Draft Copy 1 THE STANLEY FOUNDATION
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POLICY FORUM ON SECURING THE THIRD BORDER: CUBA, THE CARIBBEAN, AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY OPTIONS
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THURSDAY
NOVEMBER 1, 2001
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The forum was held at 9:00 a.m. in Conference Room B-1 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1800 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., Sherry Gray of the Stanley Foundation, presiding.
PRESENTERS:
RANDY BEARDSWORTH, Georgetown University SELWYN H. H. CARRINGTON, Howard University JAMES C. CASON, Department of State ALBERTO R. COLL, U.S. Naval War College THOMAZ GUEDES da COSTA, National Defense University MARK FALCOFF, America Enterprise Institute IVELAW L. Griffith, Florida International University ANTHONY MAINGOT, Florida International University RICHARD A. NUCCIO, Pell Center SUSAN KAUFMAN PURCELL, The Americas Society
ALSO PRESENT:
SHERRY GRAY, The Stanley Foundation JENNIFER DAVIES, The Stanley Foundation
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Welcome Sherry Gray, The Stanley Foundation ...... 4
Panel 1 - Regional Impact of the September 11th Events: U.S. Security Concerns:
Thomaz Guedes da Costa, Moderator ...... 8 Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, National Defense University
James C. Cason, Panel Speaker ...... 11 Policy Planning Coordination Bureau of Western Hemisphere Department of State
Ivelaw L. Griffith, Panel Speaker ...... 28 The Honors College Florida International University
Questions and Answers ...... 44
Panel 2 - Understanding the Current "Functional" Security Relationship with Cuba:
Mark Falcoff, Moderator ...... 75 America Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Captain Randy Beardsworth, Panel Speaker ....77 Caribbean Project Georgetown University
Alberto Coll, Panel Speaker ...... 92 Center for Naval Warfare Studies U.S. Naval War College
Questions and Answers ...... 106
Panel 3 - Security Options for the Future
Susan Kaufman Purcell, Moderator ...... 131 The American Society
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Richard A. Nuccio, Panel Speaker ...... 132 Pell Center for the International Relations and Public Policy Salve Regina University
Anthony Maingot, Panel Speaker ...... 149 Florida International University
Questions and Answers ...... 178
Adjourn ...... 205
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1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S
2 (9:40 a.m.)
3 DR. GRAY: Good morning and welcome. My
4 name is Sherry Gray, and I'm a Program Officer in the
5 U.S. Foreign Policy Area at the Stanley Foundation.
6 I'm also the coordinator of a program called Emerging
7 from Conflict. If you're interested in that program,
8 you can look on the web page EMERGINGFROMCONFLICT.ORG.
9 I think most of you know Jennifer Davies,
10 who is outside the room, is Program Associate in the
11 Emerging from Conflict Program, and she organized this
12 forum.
13 This is a bit of a departure for the
14 Stanley Foundation. This is only the second time
15 we've done a public forum. The first one we did this
16 summer on Persian Gulf issues. We normally do closed
17 small group meetings that are off the record, and this
18 meeting is, by the way, on the record and we have
19 someone recording this meeting and there will be a
20 transcript put on the web page.
21 Let me give you just a little bit of
22 background on the Stanley Foundation, for those of you
23 who don't know us. C. Maxwell Stanley started the
24 foundation in 1956, so we're nearly 50 years old. He
25 was an engineer and a businessman in Iowa, and he put
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1 part of his fortune toward what he hoped would be
2 solutions for world peace. It sounds awfully grand,
3 and it's something I always tell the immigration
4 officers when I come back into the U.S. They ask,
5 "What is your occupation? What do you do?", and I
6 say, "Well, I work for world peace."
7 (Laughter.)
8 Max was part of that generation that had
9 experienced two major wars. During the Cold War it
10 looked to him like there was an even bigger war to
11 come, and he was a World Federalist and very active in
12 that organization. He felt that the United Nations
13 embodied the best hope to prevent the coming war, the
14 war that he saw coming, and to work toward solutions
15 to global issues or global problems.
16 If you have served at the U.N. or worked
17 at the U.N., you know probably Stanley Foundation has
18 done a lot of activities there for more than 40 years.
19 People in Iowa know the Stanley Foundation for the
20 Global Education Programs that we do K through 12, and
21 people around the country know us in various places
22 for the radio program "Common Ground," which
23 broadcasts on NPR stations around the country; for the
24 World Press Review, which is published out of our
25 offices in New York, and also for community college
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1 programs that we do nationwide. I think we're the
2 only organization now that works on global education
3 programs at the community college level.
4 In the area of U.S. foreign policy, the
5 area that I work on, Max was hoping to encourage U.S.
6 leaders, policy analysts, and decision-makers, and
7 those interested and involved citizens to choose
8 various things. I think he framed it as
9 "internationalism versus isolationism," "dialogue over
10 preparing for war," and the "multilateral over
11 unilateral."
12 The Stanley Foundation is a private
13 organization and we're privately endowed. We're an
14 operating foundation. We're nonprofit. We're
15 nonpartisan, and we're based in Muscatine, Iowa,
16 which, if any of you know where that is, you might win
17 a prize. I, myself, didn't know where it was, but
18 it's right next to the Mississippi River and where the
19 Mississippi divides Illinois and Iowa. So it's on the
20 Iowa side. It's very close to Iowa City.
21 This forum is sponsored by the Emerging
22 from Conflict Program, and it reflects the Stanley
23 Foundation's interest in both security issues and also
24 in U.S./Cuba relations. I have to tell you that we do
25 a lot of activities on security issues. Whenever we
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1 do something on Asia, our programs are oversubscribed
2 and the room is full, and I see that we don't have as
3 many people who are as interested in the Caribbean,
4 but we at the Stanley Foundation think that it's a
5 very important region. We think this region is very
6 important and the topic is relevant to what's going on
7 today.
8 We have a very distinguished set of
9 moderators and presenters and also audience here
10 throughout the day, and I'm looking forward to some
11 serious and clear examination of the security issues
12 that are facing the U.S. in the region, and also some
13 thoughtful discussion that comes out of these panel
14 sessions.
15 I think throughout the day during each
16 panel the presenters will limit their remarks to about
17 20 minutes and then we'll do questions and answers.
18 I'd like to introduce Thomaz da Costa, who
19 is at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at
20 National Defense University. He is a professor there
21 and also coordinator of, I think it is, the Caribbean
22 Security Course. He has a wide and broad and diverse
23 research area.
24 He has worked on, of course, international
25 relations and defense issues throughout South America.
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1 He's worked on defense issues, defense organization
2 issues, U.S./Brazil military relations, Brazilian
3 foreign policy, and also my favorite topic, which I
4 grilled him on, the Amazon and global politics, which
5 I think is absolutely fascinating. He is now becoming
6 a Caribbean expert, and he also was a career analyst
7 with Brazil's National Council for Scientific and
8 Technological Development.
9 He has taught IR theory, strategy,
10 international security, defense issues, and what we
11 call IPE at the International Relations Department of
12 the University of Brasilia. He comes originally from
13 Rio, but is Pan-Brazilian, and I welcome him.
14 DR. da COSTA: Thank you, Sherry. I was
15 very happy for the opportunity to be here because, I
16 would say, more than I would like, 30 years ago, when
17 I first came to the United States, on the other side
18 of the river in Illinois I remember getting one of the
19 first leaflets that I got in terms of international
20 relations; it came from the Stanley Foundation. I was
21 always surprised throughout my professional life not
22 by what Stanley Foundation was doing, but coming from
23 Muscatine, because I knew where Muscatine was.
24 So I was very happy for this invitation to
25 be here. I'm a latecomer to the Caribbean issues. As
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1 I became Course Director at National Defense
2 University and the Center for Hemispheric Defense
3 Studies, the Course Director for the Caribbean
4 Program, for me, coming from South America, it always
5 has been very important to look at the Caribbean not
6 just as a bridge, but also as a divide in terms of
7 inter-American relations.
8 A month ago I was called to come to this
9 institute and we were talking about the immediate
10 post-effect of September 11th and how wide was
11 reactions to that moment and difficult it were to
12 articulate the first set essentially of joint response
13 to United States' request for the coalition process.
14 What is very puzzling -- and I would like
15 to hear from our colleagues on this panel,
16 essentially, looking at the wider notion of the
17 Caribbean -- very intriguing for me has been, since
18 September 11th, is to look or at least to consider a
19 statement made by Secretary Powell publicly in an op-
20 ed in the New York Times earlier this year when he
21 says, "Working with our friends in the Americas is one
22 of the first and highest priorities of President
23 Bush's Administration. If our neighbors are
24 democratic and law-abiding, open to trade, and willing
25 to cooperate with us on improving the environment,
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1 fighting drugs, and stopping disease, we can make a
2 vital difference in the life of every American."
3 Since then, what we are gathering from the
4 Americas is the need, driven by the United States in
5 moving this coalition in this new type of war, the
6 successive waves of shock in terms of transportation,
7 tourism, financial management, migration has worldwide
8 impact. What we would like to hear today, not just
9 from the colleagues that are here at the table, but
10 certainly from you throughout the day, is what does it
11 mean, this type of impact in terms of policy, not just
12 for the United States, but for all countries reacting
13 to that?
14 For that, I would like to invite Jim Cason
15 and Ivelaw Griffith, in the back of the program they
16 have their biographical information, but what's
17 important here is that we have two individuals, one
18 coming from the policy side, from Policy Planning and
19 Coordination in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere
20 Affairs at the State Department, and Ivelaw coming
21 from the academic side, from Florida International
22 University. So it's going to be very interesting to
23 see what kind of pace we can bring here. What are the
24 facts? What are the perspectives regarding the issues
25 of security at this time, especially U.S. policy
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1 concerns?
2 As Sherry has said, we'll have 20 minutes'
3 presentation and then we will open for questions,
4 debates, and even some statements. So, Jim, could you
5 go first please?
6 MR. CASON: Sure, I'd be happy to start.
7 Well, first of all, I want to say good morning. It's
8 a pleasure to be here.
9 I have been asked to talk about the
10 regional impact of the events and U.S. security
11 concerns. Had this conference been held a couple of
12 months ago, my remarks would have been somewhat
13 different, not too different, but it would have been a
14 different focus. But, of course, the tragedies of
15 September 11th now permeate everything that we do.
16 As Secretary Powell said, "We are in this
17 worldwide campaign together for the long haul. We
18 have endured an enormous tragedy, but we will
19 overcome. We will defend the rule of law against the
20 lawless. We will not allow murderers to destroy our
21 democracies and devastate our economies. We will
22 never let our futures be hijacked by terrorists."
23 Now after September 11th, the responses of
24 the Caribbean and, in fact, the entire Hemisphere were
25 immediate, strong, and very supportive. Prime
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1 Minister Ingraham of the Bahamas perhaps summed up the
2 feelings of many at a recent CARICOM meeting when he
3 said that, "Contrary to the pronouncements of the
4 missionaries of death, who promote such barbaric acts
5 among their young while themselves ensconced without
6 risk in safe havens, terrorism will bring them neither
7 victory nor glory. Rather, indelibly they will
8 forever be known and remembered as purveyors of death,
9 destruction, and evil."
10 Now we received messages of support,
11 condolence, and condemnation of the attacks from all
12 kinds of organizations, from thousands of ordinary
13 citizens, and from heads of state, foreign ministries,
14 and legislatures around the Caribbean Basin. This is
15 the same throughout the whole Hemisphere.
