AEI: slow burn for Cuba

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This article placed on the AEI website by their staff members specialising
in Cuba, is a signal that Cuba is not currently a priority for the Pentagon
hawks. Last month Bush said surprisingly little about Cuba at a
newsconference expectected to announce an intensification of pressure.

The article by Mark Falcoff is patronising and contemptuous, damning with
faint praise the probability that Cuba may be relatively stable for the
short term but the seeds of dissolution longer term are inevitable.

It notes the international support for Cuba and tries to suggest it mainly
consists of bizarre uninfluential left wing states, and it notes

> He remains a hero to those Americans--they are not few in our academic,
> cultural, and entertainment communities--who despise their own government
> or country.

It has an ingenious argument that dramatising the situation in Cuba at this
moment was Castro's agenda not Bush's. This argument is a signal to the
neoconservatives to fall into line and not hype up Cuba at present while
Wolfowitz concentrates on the Middle East and North Korea -

> Given the fact that these events occurred at the very moment when both the
> media and American foreign policy were focused almost wholly on Iraq, they
> might seem to have been purposely timed to take advantage of the world's
> momentary distraction. In fact, however, Castro's actions may have been
> motivated by precisely the opposite consideration: namely, a desire to
> make sure that he was not being forgotten. As one of the regime's highest
> ranking defectors remarked to me at the time, "this creates a crisis, the
> thing Fidel likes best." Lending credibility to this interpretation was
> the fact that the arrests and executions coincided with the annual sitting
> of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, thus giving a
> resolution against Cuba a much higher-than-usual chance of passing--which
> it duly did

"Castro's Gambit"

http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.17480,filter./news_detail.asp

The full article has a lot of detail which could be contended by
progressive people expert in Cuba. The main thrust seems to be mockery of
the socialist ideals of Cuba, and the impossibility of it not collapsing
into capitalism and falling into the orbit of its close neighbour,
[because, I suggest, the global unequal accumulation of capital makes it so
hard for such a country to resist.]

Chris Burford
London