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 Editorials | Opinions | August 2007 
Grab Cuba's Outstretched Hand
 Luc de Barochez - Le Figaro
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In Cuba, the interregnum is settling in for the duration. This weekend, Raul Castro begins his second year as head of state. The transition is underway, but the Castros' dictatorship is still there. That's one more setback for the United States' Cuban policy, based (for close to half a century!) on the hope of an imminent overthrow of the Havana regime.
Supported by the military nomenklatura, Raul Castro manages a bankrupt country. His strategy is becoming apparent: on the one hand, effecting "Chinese-style" changes to liberalize production; on the other, maintaining the Communist Party's absolute control over political life. For the National Holiday on Thursday, July 26, the interim Numero Uno gave something like a general political speech. He criticized the bureaucratic obstacles to development. He opened the door a chink to foreign investors. Above all, he extended his hand to the United States. He proposed - after the departure of the Bush administration - a dialogue from which he hopes the lifting of the economic embargo imposed forty-five years ago by John F. Kennedy will ensue.
Raul Castro's overture is timid and entirely relative. Public freedoms are nonexistent on the Communist island. Some 300 prisoners of conscience molder in its prisons. Free elections remain a dream, a "sleepwalker's vision," to use the interim president's expression. Raul Castro poses as a reformer to conjure himself up some legitimacy, but he does not want to undermine the family's power under any circumstances, all the more so given that big brother Fidel is watching him - undoubtedly closely - from his hospital bed.
Those limitations cannot justify the superciliousness of Washington, which responded to the proposals for dialogue formulated by Cuba with a rejection. In the Gulf of Florida, the Cold War continues. Imprisoned in an all-or-nothing idealized logic, boxed in by domestic political considerations, the Bush administration clings to a "regime change" strategy that has not succeeded in Cuba any better than it has in Iraq. For its part, the European Union is very wrong to lose interest in the Castros' island. Former colonial power Spain has unsuccessfully pleaded for the Old Continent to take a more active role.
A real change can only come from a little dose of realism in Washington. The upcoming renegotiation of the lease on the American enclave at Guantanamo could offer the opportunity for that. In the Democratic Party, candidate Barack Obama has let it be known that he does not fear talking with Castro. The stakes go beyond the fate of Cuba, to take in that of all Latin America. It's the oxygen from Venezuelan oil supplied under favorable conditions by Hugo Chavez that allows the Castros' regime to survive. The Venezuela-Cuba axis poses as a socialist and "Bolivarian" alternative to the free-trade zone from the Far North to Terra del Fuego that Washington proposes. If it wants to facilitate an authentic democratic transition in Cuba, the United States must talk to the island's leaders.
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher. |
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