20 April 2005
Bruce Jackson
Bush and Cuba
This is the full text of a talk on the May 2004 Report to the President of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba given in shorter form in the colloquium "Ultimo atto di una politica di illegatà internazionale: Il piano USA per la 'transizione democratica' a Cuba," which took place on 14 April 2005 at Sala dell'Università valdese in Rome and was sponsored by Associazione di Amicizia Italia-Cuba, circolo di Roma. The Report to the President is online at the US State Department website: http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rt/cuba/commission/2004/
A heavy report
The US Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba's Report to the President, produced under the chairmanship of then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, uses words like "justice, decency, human rights" again and again, but it does not mean any of them. It also uses the three-word term "a free Cuba," or some variant of it, scores of times. It doesn't mean that either.
The report is big, thick and heavy. If you print out the Adobe Acrobat version available on the State Department website it requires nearly 500 sheets of paper. There is no need for it to be so big or thick or heavy. Both physically and intellectually, the Report to the President is a vastly inflated object.
The text of the report is printed in 14-point type. Large-city telephone books are in 6-point type. Newspapers and most books are in 10-point type. Business letters are in 12-point type. If someone reformatted Colin Powell's Report to the President in 11-point type, it would shrink to 200 pages. If someone edited out the huge number of needless repetitions, it would have been far smaller than that.
But that would be like a general appearing in public without his chestful of ribbons and medals. How would you and I know how important the general is without his chestful of ribbons and medals? How would you and I know how important the May 2004 Report to the President of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba is if it weren't thirteen centimeters thick?
I don't want to imply that it is all air, that there is nothing of substance or consequence here. Some sections of this report have serious consequences for Cuba, for Cubans living abroad, and for anyone with a serious interest in Cuba or in world peace. Furthermore, this report tells us a good deal about the current rulers of the most aggressive, militant and dangerous nation on the planet, the United States of America.
The Commission and its recommendationsThe first meeting of President George W. Bush's Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba took place December 5, 2003, a little less than nine months after Bush invaded Iraq on the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States. The meeting was chaired by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who on 5 February of the same year had made Bush's case about Iraq's supposed-weapons of mass destruction before the United Nations Security Council, and by then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez, a Florida resident who had been born in Cuba. (Martinez was elected to the US Senate this past November and is currently trying to defend himself after a memo from one of his aides went public about the political advantage to be gained by prolonging the comatose life of a brain-dead woman in a Florida nursing home.)
Members of the Bush administration, nearly all of whom avoided the draft in the Vietnam war and seem to have learned nothing from it, believe that if people are uncomfortable they will blame their leaders rather than the people causing the discomfort. For that reason, much of the first section of the report is about ways the US government might make life for Cubans more uncomfortable than it already is.
The report recommends that Cuban Americans be permitted to visit blood family members only once every three years and that Cubans in America should be severely restricted in what amounts of financial help they can send family members in Cuba. The amount in US dollars that visitors to families or for other purposes could spend during visits to Cuba was cut by more than two-thirds, from $164 to $50 per day, deliberately putting an increased burden on impoverished Cuban families and institutions. Educational exchange programs at all levels were abolished or severely restricted. Artistic and intellectual exchanges at all levels were made illegal or vastly more difficult. In violation of the Charter of the OAS, millions of dollars were to be allocated for electronic propaganda campaigns and political disruption. The report suggests ways that American corporations and Batista-era owners of property in Cuba can be repaid, with interest, for properties nationalized by Cuba half a century ago, and ways American banks might profitably involve themselves in the Cuban mortgage market in a post-Castro, post-communism era. It suggests ways religious organizations can be given funding and authority to do what ordinary secular organizations do now, reflecting Bush's "faith-based initiatives" programs in the US, part of his controversial relationship to the fundamentalist religious right.
Bush's enthusiastic responses to the report were immediately posted on both the Republican National Committee website and the Florida Republican Committee website. On the Florida page was a button for "Accomplishments by President Bush on Cuba." Click on it and you see a screen telling you that, among other things, "President Bush has pledged to veto any attempt to weaken the Cuban embargo" and that "President Bush is committed to strictly enforce and further restrict travel to Cuba."