16 Some of our Caribbean neighbors have
17 offered, for example, free vacations for rescue
18 workers and the families of the victims, and Jamaica
19 and the Bahamas sent hospitality workers to New York
20 to help tend to the rescue workers.
21 Cuba alone failed to, in my opinion,
22 sincerely, unequivocally, and consistently raise its
23 voice to join this universal chorus. In terms of
24 concrete offers of support, CARICOM met on October
25 12th to reaffirm their ongoing support for the United
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1 States response. They have pledged to ensure the
2 widest possible adherence by member states to all the
3 relevant regional and international conventions. They
4 promise to put in place all the necessary measures to
5 comply with the new international security
6 regulations.
7 They have committed their security
8 services to more comprehensive intelligence-gathering
9 analysis and cooperation, and they have redoubled
10 their efforts to prevent the possible use of their
11 financial services for illicit activities by fully
12 cooperating with the United Nations and the
13 international community in identifying accounts that
14 may be linked to the flow of terrorist funds.
15 The Caribbean has also been active in the
16 support of the initiatives of the Organization of
17 American States, which, as you know, moved immediately
18 to invoke collective security arrangements under the
19 OAS and the Rio Treaty, convening in the Foreign
20 Ministers meeting just days after the attack. The OAS
21 has also convoked the Hemisphere's counterterrorism
22 apparatus and validated the right to self-defense.
23 In the United Nations, Jamaica this month
24 will assume the Security Council presidency and seeks
25 a leadership role in the response. Caribbean nations
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1 have offered military support in the sense of "Tell us
2 what you need and we'll try to provide it" and
3 collaboration on diplomatic and security initiatives.
4 Support has been broad-based and
5 unwavering, again, with the exception of Cuba, of the
6 Caribbean nations that provided this support while
7 simultaneously dealing with their own sorrow as a
8 result of the attack. One of the things that my
9 office does basically for Mayor Giuliani is to try to
10 track the dead and the missing, and we do that for the
11 whole Hemisphere. As of yesterday, there are 86
12 Caribbean nationals from 11 countries that were lost
13 in the attack, the Dominican Republic alone suffering
14 almost half of the casualties.
15 In terms of the impact on the Caribbean,
16 well, I think the biggest impact is the economic
17 downturn in the United States that's resulted in lots
18 of lost jobs in the Caribbean and the United States,
19 particularly in the tourist industry. That, in
20 addition to the loss of life, has had a serious impact
21 on remittances to the region.
22 Haiti and the Dominican Republican have
23 been especially hard-hit by this loss of income. As
24 the economic impact spreads around the world, we're
25 seeing economic growth slowing, and that's affecting
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1 all sectors of the economies.
2 But that's not where the impact has been
3 the most severe. The tourism industry has really been
4 devastated by the attack. The World Bank believes
5 that the Caribbean has been the most severely-affected
6 region in the world after Afghanistan's immediately
7 neighbors. The Bank predicts a 25 percent likely drop
8 in tourist earnings this coming tourist season.
9 Understandably, few people want to travel now either
10 to or from the Caribbean.
11 Where fears of terrorists and flying do
12 not stop the brave-hearted, long lines and intense
13 security checks seem to be doing so. Tourism in the
14 eastern Caribbean is already off by 40 percent,
15 hurting airlines, hotels, restaurants, and all those
16 who depend on them. The Bahamas depends on tourism
17 for about half of its Gross Domestic Product. They
18 anticipate a 50 percent drop in revenues.
19 To give you a snapshot of the problem,
20 Jamaica provides a good example. Before I took this
21 job, I was Deputy Chief of Mission for three years in
22 Kingston, and I know important tourism is for Jamaica.
23 The World Bank's worst-case scenario, which is a
24 sustained 50 percent tourism drop, would be utterly
25 catastrophic. Even with a 25 percent drop, which they
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1 consider to be likely, in Jamaica that would cost
2 30,000 additional unemployed, a 2 percent drop in
3 Gross Domestic Product, and a revenue shortfall of
4 $86.7 million. Multiplied across the region, you can
5 see the impact is sobering.
6 In Cuba, Castro himself admitted that the
7 tourist industry is in freefall in the wake of the
8 September tragedies. Although reliable statistics are
9 hard to come by, as much as 50 percent of hard
10 currency earnings likely come from tourism. It would
11 appear that remittances from Cubans abroad, another
12 important source of foreign exchange, are also down.
13 Consequently, the peso is sliding.
14 A non-communist government's response
15 would be to open up the economy and free the dynamism
16 and productivity of the Cuban people. Castro's regime
17 is more likely to implement austerity measures that
18 will squeeze even more tightly their already
19 desperately-suffering Cuban people. Without tourists,
20 those Cubans who depend on the availability of dollars
21 cannot shop dollar-only stores, which many depend upon
22 for essentials.
23 In the Caribbean then, the end result of
24 September 11th is lower growth, increased
25 unemployment, decreased tax revenue, and decreased
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1 external financial flows. It's a very bleak picture.
2 The democratic governments of the
3 Caribbean are responding by restricting spending,
4 supporting the tourism sector through new advertising
5 campaigns and reduced travel fees, and implementing
6 stabilizing monetary policies, but that only goes so
7 far. The World Bank is considering helping through
8 funds for balance-of-payment support. They have asked
9 the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral
10 and bilateral donors to come forward and begin
11 discussions of how to put a safety net under these
12 struggling economies.
13 Now what does all this have to do with
14 security? With economic difficulty, of course, come
15 other problems. As President Roosevelt said,
16 "Necessitous men are not free men. People who are out
17 of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are
18 made." Not that we foresee the rise of dictatorships
19 in the Caribbean, which has a long democratic
20 tradition and good system of checks and balances, but
21 economic difficulties always threaten to worsen
22 democratic and security problems.
23 I would say a little bit about what we
24 know about the terrorist presence in the Caribbean.
25 There are not many terrorists endemic to the region,
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1 but we don't have a clear picture yet of all those
2 that were linked to September 11th events. There's
3 lots of investigative work to do; a lot of the
4 information is close-hold, but if terrorists with
5 international links do use the Caribbean, they
6 probably use it to pass through or use the banking
7 facilities, but it's too early to reach a conclusion
8 on that.
9 We do think that one hijack suspect may
10 have briefly been in the Bahamas, and we know that
11 Trinidad and Tobago has an Islamic militant
12 organization, the Jamat-al-Muslimeen, that attempted
13 to overthrow the government in the 1990's, but the
14 reality is that indigenous terrorism is neither
15 widespread nor deeply rooted or supported in the
16 region.
17 The problem, though, is more elusive than
18 identifying terrorist cells. The Caribbean is one of
19 the great transit zones in the world. The fact that
20 there is a high volume of commercial and tourist
21 traffic is unremarkable, given its location, but some
22 of the traffic is insidious, even threatening, and it
23 hides among the legitimate movement of about $20
24 million tourists a year into the region.
25 The Caribbean forms a critical part of the
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1 world's criminal pipeline. Drugs, arms, and people
2 are smuggled up, down, around, and through the chain
3 of islands every day of the year. When the economies
4 struggle and unemployment rises, this shadow economy,
5 which also supports a lot of people in the region,
6 becomes more powerful. This, in turn, helps and leads
7 to corruption and undermines the rule of law.
8 To work toward reduction of this flow,
9 Grenada has taken the positive step recently of
10 temporarily suspending economic citizenship, but it
11 remains in place in other countries. The ability to
12 purchase nationality offers international criminals
13 the chance to use the Caribbean as a base of
14 operations with all the benefits of citizenship. When
15 coupled with tax havens and the not-always-regulated
16 offshore financial sectors, the Caribbean becomes
17 attractive as a haven for the smuggler, the money
18 launderer, and possibly now the terrorists.
19 In terms of the movement of people through
20 the region, many are the traditional economic migrants
21 that most of us think of when we talk about alien
22 smuggling or human trafficking, but intermingled with
23 those, however, are drug smugglers, possibly foreign
24 terrorists, and any and all who need to get into or
25 out of the United States through our third border
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1 without coming to the attention of law enforcement.
2 The alien smuggling and human trafficking
3 industry is rapidly becoming the most lucrative form
4 of organized crime in the world. Whether trafficked
5 or smuggled, even those who are simply trying to find
6 a better life are horrendously abused. They're often
7 packed into these tiny, unseaworthy craft to risk
8 their lives on open waters, and smugglers are known to
9 abandon them if it looks like they may be intercepted
10 or if the engine fails, leaving them to find for
11 themselves, often without food or water.
12 Combating this scourge is a high priority.
13 I think the Caribbean nations are striving to
14 modernize their immigration systems, but they have
15 much work to do still. The wide number of countries
16 whose citizens can enter without the preliminary
17 precaution of a visa also needs to be addressed.
18 Patrolling the seas of the Caribbean Basin
19 is extremely difficult, and most the region's navies
20 are not up to the task. Although many have signed
21 bilateral agreements that allowed the U.S. Coast Guard
22 to patrol, the Coast Guard does not have the
23 capability to cover the entire region, especially now
24 when they are so needed at home.
25 The aviation industry needs greater
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1 security, not only for the safety reasons, but also to
2 reassure and attract tourists back.
3 What all of this comes down to in the end
4 is money, and it is money that the small island
5 economies of the Caribbean simply do not have. It's
6 not primarily a lack of willingness or dedication on
7 the part of the governments. Rather, it's more a
8 matter of capacity.
9 Further strained by the recent tragedies,
10 governments are faced with stretching already strapped
11 budgets to the breaking point. Unable to benefit from
12 economies of scale, the task can seem overwhelming.
13 Now there seems to be a fairly bleak
14 picture, but were the nations of the Caribbean trying
15 to fight these battles on their own, it would be.
16 They are, however, not on their own. What we're
17 seeing -- and we're seeing this throughout the
18 Hemisphere -- is that the countries are coming
19 together to devise responses, to rethink their
20 positions on a lot of issues, and to fix a lot of
21 problems.
22 Throughout the Western Hemisphere things
23 that were recently thought to be too tough to tackle
24 are being attempted. An example is in El Salvador,
25 which we never thought would pass alien smuggling
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1 legislation, and in a matter of days they got it
2 through congress and out a strong alien smuggling law.
3 In response to the attacks, the United
4 States Government and its allies have developed a
5 four-part approach to beat back all of these threats.
6 The first thing is that we have asked the nations of
7 the Caribbean to ratify the 13 international
8 counterterrorism treaties. Since the crisis began,
9 the Dominican Republic is moving toward full
10 ratification, and Trinidad and Tobago has already
11 approved all of the treaties. Even Cuba ratified nine
12 treaties to become a full party, although whether or
13 not the Castro regime will live up to these
14 international obligations remains to be seen.
15 Overall, we see that about 50 percent of these
16 treaties are now in force in the Caribbean.
17 The treaties are important because they
18 allow international cooperation to work smoothly and
19 enable the exercise of universal jurisdiction over
20 terrorists. This is an important step to securing the
21 Hemisphere collectively and empowers each country to
22 help stabilize the whole.
23 The Organization of American States,
24 through its counterterrorism arm, the Inter-American
25 Counterterrorism Committee called CICTE, is using the
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1 treaties to develop a hemispheric security program
2 that will be institutionalized, a collaborative
3 structure being created, and they're also working on a
4 Latin American counterterrorism treaty.
5 Second, we are working with the nations of
6 the Hemisphere to ensure the identification and
7 seizure of the financial assets of terrorists. All of
8 the democratic nations of the region moved quickly to
9 review financial records. The Caribbean Financial
10 Action Task Force is assisting in the passage of anti-
11 money-laundering legislation in all the countries.
