Global Voices » Carlos Gradaille

Bloggers on the new US Congress and the US policy on Cuba

Carlos Gradaille — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 11:12:17 +0000

Not much has been said in the blogosphere about how the results of the recent mid-term elections in the United States, which put the Democrats in control of Congress back in November, can affect the future of current US policy regarding Cuba. The truth is that several Democratic representatives (and some Republicans too) have been supportive of lifting the embargo and/or ending the ban on travel to Cuba, ever since the island entered a period of crisis about fifteen years ago. As Sir Ronald Sanders, former Caribbean ambassador to the World Trade Organization, observes in a piece republished on the blog of US journalist David Kinchen:

. . . US policy in Cuba is still too closely tied to the fortunes of both the Republican and Democratic parties in domestic elections for any radical change to take place soon. The votes of the anti-Castro, Cuban-American community and lobby remain influential.

Nonetheless, there can be no doubt in the minds of policy makers in the US that the global community – and the Caribbean countries especially – want to see the normalization of relations between the US and Cuba.

A Cuban blog called Por la izquierda [ES] wrote a post on November 24 which talked explicitly about the election results in and the changes — if any — one should expect in US policy toward Cuba. The blogger, who writes under the name Left-handed, opens by saying:

I've read a few articles about the perspectives of change of the US policies towards Cuba, now that the democrats are in control of the US congress. It sounds good, and I hope every day for the US government to stop letting certain influences from South Florida to dictate their foreign policies in this respect.

And even more fresh and maybe more insightful are a couple of articles from December 21, published on the blog Cuaderno de Cuba [ES] by the Miami-based Cuban-American journalist Armando Armengol. He quotes the leader of the Cuban parliament, who said recently that the US policy toward the island is a problem of priorities:

…the president of the Cuban parliament, Ricardo Alarcón, mentioned an important issue while expressing his negative vision about a change in the US policy towards Cuba: the situation in Iraq. As long as the conditions in the Arab country worsens, and Raúl Castro continues the process of succession without obstacles, Washington will limit itself to maintaining without change its Cuban strategy.

Armengol also offers a good analysis there about what the options are, both for Democrats and Republicans, and how this new situation may not be so advantageous for the former.

From the electoral standpoint, the democrats may be about to enter a minefield: instead of being able to show the incapacity of the current administration to put in practice an effective policy that contributes to bringing about a change towards democracy in Cuba, they may end up being the ones responsible for failure. They have against them a situation that seems advantageous at first sight: to continue being the party in the opposition, only that now with a considerable amount of power that makes them responsible for the errors.

On his second article touching on these issues Armengol goes deeper into the declarations of Alarcón, and he wonders why these contrast to such an extent with Raúl Castro's recent overtures to the US:

[Alarcón's negative and pessimistic] position is somewhat contrasting with the attitude, expressed twice already by Raúl Castro, of being willing to talk to the US.

Bloggers on the UN resolution condemning the US embargo against Cuba

Carlos Gradaille — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:00:58 +0000

On November 8, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution aimed at condemning the US embargo against Cuba. Since then, bloggers have been actively sharing their opinions on the matter.

In 1960 the US government imposed an economic embargo against Cuba, hoping that this would help bring about a transition along with democratic and economic reforms. Every year since 1992, the UN General Assembly has tabled a resolution calling for the end of the embargo, and voting has always been overwhelmingly in favour of the lifting of the embargo. In spite of this, the US continues to maintain its position, arguing that the embargo is a bilateral issue that should not come before the Assembly.

But this year there was a twist. Australia, while still supporting the resolution, presented an amendment requiring the Cuban government to make certain changes in its democratic and economic structures. The blog Cuba Journal republishes a very thorough International Herald Tribune article about this year's voting process which offers some good background on the Australian amendment:

The assembly voted on the resolution soon after adopting a resolution to take “no action” on the Australian amendment, which meant it could not be added to the Cuban draft. The “no action” resolution was adopted by a vote of 126 to 51 with 5 abstentions.

The proposed amendment stated that the U.S. laws and measures “were motivated by valid concerns about the continued lack of democracy and political freedom in Cuba.”

Armando Armengol, a well-known Cuban-American journalist based in Miami, discussed the vote on his blog Cuaderno de Cuba (ES). Though he noted that the number of countries supporting the resolution has increased over the years, Armengol was not very hopeful that this would have any lasting effect:

. . . the measure won't have any more importance than in previous cases. We're talking about a resolution that is approved annually, but lacks the possibility to be anything more than a quote in speeches and documents.

On the other hand, Luis M. García, the Cuba-born, Australia-based author of the blog Growing Up in Castro's Cuba, hails the Australian proposal that “infuriated the Castro representatives in New York,” adding, “it makes me proud to be an Aussie.”

But some other bloggers consider this new adoption of the resolution as an even more emphatic victory for Cuba, precisely because of the increasing volume of votes in favor of the resolution, even in spite of the attempt by Australia to introduce this amendment. The prolific blog Proposiciones (ES), written by Cuban journalist Belkys Pérez Cruz, criticizes the attempt, praising what she calls a record vote favoring Cuba:

The General Assembly registered last year a record of 182 votes in favor, but today it added one more under exceptional circumstances, due to the attempt by the United States, with the assistance of Australia, to amend the resolution against the blockade.

Ever since the General Assembly started considering the subject in 1992 . . . Washington has been trying to undermine the voting process.

