A Mother’s Day Message for President Obama and Vice President Biden

Earlier this week, Vice President Biden said Cuba had made some “small encouraging signs of change,” but that the administration still wants to see “real change.”

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t make headlines.  It’s a little sad but it’s not news that their two-year-old message about Cuba, “your change isn’t big enough,” still permeates the administration’s talking points.

They must have decided, if it worked for President Obama in September 2011, “We have not seen evidence they have been sufficiently aggressive in changing their policies economically,” to just keep repeating the message, even if the point they are making really isn’t so.

You might ask, what does any of this have to do with Mother’s Day?  We were just getting around to that.

To its credit, the administration has spent part of the last four years advocating for women to be equal partners in more just, prosperous, and more effectively governed societies.  It was just last week when Treasury Secretary Lew said:  “The facts are clear: empowering women is not only a question of equity, it is simply smart economics.”

The State Department has been all in, too.  They tweet about women.  They herald investment in women-owned enterprises as “one of the best ways to achieve economic, financial, and social impact.”  They have created a partnership program to expand women’s political and economic participation.

But Cuban entrepreneurs or “cuentapropistas” – and especially female small business owners – are rarely offered a seat at any of these tables.  That’s not a big surprise either – if they are not willing to admit that economic reform is happening at scale in Cuba, where the biggest changes in its economic model are taking place since 1959 – it wouldn’t occur to them to reserve a seat for a Cuban.

That’s a shame.  Paradoxically, what is happening in Cuba – with men and women leaving the state payroll for jobs in the non-state sector –happens to be consistent with the oft-stated desire by the U.S. for greater independence of the Cuban people.  It’s easy for us to talk about.  But, they are the ones who are taking great risks, taking on new and unfamiliar responsibilities, and making a leap at a disruptive time in Cuba’s changing economy.

A lot of these businesses fail, as do small businesses here in the U.S.  But, when they succeed, as an entrepreneur named Barbara told us in our report about the future of gender equality in Cuba, Women’s Work, exciting things can happen:

“My life has improved over the last several years with the possibility of working as a cuentapropista….More than anything, the benefit of being a cuentapropista is the ability to manage your own decisions. I can decide how to invest, what hours to work, whether I want to offer specials and other decisions regarding how to manage the business. In other words, I’m my own boss and I suffer the consequences, but also reap the benefits of my decisions. Moreover, economically, there are few, if any, jobs in the state sector that can compare with cuentapropismo when it comes to salaries. I’ve been able to save a little money, invest in fixing up my house, buy my daughter what she needs and put food on the table. In the end, I’m a more independent woman. My husband and I help each other but we both contribute and I don’t have to rely on him.”

It would be nice, but only a start, if the President and Vice President credited Cuba’s government with making the changes it has, and then recognized that women like Barbara actually exist.

But they could go even further.  The administration should end the backlogs and delays that cause many people-to-people groups and research institutions to wait for months to hear back on renewals and new applications, so that more Americans could visit Cuba and utilize the services in the growing private sector, helping to empower individual Cubans, just like their talking points say.  If Miriam Leiva’s White House petition is any test, steps like these would be warmly welcomed in Cuba.

They could also facilitate the flow of capital to entrepreneurs in Cuba by allowing imports of products made by Cubans working in small businesses and cooperatives.  They could stop freezing financial institutions with the fear of fines for engaging in legal transactions with individuals and institutions in Cuba.  They could make projects that help women in Cuba eligible for remittances under the president’s 2011 policy.

In fact, there’s a lot of serious progress that could be made if they included Cuba, Cubans, and Cuban women in their vision of a more just world built on gender equality.

It’s a thought for Mother’s Day and we hope they think about it.

With Boston in our thoughts

This was a violent, disheartening week in the United States.  A town called West, Texas was knocked down by an explosion at a fertilizer plant that claimed at least a dozen lives and injured hundreds of others.  Survivors of the Sandy Hook Elementary School and other massacres watched with broken hearts as the U.S. Senate voted to do nothing about gun safety.

But these events were surpassed by the suffering inflicted on Boston and its marathon.  It began with terrorism at the finish line, where bystanders were killed and grievously wounded, as were runners trying to complete the race.  As we went to press, there was more: a campus police officer murdered at MIT, gun battles, a metropolitan-wide lockdown, and rampant fear.