12 Through CFATF, which is Caribbean Financial Action
13 Task Force, Mexico, Canada, France, Holland, Spain,
14 the U.K., and the U.S. are assisting the Caribbean
15 nations in improving the capacity to combat financial
16 crime.
17 Many Caribbean nations have created, or
18 are now rethinking the creation of, financial
19 intelligence units, some with the assistance of the
20 U.S. Aruba, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the
21 Dominican Republic and the Netherlands Antilles are
22 members of the EGMONT group which works to create a
23 global network of financial intelligence units to
24 facilitate international cooperation, in part, through
25 the secure Internet website that they have. So what
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1 we're seeing is that the places where terrorists can
2 hide their assets are rapidly dwindling.
3 Third, we're working with all the
4 countries to ensure that terrorism is criminalized in
5 all its forms. United States law enforcement and
6 other agencies are working on technical assistance to
7 governments working on such laws. Together with the
8 universal jurisdiction created by the treaties, this
9 strips away much of the appeal of using the Caribbean
10 as a pipeline.
11 The terrorists and their abettors will
12 soon learn that there is nowhere to hide. Wherever
13 their attack was a crime, they can be tried or
14 extradited, and it will soon be a crime to be a
15 terrorist, conspire with a terrorist, or to help a
16 terrorist in every corner of the globe.
17 Lastly, and more importantly, we are
18 working with the Caribbean to improve border controls,
19 and this is in all of our interests. The Federal
20 Aviation Administration has suggested ways to improve
21 airline security, and airlines throughout the
22 Caribbean are complying with those guidelines. The
23 Immigration Service is providing training to
24 immigration and airline personnel around the region to
25 increase airport security and border integrity, as
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1 well as to establish cooperative ties to enable
2 international cooperation on immigration issues. This
3 also helps on the corruption side.
4 Secure machine-readable passports,
5 together with computerization of immigration systems,
6 would have an enormous impact on migrant flows, and
7 this is an area that requires greater attention and
8 resources. We are working with the Caribbean on such
9 issues.
10 A lot of the nations are reconsidering the
11 merits of economic citizenship, and we're seeing a lot
12 of increase of information-sharing, especially in the
13 Dominican Republic and Haiti. Great strides are being
14 made in this area. One thing that ought to be
15 considered as well is that nations should be sharing
16 information on criminal deportees that have come back
17 in.
18 Hand in hand with all of this, however, is
19 the work we have been doing for years, not just since
20 September 11. The greatest enemies of terrorism and
21 organized crime are democracy and economic stability.
22 Our approach to the Hemisphere has remained the same,
23 and it's based on three critical pillars: sustainable
24 development, including increasing free trade and
25 economic stability; democratization of rule of law,
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1 including human rights and education, and promoting
2 hemispheric security, including combatting terrorism
3 and an aggressive but balanced counternarcotics
4 program. Each of these is necessary to the other.
5 We continue to work with the Hemisphere on
6 free trade initiatives and economic growth. The
7 Administration has prepared an energetic package of
8 measures to stimulate the U.S. economy which will have
9 a big impact on the Caribbean. USTR's Bob Zellick
10 wrote, just days after the attack, that "Today's
11 enemies will learn that America is the economic engine
12 of freedom, opportunity, and development."
13 During the 1980's per capita income in
14 Latin America fell by 1 percent a year. During the
15 nineties per capita income grew by 1.5 percent per
16 year. We're seeing a big increase in foreign direct
17 investment in Latin America, and the Caribbean Basin
18 Initiative and the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership
19 Act have taken important steps to further this
20 improvement.
21 But the ultimate goal is a Free Trade Area
22 of the Americas, which has the potential to triple
23 trade flows among the countries of the Americas. All
24 34 democratic leaders recommitted themselves to free
25 trade at the Quebec Summit.
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1 Finally, economic stability and political
2 stability go hand in hand. We are working on plans to
3 help the smaller nations of the Caribbean position
4 themselves better for the FTAA and will continue to
5 work on these fronts to create a Hemisphere of peace
6 and security.
7 It was ironic that on the day of the
8 attacks Secretary Powell was in Lima, where the OAS
9 was adopting a landmark charter declaring democracy
10 the birthright of all peoples of the Hemisphere. The
11 democratic charter makes clear the vital link between
12 democracy, prosperity, and peace. It enhances the
13 ability of the OAS to assist democracies in crisis.
14 Only Cuba remains outside the democratic family of the
15 Western Hemisphere.
16 To conclude, we are continuing on our path
17 to a Hemisphere that is free, prosperous, and
18 peaceful. Not even the attacks of September 11th can
19 turn us from that goal. Secretary Powell reminded us
20 not long after that that America's got to get back to
21 work; we've got to get back to some sense of normalcy.
22 If we stick in our bunkers and walk around afraid,
23 they will have won.
24 The goals we have now, and the goals we've
25 always had, are the best route to defeating
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1 terrorists, criminals, and every other threat we face,
2 and those are prosperity, peace, and freedom. That's
3 my remarks.
4 DR. da COSTA: Thank you, Jim.
5 Ivelaw Griffith.
6 DR. GRIFFITH: Thank you, Thomaz. Good
7 morning.
8 (No response.)
9 That's a non-response. Good morning.
10 (Participants respond "Good morning.")
11 Let's get a Caribbean response now. Good
12 morning.
13 (Participants again respond "Good
14 morning.")
15 You people don't want to go to Jamaica for
16 a week on vacation, right?
17 (Laughter.)
18 Jim was going arrange everything one week
19 for everyone who participates in this seminar by
20 asking him questions and asking me none, and they get
21 a week in Jamaica.
22 (Laughter.)
23 Let me first thank the Stanley Foundation
24 for asking me to share some thoughts on the subject.
25 I thought it might be useful to talk about United
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1 States security interests in the Caribbean post-9/11
2 by putting 9/11 in some context before we go to look
3 at the security concerns themselves.
4 What I would like to do, therefore, is
5 talk about U.S. security concerns post-9/11 and 9/11
6 itself under the rubric of two simple letters, two
7 "C's." I want to spend a couple of minutes talking
8 about the first "C," which is context, looking a
9 little bit about 9/11 in a broader context, and then
10 spend some time talking about the second "C,"
11 convergence. Where are the areas of convergence of
12 U.S. and Caribbean interests? What are some things
13 Caribbean people are interested in? What are some
14 things that United States policy and political elites
15 and economic elites are also interested in? So my
16 first "C" will be a little bit about context, and my
17 second "C" will be about convergence.
18 Let's go to the first "C." 9/11 is one of
19 those, as we all know by now, dramatic, revolutionary,
20 earth-shattering events. When political scientists
21 are confronted episodes of this kind, one of the
22 things that we do is try to see if any of the great
23 books of American politics, any of the great books in
24 political science, have anything to say about them,
25 either directly or tangentially.
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1 I've been reading quite a lot recently in
2 one of the books which I consider to be one of the
3 great books of political science. It's a book called
4 Democracy in America. It's a book written by someone
5 who is not an American, who was not an American.
6 Alexis de Tocqueville spent some 19 months in the
7 United States in the early part of the 19th century
8 and wrote the book which has become a classic of
9 American politics and a classic of political science,
10 and I want to share with you a part to set in the
11 context to look at 9/11, one simple sentence which I
12 think resonates very well, gives us cause to pause as
13 we think of a context of 9/11. This is a sentence
14 which in my edition is found on page 283.
15 This is what Alexis de Tocqueville said on
16 page 283: "There are two things that a democratic
17 people will always find very difficult: to begin a
18 war and to end it." Now when de Tocqueville was
19 writing this sentence in the context of looking at
20 democracies and war, he was writing about a different
21 kind of war. He was writing more about interstate
22 conflict. He was also talking in some respects about
23 civil war.
24 Needless to remind us, 9/11 and the
25 aftermath are dramatically different. It's a
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1 different kind of conflict. It's a different kind of
2 war.
3 But I think that the value of de
4 Tocqueville's statement is there in the sense that it
5 will be, the war that we have engaged in will be a
6 difficult war for our democracy, for democracies in
7 the Caribbean to be part of. Now that we have started
8 the war, that we are engaged in the war, and part of
9 the difficulty of engaging in the war and winning the
10 war has, to my mind, to do with a context which I
11 would like to speak about for five or so minutes.
12 That context is transnationality. The war in which we
13 are engaged post-9/11, 9/11 precipitated a
14 transnational conflict, and I think that's the
15 conflict in which I would like to suggest to us it may
16 be useful to look at 9/11.
17 Now there are a number of aspects to
18 transnationality of 9/11 to which we can make
19 reference, but I have time only for two. Permit me to
20 say a few words about some of the context
21 transnationality aspects of 9/11 and the conflict in
22 which we are engaged, and then to talk about
23 consequences of the 9/11 transnationality as a way of
24 segueing into the convergence of the U.S. and the
25 Caribbean on this issue.
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1 One of the things we heard from Jim a
2 minute ago smacks of the transnationality. He told us
3 that 11 countries from the Caribbean, 86 people, were
4 involved in 9/11. In other words, the victims of
5 9/11, while 9/11 was an episode in the United States,
6 the victims have not simply been Americans, United
7 States citizens. The victims have come from different
8 countries around the world.
9 If you take a broader landscape, my
10 records show that there 85 countries around the world
11 who have had victims in this 911 episode, if you take
12 New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. If you ask
13 yourself, among those 85 countries in the world, how
14 many in the Americas at large have been involved, the
15 number is 30. If you go down for a subset of the
16 Americas to the Caribbean Basin, not just the
17 archipelago, there are 30 countries in the Caribbean
18 Basin which have had victims. The transnationality is
19 reflected, I think, in the victims. It's not simply
20 about America; it's about people from other nations;
21 it's about transnationality in many respects.
22 But the transnationality is to be found, I
23 think, not only in the victims component of the
24 content of this transnational conflict. The actors
25 have not all come from one country. The organization
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1 has not been centered in one country. Countries in
2 Europe have been involved. Countries in Africa have
3 been involved. People attempted to get training in
4 the Bahamas. Some of the financial assets have been
5 in parts of the Caribbean, as we heard referred to by
6 Jim.
7 So if you ask yourself what are the bits
8 of evidence of transnationality, you need to go beyond
9 the victims to see that the who and the what and the
10 how of the conflict of the engagement involve
11 countries, simply not the United States, but a variety
12 of countries around the world. And you can also see
13 the transnationality reflected in the organization in
14 a variety of different places; in a variety of
15 different modalities, the transnationality is also
16 reflected in there. What I'm simply saying is that
17 the larger context in which we can look at the United
18 States and the Caribbean 9/11 context is a
19 transnational context, partly because it's not just
20 victims of the United States; it's not this
21 organization done in the United States. A number of
22 countries around the world have been implicated.
23 By the same token, if you ask yourself,
24 what are some of the consequences of 9/11, you get
25 transnationality in your face again. The consequences
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1 have to do both with redefinition, rethinking of
2 policy. The consequences have to do with
3 redefinition, rethinking of practice -- practice in a
4 variety of areas, policy in a variety of areas.
5 Defense and security, no less important than others,
6 is being rethought as a way in which America does its
7 business with the rest of the world, Caribbean-
8 inclusive.