The decision by the US administration to present this amendment using Australia as mediator was made after it became evident to US diplomats that they could not counteract the support being given to the resolution against the blockade.

It is interesting to note how different bloggers refer to the US sanctions against Cuba either as an “embargo” or a “blockade”. People sympathetic to Cuba tend to consider those sanctions a blockade, arguing that the word “embargo” has a softer and more condescending connotation. Also noteworthy is that supporters of Cuba seem to interpret the Australian initiative as an idea of the US government disguised as an Australian decision.

Further perspectives on the subject can be found on several other blogs, particularly at Cuba vs. Bush (ES), a blog highly critical of US policies. There are three posts there, one before the voting, another with a table of all the results of previous resolutions, and a more recent one celebrating what they call a “Stunning victory for Cuba at the UN”.

In the speech delivered prior to the voting, the Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs, Felipe Pérez Roque, asserted that the economic sanctions imposed by the United States constitute a genocide and have resulted for in damages, for his country, of more than 86 billion dollars.

He added that seven out of ten Cubans have borne and resisted since birth the effects of such a hostile policy which tries to bring us down by means of hunger and disease.

Cuba and the Internet

Carlos Gradaille — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 02:01:17 +0000

There has been a lot of talk lately in the Cuban blogosphere about Cuba's attitude towards the Internet. The reactions appear to be as diverse as the myriad persons concerned with this rather heated issue. Some of this discussion was provoked by a recent report by Reporters without Borders about restrictions and censorship for Cubans accessing the World Wide Web.

Connection to the Internet in Cuba is slow, and Cuban nationals cannot normally ask for the service to be installed at home, with some rare exceptions given usually for work reasons, in which case the employer pays for the service for its employee. Only companies and foreign visitors or residents can hire the service and pay for it, as prices are awfully high, and the quality of the connection is still not good. Yet many average people get access to the World Wide Web at work, mostly IT staff of connected companies, or people subscribed (also for work reasons) to the health network and ISP Infomed, which gives access mainly to many specific web sites such as Wikipedia, free software resources and health-related pages.

On the one hand, apologists for Cuba's policies defend the government's position, attributing all the responsibility for the poor bandwidth of Cuba's link to the Internet to the US government, which is said to be blocking all attempts in the island to connect to high-speed links. The general argument is that, as the overall connection speed of Cuba is not sufficient to serve the entire country, the government has to control this scarce resource in order to use it optimally for the benefit of everyone, albeit indirectly.

On the web site of the Party for Socialism and Liberation there's an English version of an article by Jose R. Vidal, a professor of at the University of Havana, who writes that

This is how scarce financial and technological resources are directed towards the essential interests of the country and the possibilities offered by the internet, in general, and how information and communication technologies favors the entire population and not only those that are connected to the internet.

The blog Proposiciones (ES) reprints an interesting article from the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde. The author of the article argues that

Since the first days of the Internet, the US has interfered the access of Cuba to it, and at the same time has unleashed a ferocious campaign against the revolution, accusing it of not giving freedom of connection to the global network.

What really happens is that, because of the laws of the blockade, the country is unable to connect to the international fiber optics channels that pass near its coasts, thus having to connect through satellite links which are more expensive and it limits considerably this resource.

On the other side, the most extreme critics of Cuba's policies state that such control is an excuse of the Cuban government to grant access only to those people they consider are “ideologically secure”. They also report that acquiring computer equipment in the island is not affordable for many, and even if people had the means to do so, it is not as simple as going to a store.

Another interesting argument from these critics is that the claims that the US government blocks Cuba from connecting to high-speed links are not true, and they base this assertion on a debate that occurred recently in a UN summit in Athens, Greece, between a Cuban government official in charge of electronic commerce in the island and an independent researcher and networking engineer, who asserted that “the Cuban government's problems stem from its own telecommunications monopoly and its official censorship policies”. (For more information on the Internet Governance Forum in which this debate occurred, see Jose Murilo Junior's Global Voices article.)

El Güinero talks (ES) with some irony about these issues:

Lately, the “grandma” [a play on words referring to the Communist Party daily, Granma] has been doing its best to deal with the fuss about a report that criticized the limits of accessing the internet on the island. They have come up with a logic of “you tell me what I will tell you.” Fantastic! And as part of the offensive, “La China” - or maybe it was Ramiro who is in charge of computing now - unleashed UN representative Juan Fernandez to declare war.

Also, some of the posts reflecting these and other opinions have already been cited recently here on Global Voices, a few of them from the blog Child of the Cuban Revolution, which has a series of articles about Internet in Cuba (No Internet for you, Castro's Internet I, II and III).

It’s been a lot of fun watching the Castro regime and its apologists trying to explain over the past few days why the vast majority of Cubans are effectively barred from accessing the Internet.

As you'd expect, it’s the fault of those evil Americans - the “criminal” commercial embargo stops Cuba from linking to fast fiber optic cables, etc, etc.

And finally, there are also some blog posts in the middle like the one by El cubano de la isla on his blog Mi isla al mediodía (My island at noon). In an article entitled Hipocresía (ES), he refers to his government's position as an hypocritical one, and at the same time criticizes the US for its policies for a “Free Cuba”, also considered by him as hypocritical as well.

The blogger Left-handed on his web site Por la izquierda (On the left) also assumes an intermediate position by arguing that both sides of the controversy are to blame (ES). He goes as far as to say that “The biggest damage that [the US] has made to this island is to maintain a blockade that serves more like a pretext and justification to cover all that has been done wrong….“