This incident stung us for obvious reasons, but also because, as Governor Deval Patrick reminded us, “Massachusetts invented America.”  Even at a time when the United States is so disunited, Massachusetts with its special place in America’s history and civic ideals was also able to connect us and bring us closer together.

Starting when we learned something was horribly wrong on Boylston Street, there were stories of women and men rising to their better selves; Samaritans coming to the aid of strangers; Cuba and other nations expressing their condolences; reporters and others insisting that lies be brought to heel with the truth, because facts, like the size of the casualty count, matter, and because no victim (and no nation) should be wrongfully accused of committing or supporting terrorism.

In his eternal inaugural address, President John Kennedy, a son of Massachusetts, brought the Cold War to the center of his foreign policy, when he said “Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.”  But, he also said, just a few sentences later, “let us begin anew – remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.  Let us never negotiate out of fear.  But let us never fear to negotiate.”

Fifty years ago, as Peter Kornbluh explains (behind the pay wall in The Nation), the Kennedy administration made a diplomatic approach to Cuba’s government that resulted in Cubans imprisoned in the U.S. and Americans, including CIA agents, behind bars in Cuba returning to their homes.  He offers this example of James Donovan’s ‘metadiplomacy’ to show how normal relations between the U.S. and Cuba are possible, when we do not fear to negotiate.

Civility is not weakness.  There are prisoners still left to be freed, a terrorism policy that must be applied based not on politics but the facts, lessons to be learned from the displays this week of humility and humanity, public officials who must rise to their better selves.  Boston reminds us: this work can truly be our own.

The Democracy Promotion Paradox – or why Americans hate politics

Sometimes our Cuba policy is so farcical, it’s impossible to keep a straight face.

Consider poor Pedro Adriano Borges, age 68 who, according to the Miami Herald is awaiting trial in federal court.  He is charged with ten violations of the Trading with the Enemy Act, money laundering, and other crimes for which he could spend 35 years in prison if convicted.  The underlying charge is this: he shipped $93,000 worth of goods – including light bulbs and diapers, spices and mayonnaise – to Cuba before Congress authorized food trade with the island.  Opening the market to mayonnaise might be considered a crime against Cuban cuisine, but he should hardly be facing jail time in 2013 for an activity that’s been legal for a decade.

Other times, however, the policy is not just farcical, but so internally inconsistent that it edges in the direction of tragedy.  Consider what we continue to learn about the USAID democracy promotion or regime change programs.

The Government Accountability Office issued a report on the programs this week.  Unlike prior studies, which disclosed that U.S. recipients of the funds were wasting them on Godiva chocolates, cashmere sweaters, and Nintendo Game Boys, GAO said the program was being operated with tighter internal controls.  This – along with headlines like “U.S. government report says America’s democracy programs have improved” –undoubtedly delighted USAID, which just last month read this story in the Washington Post:  “Interference with bid-rigging probe alleged at USAID.”

In fact, Marc Lopes, head of USAID’s Latin American and Caribbean section, told the Herald in a phone interview, “We have increased transparency and financial monitoring, and we are pleased that GAO has recognized that.”

But, remember, the GAO makes judgments about accounting, not about policy.  As the Miami Herald reported, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $205 million dollars on democracy promotion activities since 1996.  There is no evidence that the programs are achieving their objective of hastening a democratic transition in Cuba.  Phil Peters says it well on his Cuban Triangle Blog:

“So the dollars are well accounted for, but as to whether they are being spent in ways that make a positive difference, well, that’s outside the scope of the report.

“Which is worth noting because in the case of USAID’s satellite Internet program run by Alan Gross and other grantees, the dollars may have been perfectly managed and 100 percent accounted for, but they were 100 percent wasted because these operations were rolled up by Cuban intelligence.”

Wasted and obscured from public view.  There is another version of the report, “sensitive but unclassified,” that GAO won’t allow U.S. taxpayers to see.  Even worse, Tracey Eaton, an investigative reporter with whom our organization is working, discovered that USAID hired an outside contractor to review the programs, which found “questionable charges and weaknesses in partners’ financial management, procurement standards, and internal controls.”   But when Mr. Eaton filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy of the outside audit, USAID fought him and then provided only ten pages of material that “omit most findings, recommendations and other key information, including the identity of the aid recipients named in the audit.”

This is more than a little odd coming from USAID which recently gave a $25 million grant to researchers at the University of Texas…(wait for it)….to develop tools that will “Increase Global Aid Transparency.”

Not only that, Mr. Eaton requested an interview with Mr. Lopes a little more than a week ago, and he declined.