9 Foreign policy of the United States is
10 going to be affected and foreign policy of other
11 countries relating to other parts of the world is
12 going to be affected. Immigration policy is going to
13 be dramatically affected, not only by the United
14 States as the way it does its immigration business
15 with other countries, but in the way in which other
16 countries do immigration business with each other in
17 other parts of the world.
18 Earlier in this year we had a visit from
19 one of our NAFTA partners to this town, made a pitch
20 for a certain immigration policy. That kind
21 gentleman, President, is now one of the victims. His
22 policy pursuits, which were not rejected out of hand
23 in Washington -- people said, "Let's think about it.
24 Let's talk about" -- that I want to recommend to you,
25 as I'm sure we all know, is going to go through some
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1 re-examination, redefinition.
2 Transportation policy is going through re-
3 examination, redefinition. I have been traveling --
4 this is my fourth trip out of the Republic of Miami,
5 where I live since 9/11 (laughter), and I have had
6 women less charming than my wife do things to me which
7 I thought, why are these women doing these things to
8 me? But it's all under the guise of a redefinition of
9 what transportation policy, what security measures
10 are, how do we do our business, and it's not only by
11 the United States. It's by countries elsewhere in the
12 Americas. It's by countries elsewhere in the world.
13 The international economic relations --
14 the Caribbean, the United States, other parts of the
15 world -- those relations are going to be redefined.
16 What I'm suggesting, therefore, is that we ask
17 ourselves a larger contextual question of 9/11. We
18 see transnationality as that context. We see the
19 transnationality in relation to what, the nature of
20 the conflict, and we see the transnationality with
21 regard to the consequences, things to which the
22 conflict will give rise. We can come back to talk
23 about some of these in the discussion time.
24 But then we come to the second main "C,"
25 the convergence, and we find that a convergence itself
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1 has aspects of transnationality to it. When you ask
2 questions about the convergence of the United States
3 and Caribbean policy or interests or the United States
4 and any country or region policy interests, you are
5 begging a certain question. The question you beg is,
6 where in the region -- in this case, the Caribbean --
7 does the United States have interest? What are the
8 commonalities of interest between the United States
9 and Caribbean countries? Where are the convergence
10 points? Where are the convergence points that are
11 going to be dramatically affected by 9/11 in the
12 context of security, in the context of trade, in the
13 context of immigration, in the context of the other
14 things to which we didn't have time to make reference
15 earlier?
16 In dealing with convergence, I like to
17 think of the United States/Caribbean convergence again
18 using a couple of letters. I like to think of
19 convergence in the context of one "D" and three "G's."
20 I like to think of the convergence in the context of
21 -- don't laugh at me. I'm a simple person. I live in
22 the Republic of Miami. We think in very simple terms.
23 (Laughter.)
24 My "D" is democracy. There is a
25 convergence point of Caribbean and the United States
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1 with regard to democracy. My first "G" has to do with
2 geopolitics. My second "G" has to do with
3 geoeconomics. My third "G" has to do with
4 geonarcotics. There are democratic issues on which
5 the Caribbean and the United States converge. There
6 are geopolitical issues on which the United States and
7 the Caribbean converge, where the United States has
8 geopolitical interests in the region, and there are
9 economic and there are narcotics. Drugs drive the
10 agenda on a variety of other interest areas.
11 Now since I only have five minutes left in
12 my time, what I would like to do is suggest that
13 perhaps, even if only to look at two of those four
14 letters, "D" would be important to focus on a little
15 bit, democracy. I would like to spend a minute or two
16 talking about democracy, and then reserve a little
17 time to talk about geopolitics because I think there
18 is a mistaken notion that the end of the Cold War saw
19 the demise of geopolitics as an issue. There's a
20 mistaken notion that the end of the Cold War saw the
21 end of geopolitical analysis as relevant analysis for
22 this part of the world. I want to suggest that it's
23 not. Geopolitics is not dead, and the geopolitical
24 interests of the United States and the Caribbean,
25 geopolitics is one of those areas of convergence.
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1 But let's deal with the "D" first, even if
2 only we've got to be alphabetically correct. I would
3 argue -- and I think we had a sense of that from Jim's
4 presentation -- that the ultimate interest on the part
5 of the United States in the Caribbean, the ultimate
6 interest on the part of Caribbean countries in
7 themselves and in dealing with the United States --
8 has to do with democracy, has to do with maintaining
9 democracy, has to do with consolidating democracy, has
10 to do with strengthening it.
11 Now that is not to suggest that, which is
12 mistakenly a notion in other parts of the world, that
13 all is well with democracy in the Caribbean. All is
14 not well. But 9/11 places some strain on democracy,
15 both in the United States and in the Caribbean.
16 Part of the challenge for the United
17 States, part of the challenge for the Caribbean will
18 be how to balance the action in regard to democracy
19 and democratic practices, on the one hand, and
20 security and law enforcement on the other hand. The
21 balancing act relating to democracy, the area of
22 convergence, there's a balance in that which the
23 United States is going to be going through, has begun
24 to go through, and which Caribbean countries are also
25 themselves going to go through.
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1 Now my good friend de Tocqueville also
2 spoke about the challenge of democracy in the context
3 of conflict, and I want to share with you a couple of
4 lines, things which I think are germane to the
5 discussion about the balance between security and
6 democracy in the 21st century, things that are germane
7 to the discussion in any part of the world where
8 there's a democratic interest post-9/11.
9 “No protracted war can fail to endanger
10 the freedom of a democratic country. War does not
11 always give over democratic communities to military
12 government, but it must invariably and immeasurably
13 increase the powers of civil government. It must also
14 compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and
15 the management of all things in the hands of the
16 administration. War does not lead to despotism by
17 some violence. It prepares men far more gently by
18 their habits for despotism.
19 All those who seek to destroy the
20 liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that
21 war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish
22 it.” Way back in the 19th century, de Tocqueville was
23 warning us of the consequences for a democracy as you
24 engage war, wars which democracies will find difficult
25 to start and to win.
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1 Part of the conflict in which we are
2 engaged is that balancing act between democracy and
3 security. It's a point of convergence for the
4 Caribbean. It's a point of interest for the United
5 States.
6 Now geopolitics is certainly relevant, and
7 I'm only going to take one minute to talk about this.
8 If you ask yourself, what is the relevance of
9 geopolitical analysis for the Caribbean, for the
10 United States and the Caribbean, a number of things
11 readily come to mind. The United States has a variety
12 of interests in the natural resources which help to
13 fuel the American economy coming from the Caribbean.
14 We all hear of the significant amount of
15 Middle East petroleum that we get from the United
16 States, but we sometimes forget that a good 40 percent
17 of American petroleum products come from Trinidad and
18 Tobago and Venezuela. A significant proportion of the
19 liquified natural gas consumed in the United States
20 comes from Trinidad and Tobago. We sometimes do not
21 remember that the bauxite, which is so critical to
22 many of the industries in the United States, comes
23 from Suriname, comes from Guyana, and comes from other
24 parts of the Caribbean.
25 In other words, there are interests in
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1 geopolitical resource terms for the United States and
2 the Caribbean. Not only do we have petroleum
3 products, but I was reminding a friend last week that
4 one of the largest refineries of Middle Eastern
5 petroleum is in the Western Hemisphere, is in the
6 Caribbean, the United States Virgin Islands. So not
7 only do we have production of crude and refining, but
8 in the American interests in the Caribbean having to
9 do with geopolitical resource value, places in the
10 region are critical to refining of American used
11 products.
12 Not to be, I think, outdone in importance
13 is the importance of the sea lanes of communication.
14 True, the Panama Canal is now relatively less
15 important than it was 50 years ago, but it is still
16 important, not only important to the United States,
17 but important to American allies. A significant
18 amount of Chile's trade goes through the Panama Canal.
19 There is value of the sea lanes of communication.
20 The Panama Canal, Windward Passage, Mona Passage,
21 Florida Straits, all those things are important.
22 And all those things are vulnerable to
23 attacks. People who are looking to attack you
24 sometimes try to get you through your cousin or your
25 brother or your neighbor. The Caribbean is part of
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1 the neighborhood of the United States, and Caribbean
2 countries are vulnerable to attacks on the United
3 States simply because of the neighborhood in which we
4 live.
5 The collateral damage, then, is likely to
6 be significant not only in economic terms, but if the
7 terrorists decided to perpetrate action abroad
8 panoply, the Caribbean countries risk getting a
9 significant amount of that damage.
10 What I'm saying, then, as I try to
11 conclude my remarks is that there are reasons why the
12 United States should be interested in the Caribbean in
13 reasons way and above the fact that it's our front
14 yard or our back yard, reasons that have to do with
15 the context of the 9/11 conflict and reasons that have
16 to do with the convergence that the United States and
17 Caribbean countries have on issues of democracy, on
18 issues of geopolitics, on issues of geoeconomics, on
19 the issues of geonarcotics, which we didn't have time
20 to go into much.
21 Convergence suggests the need for
22 cooperation, and we heard from Jim points of
23 cooperation, points of operational convergence, in
24 which the United States and Caribbean countries have
25 been engaging since 9/11. Cooperation and
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1 multilateralism is a difficult thing sometimes, partly
2 because it's incremental, partly because it is time-
3 consuming, partly because in the context of the United
4 States and the Caribbean, we are talking about
5 asymmetric powers, very big United States, the
6 Leviathan of the North, and very small countries, St.
7 Kitts and Nevis being the second and the smallest
8 state in the Western Hemisphere.
9 Convergence, cooperation are all
10 important, but they often mean that we've got to take
11 pause at not only what we do, but how we do it.
12 There's a thin line sometimes between cooperation and
13 dictation, and sometimes walking that thin line as you
14 balance democracy and security is something you ought
15 to remember a little more carefully.
16 Let me end, Thomaz, by leaving with you
17 another little sentence from my friend Alexis de
18 Tocqueville. So much of what we are engaged in right
19 now has been written about by great thinkers in the
20 world of politics before our time. It is something
21 that he was thinking about, about transformations in
22 the social context. What we are engaged in here right
23 now is transformation in our social context, in our
24 political context, in our economic context.
25 This is what he says on page 247, as I
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1 wind myself down: "The political world is
2 metamorphosed. New remedies must henceforth be sought
3 for the new directions we need to take." Thank you.
4 DR. da COSTA: Thank you, Ivelaw.
5 As I try to go through all my notes here
6 and try to figure out what is the question that our
7 two speakers invite us to reflect, what I can see
8 immediately is the challenge, the urgency, that policy
9 must respond and then we see perhaps this operation of
10 convergency clearly illustrated in the four proposals
11 or four policy elements that maybe I could use the
12 word "F" of flow, and Ivelaw bringing to us an issue
13 of this post-9/11 where we are trying to figure out
14 what is the conceptual convergency, especially
15 regarding attitudes in conducting the new
16 international politics associated with internal
17 impacts and politics.
18 But certainly what I would like to do now
19 is to invite you with your questions for our speakers
20 and also with your challenges to their presentations
21 and their arguments here. So please identify yourself
22 and be brief, but be generous with your inquisition.
23 Thank you.
24 Candidates? Tony, please.
25 DR. MAINGOT: I'm already getting some
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1 critique before I even say anything from by co-
2 partner.
3 I want to ask James Cason, whose
4 presentation I very much enjoyed for its
5 comprehensiveness, I want to ask the following: Three
6 times you said that Cuba was the exception to the
7 Caribbean. Now it turns out we have a folk saying:
8 “Talking to your daughter-in-law so your neighbor can
9 hear.” The question is, does that neighbor want to
10 hear?
