85% Catholic. It is the most Catholic, in this sense, of the world’s Spanish-speaking countries. His second visit was to Cuba, a country that has been traditionally Catholic, but was officially an atheist state from 1959 until the fall of the Soviet Union, when it amended its statutes and declared itself a “secular state” instead. In fact, pollsters now call Cuba the least devout nation in Latin America – so perhaps the least Catholic of the world’s Spanish-speaking countries.

So why, with only two stops in the hemisphere, was Cuba a destination for the papal visit? Perhaps precisely because it is the country in Latin America where the Church’s influence has changed so dramatically in the last two decades, and where the Church has significant gains to consolidate. The Church has been a positive force in particular over the last couple of years in working with the Cuban government to negotiate the release of dissident prisoners that occurred in 2010 and 2011, which came as a very pleasant surprise for Cuba watchers. And after long years of oppression in the last half century, the Church is now much more respected by the government, and Catholic Cubans enjoy the right to worship: last Wednesday was even made a paid holiday for Cuban state workers to attend mass with the Pope.

But critics of last week’s visit pointed to the Pope’s comments before departing for Cuba (“Today it is evident that Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality… New models must be found with patience and in a constructive way.”), squared them against the fact that he would not be meeting with any dissidents during his visit on the island, and thus argued that he was perhaps not doing enough, not leaving a lasting impression on the island, and not using his visit to push for something big — whether that meant in terms of human rights or political change. The U.S. State Department, too, had urged the Pope to use his 48-hour visit to speak out against the regime. Anyone actually expecting this would have been disappointed.

The assessment is an impatient one. What did activists really anticipate from a two-day visit beyond what did happen? We saw Pope Benedict XVI meet with both Raúl and Fidel Castro, and speak openly and frankly with both. No morals or principles were compromised in those discussions or in his public addresses. He spoke of “reconciliation,” “unity,” “authentic freedom” and “greater openness.” He gave a sermon to an assembled crowd, with President Castro seated in the first row, that warned against the mindset of those that “close themselves up in their own truth and try to impose it upon others.” And he openly requested that the increasing religious freedoms granted to Cubans continue to be allowed to expand.

But he did not meet with dissidents, and some, including the Ladies in White, had requested an audience with him. Various reports cited hundreds of Cuban dissidents rounded up and held for the time that the Pope was in the country in order to avoid “problems” (though others cited peaceful protests by the Ladies in White proceeding with fewer issues than usual for the dissidents involved). What is the responsibility of the Vatican on these issues? Frankly, such meetings would have made the conversations with the Castros much more challenging, and the Church has already shown that it fully and publicly supports the freedoms of Cuban dissidents, so that is not in question. It could be argued that it is much more effective to push for those freedoms by speaking directly with the head of the country.

Key here is that the Vatican appears to understand something that has been so difficult for the United States to grasp, whether due to political realities or simply stubborn hard-headedness. Consistent dialogue and respectful exchanges of views will ultimately be more effective with Havana than an attempted one-way imposition of values. Raúl closed the Pope’s visit to the island not with a combative response to Benedict’s suggestions, but with a respectful statement that included the comment, “We do not think alike on all matters.“

The polite diplomacy therein is noteworthy. And the Church continues to make gains in Cuba with this tack: following Pope Benedict’s departure, Havana honored an appeal made during his visit and declared Good Friday a holiday for Cuban workers.

Any lessons to be learned there?

(Photo credit: Osservatore Romano via AP)