President Barack Obama made history this week by freeing Cuban-Americans from restrictions on their rights to visit their families on Cuba and to provide them with financial support. While the changes he ordered affect a meaningful but tiny part of the U.S. embargo, it now seems clear that Obama has set into motion forces that will force a decisive shift in this failed and futile policy.
The actions announced by the White House - primarily, eliminating travel and financial restrictions on Cuban-Americans - are deeply humanitarian acts that will reunite Cuban families divided by the policies of George Bush. Cuban families in Miami and Havana reacted to the new policy with expressions of great joy, and rightly so.
If their constituents and kinsmen were elated, Cuban-American Members of Congress, once a proudly solid block, reacted in ways that showed divisions, cracks, and uncertainty. They are reading the handwriting on the wall about where the policy is headed and it showed in their comments and in what they didn't say as well.
While the President made further progress on Cuba conditional on actions in response by Cuba's government, his decisions were seen, domestically and internationally, as an overdue concession that the policy of regime change is over, that the embargo hasn't worked and will never work, and must be taken down.
Some in his administration would prefer the president to stop here and make no additional policy changes beyond allowing Cuban-Americans here to visit their families on the island. But the president cannot stop here. A policy that consists only of Cuban-American travel isn't a Cuba policy and it's not sustainable substantively or politically.
Travel just for Cuban-Americans, which we call "travel for some but not for all," doesn't help any other U.S. citizens, black, white, yellow, brown or red, whose constitutional claim to their travel rights are every bit as legitimate as those of the Cuban-American community. It doesn't help any Afro-Cubans on the island, because only a tiny fraction of Cuban-Americans who could provide financial support to their relatives on Cuba are black. It tells Americans of all backgrounds, businessmen and workers, cultural figures and students, religious groups or tourists of any kind, that they cannot contribute to openness in Cuba or promote American values there.
Travel for some keeps in place a policy whereby Americans can travel to Iran or North Korea but cannot get to Cuba without a license. Travel for some does nothing to please our allies in the region, or to address their concerns about the U.S. trying to deny Cuba's place in the Hemisphere, nor does it speak to the anger of those who admire Cuba's independence and sovereignty and despise the actions we take to diminish those facts.
No president since Lyndon Johnson has spoken with greater clarity and understanding about race in America than Barack Obama. The Senate candidate who told his party's convention "there's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America," the Presidential candidate who said, "I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together," who said that it was seared in his "genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many we are truly one," will not, and cannot, rest with a policy that distributes travel rights based on the ethnic make-up of the traveler.
For these reasons and more, we are compelled to believe that more changes will come. That Americans of all backgrounds will be pressed into service as ambassadors of good will by the President. That he will see the value of engaging more and more of us in a two-way conversation with the Cuban people that reflects the reality that we have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from us. That he will see the responses that have already come from Cuba - Raul Castro has said once again, he will sit down with Obama and talking about our political differences - as an inducement to do more. That he will learn from his colleagues at the Summit of the Americas that they want this to be a beginning and not an ending. That he will do more because doing more is so obviously in America's interests.
President Obama doesn't know everything. He doesn't know, for example, that Cubans can now worship freely in their churches. But there is one unmistakable truth about President Barack Obama - he can hear and respond to the most distant calls of history that are otherwise muted to those without his gifts of leadership.
That is why we're convinced that this is just the beginning.
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Here's what really happens. US dollars are worthless pieces of paper to the family members until Cuba converts them to Cuban pesos. But Cuba can not then convert them into any other currency. The US embargo does not just forbid US companies from conducting business with Cuba, it forbids all companies on this fair planet from conducting that business. Any business that does, gets fined by the US Treasury if it also does business in the US. Cuba can not therefore just go to the Swiss bank and exchange the dollars for euros or whatever, the Swiss bank cannot afford the fine. Instead Cuba has to convert the dollars on the international black market (think Stanford Bank). That's where the 20% gets charged, by some shady bank in Antigua or the Caymans.
If Cuba did not take the 20% off the top of the remittance, then every remittance sent would be a tax of 20% against the Cuban government, which in turn would be a tax against all the Cubans who do not get a remittance. The cause of the tax is the U.S. embrago.
I am embarrassed for Obama, his staff set him up on this one. Obama needs to fire Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Thomas Shannon, a Bush holdover.
Obama extends thorny rose to Cuba
By Nancy Abbey
I find Obama’s easement of restrictions regarding Cuba to not only be disappointing, but insulting, insidious, cynical, manipulative, and frankly, just more of the same.
First, it is disappointing because one would expect that after 3 months of examining our Cuba policy, as the administration has said it is doing, and after 120 Congressmembers and 20 senators have called for a complete lifting of the travel ban, that the “candidate of change” would have at least put policy back to where it was before Bush got his hands on it.
Second, it is insulting that Cuban-Americans are being given rights that I don’t have. I thought we were about equal rights for everyone.
I also find it insulting that instead of easing regulations that would have made it easier for Cuban to purchase food and medicines or building materials, Obama chose to ease regulations on telecommunications! What is the message there? We don’t care if you have a roof over your head, or food to eat, or the medicines you need, but we worry that you are not getting to watch satellite TV.
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Third, it is insidious because liberating remittances, but leaving in place restrictions on who can send them to whom, insures the eventual emergence of an elite class in Cuba that is bound by family ties to the Miami Cubans - thus multiplying the latter’s influence on the island. Moreover, the small percentage of the 11 million Cubans on the island who have relatives in the US, who will form that elite class, will not have achieved their status by merit. In effect, those who do put in an honest day’s work, but do not have Miami kin, will be punished.
It is cynical that Obama would offer to allow television and cell phone services to be paid for by people living in the US for people living in Cuba. This comes from a country where major cell phone companies have been caught collecting conversations to hand over to federal agencies and where the FBI has the right to listen to any telephone call between the US and another country.
More over, we have spent millions of dollars trying to broadcast subversion and disrespect into the island for years via Radio and TV Marti!! Does Obama suggest that Cuba should allow Miami Cubans to buy satellite TV for their brethren on the island so that they can watch that TV Marti? This regulation change should have been preceded by the announcement that TV and Radio Marti were being put to rest.
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Here’s where the manipulation comes in. Obama is now saying that if Cuba would like more of the carrot, it will have to make the next gesture. By including the telecommunications provision in this first gesture, Obama intends to force the Cubans into accepting it as the return gesture, instead of allowing Cuba to decide for itself what initial move it is willing to make—if Cuba, in fact, thinks this move by the US is worthy of reciprocation of any kind.
Obama cleverly places Cuba in a position in which the Cuban government either has to agree to the offer or come off looking like the bad guys.
One has to ask, why would Obama start out with such a controversial move instead of a truly meaningful one - like removing the 180 day restriction on ships entering the US after docking in Cuba?
That brings us to the last point. There appears to be no change whatsoever in the US attitude. While our country’s favorite middle-eastern ally is a king, our Afghani pals won’t let their women go outside, and our Chinese enemies fill Wal-Mart, our government insists on telling Cuba how to run its affairs.
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And it seems that the US has not learned a thing in the past 50 years about strategy. The Obama administration maintains the paternal attitude toward Cuba which sees the island as a naughty child whose privileges will be slowly restored as it conforms to the US ideal.
Instead of respectfully sitting down to discuss how to heal this broken relationship, as President Castro has offered, Obama challenges him with a potential non-starter and drones on about freeing political prisoners, to which the Cubans will respond with the Cuban Five, Posada Carriles and Guantanamo… to which the US will cry about….and on and on…. for how many more US presidents?????