11 What I am going toward is the following:
12 I have been in the Dominican Republican most of last
13 month, and I was impressed with the fact that
14 Dominicans look at the Cuban responses as providing an
15 opening. They talk about, for instance, the big
16 demonstracion contra el terrorismo, which CNN carried,
17 mass gathering, and they note the evident presence of
18 a lot of American flags in the audience.
19 Now it might very well be that the
20 government of Cuba has not responded in the same way
21 as the other governments in the Caribbean, but I would
22 note that the way the governments of Brazil and Mexico
23 responded is not the way their people feel about this.
24 The polls show that very clearly.
25 I'm wondering if our ears, as you say in
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1 Spanish, as regard to Cuba, are still not frozen in
2 the Cold War, that we are not picking up on what Lord
3 Palmerston said when he said that Britain has no
4 eternal enemies, no eternal friends, only eternal
5 interests, and whether we might be losing some of our
6 possible interest by having eternal enemies.
7 MR. CASON: I think you're seeing
8 throughout the world a lot of rethinking of
9 relationships. I think if you look at the discussions
10 we're having with Syrians and others that have been
11 sponsors of terrorism in the past, who have offered a
12 lot of cooperation in terms of September 11th, I think
13 you see I think Cuba lost a good opportunity, if they
14 wanted to show that they were against terrorism, if
15 they wanted to help get themselves off the terrorist
16 list, they could have done a lot more in terms of the
17 fulsomeness of their state declarations.
18 They were very equivocal. They did
19 express concerns of the American people, but spent
20 most of the time in their statements talking about all
21 the things that happened to Cuba, and of course didn't
22 refer to all the things that Cuba did over the years
23 in terms of sponsoring terrorism.
24 So I think they lost an opportunity. They
25 could have done a lot more, been a lot more vocal, a
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1 lot more along the lines of what the Bahamians and
2 others have said. I think it's too bad, but I don't
3 think they did themselves any favor by the way they
4 came out with their public statements.
5 And the fact remains that Cuba still
6 harbors a lot of fugitives from U.S. justice who we
7 still are looking for. They could do a lot in terms
8 of turning over terrorists that are residing there,
9 the ties with the FARC, the ELN, ETA, IRA that are
10 still there. They did quickly ratify the treaties
11 afterwards, but up until September 11th they basically
12 did not sign most of those treaties.
13 So I think they could have -- we don't
14 know what the Cuban people think because they aren't
15 allowed to come out and say it in a way that we can
16 hear always, but there probably is a big difference
17 between what the Cuban people think and what the Cuban
18 government statements have said.
19 DR. da COSTA: Thank you.
20 AMB. COWAL: Hi. I'm Sally Cowal from the
21 Cuba Policy Foundation. Just one question to follow
22 up on what you said, Jim, and that's, how many
23 countries in the Caribbean or in the Hemisphere have
24 ratified all of those terrorism things before
25 September 11th and how many have ratified them now?
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1 MR. CASON: I have a chart of sort of
2 who's done what and where we stand right now. The
3 U.S. had ratified 97 percent. There were two that we
4 haven't, and the Administration has asked the Congress
5 to get to work on those right away. Trinidad and
6 Tobago I said was 100 percent. Cuba is now at 100
7 percent. But it ranges from a low of St. Kitts at 9
8 percent of the treaties up to Trinidad at 100 percent.
9 So I think the important thing is that
10 this is --
11 MS. COWAL: And Cuba is at 100 percent?
12 MR. CASON: And Cuba is at 100 percent
13 now, that's right. I think our goal is to get, and I
14 think the OAS goal is to get, everybody to 100
15 percent. Now that's the least you can do, is sign up
16 to international conventions of which there are 13.
17 So that's one of the litmus tests of the degree of the
18 willingness to cooperate.
19 I think from what we're seeing -- and we
20 monitor this daily -- lots of legislatures have now
21 given renewed thought to these. So there's movement
22 across the board on this.
23 MR. NELSON: Dick Nelson, Atlantic
24 Council.
25 Jim, are we also looking at, since we've
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1 ratified these treaties, about getting our own house
2 in order with regard to terrorists in the United
3 States, IRA, people accused of the bombings in the
4 hotel in Havana, and stuff like that?
5 MR. CASON: I hope so, but I mean that's a
6 crime. Terrorist acts are a crime in the United
7 States, and I think if they can make the case, they
8 will, but I really can't comment more on that, but
9 that should be the goal.
10 MS. LANDAU: Anya Landau, Center for
11 International Policy. I have a couple of questions
12 for Mr. Cason.
13 One, I would be interested in what
14 cooperation in specific -- you mentioned that Syria
15 has offered, and I wonder whether it's not in a
16 position to offer more information than perhaps the
17 Cubans. I'm also curious whether you're aware that
18 the Columbian government still maintains that, in
19 fact, Cuba is helpful in the peace process?
20 MR. CASON: With just about all the
21 countries of the world, we are trying to get as much
22 intelligence cooperation on the Al Qaeda organization,
23 the individuals that we think or now know that were
24 involved in the 9/11 events. Sudan has come very far,
25 for example. I don't know the specifics, and probably
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1 wouldn't be able to talk about them, if I did, in
2 terms of what Syria has offered, but this is part of
3 the sort of rethinking and new opportunities that have
4 come since September 11th. A lot of the countries
5 that we were not dealing with before in terms of
6 cooperation, we're finding a new willingness to
7 cooperate with us. So that's what I was trying to
8 point out with that.
9 Sure, Cuba's part of the group that's
10 honchoing the peace process in Columbia. On the other
11 hand, some of the people that were involved with bomb
12 making were resident in Cuba. Now whether that means
13 that the Cuban government knew about it, I don't know.
14 I'm just saying that one of the reasons we continue
15 to keep Cuba on the terrorist list, state-sponsored
16 terrorist list, is the fact that they are harboring
17 people who have been indicted in the United States and
18 are wanted for terrorism. So that's the main point.
19 DR. da COSTA: In the back there. I
20 thought there was someone in the back there. Go
21 ahead.
22 DR. NUCCIO: I'm Rick Nuccio with the Pell
23 Center. I do not have a question about Cuba.
24 (Laughter.)
25 Or a comment about Cuba.
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1 I'm going to violate your request,
2 Professor Griffith, and direct a question to you.
3 DR. GRIFFITH: You're not going to get a
4 vacation doing it.
5 (Laughter.)
6 DR. NUCCIO: I'm sorry. I already live in
7 Newport, Rhode Island. We can offer vacations in
8 Newport if needed.
9 (Laughter.)
10 I agreed very much with looking back to
11 wiser heads than ours to try to give some context, and
12 I was struck by a couple of things you read from de
13 Tocqueville. It's been a long time since I read that
14 book. My edition is probably about the age of yours,
15 but I'm not sure I've read it since college or
16 graduate school days.
17 But I got a different meaning from that
18 passage, the first one I think it was that you read,
19 that democratic peoples, which I think is how I maybe
20 would translate democracies, democratic peoples have a
21 hard time starting wars and ending wars. Then later
22 you changed the word "end" to mean win. But I
23 understood that quote differently, that democracies
24 have a hard time starting wars because we depend on
25 mass mobilization, and there's a kind of resistance in
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1 democratic societies to going to war unless very, very
2 great principles are at stake or direct threats are
3 perceived, which is certainly the case we find
4 ourselves in now.
5 But we similarly have trouble ending wars,
6 not because we have trouble winning them, but because
7 we have trouble defining the goal of the war as
8 anything short of a kind of millennial solution to all
9 the world's problems, which is the basis on which we
10 fought at least the two successful wars of that
11 century, World War I and World War II.
12 This brings me to another reflection on
13 your quotes, which is the cost in a democratic society
14 of a perpetual state of war for civil liberties, for
15 basic democratic processes, and that we are apparently
16 about to enter another period, this one defined at the
17 beginning as probably not having an end by the
18 policymakers who are directing the effort. At first
19 it was talked about as a couple of years. Then it was
20 in our lifetime; maybe this will never end, the war
21 against terrorism.
22 This follows on another exceptional period
23 of roughly 50 years of the Cold War in which we self-
24 consciously, at least at some points, acknowledged
25 that we were in an exceptional period that required
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1 extra constitutional measures. I consider one of them
2 to be the 1947 National Security Act that set up our
3 entire National Security Council, the CIA, and other
4 parts of the intelligence apparatus to be such a
5 constitutional exception.
6 So I guess I'm throwing this back at you
7 to ask you if you would reflect on my reflection on
8 some of your quotations.
9 DR. GRIFFITH: Before we start the
10 reflecting thing, let me see if I can say a word on
11 the question posed to Jim on Cuba. I find it
12 sometimes helpful to say, look at what statements
13 governments have made, but also look to see what
14 statements they have not made. I find that for the
15 state of Cold War, which I think correctly
16 characterizes United States/Cuban relations for the
17 last number of years, the fact that you didn't have
18 the Cuban government coming out with condemnation over
19 America's action in the last couple of 11 days, 12
20 days in the Middle East is also cause for pause and
21 interest. It's not only what the governments have
22 said; it is also what they have not said by way of
23 condemning United States action I think is also
24 important.
25 I think it's also important in looking at
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1 a Cuba and a United States equation to see that, while
2 Cuba has been on the American state-sponsored
3 terrorism list for a number of years, Cuba itself has
4 also been a victim of terrorism, some of the terrorism
5 perpetrated, organized, funded from the Republic in
6 which I live, Miami. So they are victims, too.
7 October the 6th this year marked the 25th
8 anniversary of a terrorist incident in the Caribbean
9 where Cubans were victims, where people from the
10 country I was born were victims, where North Koreans
11 were victims, the Cuban air disaster.
12 So the victim syndrome is there as well in
13 Cuba. It's interesting to know that they, themselves,
14 see themselves as victims of terrorism.
15 I also think it's important to partly
16 answer Tony's question about United States relations
17 with Cuba post-9/11. I think it is frozen in Cold War
18 contexts: the unwillingness to openly acknowledge
19 that there's an opportunity publicly to engage Cuba to
20 another level. I am sure that there is engagement
21 privately. I would not be surprised -- and I know Jim
22 is not going to tell us, even if you give him a trip
23 to Vermont or Rhode Island, he's not going to tell us
24 (laughter) -- I would not be surprised if there isn't
25 cooperation and intelligence with regard to terrorism
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1 between the United States and Cuba.
2 Therefore, General Sheehan of the Atlantic
3 Command once said years ago before he retired, "If
4 people in Miami knew how much cooperation happens
5 between Cuba and the United States, they would burn
6 the whole Miami down." Part of the domestic politics
7 of the United States perhaps prevents the American
8 government from being public about the levels of
9 cooperation we have with Cuba, as perhaps we have in
10 cooperation with Syria and other so-called terrorist
11 states.
12 I didn't change the words, Rich. He did
13 talk about beginning and ending, and he did talk about
14 the difficulties of democracies doing that. There are
15 parts of the discussion where he talks about
16 democratic peoples, about some of the dilemmas of
17 democracies engaging in conflict, for some of the
18 reasons you mentioned, but for some other larger
19 reasons, reasons that have to do with the democratic
20 neighborhood, reasons that have to do with the pursuit
21 of the economy of development. Democracies don't want
22 to jeopardize those elements of good nationhood once
23 they launch on nationhood paths, and war, conflicts,
24 especially the long conflicts, have the capacity to
25 jeopardize that happening.