Can someone stop the pain?

Not if what President Eisenhower might have called The Cuba-Industrial Complex has anything to say about it.  Although there was scant public mention of democracy promotion at John Kerry’s confirmation hearing, a new round of questions and answers about the program popped up in the Congressional Record, according to “Capitol Hill Cubans,” an eager supporter of regime change in Cuba.

In testimony apparently provided for the record –questions asked and answered in private – Senator Marco Rubio urged Mr. Kerry not to negotiate with Cuba to obtain Alan Gross’s release; not to shut down or rollback democracy programs; and to scrutinize the already legal people-to-people trips to Cuba.  You can read Kerry’s responses here.  We think he gave Senator Rubio no quarter.  To date, Mr. Kerry has made no public statements about whether he’d change the programs that he tried to reform as a member of the U.S. Senate.

But, the bodyguards surrounding USAID’s Cuba programs – the contractors, the pro-sanctions Senators, the array of publicists and polemicists aligned with them – will continue resisting the scrutiny and long-overdue public debate that ought to take place about these wasteful, ineffective, covert-but-not-classified programs that antagonize Cuba and which turn Latin America more broadly against us.

We are reminded of what E.J. Dionne wrote in “Why Americans Hate Politics” –

“With democracy on the march outside our borders, our first responsibility is to ensure that the United States becomes a model for what self-government should be and not an example of what happens to free nations when they lose interest in public life.”

Such is the democracy promotion paradox.

Senator Menendez- Travel and Glass Houses

In public, Senator Bob Menendez is never a shy skeptic about certain kinds of travel.

He bitterly opposed reforms in 2009, to allow Cuban Americans unfettered travel rights to Cuba, and later teamed up with Senator Marco Rubio to oppose opening up people-to-people travel for most other Americans.  Early in the Obama presidency, Menendez, an environmentalist who believes in climate change, held up the nominations of John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, world class scientists, to block a Senate bill with language to liberalize travel to Cuba (something his Hurricane Sandy-battered constituents probably never heard about).

When the Center for Democracy in the Americas was organizing a Cuba trip for Senate chiefs of staff, he and Senator Bill Nelson warned all of their colleagues not to allow their staffs to go (nobody listened).  At John Kerry’s confirmation hearing, he scolded Senator Jeff Flake, who joked about using “spring break” to disrupt the Cuban government’s hold on the island.

Like other hardliners, Senator Menendez even suggested that travel to Cuba was about little more than sexual tourism, as he did in this speech against Cuban American family travel four years ago.

Had Senator Menendez heeded his publicly expressed doubts about travel in private, he might not be in the hot water he finds himself today.  His story has moved swiftly from a lurid set of accusations – which the Senator denies, which some independent journalists and ethics watchdogs  doubt, and at least one late night comic has mocked – to issues involving a friend and donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen, that have ensnared him in investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Senate Ethics Committee.

These developments are serious, as Paul Kane of the Washington Post wrote, because his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “makes him the top diplomat on Capitol Hill, someone tasked with greeting heads of state visiting Washington, and affords him the kind of public profile that prompts regular appearances on the Sunday morning political talk shows.”

Questions about his relationship with Dr. Melgen –described as “a high-profile Palm Beach ophthalmologist with major tax problems” –captured media attention this week when the FBI conducted a surprise raid on the doctor’s offices.

According to NBC News, the raid ostensibly “concerned a separate criminal probe conducted by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which typically investigates Medicare fraud. However, agents were also looking for evidence in the other case concerning the alleged under-aged prostitutes” and two airplane rides Menendez and Melgen took to the Dominican Republic.

The trips were never paid for by Senator Menendez or accounted for as gifts, as required under the rules of the Senate, an oversight which his staff attributed to “sloppy paperwork.” But, it’s more than that.  “It’s technically a federal crime to not report gifts on a federal financial-disclosure form,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility, to the Miami Herald.

Mr. Menendez has dug deep into his pockets and sent a check to Dr. Melgen’s company for $58,500 to clean up the error.  This could not have been easy for Mr. Menendez, who was ranked 79^th among his Senate colleagues in wealth by the Center for Responsive Politics after reporting net assets of under $500,000 in 2010, according to the Washington Post.  By taking this route, rather than invoking what is called a “friendship exemption” and amending his filings with the Senate Ethics Committee, to clean up the error, he has avoided any requirements to make a public disclosure of details about the trips.  Surely, commercial flights would have been cheaper.

