Today, the Miami Herald follows up on Senator Obama’s call to ease the Cuba embargo.
If anyone had hoped that Senator Clinton would use this opportunity created by Obama to break with her slavish devotion to pandering to a small group of former and wannabe oligarchs in South Florida and instead embrace a bold and positive new policy toward Cuba and all of Latin America, today is disappointment day. Again.
Although many comments by Clinton supporters yesterday expressed the view that Obama’s position was no different than that of all Democrats, Clinton in fact supports the status quo:
''She supports the embargo and our current policy toward Cuba, and until it is clear what type of political winds may come with a new government -- if there is a new government -- we cannot talk about changes to U.S. policy,'' Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee said.
Got that? “We cannot talk about changes.” Again, we must not even speak of it. And Clinton is in dubious company with that stance: The Bush Administration, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney line up with Clinton in calling for more of the same...
The Herald continues:
Two of the major Republican candidates, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, said Obama's proposal would bolster the Castro regime.
In yesterday’s diary, more than 600 comments and 2,300 votes on a poll showed broad support for easing the embargo against Cuba:
Should the US ease its embargo of Cuba?
Yes: 96% (2262 votes)
No: 2% (53 votes)
I’ll explain in the comments: 0% (18 votes)
(2333 votes cast)
The large volume of comments – most of them seriously vetting the issues raised by Obama’s call for easing the embargo, with the on-topic “brushing back” of several hijack attempts – is an indication that this issue is important to a great many people, not only Cuban Americans.
A very moving part of the conversation came when Kossack sneakysnu, blogging from Havana, Cuba (where she has access not just to the Internet, but to CNN and other US media, contrary to what much of that media tells us about Cuba), told the story of how the embargo prevented her mother from coming to visit when she had her child there.
Her mom, historysmysteries, blogging from North Carolina underscored the point:
I am still angry about not being able to be with you at the end of your pregnancy and for the delivery of my beautiful grandchild. I tried to get permission to go legally, but couldn't.
This is one example of the harm wrought by Senator Clinton’s (and others’) super-gluing themselves to the failed Cuba embargo policy.
The status quo candidates turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to that mother and grandmother, and to millions like them. They cling to the “conventional wisdom” which gives a small minority of older generation Cuban-American political bosses in South Florida veto power over every aspect of US policy.
Meanwhile, as with previous news cycles that Obama has opened up to redefine the foreign policy debate, others are weighing in.
Robert Naiman, national coordinator of Just Foreign Policy, blogs on the Huffington Post that Clinton’s position is the “outlier” among Democrats running for president:
…tallying up, of the candidates mentioned: on the travel restrictions, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Dodd, and Kucinich would get rid of them; Clinton and Biden would keep them. On remittances, Obama, Richardson and Kucinich would remove the Bush restrictions. Five of the seven support at least some reform; Clinton and Biden support the Bush status quo. Who are the outliers?
Speaking of "outliers," the "out-and-out liars" weighed in, too, siding with Clinton's position. Bush Administration State Department spokesman Gonzalo R. Gallegos chimed in at a press briefing:
QUESTION: On Cuba, Barack Obama has an op-ed out today calling for an easing of the embargo to Cuba. Just wondering if you have any comment of that; if you think that's an ill-informed suggestion and whether you think that these types of comments by political candidates negatively affect the policy that you're trying to advance right now.
MR. GALLEGOS: …Suffice it to say that this Administration's policy on that is well known, has not changed, and I don't believe it's going to be changing in the near future. I know and understand, having served in Cuba, in Havana, the feelings of some people who believe that the policy should be changed. However, I've also seen the effects of a regime, the Castro regime, that has a tremendous capacity to take U.S. dollars and other funds that enter into Cuba to strip it away from the people who live in Cuba and then to use it to maintain their totalitarian regime.
Tim Padgett, writing for Time magazine, notes that the “conventional wisdom” has long held that you just can’t buck the oligarch establishment in Miami, and asks:
So why would Barack Obama — who is scraping to keep up with Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination — ignore that seemingly golden rule?
He then answers:
Maybe it's because Obama knows a new conventional wisdom may well be taking shape in the state — one that could actually make his declarations this week an asset when Florida holds its primary election next January…
The restrictions — widely viewed as a thank-you to the hardline exile bloc that helped Bush win Florida in 2000 — allow Cuban-Americans to visit the island for only 14 days every three years and limit remittances to $1,200 per year. "It's almost as if you have to decide ahead of time when a relative is going to die," says Miami immigration attorney Magda Montiel Davis, a Cuban-American moderate who says she is now voting for Obama after reading his Herald article.
