A suggestion to Obama: Go to Cuba

The time is right for Barack Obama to travel to Cuba, two Cuba scholars propose.
In an op-ed article Monday in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Kornbluh, head of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, and William LeoGrande, a dean at American University, contend that "for perhaps the first time in the last half-a-century, both the policy logic and political realities of U.S.-Cuban relations are aligned to allow President Obama to cut the Gordian knot that has bedeviled so many of his predecessors."
After recounting the history of those relations and recalling President Nixon's visit to China in 1972, the authors point out that Raúl Castro "abstains from the anti-American rhetoric that made Fidel famous and on several occasions has offered dialogue." During the campaign, "Obama pledged to meet with Raúl Castro as part of a new policy of engagement. Summits require careful preparation, of course, but Obama should keep his pledge sooner rather than later. For all Nixon's faults, his trip to China is remembered as a courageous, farsighted initiative that opened a new era in Sino-American relations," the authors conclude. "A trip to Cuba by President Obama would be no less historic."
To read the entire article, click here. [PHOTOS SHOW: Kornbluh, top left, and LeoGrande.]
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Comments

[Abe Issacs]

I have a counter suggestion of my own:

Why don't Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande go to Cuba, and stay there for about six months. Then, I dare say, they'll understand why dealing with that government is like borrowing from a loan shark.

It's ironic that all these ideas and suggestions of appeasement come from left wing journalists and academics, who would never want to actually live in Cuba under the current terrible circumstances.

[Joe Jericho]

I tend to agree. Obama going to Cuba may not be the right thing to do. There has been a deep freeze in the relationship for almost 50 years. It'll be hard to thaw. I know the Cubans want contact at the highest levels, but it seems to me that the contacts will have to start at a lower-level and at a neutral type of place. The UN may not be a bad idea or some sort of Americas summit. If Obama showed up in Cuba, the regime there would spin that to their advantage all day long amongst the populace. Obama showed his naivete during the campaign when he said he would meet with Castro without pre-conditions. He now knows he can't do that. The table has to be set. He can't go to Cuba and get surprised. We shouldn't forget that Raul did say he would meet him at Guantanamo and give him the American flag to take home with him as a gift. We all know what that means.

[Carl - England]

I fully support this
Having been travelling to Cuba for 20 years, I urge the US govt to lift the embargo, and encourage as much free trade and travel between the two countries as possible.

How about Obama offers to help Detroit by offering 1 million cars to Cuba on a 20 year soft loan? Helps Detroit move cars which are not selling; and Cuba desperately needs transport.

[gabrielr]

Here is the speech President Obama should give:

From the White House: A Presidential Speech in 2009? (by Maury Silverman)

THE WHITE HOUSE:
Today I am making an important announcement with respect to relations between our
country and the nation of Cuba. I am declaring that our tortured history of poor relations is now over.

After more than 50 years of failed policies
with Cuba, I am moving our country in a new direction towards the normalization of relations between our two countries. I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury
to suspend all activities related to the
enforcement of the trade embargo, travel
and remittance restrictions, and will
formally ask the Congress to repeal or
sunset the following laws with respect to
Cuba: the Helms-Burton Act, the Cuban
Democracy Act, the Trading With the Enemy
Act, and the Cuban Adjustment Act.

All appropriations for projects such as
Radio Martí, TV Martí and Cuba-related
democracy projects will be deposited into an
account to be used for the reconstruction
and reconciliation of Cuba in the name of
friendship between our two nations. We will
call it the Inter-American Development Bank
for Cuban Reconstruction.

As part of our country’s new foreign policy
in Latin America, one of the outstanding and
unresolved issues has been Cuba. With this
in mind I will appoint a special envoy to work with the Secretary of State and travel to Cuba to begin laying a framework for the unraveling of the complex issues that remain for over 50 years between our two
countries immediately.

We will find solutions to the issues of
expropriated American properties, assets and
claims left outstanding since Jan. 1, 1959.
We will have a more constructive discussion
and dialogue on issues like human rights,
migration, drug enforcement and extradition.

And it is my intention to personally go and
travel to Havana and meet with the Cuban
president and commence negotiations to
follow through on these declarations. I
intend to invite key leaders of the Cuban
American and U.S. business, travel, sports
and entertainment community who have
maintained a peaceful desire to assist with
the rebuilding and reconstruction of Cuba
to join me and begin having a truly
meaningful dialogue and purpose with their
ancestral neighbors and island nation.