The payment will not make the attention go away. On Thursday, The New York Times reported on how Senator Menendez used his office and position to fight for a contract to help a company in which Dr. Melgen was an investor.  That company “had a long-dormant contract with the Dominican Republic to provide port security and x-ray cargo. Mr. Menendez, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee that holds sway over the Dominican Republic, subsequently urged officials in the State and Commerce Departments to intervene so the contract would be enforced, at an estimated value of $500 million.”

The Times reports that Menendez spoke to State Department officials about the contract, and used a hearing he chaired last July to question State and Commerce Department officials about why they weren’t being more aggressive in getting the DR to honor the contract, even though his friend lacked border security experience.

According to the Miami Herald, Menendez’s office said the senator did nothing improper, he was a long-time champion for U.S. business abroad, and that “Senator Menendez has over the last few years advocated for more attention to the spread of narco-trafficking throughout Central America and the Caribbean.”

In light of Dr. Melgen’s political contributions to Menendez and others –more than $426,000 in campaign donations since 1992 – news organizations and investigators are likely to examine whether he crossed the line from business advocacy into the land of the quid pro quo.

Beyond dealing with a federal investigation, Senator Menendez is also facing a Senate Ethics inquiry.  Sen. Johnny Isakson (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the committee, told the Washington Post yesterday, “The Senate Ethics Committee is aware of the article in the Miami Herald and other media outlets, and we are following established procedures.”

The Department of Justice will neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.  As a long-time public servant told the Cuba Central News Blast, if the Senator was just an average Joe with a security clearance, that clearance would be suspended – and his access to classified information stopped –until the matters were satisfactorily resolved, one way or the other.  That’s not happening to Mr. Menendez, yet.

What is happening instead is quite telling.  At the White House, for example, Jay Carney, the press secretary, “declined to answer when asked whether the president still has full faith and confidence in Menendez. ‘I don’t have anything for you on that,’ Carney told reporters.”  Asked about the scandal, Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic Leader, praised his colleague as “an outstanding senator,” and then encouraged reporters to call his office.  “Any questions in this regard, direct to him. I don’t know anything about it.”  Allies like Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who celebrated Menendez as “a proven leader and defender of human rights when he became chairman,” have said nothing at all.

Rather than dodging the press in New Jersey, as Mr. Menendez appears to be doing, perhaps he should be taking to heart in private what he said in public at John Kerry’s confirmation hearing:

“Yours is a big chair to fill, and I will do my best today to live up to your example. I have watched you lead the Committee with an equally deep and abiding commitment to getting to the heart of the matter — always probative, always open to debate, but always ready to mitigate disagreements, always looking for the truth — for answers – uncovering the facts, hearing all the evidence, and then publically speaking truth to power based solely on what was best for this nation.”

Unless he lives up to that standard, the Senator could put his power and new position at risk.

Arson in Florida and the Shameful Sounds of Silence

In April, arson destroyed the offices of Airline Brokers in Coral Gables.  It was a disgraceful act of domestic terror.  But it hasn’t incited the outrage you might expect.

Terrorism, you ask?  Well, yes.

Terrorism has been defined under U.S. law as the “unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”  Arson and the bombing of property used in interstate commerce are among those offenses.

This attack was not a random street crime.  “I am afraid it was intentional,” Vivian Mannerud, the owner said at the time, “because of the indignation over the pope’s visit.”

Airline Brokers was famously involved in arranging travel for 340 Cuban American pilgrims, led by Miami’s Archbishop Thomas Wenski, who went to Cuba in March to witness in Pope Benedict XVI’s visit with the island’s faithful.

It didn’t take long for law enforcement to confirm the worst.  The Coral Gables Fire Department said the fire was deliberately set.

According to the Miami Herald, “A K-9 dog trained to detect accelerants led investigators to three separate spots where the fire at the Airline Brokers Co. began, including an area where a shattered green bottle was found.  Investigators also found a disposable lighter in a doorway outside the southeast corner of the company’s ground-floor office at 815 Ponce De Leon Blvd.” At the beginning of June, investigators released FBI photos of a ‘vehicle of interest.’  Nearly a month has gone by and no suspects have been arrested or named.

This incident might have receded from public memory but for Archbishop Wenski.  Yesterday, he visited Airline Brokers’ temporary office to bless the facility.  He said “that although we do not hate those who perpetrated this deliberate act of arson and we forgive those who ‘trespass against us’,” that those responsible for the act had to be brought to justice.  “Coming here today,” he concluded, “is a gesture of pastoral solicitude, and of solidarity with victims of a crime.”