…by playing that safe card in Florida, Clinton may have allowed herself to be "outmaneuvered by Obama on this one," says one Cuban-American leader who asked not to be identified, pointing to a recent Florida International University poll showing that more than 55% of Cuban-Americans in Miami favor unrestricted travel to Cuba.
And he notes that on Saturday, the issue will gain more steam:
Obama will get a better idea of how his position is playing out when he takes the stage Saturday for a Miami Democratic fundraiser at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium — located in the hardline bastion of Little Havana. He and Clinton will also get a chance to square off on Cuba policy on Sept. 30 during a scheduled Democratic presidential debate at the University of Miami. The responses at both events should be a good gauge of whether the rules in Florida are really ready to be broken.
That Saturday event is a $30 ticket to benefit the local Democratic party, by the way.
The debate over the Cuba embargo - showing another substantive difference between Obama and Clinton - has ramifications for foreign policy throughout Latin America and in fact throughout the world. The conventional wisdom that has failed America similarly believes that the US should back small groups of oligarchs to rule in other countries.
So it’s no surprise then that Clinton and most Republicans also back the Uribe regime in Colombia to the tune of a multi-billion dollar US-funded civil war, complete with paramilitary death squads and regular assassinations of union organizers and others that speak out against the regime. It was the previous Clinton Administration that imposed that so-called “Plan Colombia” and it’s been an expensive quagmire for the US ever since.
But the evidence mounts that this support of some undemocratic regimes while demonizing even a democratically elected government (in Venezuela) is a counterproductive policy that boomerangs on US interests, eventually, in every case.
- It’s what they advocated in Venezuela and after Chavez was elected in 1998 the “conventional wisdom” even cheered the attempted military coup d’etat there in 2002.
- It’s what they advocated in Iraq prior to the first Gulf War. We can all see the human tragedy that has wrought today.
- It’s what the conventional wisdom advocated in Iran, propping up the ruthless and violent Shah, leading to a backlash revolt that still has religious fundamentalists in power.
- It’s what Clinton and the Republicans continue to advocate in Pakistan with the Musharraf regime.
- Of course, it was the original impetus for the 1958 revolution in Cuba led by Castro; the US had propped up the repressive and undemocratic Batista regime there prior to that.
And thus this latest chapter – Senator Clinton’s stubborn adherence to the failed doctrine of an economic embargo against Cuba (and against American citizens that wish to visit or do business there) – is part of an overall pattern.
When terrorists strike it is very unpopular to say, at the time, that US policy shares in the responsibility for how it has provoked others around the world. And yet isn’t it exactly what is being promoted for the future? The Clinton position generates more hatred of America, rooted often in legitimate grievances, not merely ideological fundamentalisms.
It has also led to a dangerous double standard that has stripped the United States of any moral authority in most of the world: The conventional wisdom myopia on Cuba goes so far to have the US government now protecting an admitted terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, a hero to the political bosses of South Florida who has admitted responsibility for blowing up a Venezuelan passenger jet filled with civilians because youths on a Cuban team in the Olympics were on the plane. That policy – of protecting Posada Carrilles from deportation to Venezuela, where he conducted that terrorist attack and is wanted to face trial – has made a mockery, throughout the world, of all US anti-terrorism actions because, after all, who is going to support a nation with such a harmful double standard.
While coddling the terrorist Posada Carriles, the Washington insiders also persist in demonizing Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and other world leaders, insisting they cannot even be spoken with, and that common ground on areas of mutual benefit to the citizens of the US and of those countries should not even be sought.
This conventional wisdom has brought consequential harm to US citizens through the rise in gasoline and oil prices, through Washington's inability to involve Iraq’s neighbors in ending the war, and in many other matters as well.
This is what Senator Clinton has bit into, hook, line and sinker: the continuation of an uber-policy that says that small groups of oligarchs get to decide US policy toward their countries.
It is an outrage that should not be accepted from anyone, Republican or Democrat. And until it changes, more and greater harm will come as a result.
It is statements like that by Senator Clinton that should convert the Democratic caucuses and primaries of 2008 into a crusade to break the stranglehold by the conventional wisdom and its adherents in Washington. Enough already. It is time to step into the future.