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1 There is cause for concern perhaps, I
2 think rightly so espoused by you, about the open-ended
3 definition of the conflict the United States is
4 engaged in, but I see part of the statements on the
5 part of President Bush and the leadership team as
6 itself playing on the psychology of Americans who need
7 to be told that this great power is doing something,
8 who need to be told that this great power is doing
9 something in an unconventional warfare.
10 You know, part of the transnationality
11 itself is reflected here. Even if you suspect that
12 part of the transnational organization and management
13 is in State "X", you can't eliminate State "X" because
14 State "X" is not a defined enemy of yours. So you've
15 got to find ways of letting your publics, your
16 American publics, know that you are doing something,
17 but you want to temper the expectations of quick
18 victory or you want to temper the expectations of
19 bringing justice by creating ambiguities.
20 Part of the "it may be a long war," "it
21 may be perpetual" is part of the ambiguity. Now that
22 ambiguity can come back to haunt the American publics
23 because that ambiguity is going to be linked with some
24 of the larger limitations on democracy and civil
25 rights. How much longer am I going to have every
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1 toothbrush I have in my travel suitcase be subjected
2 to scrutiny five times as an American person? How
3 much longer am I going to have to hear that the
4 likelihood of X, Y, Z taxes on my ticket is going to
5 be there? How much longer am I going to be able to
6 not go anyplace and not remember to take my driver's
7 license with me? In other words, the tolerance level
8 of the American publics or any democracy's publics is
9 going to be tested with that perpetual state of war.
10 So, particularly for me, that this is an
11 unconventional, non-traditional raises even greater
12 risks about democracy's solid state because you've got
13 to redefine the conventionality in a variety of
14 respects. You've got to redefine -- and Colin Powell
15 and President Bush have been making the point that
16 this is not only about military assets, it's about
17 economic assets. It's not only about military assets,
18 it's about American economic assets of American
19 citizens.
20 I remind people very often in relation to
21 the Caribbean that Caribbean countries we are offshore
22 financing is an important part of the economic
23 buoyancy. Also, banking was not designed for money
24 laundering by drug guys. It was designed with a
25 complicity of British and the United States interests
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1 as a way of having people shelter their money, good
2 guys. The good guys are going to be implicated in
3 this. Big companies, big banks who have got interests
4 in offshore financing are implicated in this.
5 To what extent is the American public
6 willing to jeopardize the interest of American
7 citizens by having a perpetual state of war, which is
8 unconventional, which is non-traditional? What I'm
9 saying in some respects is that there are things that
10 de Tocqueville spoke about which part of our
11 circumstances because not just democratic peoples or
12 democracies, by the way in which they define their
13 interests, are going to be subjected to scrutiny, but
14 by virtue of the fact that this is a slightly
15 different kind of conflict, there's a greater premium
16 placed on how you balance the creation between
17 tolerance of democratic and civil liberties and rights
18 and how you safeguard, protect people in this
19 security.
20 There, I think, is no one answer for this.
21 We've begun to see some of the redefinition along the
22 lines of 1947 of new architectures for security. We
23 are hearing on the grapevine, some of us who are the
24 security grapevine, that not only is the homeland
25 defense is going to be an important part of that
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1 architecture, but some of the unified commands may be
2 redefined out of existence.
3 People in the part of the world that I
4 live in know of SOUTHCOM, and there's a lot of
5 "noise", as the psychologists call it, about a
6 redefinition out of existence of SOUTHCOM as part of
7 the redefinition of how you do your architecture. So
8 I can really imagine in the next couple of years vis-
9 a-vis 1947 all the architecture, superstructure, and
10 otherwise you're going to see a redefinition, but it's
11 this unconventionality at large, a greater premium on
12 the stress that democracies and the democratic people
13 I think will go through.
14 DR. COLL: Thank you. I'm Alberto Coll
15 from the Naval War College. I have a question for Mr.
16 Cason, following up the comments made by Mr. Griffith.
17 Would the United States Government be
18 willing to explore a diplomatic deal with Cuba in
19 which we would ask the Cuban government to return to
20 us some of those fugitives there who fled to Cuba in
21 the 1970's for crimes committed here in the United
22 States, and exchange for Cuba handing over those
23 fugitives, we would extradite to Cuba Orlando Bosch?
24 As you know, Orlando Bosch is free today.
25 Mr. Griffith reminded us about this terrorist incident
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1 in 1976. Until September 11th, this was the largest
2 civilian aircraft act of terrorism in the Western
3 Hemisphere. Seventy-three innocent people died.
4 The Attorney General of the United States
5 described Mr. Bosch as a reformed terrorist, and a
6 Deputy Attorney General went on to say, for 30 years
7 Bosch as been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy
8 of terrorist violence. He has repeatedly expressed
9 and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate
10 injury and death.
11 Would we be willing to explore such a
12 deal?
13 MR. CASON: To be frank, I can't answer
14 that question because I don't run Cuba policy. I'm in
15 Planning and Policy, but I think Cuba could always
16 offer to return the terrorists that we've been asking
17 them to return for a long time, and then we could see
18 what happens.
19 But I can't comment on that, because I
20 don't know the details of the indictments in the
21 United States and the status of the extradition
22 treaties, and so on, whether it could happen, but
23 everything is possible. I think there are a lot of
24 things Cuba could do to get itself off the state
25 terrorism list.
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1 DR. COLL: And are there things that we
2 would prepare to do also? I mean, in diplomacy, as
3 you know, there has to be give and take. In this case
4 it seems like a very fair deal. We get some
5 terrorists back; they get a terrorist back.
6 MR. CASON: I don't know the answer to
7 that.
8 MR. KASPEROWICZ: Hi. Pete Kasperowicz
9 with Cuba Trader. It's, unfortunately, another Cuba
10 question, I guess, and sort of a follow up.
11 I was curious if Mr. Cason could tell us a
12 little bit on where Cuba is on helping to track
13 terrorist financing and also the idea of criminalizing
14 terrorism. Assuming that they're not cooperating --
15 again, it follows up his question -- what does this
16 change? I mean, can we live with this or do we need
17 to engage them a little or do we need to invade?
18 Where on the spectrum -- what does it do to U.S.
19 policy, assuming it's important to get their
20 cooperation or to force their cooperation somehow?
21 MR. CASON: In terms of 9/11 and the
22 people that might have been involved in it, I mean,
23 anybody that has information should provide it.
24 Obviously, that follows up in United Nations
25 resolutions. If there are funds in Cuba -- I have no
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1 idea if there are -- they ought to come forward and
2 let us know what they know. If there are people that
3 they think were involved based on the names that are
4 coming out of the United Nations of the organizations
5 and the names that have been in the press, they ought
6 to come forward. That would be a great gesture.
7 I don't know if they are tracking -- the
8 matrix we have under Cuba in terms of freezing assets,
9 we don't have any indication. So I don't know whether
10 we don't have the information, because I don't follow
11 this on Cuban affairs on a daily basis, but it's all
12 blank. But we really don't know.
13 I mean, we're not finding a lot of
14 terrorist money in the Hemisphere. It seems to me
15 more a place where money is collected and sent out,
16 rather than received to do operations. The amount of
17 money that international terrorists need is not the
18 hundreds of millions, but tens of millions of dollars.
19 So how much is out there, where is it, usually it
20 tends to go to deep banking systems where you can hide
21 it a lot, but whether Cuba has discovered any of this
22 I don't know. They haven't told us.
23 DR. da COSTA: Thank you. Sherry has a
24 question.
25 DR. GRAY: This is just a quick question
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1 and reflects my ignorance about the region. But, as I
2 understand it, there is a large Muslim population
3 within the region. What are the connections, if any,
4 between that population and what we're looking at with
5 the networks, including Al Qaeda?
6 MR. CASON: I think most of the historic
7 immigration of people from the Middle East to Latin
8 America were Christians, I mean basically from the
9 area around Bethlehem. Certainly in the places where
10 I've served -- and I've been in 12 countries --
11 they've been Christians.
12 There are, of course, on borders in Maicao
13 between Columbia and Maracaibo and in the tri-border
14 area, there are more recent immigrants. I think the
15 groups that are there tend to be raising funds for
16 Hamas and Hezbollah, but we don't know of any Al Qaeda
17 cells in the sense of fixed organizations in the
18 Hemisphere. It doesn't mean they're not there. We
19 didn't know a lot about the organization before
20 September 11th.
21 So I think the answer is that most of the
22 groups tend to be Christian. The vast majority have
23 been for a long time. Most of them, for example, in
24 Honduras, have been there since the end of the Ottoman
25 Empire. So I don't think you're going to see large
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1 numbers of radical Islamic terrorists stemming from
2 that.
3 DR. GRIFFITH: If I can just make a quick
4 comment on Jim's answer, if you were to go to the
5 archipelago, however, you would find that there is a
6 significant non-Christian component. You would find
7 that there are places in the Caribbean per se where
8 the religious persuasion is varied, and Christianity
9 is a small proportion. If you go to Guyana, you will
10 find that there are more non-Christians than
11 Christians. A significant part of the non-Christians
12 is Muslims. Muslims and Hindu are much more -- I
13 suspect it's the same thing in Trinidad or Tobago
14 where the immigration patterns bringing in the
15 religious persuasion have been a little different.
16 But notwithstanding the fact that there
17 are fairly numerous pockets of non-Christians, I don't
18 have any sense that there is an overt affiliation on
19 the part of the Muslims, for example, in Trinidad and
20 Tobago. The press in Ft. Lauderdale was trying to
21 make a play between Jamat al Muslimeen and Al Qaeda in
22 the sense that some money was given to Libya 10 years
23 ago. I think there's a lot of anecdotal, whimsical,
24 sensationalistic linkage, but I don't have any
25 indication that there's a strong terrorist.
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1 What I suspect, and I know it is happening
2 in many parts of the region, though, is the
3 convergence of religion, which is creating reactions
4 different among some people, and the governments.
5 There is not sympathy for the terrorists, bin Laden,
6 but people who are Muslim in Trinidad and Tobago, who
7 are Muslim in Guyana or who are Muslim elsewhere, are
8 saying: "My religion is being attacked. I'm not
9 necessarily going to go join, as the Pakistanis have
10 been doing, the war, but I don't like Islam being
11 attacked." So there is a mixed landscape both of
12 religious constituencies and responses among people
13 who are non-Christian, my thinking is.
14 DR. da COSTA: I'm going to extend another
15 five minutes because we've got three questions. In
16 the back there, please, and then you and then Tony.
17 Go ahead.
18 MR. MANAIGO: Aaron Manaigo, Fenner, Gray
19 and Associates.
20 Mr. Cason and Mr. Griffith both, I would like
21 for you to touch on this point, if you can. Mr.
22 Cason, you briefly touched on criminal deportees. I
23 know that about 90 days ago or so the Supreme Court
24 issued a ruling that said that the United States could
25 no longer hold illegal aliens that have been jailed
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1 indefinitely, and that there has to be some type of
2 methodology introduced to allow these individuals to
3 have due process.
4 In such, I assume that some will be freed.
5 Being considered non-desirable by the United States
6 after such time, they will have to be, I guess,
7 deported back to their home country. Many instances
8 their home country will not want to accept them back
9 into that country.