In contrast, hardliners in the U.S. Congress have done and said nothing to denounce the arson.

Think about that.  Senator Marco Rubio and Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart, and David Rivera – who condemn Cuba and its false designation on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List; who use incendiary rhetoric to accuse those who travel to the island of ‘filling the Castro’s coffers’ –have been conspicuously silent about this act of domestic terror visited upon a constituent’s business in their own State.

What about Bill Nelson, Florida’s other Senator?  If you visit his official website (and scroll down), you will find a list of his accomplishments dating back from his service as Florida Treasurer, Insurance Commissioner, and Fire Marshal (no, not kidding).  He earned, he says, top rankings in insurance fraud arrests and convictions, and mounted aggressive investigations of church arson fires.

We gave Senator Nelson’s office the chance to respond to an email asking for comment about the arson at Airline Brokers and heard nothing back.  No surprise.  Arson may be in his sweet spot, but speaking truth to power?  Not so much.  It’s an election year.

In a statement released today, Cuban Americans for Engagement (CAFÉ) urged elected officials “to denounce this act of terrorism, no matter the ideology or political position of the victim or the perpetrator…and call publicly for total cooperation with the authorities in the identification and capture of the author or authors of this callous and cowardly attack.”

Someone is protecting the identity of whoever tossed that piece of pavement stone through the window at Airline Brokers and lit the fires that burned the business.  But they’re not telling; and apart from the stand-up citizens who are speaking out, no one representing the people of Florida really seems to care.

Haiku Hype: The Flutter over Fidel’s Twitter-Length Reflections

Whoa, Fidel Castro in the age of Twitter.

Headlines from Miami to London sound the alert.  “Fidel Castro leaves people guessing as he writes cryptic, Haiku-like notes.”  As the Miami Herald put it:

“In cryptic paragraphs of never more than 65 words, the former Cuban president has written about yoga poses, edible plants, a criticism by a Chinese leader who died 15 years ago and a former leader of communist East Germany who died even further back.”

Despite more contemporary concerns –such as this week’s meeting of bloggers in Cuba or the report that U.S. sanctions prevent Cubans from using Google analytics—it is no surprise that this development made news.  What Fidel Castro says and how he communicates has been engaging some and enraging others since before the creation of the computer, the fax machine, or the U.S. embargo.

According to Lars Schoultz, political scientist and renowned Cuba scholar, the U.S. government has been tracking what Fidel Castro thinks and says since 1947 when he was in college, sixty-five years.  That is longer than the time period extending from Morse to Marconi, from the invention of the telegraph to the invention of radio.

This preoccupation with Castro’s communications skills intensified after the revolution.

In 1959, as Schoultz records in his classic history on U.S.-Cuba relations, “That Infernal Little Cuban Republic,” the U.S. Embassy in Havana described one of his appearances as follows:

“Castro in his standard uniform of rumpled fatigues, radiating health and boundless energy, hunched over the table as he talks, waving his arms and hands, with the eternal cigar always at hand.  Words pour from him like a ceaseless torrent.  He appears literally capable of talking forever, on any subject under the sun.”

The volume of words was astonishing.  “This is, after all, the man who gave the longest speech in the history of the U.N. General Assembly,” Joshua Keating observed in his foreign policy blog.  But, of course, the effort to overthrow Castro and the Cuban system stemmed not from how much he said –or how he said it – but from his commitment to revolution and his resistance to the will of the U.S.

What followed has been decades of U.S. sanctions, and division between both countries, a collision between Cuba’s immutable faith in its right to self-determination and the immoveable desire of U.S. policy to upend its system.

Reporters inside Cuba tell us that Cubans are genuinely baffled by the former president’s messages on the Moringa tree, the cosmos, and yoga, published after his most recent full-length treatise on the use of drones by President Obama.

That’s probably right.  This interest is clearly shared by the boo-birds in Miami who’ve waited so long for the embargo to bring Cuba to its knees that they are now reduced to snickering about Fidel Castro’s twitter length pronouncements.

One “Miami analyst” said the former president needs to stay in the limelight.  “Like a mediocre starlet of cheap and superficial shows, [he] needs to feel like he’s in the center of the spotlight.”  Prof. Jaime Suchliki, Director of Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, sniffs, “Evidently he does not feel coherent enough to write longer pieces.”