Fidel
The report isn't just about what the US might do when change comes; it is also about how the US can make change happen sooner rather than later.
Powell's one-page Preface to the report uses the word "transition" eight times and the word "hasten" three times. In ordinary circumstances, Powell's repetitive Preface would be considered very bad writing and it wouldn't get by the most inexperienced editor. Since that repetitive prose got by all the editors who were involved in the production of the report, we should assume that Powell is saying something important, so important they felt the need to say it again and again and again. Indeed, the next three chapters are going to repeat what is in this introduction again and again and again. The message is this: George W. Bush wants regime change in Cuba; he is willing to crank up the pressure on Cubans at home and Cubans in exile to get it; and the US promises to help whatever new Cuba comes out the other side, provided it is a Cuba of which the US approves.
The report promises a huge amount of consultation and collaboration and aid after a new approved government is in place. But there will be no consultation and no collaboration on the kind of government the Cubans must have: Cubans are free, says the Powell report, to have only a government of which the Bush administration approves. Under no circumstances will the Bush administration allow Fidel or Raoul Castro to have any role in the new Cuban government. Unless Cuba comes up with a form of government the Bush administration likes and unless it agrees to banish Fidel and Raoul from any government position, Cuba will remain an enemy state, subject to blockade, harassment and continuing illegal meddling.
Four Questions
Documents like this are not simply compilations of fact, however factual they may be. They are not like a report on patterns of rainfall in the Piedmont over the past ten years or on the efficiency of this kind of farming or that kind of factory process. Documents like this are strategic; they are meant to do something, not just to present information. That is why I always try to answer ask four questions when I read a government report:
—who did it?
—what kind or level of information does it contain?
—whom was it done for?
—what did the writers hope it would accomplish?Who did it?
The core group members of the committee chaired by Secretary of State Colin Powell were the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (Condoleezza Rice, Powell's successor as Secretary of State) and the administrator of US Agency for International Development (Andrew S. Nastios). The project was coordinated by Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. The individual sections were prepared by their various staff members. The report mentions no non-Bush administration contributors at all.
That is important: no scholars or researchers not in the direct employ of the Bush administration had any role in the formulation of any part of this report. No economic, environmental, historical, political, or any other kind of research organization took part in it. The report is, basically, a political document, prepared on the basis of political ideas, by political people, for political ends. The most believable and responsible part is the final two section, which deal with infrastructure and environmental problems. Those are the sections most grounded in reality and the only part of the report with documentation. But the section taken most seriously by the Bush administration is the first, which is the section most grounded in political dogma.
What kind of information does it contain?
After the front matter, the report has six chapters, which are the product of five working groups:
1: Hastening Cuba's Transition
2: Meeting basic human needs in the areas of health, education, housing, and human services
3. Establishing democratic institutions, respect for human rights, rule of law, and national justice and reconciliation
4. Establishing the core institutions of a free economy
5. Modernizing infrastructure
6. Addressing environmental degradationThe first three sections read as if they had been written by people who knew nothing about Cuba and took the trouble to learn nothing about Cuba in the course of their work on this project. They read as if they had been written by people who looked instead at President Bush's rhetoric about Cuba and went on from there. These sections are full of name-calling and sloganeering. Sometimes they read as if the American president said to his Secretary of State, "We've about to acquire a little country in the Carribean. We expect to lock up or exterminate most of the government, or to get people there to do it for us so we won't get our hands dirty. Those people know nothing about anything. They don't even speak English. Once we own it, we want it to work, and we want to get back the money our corporations lost there 50 years ago. What resources or programs do you want to put into place so that little country can be useful to us as soon as possible? What questions do we need to have answered in order to do that most efficiently?"
Some of the suggestions in this half of the report are broad and sweeping, like the one to replace Cuba's entire government with a Bush-approved democracy that will arrive from some unspecified place in some unspecified way in some unspecified form. And some suggestions in this half are absurd microdetail, like the one that describes vacation retreats for schoolteachers so they can talk about lesson plans.