10 My contention is that these people in many
11 instances have been Americanized. Where they are
12 criminals and have been engaged in illegal activity,
13 drugs or other types of illicit dealings, that you
14 would be basically introducing a sophisticated
15 criminal now into a -- I don't know if I could use the
16 term maybe "unsophisticated" -- a policing system back
17 in many of these countries, particularly in the
18 Caribbean.
19 If we're considering the Caribbean to now
20 be a strategic third border to the United States, and
21 where in many instances these individuals have no real
22 ties to these homelands -- they may have left there
23 when they were children or family members that they
24 did know are no longer alive; they have no real means
25 of income, et cetera. Wouldn't these individuals,
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1 then, be ripe to be picked off by potential terrorists
2 and other drug traffickers to then begin to bring that
3 whole type of a sophisticated criminal presence into
4 that land? What would you propose we do to start
5 dealing with this issue now, as opposed to later?
6 DR. da COSTA: Can we have two more
7 questions?
8 MS. COWAL: I'll withdraw.
9 DR. da COSTA: Okay, thank you.
10 Tony, do you have something?
11 DR. MAINGOT: I'll include it in my
12 statement this afternoon.
13 DR. da COSTA: Okay, thank you very much.
14 DR. MAINGOT: The Syrian-Lebanese
15 community I think is a very serious one.
16 DR. da COSTA: Okay, thank you very much.
17 MR. SMITH: Wayne Smith, Center for
18 International Policy.
19 Just a quick comment on the Islamic
20 populations, I think the largest Jewish community
21 outside the United States and Israel is in Argentina.
22 Argentina also has a large Islamic population. I can
23 remember President Menem, who had been Islamic and
24 then converted to Catholicism so that he could be the
25 President.
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1 As the economic situation deteriorates in
2 Argentina, and given the present world situation, our
3 war against bin Laden, and so forth, I would be a
4 little concerned about that Islamic population in
5 Argentina. Just a comment.
6 MR. CASON: Well, I think we are concerned
7 about the tri-border area, because of all the areas
8 where you might see some connection with September
9 11th or certainly international terrorism, that's one
10 of the key areas. So everybody is concerned about
11 that. I was reflecting on places that I live and the
12 nature of the Middle East immigrant community there.
13 I would be happy to talk about the
14 criminal deportee issue because I've heard your
15 argument before. When I was in Jamaica, we decided to
16 try to get some hard statistical data on this, and we
17 went back for five years and took every criminal
18 deportee that came back, 6,100 of them, and did a
19 statistical analysis to get at the argument that we're
20 taking babes in arms into our decadent culture and
21 making criminals out of them.
22 Our results of that study was that the
23 average deportee is a 34-year-old male who entered the
24 U.S. at the age of 23. Most of them got involved in
25 drugs and were deported after about five years. Very
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1 few of them entered as young people. In fact, in
2 Jamaica, when we discussed this with the police and I
3 personally went to the Office of the Statistician, we
4 found out that 50 percent of those that were returning
5 on criminal deportee flights had criminal records
6 before they left.
7 So I don't buy the argument that they come
8 up to the United States and become schooled and become
9 advanced criminals. Great numbers were before, and
10 they get through because we don't do criminal checks
11 on non-immigrant visa applicants. Lots of them enter
12 without inspection.
13 In the United States to a great extent
14 these criminals live in their own communities. So I
15 don't buy the argument. The numbers that are returned
16 as a portion of those that are allowed into the United
17 States is very, very generous, the number of people
18 from the Caribbean that are allowed into the United
19 States. Very few get involved in criminal activity.
20 In fact, the numbers have dropped in
21 fiscal year 2001. Take, for example, Jamaica. There
22 were 378 criminal removals versus 1,300 the year
23 before. So the numbers are dropping.
24 Jamaica takes back most of the criminal
25 deportees. One of the reasons is that they brought up
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1 two police officers to serve as liaisons with the
2 courts and get any information that people need in
3 Jamaica to track, if they so choose, the returnees.
4 Most of them that are coming back are not
5 murderers. They've been involved in drug trafficking
6 with arms-related offenses.
7 So I think, based on the only country that
8 I can talk to specifically, Jamaica, the myth is a
9 myth. It doesn't mean that there aren't some that
10 come up as children of immigrants and get involved in
11 criminal activity, but the vast majority are adults
12 when they show up, adults when they committed their
13 crimes, served their sentences, and went back.
14 DR. da COSTA: Ivelaw?
15 DR. GRIFFITH: Sometimes when I hear
16 statistics, I'm reminded of Mark Twain. "There are
17 lies, damn lies, and statistics." Because you can use
18 statistics -- you know, statistics do a whole bunch of
19 things.
20 I think Jim's statistics are correct for
21 Jamaica. Jamaica, however, is not the single largest
22 country to which deportees are sent in the Caribbean.
23 That country is the Dominican Republic. If you did a
24 statistical analysis of who they are, you find a
25 different profile altogether.
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1 But I think there are a couple of things
2 that one can say about the deportees issue. One of
3 them is that the issue of the deportees reinforces for
4 me the absence of a divide between domestic politics
5 and international politics. There's a term that's
6 about a decade old now in political science called
7 "intermestics," things where you've got a connections
8 between things domestic and things international.
9 What you see with the deportees issue is a
10 press on the part of American domestic constituencies
11 in relation to crime, in relation overcrowded prisons,
12 to do something about crime, to do something about
13 criminality, to do something about criminal justice.
14 So what do you do as a response? You look at the cold
15 heart of your criminals who come from elsewhere and
16 you send them back.
17 Now from the vantage point of the
18 receiving country, it's not a great thing, but for the
19 receiving country, whether it's Jamaica or the
20 Dominican Republic or El Salvador, which also in the
21 sense of American context has been a huge deportation,
22 largely the Dominican Republic, it raises some of the
23 challenges of statehood.
24 If you're a big boy and an independent country,
25 you've got to honor some of the obligations of your
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1 statehood. If you have a citizen from your country
2 who's been exported or deported from another country,
3 where he's getting some form of refuge or domicile
4 under what status, you as a state are obligated to
5 take him back. I think what Caribbean countries and
6 Central American countries have been having is
7 variations of the challenge of statehood, and the
8 deportee issue is one of those dramatic episodes of
9 how difficult it could be to be a big boy, if you're a
10 big boy called Jamaica, where you've got obligations
11 of statehood.
12 Some of the challenges of obligation of
13 statehood are being played out right now in the United
14 States/Guyana relations. The United States gave
15 Guyana a list, I think, first, of 141. Guyana said,
16 no, we're not taking them. The United States response
17 was to suspend, or at least threaten -- I don't
18 believe they've done the suspension -- they're going
19 to suspend any visas from Guyanese officials traveling
20 to the United States, not even to come through the
21 United States. We are going to have these strong-arm
22 tactics. Now Guyana relented. Part of the challenge
23 is how you manage that statehood.
24 But the deportee issue is not an issue
25 only for Caribbean countries. May 9, 1997 was an
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1 historic date for United States/Central American
2 relations. May 10, 1997 was an historic for
3 U.S./Caribbean relations. On May 9 and May 10,
4 Clinton went to Costa Rica on the 9th. He met with
5 Central American presidents. He went to Barbados May
6 10, met with Caribbean presidents and prime ministers.
7 The top of the agenda at both summits was deportation,
8 criminal deportations. It's a clear and present
9 danger for countries in Central America: Guatemala,
10 Salvador, Honduras, among the top numbers where
11 deportations are held, and in the Caribbean countries.
12 One of the things I think has been a
13 positive out of those summits for deportation is an
14 improvement in the management of it. How do you tell
15 the country who has to receive that you've got these
16 people coming back; here are some data about them?
17 One country in our Hemisphere chartered a plane and
18 just dumped the deportees in the soil of this country
19 and took off. Now I don't think that is best
20 practices among international relations. So
21 management has improved a little bit.
22 There is a certain amount of culpability
23 in the Caribbean country side and Central American
24 country side in processing. Now they sometimes don't
25 like to hear that when you go to the Caribbean, but
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1 sometimes Caribbean countries and the embassies in
2 Washington, and Jamaica has done something appreciably
3 different to manage. There is culpability on the side
4 of the Caribbean countries also.
5 It's one those issues that can sour
6 relations as you fight other things, as you fight
7 terrorism, as you fight transnational organized crime.
8 It's one of those in domestic episodes that
9 challenges the sovereignty capacity of Caribbean and
10 Central American states.
11 DR. da COSTA: Thank you, Ivelaw.
12 We still have one more question?
13 DR. GRAY: I think we have to end this.
14 DR. da COSTA: All right. So, anyway, we
15 come to the end here with a very exciting and for the
16 Caribbean a very crucial theme. I would invite, as we
17 finish this session, not just to appreciate the
18 directions the American policy is taking, but also, as
19 you go to your business, to ask a question: To what
20 extent are countries willing to cooperate, not just
21 countries, but as we put here, societies, willing to
22 cooperate in this effort? Are they focusing their
23 attention and their resources or are they just going
24 by trying to reduce costs?
25 I think in a symmetry relationship between
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1 countries, especially the United States and small
2 micro-states in the Caribbean, this is a challenge,
3 not just for those that are willing and have the need
4 to focus on policy decision-making, but also those
5 that will go back and look at the classics and figure
6 out where democracy is going in this process.
7 Thank you for the opportunity. I thank
8 the members of the panel and the audience for your
9 participation.
10 We'll have a short break -- what, 10
11 minutes? -- and we'll be back here with the next panel
12 on Cuba now. Thank you.
13 (Applause.)
14 (Whereupon, the foregoing matter went off
15 the record at 10:51 a.m. and went back on the record
16 at 11:05 a.m.)
17 DR. GRAY: Your presenters await an
18 audience.
19 I'm going to follow Professor da Costa's
20 example and not give a lengthy introduction because we
21 do have biographies on the back of the schedule. I
22 think Dr. Falcoff is well known. So I will just turn
23 that over to you.
24 DR. FALCOFF: Okay, thank you very much.
25 I found fascinating the comment in the
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1 last panel attributed to General Sheehan. I'm not
2 sure that he would agree that he actually said that,
3 but it had a great resonance with me because one of
4 the interesting things about living in Washington is
5 you periodically meet people who work on other areas
6 of the world that you know nothing about, and you're
7 always astounded by the things that you learn from
8 these people, desk officers or different departments
9 of the government who work on unpleasant countries
10 like Syria and Iran, and so on. And you learn that
11 nothing is quite what it seems in the newspapers.
12 In the newspapers we don't have relations;
13 we hate these countries; they hate us, this, that, and
14 the other thing. Meanwhile, however, there's a lot
15 going on below the radar.
16 I'm just thinking of both Syria and Iran.
17 I had occasion to be at a dinner recently with
18 someone who's an Iranian-American lawyer, and he goes
19 back and forth. I was amazed to learn all the things
20 that are going on between the United States and Iran.
21 You certainly never get that impression reading The
22 Washington Post.
23 So, therefore, I'm never too astounded by
24 what I learn about U.S./Cuban relations below the
25 radar, but I hope to learn even more. For that
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1 purpose, we're going to have a panel today with two
2 very capable people.
3 Captain Randy Beardsworth was formerly on
4 the National Security Council staff, but, more to the
5 point, as his CV points out, he had responsibility for
6 all Coast Guard counternarcotics operations in the
7 southeast United States and the Caribbean, which
8 inevitably brought him into contact with a number of
9 people we don't normally think of as being involved in
10 a dialogue with us. I know we'll learn a lot from
11 him. So I welcome him here.
