US President Barack Obama’s decision to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba will face an early test next year as the White House tries to make good on its contention that the policy shift will lead to a gradual improvement in the Cuban government’s dismal record on human rights.
The Cuban authorities have promised to release 53 political prisoners, but at first they wanted to send the prisoners to the US. However, US officials insisted that they be allowed to remain in Cuba with no restrictions on their activities. The Cubans agreed.
US officials will be watching to see if all 53 are released and if the Cuban government undermines the gesture by continuing to detain or harass other political opponents. Some US officials believe that Cuba has been holding more political prisoners than the 53 and say that it will be important to push next year to secure the release of the others, as well.
Senior Obama administration officials insist that the improved ties between the countries will strengthen the prospects for reform by precluding Cuban President Raul Castro from blaming US efforts to isolate his country for the failings of Cuba’s government.
“It denies the regime an excuse and enables us to leverage stronger pressure from Europe and Latin America, which we couldn’t do effectively as long as our policy was viewed around the world as a bigger problem than the Castros’ repression,” said US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and LaborTom Malinowski, the US Department of State’s top official for human rights. “For many of us who worked on human rights in Cuba for many years, it feels like this is the first time we really have a chance.”
The policy will face other early challenges. A second test will be whether Cuba makes good on its pledge to allow US companies to improve Internet access in Cuba, a commitment that White House officials highlighted as a way of expanding the ability of the Cuban public to communicate with Americans. The new administration policy also seeks to help Cuba’s small private sector by expanding US exports to Cuba’s entrepreneurs and small farmers.
Obama administration officials are calculating that they can enlist support from European and Latin American countries to persuade Cuba to accede to a major treaty protecting political freedom — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — and, ultimately, to improve its legal system.
Specific talks between the US and Cuba on human rights have yet to be scheduled. The compartmentalized nature of the secret negotiations, in which the US side was represented by a deputy national security adviser to Obama and a senior US National Security Council aide, means that the rest of the administration is still trying to flesh out a strategy to advance political freedoms in a nation that has been a notorious violator of human rights.
In his news conference last week, Obama said his policy could involve “carrots as well as sticks” to induce the Cuba government to make changes, but administration officials have not publicly specified what they might be.
“The State Department was not part of the negotiations; neither was the Cuban Foreign Ministry,” said Tim Rieser, a foreign policy aide to US Senator Patrick Leahy, one of the US Senate’s leading human rights champions. “It is going to be a process of determining how best to advance our human rights goals.”
Cuba’s record on human rights is well documented.
The State Department’s annual human rights report said this year that the Cuban government carried out arbitrary arrests, failed to hold fair trials, spied on private communications, opposed free speech, restricted its citizens’ access to the Internet and refused to recognize independent human rights groups.
Human rights advocates say the Cuban government has relied less on long prison terms to silence dissent and more on short-term detentions, which rose to more than 8,400 this year, according to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, an independent human rights group.
An especially pernicious practice, the State Department report says, is a legal provision that allows the Cuban government to detain people for up to four years for “potential dangerousness.”
The State Department says the measure has been used to “silence peaceful political opponents.”
“Most human rights abuses were official acts committed at the direction of the government,” the State Department report says. “Impunity for the perpetrators remained widespread.”
Castro has made it clear that he intends to preserve Communist rule in Cuba, and Cuban officials did not approach the secret talks with the US with the notion that they were interested in changing their political system.
Castro said the goal of any economic changes would be to establish a system of “prosperous and sustainable communism,” and he offered no concessions on demands for human rights improvements.
Critics say that the White House’s new policy is little more than an act of self-delusion. The extensive diplomatic and economic ties Cuba has with European and Latin American nations, they say, had not led to a liberalization of Cuba’s political system. And the new US policy, they assert, will merely reduce the pressure on the Cuban government to make long overdue reforms as Castro, 83, approaches a period of political transition.
“How is Mr Obama going to bring freedom to Cuba?” Center for a Free Cuba executive director Frank Calzon said. “Cuba has full diplomatic relations with Spain and Germany, with all the countries in the world. Have those full diplomatic relations brought freedom to Cuba? You are dealing with a totalitarian regime. All they care about is to remain in power indefinitely.”
Even proponents of the new policy expect an uphill struggle.
“Cuba’s government is extremely repressive,” Leahy said. “Political opponents and human rights advocates are harassed and jailed. Information is tightly controlled. But the solution of President Obama’s critics is more of the same, even though it has not worked for five decades. Normalization with Cuba will be a process. Its pace and scope will depend, in part, on the actions of the Cuban government to permit dissent.”
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