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DUBYA Y CUBA

Clarifying the cutesy title: In Spanish, “y” means “and.”

This morning’s announcement that Fidel Castro Ruz, hobbled by illness and advanced age, will resign as Cuba’s “líder máximo” has set the rumor mills a-whir. Experience teaches that these things do not happen in a vacuum. Sometimes it takes a lot of diplomatic back-channeling to get them started. I suspect that the announcement was arranged to take place while Dubya was off, doing his black swan song on the Dark Continent. Thus, he is afforded a ritual, Pius-style (not “pious”) ablution while the deed is being done. “What deed?” you ask—

Sometime—probably when election fervor is at high decibel—look for a relatively low-level State Department announcement that travel restrictions are being eased for expatriate families. Then, not too long afterwards, we may get a similar announcement that consideration is being given to removing the 45-year-old economic quarantine of Cuba. Later, maybe in December, after the president-elect has been chosen, expect for President George W. Bush to announce that diplomatic relations have been resumed with Cuba. This scenario is strictly in my head, but, nevertheless, it is prompted by fact and history.

• We could start with the “Amistad” survivors being tried in U.S. courts, defended by the retired 2nd president of the new republic, John Adams.
• Then, there are shades of Rough-Rider Teddy Roosevelt leading the charge up San Juan Hill (mostly on foot).
• Later, there was “President” Theodore Roosevelt with his “big stick,” warning European powers to keep their noses out of the Americas.
• The explosion of the battleship “Maine” in San Juan Harbor still remains a mystery; however, William Randolph Hearst did suggest that he could supply headlines any place the U.S. wanted war.
• After the Spanish American War we were left with that little corner of Cuba called “Guantánamo Bay.”
• Although we did not swallow Cuba whole (as we did Puerto Rico), after that war, our controlling claws remained intact—there, and in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, any number of “banana republics” and the faraway Philippines.

In case you think that Castro was always the bad guy, at the beginning of the Cuban revolution to root out the malevolent dictator Fulgencio Batista, Fidel was our boy. Apparently our gambling and other “business” interests were being unfairly squeezed by the pompous son-of-a bitch Batista, so we thought a more pliant puppet would be more our cup of tea (reminiscent of the plight of a future Manuel Noriega). When we learned that Castro’s real purpose was to take his island back from the foreign invaders (remember 1776?) and eliminate racial discrimination, poverty, disease and illiteracy, we were horrified. At that point Castro announced that he was a “Marxist-Leninist,” and that history would bear him out. (Does that phrase sound eerily familiar?)

Anyway, after the revolutionaries kicked out the oppressors—both foreign and native-born, the U.S. was established as an enemy. Eisenhower began the take-back planning with the Cuban exiles, but it was all dumped in Kennedy’s lap. After the Kennedy decision to withhold air support from the Bay of Pigs invasion, the stage was set for the Soviet Union to get into the act. With T.R.’s “Big-Stick” policy now outdated, Khrushchev saw his opportunity. After those strained “Seven Days in May” that almost brought the world to nuclear disaster, Castro cut off the water to Guantánamo, and the siege was on.

During the past fifty years, things are not perfect in Cuba; however:

• Racial discrimination has been eliminated.
• No one lacks for free medical care.
• Cuba has more doctors, per capita, than any country the world.
• All education is free.
• Cuba has the highest literacy rate in the world.

Of course, the U.S. would have removed the embargo a long time ago, except for—yes, you’ve got it!—the Cuban expatriate community in Florida. The original expats and their U.S.-born progeny drive U.S. policy with regard to Cuba. As we learned years ago, Florida is a powerfully pivotal state. Any attempt at normalization with Castro would mean political disaster for any candidate affected by the Miami monopoly vote. Ergo, the spooky scenario I paint above. Dubya is in a unique position to bring about this needed change in U.S. policy, without it reverberating negatively against him or his party. So, be on the lookout for this devilish dénouement.

I am very curious to see how Cuba is going to work out its post-Fidel positioning. For a long time, it has been known that Fidel’s successor would be his younger brother Raúl, the current regent. During a personal fact-finding trip to Cuba, about 15 years ago, I discovered that it is an open secret there that Raúl—although he is married and has children—is actively gay. The only public mention I have heard of this—there or here—has been by Jay Leno, on the Tonight Show, within the past two years.