There will be no violence or covert action
tolerated or sanctioned by this government
any longer on Cuba. While the idea of a communist state so close to us offends our political notions, it has been a poor and ineffectual use of our resources and foreign policy to have isolated an island nation of 11.2 million inhabitants that no longer poses any threat to the security of our country.

This is 2009, not 1962. And anyone with
knowledge of politics knows that communism
is a failed political ideology and economic system. The Iron Curtain fell from the Soviet Union not because we isolated it, but because we engaged and challenged it. This is the best way to confront and challenge communism peacefully and effectively.

One of my predecessors, President Richard
Nixon, had the foresight and political intellect to travel to China and begin a dialogue that has forever changed that country and its relations with the west in a positive direction.

For far too long, our policy of isolation
through the embargo and travel restrictions
has been rooted in, and focused on vengeance,retribution and hatred. Fidel Castro is now retired. The Cuban people and history will judge him and his performance as their leader accordingly.

With the fear of interference by the United
States into the internal affairs of Cuba no
longer an issue, I call upon the Cuban president to free all political prisoners and to begin building a society that allows an opposition to freely exist and participate in the governance of its nation. There are no mercenaries of the
United States in Cuba. There are only Cubans
with a sincere desire to change a repressive
political system.

Cuba can never call itself a free and
democratic nation in a world of a oneparty
police state rule and where no opposition can freely exist to keep a check and balance on power.

True democracy exists when opposition parties can co-exist and exercise their primary function to hold accountable
the government and participate in
free elections. This is a system we know that has worked well for more than 200 years and a process I would like our nation to honorably influence in, and not interfere with, our neighbor in the Caribbean.

To members of the Cuban-American community who advocated a violent overthrow of the government in Cuba, I say to them that violence is not the solution nor is an embargo, nor will it be the policy of
this government any longer. Some of my
predecessors and candidates for this office
have stood before you and made a series of
empty promises about what they would do to
Cuba to free it over many decades.

You even heard some of the same rhetoric
in the 2008 campaign. And you gave your
campaign donations and votes because you
liked what you heard. But as many of my predecessors, they did effectively nothing. I will not mislead you. I am not such a politician. It is my commitment as President of the United States to deal with our foreign policy in a more thoughtful manner than my immediate predecessor has, especially in Latin America.

And it is better that you invest your money
and resources towards the rebuilding of your
ancestral homeland rather than be on the
sidelines with an ineffective embargo and
hoping for an American military intervention
that will not occur. That is how you will really change things in Cuba.

There will not be another Bay of Pigs invasion or any military action on Cuba while Cuba does not pose a threat to the national security of the United States.
U.S. military and foreign policy cannot be
held hostage to the Cold War ideas of the
past. Nor will I allow as president the risking of American soldiers' lives in an incursion with a nation that may have an offensive political system but poses no military threat to the United States. Some of our closest political and economic allies in the world have political
systems that are quite different from ours.

Cuba’s future is, and will be, determined
ultimately by Cubans who live on their island, not by Americans. The Cuban people have to come to grips with the realities, failures, and limitations of their own political and economic system. We cannot do it for them or humiliate them to change their ways.

We can stand by them as good neighbors to
assist them to change as they decide. The Cuban-American community can have a great influence on the island’s future through a pathway of peaceful dialogue and engagement.
Families, the American people and American
goods and services are our best ambassadors
of democracy and free market ideas. I
say to Cuban-Americans with families in Cuba: you can now begin to enjoy the full measure of that sacred relationship, the family.

Our responsibility as a nation is to maintain security for our hemisphere and to work with all of our Latin American neighbors to create opportunities for a more vibrant and democratic future. Bringing Cuba back into this dialogue will make such a vision more possible and likely to occur. Thank you.

[Mambi]

Let me see, so, Nixon bravely went to China and opened relations with them. OK, and now 36 years later China is still a Totalitarian Dictatorship who views the US as enemy #1. They've used those 36 years to strengthen themselves at our expense while their people's freedoms are brutally stifled. So, following that great achievement, lets do the same thing 90 miles from our shores by assuring that the anti-US, Cuban dictatorship manages to survive another 50 years. That is a morally bankrupt policy that will only benefit our enemies, undermine elements of our national security, and ensure the continued enslavement of the Cuban population. Absurdly non-sensical! and criminal to a degree.

[Juan Gomez]

Gabriel R, how wrong it would be for the US administration to unilaterally lift the embargo without any preconditions. How little you know of the Cuban history or of the Cuban reality. Your article was naive at best.