The Chairman of The
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Says Now Is Not The Time To Ease Up On Cuba by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC)
President John E Kennedy is said to have
instructed his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to go out and buy as many Cuban cigars as
he could get his hands on. Slinger returned to the Oval Office the next day with more than
a thousand Cuban cigars. President Kennedy, the story goes, inspected the loot, then took
out his pen and signed the Executive Order imposing the Cuban embargo. Kennedy may have
been the last American to legally stock his humidor with Cuban tobacco, but in signing the
Cuban embargo he did the right thing. And bipartisan majorities in both Houses of Congress
have supported the U.S. policy of isolating Castro’s brutal dictatorship ever since.
In my career in the Senate, I’ve
dedicated a great deal of my time and effort to defending smokers rights. But when it
comes to Cuba, I put the human rights of the Cuban people far ahead of any smoker’s
right. We become a part of what we condone. And we Americans must never condone
Castro’s ruthless oppression of the Cuban people.
Castro is desperate for the United States
to lift the embargo, because he is desperate for hard currency to keep his faltering
Marxist-Leninist economy afloat. For many years he was able to withstand the pressure of
the U.S. embargo, because the effects of the embargo were almost entirely offset by
massive subsidies from the Soviet Union — upwards of $5 billion to $7 billion a year.
Only with the collapse of the Soviet
Union in the 1990s has the embargo begun to have an effect, not only in Cuba but across
the region. The moment the embargo started having an impact, Castro’s efforts to
finance Marxist insurgencies across Latin America stopped, allowing the nearly complete
democratic transformation of the hemisphere.
Flooding Cuba now with new U.S.
investment and American tourists will do nothing to bring democracy to Cuba. To the
contrary, it will give new life to Castro’s crumbling regime. Here’s why:
As almost any Cuban will confirm, the
real cause of the misery of the Cuban people is not the U.S. embargo—it is
Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economic system. Castro’s Cuba is a brutal police
state; Castro maintains power by fear, intimidation and deprivation.
His regime controls every aspect of Cuban
life—access to food, access to education, access to health care, and access to work.
And if you say the wrong thing in Castro’s tropical gulag, you lose your job. If you
refuse to spy on your neighbor for the government, you don’t get to go to college. If
you dare to organize an opposition group, you go to jail.
U.S. investment won’t change this.
It won’t empower individual Cubans nor will it give them independence from the
regime. Why? Because foreign investors cannot do business with private Cuban
citizens—they can go into business only with Castro. Consider: it is illegal in Cuba
for anyone except the regime to employ a Cuban citizen. Everyone works for Castro.
Foreign investors cannot hire nor pay
Cuban workers directly. They must pay Castro in hard currency for the workers. Castro then
pays the workers in worthless Cuban pesos, while keeping the rest. Under these
circumstances, U.S. investment cannot help average Cubans—it would only help the
Castro regime.
Consider a real-life example: Sheritt
International is Canada’s single largest investor in Cuba today. It is operating a
stolen American-owned nickel mine at Moa Bay, where roughly 1,000 Cubans work as virtual
slave laborers. Sheritt pays Castro approximately $10,000 for each of those Cuban workers.
Castro gives the workers the equivalent of about $10 a month in Cuban pesos—and then
pockets the difference.
The result? Sheritt provides Castro with
a $10 million direct cash subsidy each year. And what does Castro do with that hard
currency infusion? He uses it to pay for the ruthless and cruel apparatus that keeps him
in power— and the Cuban people in chains.
Foreign investment can thus do nothing to
promote democracy, nothing to promote entrepreneurship or independence from the state.
What it does is directly subsidize the oppression of the Cuban people.
Tourism is another source of hard
currency for the Castro regime that Castro is desperately seeking to expand. Every one of
the tourist dollars spent in Cuba ends up in government hands—the Cuban government
owns all the hotels, and it owns all the stores on the island.
And another side effect: Cuba has become
the world’s capital of sex tourism. Thousands of destitute Cuban women, who cannot
survive in Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economy, have no choice but to prostitute
themselves with foreign tourists from Canada, Italy, Germany and other nations to get hard
currency.
Many of these prostitutes—or jineteras—are
schoolgirls as young and 12 and 13. Others are educated women— doctors and
lawyers—who cannot earn enough practicing their professions under Castro to feed
their families. Americans simply must not become a part of this degradation of Cuban
women.
The United States must continue the
embargo to keep up the pressure for change on the island, because if we don’t give up
our leverage by unilaterally lifting the embargo, Castro’s successors will he forced
to exchange normalized relations with the United States for a complete democratic
transition in Cuba.
Fidel Castro isn’t going to live
forever. He is going to leave power in Cuba— either vertically or horizontally. And
we need to start planning for the day when he is no longer there as the unifying force for
tyranny on the island.
That is why maintaining the embargo, by
itself, is not enough. We need to start helping the Cuban people prepare for that day, by
helping them to create an independent civil society, helping them to build free
institutions, and getting resources to the human rights advocates, independent journalists
and democracy activists so they can expand their space in society—just as Ronald
Reagan helped the opposition leaders in Eastern Europe (who are now the presidents and
prime ministers of free, democratic nations).
Last year, along with two dozen
co-sponsors, I proposed bipartisan legislation— the Cuban Solidarity Act—to
provide $100 million over four years in humanitarian relief directly to the Cuban people
through private charities on the island. We will pass it, and send a message to Fidel
Castro—and to the Cuban people that Congress and the Administration arc united in our
support for freedom in Cuba.
I look forward to the day when Americans
can once again go to their corner stores and purchase Cuban cigars. But those will be
cigars will have been produced by free labor in a free and democratic Cuba. To get to that
day, we must keep the pressure on Castro, while simultaneously working to help the Cuban
people build a free and independent civil society within the crumbling shell of
Castro’s teetering communist regime.
Cigar Aficionado June 1999
page 80 |