If the “Cuba wars” are now being waged with exchanges of snark and sarcasm, we suppose that’s progress.  But, after 65 years, if we’re still worrying about how Fidel Castro, Cuba’s former president is expressing himself, we’d humbly suggest that the policy of not talking to the current president of Cuba about matters that actually concern us merits reexamination.

Governor Scott steps on a rake; the Cuba Transition Project loses the plot

Last week, we reported on Governor Rick Scott’s decision to sign legislation to stop Florida’s municipalities and state agencies from doing business with companies that have dealings with Syria and – the intended target – Cuba.  At the time, we called him “cynical” for signing legislation that is probably unconstitutional and bad for business and the economy of his state just to score points with hardliners in the Cuban American community.   It turns out we gave him far too much credit.

On Tuesday, Scott signed the bill at a ceremony staged at the Freedom Tower in Miami to impress the hardliners who sponsored and supported the legislation most strongly.  But immediately after the event, he issued a letter indicating the law might be unconstitutional. Scott didn’t utter a word about his doubts or about his letter while the signing ceremony was taking place.  The Miami Herald said that “No governor in recent memory has signed a law and then called it unenforceable in his bill signing.” His cheering section felt blind-sided and betrayed.  Congressman David Rivera threatened to sue Governor Scott.  Cowed by controversy, Scott doubled back, promising to enforce the law.

What was he thinking?

Scott’s office issued a statement that got close to the truth:  “After consulting with all interested parties and thoroughly weighing all sides of this issue, Governor Scott signed House Bill 959 into law on May 1, 2012.”  He didn’t just weigh all sides; he adopted virtually every position imaginable on the law before buckling under the weight of a P.R. stunt gone bad.

Moving from the farcical to the tragic, let us briefly take up the promising signs coming from Cuba that Cuban citizens might soon enjoy greater freedoms to travel from and return to the island, and the Cuba Transition Project’s puzzling, even dour, reaction to this news.

Cuba maintains a complicated and costly set of rules that prevent the Cuban people from leaving or returning to the island without their government’s permission.  Cuban citizens are vocal and plain-spoken in their desire to travel freely without having to apply for exit visa, the carta blanca, requests which are often denied. These restrictions are condemned annually by the U.S. State Department and organizations like Human Rights Watch.

As the Associated Press is now reporting, “Cuba appears on the verge of a momentous decision to lift many travel restrictions.”  Some travel controls could be scrapped – cutting the fees to apply for the exit visa, ending limits on how long Cubans can live abroad, and increasing the number of Cubans allowed to travel abroad for work. According to AP, the U.S. State Department “would certainly welcome greater freedom of movement for the Cuban public.”  The news agency quotes a shop worker in Cuba saying “It’s absurd that as a Cuban I must get permission to leave my country, and even worse that I need permission to come back.”

You might well expect the scholars at the Cuba Transition Project, which calls itself “an important and timely project to study and make recommendations for the reconstruction of Cuba once the post-Castro transition begins in earnest,” to regard these reforms as important and, if not timely, certainly long overdue.

Well, instead, they seem quite miffed, very concerned, and surprisingly negative about the whole thing.  In a broadside titled “Is Cuba Planning a Legal Mariel?” Jaime Suchlicki, the Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor and Director, Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, worries that:

• Cubans will line up in front of foreign embassies to request tourist visas and that the U.S. Interests Section – since most Cubans want to visit the United States – would be most impacted;
• Airlines will benefit financially from Cubans who fill their seats in flights away from Cuba;
• It might make Cubans on the island happy(!) because the reform will eliminate one of their major complaints;
• It’s all a secret plot by President Raúl Castro to relieve internal pressure on the island because so many Cubans will want to come to the United States.

But Dr. Suchlicki has a plan to foil the plot.  Tighten the number of visas the U.S. can give Cubans to visit here.  Stop Cuban Americans from traveling to Cuba (and giving money to their relatives who might want to make reciprocal visits).  And reduce the presence of U.S. diplomats in Cuba so fewer personnel can process an increased number of visas requests.

Why would he suggest such measures?  Because, perhaps, if Cuba’s reforms take place and Cubans can travel freely to the U.S. and elsewhere, the only government restricting its citizens from traveling to Cuba will be ours.  He seems to be saying, forget the liberty interests of average Cubans; Dr. Suchlicki just doesn’t want us to be embarrassed.