A good deal of the report's first section, "Hastening Cuba's Transition," is factually wrong. For example, the report says at one point, "Cuba presents itself internationally as a prime tourist destination, as a center for bio-technological innovation, and as a successful socialist state that has improved the standard of living of its people and that is a model for education, health care, and race relations for the world. This image belies the true state of Cuba’s political, economic, and social conditions, its status as a state sponsor of terrorism, and the increasingly erratic behavior of its leadership."
But Cuba is an important tourist destination, and would be even more so if the US didn't make visiting it illegal for almost all of its citizens. Cuba is a center for bio-technological innovation. And it has significantly improved the standard of living for its people. In the late 1950s, under Batista, life expectancy in Cuba was 59 years. According to the CIA World Factbook, Cuban life expectancy is now 77.04 years, only a month or two less than the life expectancy in the US. Cuba has lower infant mortality than the US. Cuba has the highest rate of literacy in the Americas—higher than the US. Unlike in the US, medical care in Cuba is free. In Cuba, every child is inoculated against 13 diseases. In the US, funds for infant and childhood inoculations have been slashed repeatedly by the Bush administration.
There is no evidence that Cuba is a "state sponsor of terrorism." The Bush administration has been saying for a long time that Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism, but it has never produced any evidence to support that accusation. Bush's nominee for US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, claimed in a talk at the conservative Heritage Foundation in May 2002, that Cuba had biological weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. Members of the scientific community and former US President Jimmy Carter asked what evidence Bolton and the Bush administration had for those accusations. No evidence was ever produced. Bolton also said that Castro said in a speech at Tehran University that "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." That wasn't true either; Castro never said any such thing.
But the Bush administration had not been deterred by the absence of facts in their accusations against Castro's "state-sponsored terrorism" any more than it was deterred by the absence of facts in their claims of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
There is state-sponsored terrorism in the Caribbean, of course, but Cuba isn't the state doing the sponsoring. Quite the contrary: it has been the victim of terrorist acts, many of them committed by members of Cuban exile groups in Florida receiving their primary funding from the US government. The US calling Cuba "terrorist" is like the man who beats his wife complaining to the neighbors that she is a violent person because her face keeps smashing into his fist.
Whom was it done for, and why?
A Spanish version of the executive summary was prepared but I find no evidence that the translation was ever widely circulated. The State Department never bothered to translate the full report. The report promises riches that will descend from Washington once the Cubans install a government acceptable to the Bush administration, but Cubans are literate, so they surely know how US promises evaporated in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban and in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Nearly every country in Central and South America has specific memories of promises of aid from the US that never materialized, or which all went into the pockets of the next repressive military government. Even if Bush knows little or nothing about history and global politics, Colin Powell was sophisticated enough about such things. The Cuban people were talked about in this report, but I doubt they were seen as recipients of it.
The audience was primarily in the United States.
Part of that audience may have been the growing number of Americans angry at the Bush administration because of their failure to have planned for a post-war Iraq. Iraq was, by late 2003, a political, military and human disaster. Everyone taking part in the Commission's first meeting knew that the US had gone after a hated enemy, had with ease destroyed his army and his government, and had, in the process, also destroyed the country and saddled the US with a huge economic and political burden. They also knew that the US invasion had done more to increase global terrorism than to reduce it. American newspapers were full of stories about looting and violence, of Iraqis without water, of hospitals without electricity for respirators or medicines for the sick and dying. The Bush administration was looking more and more incompetent.
It is likely, therefore, that one major function of this commission and this report was Iraq damage control. This report, with all its specifics about water supply and roads, about schools and hospitals, about police forces and agricultural operations, is the kind of report they should have done about Iraq before they sent the first missile crashing into Baghdad. This is a report that claims, "We really do know how to do this. Look how we even planned for teachers to go on vacation and talk about lesson plans."
It is also likely that the major purpose of this entire endeavor was to shore up Bush's unsteady support in the Florida Cuban exile community. Older members of that community—middle class and still full of rage—are said to have one political desire: punish Fidel. The report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba is in part in the service of that end. George W. Bush's Cuba policy is unsupported by most Americans, by most members of Congress, and perhaps even by most Cuban-Americans. But it is vigorously supported by those older Cuban Americans in Florida.
All the polls showed that younger Cuban-Americans did not share the Cuban exiles' hatred for Castro and wished for a normalizing of relations with Cuba sooner rather than later, whoever was running the country and whatever kind of government it had. But in the US, older people vote in much greater proportions than younger people, so the older Cubans were a far more important target for the Bush campaign.
In the 2000 election, Bush won Florida by only 437 votes. He won only because thousands of blacks were prevented from voting and thousands of Jews were so confused by a bizarre ballot that the votes they intended to go for the Democrat Al Gore went instead to Pat Buchanan, an extreme conservative those Jewish voters regarded as a lunatic anti-Semite. Even then, it took the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, to give Bush the state and thereby the presidency. The Bush team knew that 2004 would not be so easy: he would need to have the votes to carry Florida this time. The Supreme Court couldn't so easily come in and save him a second time. It was therefore of urgent importance that Florida's older Cubans be mobilized to vote.
If that was Bush's strategy, it worked. Those older Cubans in Florida did turn out in the November 2004 election, and nearly all of them voted for George W. Bush, enemy of Fidel, enemy of socialism, enemy of communism.
The instrumental questions
Is the May 2004 Report to the President of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba a prelude to war? Are all the broad and petty details of what the US might do if a US-friendly government were installed in Havana a user's guide for an army of occupation, a manual of how to avoid the mistakes and blunders the US army of occupation made in Iraq? Was the Bush administration using this report to see how the American public might respond to his administration violently intervening in another nation's affairs, seeking regime change a third time?
Possibly.
George W. Bush has tasted blood twice now, and all evidence indicates he relishes it. Before becoming governor of Texas he was a failed businessman, rescued again and again by his father's rich and powerful friends. He is not a president of ideas. He doesn't read. His speech never includes reference to political or historical thinkers. He sees himself as a man of action, not reflection. When he met Russian president Vladimir Putin he said he knew he could trust Putin because he had "looked into his eyes." Most world leaders rely on more sophisticated data than soulful glances. He is, his friends say, an impatient man. He likes to think of himself as a successful warrior. Not long after his invasion of Iraq he made a highly-publicized landing in a jet fighter (flown by someone else, though he pretended he was in control for part of the brief flight from San Diego) on an American aircraft carrier anchored a short distance off the California coast. He wore a snug pilot's suit with straps pulling it even tighter around his crotch. A huge banner on the ship's bridge proclaimed "Mission Accomplished."
But the mission in Iraq was not accomplished when Bush staged that television performance on the aircraft carrier, and he cannot be as glib about violent regime change now as he was three years ago. The US occupation force is still in Iraq, American soldiers are killed every day, and Iraq is a mess that shows no signs of getting neater anytime soon. The American public is unlikely to welcome another war mounted because of false claims about weapons of mass destruction and state-sponsored terrorism. In the US, funds for health care, schools, infrastructure and research have been slashed to pay for Bush's tax cuts for the rich and the huge continuing cost of his war in Iraq. The money isn't there for another war and military occupation. Bush cannot be elected to a third term, so the Republican-controlled Congress, which has slavishly obeyed him until now, will be unlikely to endorse another war.
Bush might have fantasies about swooping into Cuba and accomplishing what no other US president in 50 years has been able to accomplish, but right now he has neither the political support nor the financial resources to do it. That doesn't mean he won't do it. He isn't always rational and neither is he always predictable. But it seems unlikely.
The Report to the President of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba is a document the Bush administration wrote to justify being crueler to the citizens of Cuba and meddling more than it already does in Cuban political and social life. It is a document the Bush administration wrote to make it more difficult for Americans to have contact with Cubans and to learn the truth about Cuba. Why Bush wants to do that and why he (like so many of his predecessors) has this relentless obsession with Cuba and its leaders is more a matter for a psychiatrist than a political analyst. It makes no human, political or ethical sense.
Copyright 2005 by Buffalo Report, Inc.