12 And our other panelist, who will
13 immediately follow him, is my good friend, Alberto
14 Coll, who is the Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare
15 Studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport. He
16 is certainly one of the most engaged people in the
17 academic community on Cuban issues, and I know we'll
18 have a great opportunity to learn from his as well.
19 With that, I turn the panel over to
20 Captain Beardsworth.
21 CAPTAIN BEARDSWORTH: Thank you. With the
22 title being "Understanding Current `Functional'
23 Security Relationships with Cuba," I have been in the
24 center of a couple of those functional relationships
25 with Cuba over the years, actually over 27 years. I
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1 recently retired from the Coast Guard with spending
2 about half of my time in the Caribbean and about half
3 of time on ships, some of those or most of those in
4 the Caribbean, dealing with a number of issues.
5 My first command, the first time that I
6 had my own cutter was in Key West in 1976-1987, and I
7 was dealing with some of the issues that we're still
8 dealing with today in terms of migrants and
9 relationships with the Cubans, and so forth.
10 Therefore, the things I'll be talking
11 about are from a practitioner's perspective, from an
12 operator's perspective, from somebody that's been out
13 there working in the real world trying to find
14 solutions to real problems.
15 I happen to believe that policies should
16 protect national interest. This should mitigate
17 future problems. I, obviously, have a Coast Guard
18 bias in what I am going to talk about today. I'll try
19 to expand beyond that, but, clearly, that's what I
20 know the most about.
21 I intend to talk a little bit about
22 overview of what the functional relationships are as I
23 see them. I may miss a few. I'll get into depth on
24 my experience with the Coast Guard functional
25 relationship, and particularly on counterdrugs, and
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1 then I'll talk briefly about future functional
2 relationships and what I see are some opportunities
3 out there and some challenges.
4 I would argue that there are four reasons
5 why we have functional relationships today. The first
6 is necessity or U.S. national interest.
7 The second reason is generally is that
8 these functional relationships are not very
9 controversial.
10 Thirdly, there is a certain element of
11 persistence. The problem has to be there for a
12 lengthy period of time over the years before we
13 finally get around to building the functional
14 relationship that works.
15 Fourthly is that the functional
16 relationships that we currently have can be grouped
17 under the category of border issues. I've heard that
18 term come up more frequently to describe the grouping
19 of relationships that we have, and I kind of like that
20 and I think it holds true.
21 I would also say that there are two
22 reasons why we should have other functional
23 relationships that we may not have. One is to
24 mitigate future problems, to look over the horizon, to
25 look ahead. What are the issues that are going to be
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1 out there? What could we be doing today to mitigate
2 the problems that are going to come up in the future?
3 Lastly is a sixth reason that I don't
4 think will ever catch on, but when we have functional
5 relationships with governments like Cuba, you tend to
6 shine a light in sometimes a dark area, and all types
7 of things are going to scurry out of the way when you
8 shine a light on it and you look at issues.
9 The functional relationships that we have,
10 I'll just run down and comment on a few of them.
11 Certainly the first one that we probably don't think
12 about too often is the Federal Aviation
13 Administration, the air traffic control, the
14 relationship between Havana Center and Miami Center in
15 terms of dealing with aircraft. Even with aircraft
16 security issues, as I understand it -- and I don't
17 have all the facts on it -- but Cuba had to comply
18 with U.S. regulations for airport security before they
19 could resume flying over U.S. airspace after September
20 11th.
21 Another area where we have functional
22 relationships are in the grouping I call weather,
23 science, and the environment. Some of that is sort of
24 an academic relationship. Certainly we have some
25 weather relationships with passing weather
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1 information.
2 But on the environmental level I want to
3 highlight one aspect of that, and that's the maritime
4 environment. Certainly the border between the U.S.
5 and Cuba is the Florida Straits. What happens in the
6 Florida Straits is certainly a border issue.
7 Mike Smith, in the Conservation
8 International, gave a fascinating presentation a while
9 back that a few of us were at talking about some of
10 the reasons that the Florida Straits are important,
11 and I'll get to this sort of at the end of it. But
12 just to whet your appetite on that, the highest
13 concentration of marine biodiversity in the
14 continental United States is along Florida's east,
15 central, and south coasts. This biodiversity is
16 related to organisms, maritime aquatic life south of
17 Cuba as the currents flow up into the Gulf of Mexico,
18 make a loop, come back and form the gulf stream. Then
19 if you start to look at the economy of south Florida,
20 the ecosystems in south Florida and the north coast of
21 Cuba, you begin to see that it's an important
22 environmental issue.
23 Under this sort of broad spectrum of
24 maritime environmental issues, we have established an
25 agreement with the Cubans that defines the boundary of
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1 our EEZ. I think that was under the Carter
2 Administration.
3 There is also a traditional fisheries
4 agreement that has since lapsed. There's an agreement
5 between the Smithsonian and the Cuban Academy of
6 Sciences that is sort of a cover agreement under which
7 various research is done. There has been cooperative
8 research with NOAA vessels, National Oceanic and
9 Atmospheric Administration vessels, into Cuban waters,
10 20 of these such clearances that have Cuban
11 researchers on U.S. vessels doing oceanic research in
12 Cuba and one Cuban vessel that I know of that did
13 research in U.S. waters.
14 Another area of functional relationships
15 is Guantanamo Bay, loosely termed a border issue there
16 in terms of those conversations. I won't say much
17 about that in case Alberto wants to go into that.
18 Then Coast Guard functional relationships.
19 This is where we get into some nuts and bolts. I'll
20 try to give you enough detail to make it interesting
21 without boring you with things that you probably have
22 no interest in.
23 But the scope of the Coast Guard
24 functional relationships are search and rescue, drugs,
25 migration, exile flotillas, oil spills, incidents-at-
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1 sea agreement like we had with the Soviets, return of
2 boats, U.S. boats that end up in Cuba, Cuban boats
3 that end up in the United States, and there are over
4 12 multinational maritime safety agreements to which
5 both the United States and Cuba are signatories.
6 The history of this is after the
7 Revolution and in the sixties, when we cut off
8 diplomatic relationships with Cuba, there was still
9 one of these little telex machines in the back room of
10 our search-and-rescue operation in Miami that we could
11 telex Havana Center, and the Coast Guard continued to
12 use this to work on search-and-rescue cases that
13 happened in the Straits of Florida when a boat was
14 going into Cuban waters, or so forth.
15 This evolved. That machine obviously
16 disappeared. It was overtaken by technology. But we
17 still continued to use a fax machine to talk about
18 issues like search and rescue with the Cubans over the
19 years, going through the FAA or some other system.
20 This system has evolved. The procedures
21 have evolved. It's had its ups and downs. In the
22 nineties, for example, what the Coast Guard could say
23 to the Cubans about functional things was limited. It
24 was subject to an interagency process. It go to be so
25 routine that there were six areas where we could
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1 functionally talk with the Cubans where we didn't have
2 to have a "Mother, may I?" from the State Department
3 to talk to the Cubans, and that was the nature of our
4 relationship, were in these six areas -- mostly search
5 and rescue, occasionally a case-by-case counter-drug
6 incident, a rare fisheries incident. But it was all
7 very carefully managed by the interagency process. It
8 was cumbersome, as I said.
9 Now how did I get into the picture here in
10 dealing with these issues? When I was a few years
11 back at the Kennedy School, Jorge Dominguez had a
12 Cuban scholar visiting for a few months, and he and I
13 got to talking about things that we could do -- this
14 was 1995; it's important to note it was before 1996 --
15 we were talking about things that we could do, that
16 the Coast Guard could do, in terms of confidence-
17 building when U.S/Cuban relationship was such that we
18 could proceed with this.
19 Unfortunately, February 24th came around,
20 Helms-Burton, the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft was
21 shot down. Helms-Burton was implemented, and my
22 acquaintance that I was working on this with in Cuba
23 got exiled into the back waters of academia there.
24 But after that, I went down to Miami to be
25 Chief of Law Enforcement in dealing with growing
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1 migrant problems, drug operations that were tending to
2 push the flow of drugs over and around Cuba, and
3 dealing with exile flotillas, and so forth. That's an
4 area where we had some significant functional
5 relationships.
6 To set the stage and to go into depth a
7 little bit on the counter-drug issues, in 1998 we had
8 been running -- "we," the United States Government --
9 JIATF East, the Joint Interagency Task Force East and
10 the Coast Guard and Customs had been running some
11 significant operations around Puerto Rico, counter-
12 drug operations. This tended to push the flow to
13 paths of least resistance.
14 What we began to see in 1998, I believe it
15 was, was a pattern of airdrops going over Cuba
16 airspace, over the center part of Cuba, into the north
17 coast, dropping cocaine to go-fast boats that were
18 then going up to the Bahamas. The boats would wait
19 there until we could no longer track them. Our
20 aircraft ran out of time, out of fuel. We ran out of
21 assets, and then they would go on up.
22 We observed that the Cubans weren't doing
23 very much about this. This was right after they were
24 just beginning to recover from their periods of
25 austerity, severe austerity.
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1 We also noticed in the first six months of
2 1999 about 30 go-fast boats going from Jamaica, up to
3 the Bahamas, skirting through Cuban waters. We would
4 observe these things, and we'd fax down to the Cubans
5 that a go-fast boat was coming. A go-fast boat does
6 50 miles an hour. It goes a hundred miles in a couple
7 of hours. By the time we wrote up a fax, sent it down
8 to the Cubans, they got it translated, managed to get
9 word to their people, they were unable to effect an
10 end game to interdict the go-fast boats. They tried.
11 We saw them send boats out. They told us they tried,
12 but they weren't getting anywhere.
13 In my poor operational mind, I was pulling
14 my hair out. I said, why can't I pick up the
15 telephone and call them and tell them that they have a
16 problem coming their way; why don't they do something
17 about it?
18 So at some point in that timeframe I wrote
19 up a paper and sent it up the chain of command saying,
20 here's some things that we can do. To cut through
21 some of the details, we, the United States Government,
22 ultimately agreed to respond to the Cubans' request to
23 cooperate a little bit more. I'm not sure if it was a
24 Cuban request or a U.S. request. We sort of felt each
25 other out and decided to talk about it. We came up
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1 with four areas that we thought we could look at.
2 One was to pick up the telephone and talk
3 to them, instead of using a fax machine. Interesting,
4 this conversation we had in June in 1999 with the
5 Cubans was the fourth or fifth such conversation we
6 had had with the Cubans about communications, border
7 issues, if you will, in the previous probably 20
8 years. We had agreed to pick up the telephone five,
9 six, seven years earlier, and we never carried through
10 with that.
11 The second thing that we agreed to do was
12 to coordinate our efforts at sea. We had an incident-
13 at-sea agreement with the Cubans that said that we
14 could talk with each other, so that we didn't run into
15 each other. Now we wanted to expand that so that we
16 could talk with each other in case we were both
17 pursuing the same go-fast boat, we wouldn't run into
18 each other and we could be more effective.
19 We also offered to provide on a case-by-
20 case basis expertise for searching large ships. This
21 came out of a couple ships that the Cubans searched.
22 One famous case, of course, was the Limerick, which
23 I'll be glad at some point to give you some sea
24 stories about.
25 The fourth thing that we talked about was
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1 putting the drug interdiction specialist in Havana to
2 be able to coordinate directly with his counterparts
3 in Cuba to combat drug smuggling. We finally made
4 that agreement in the summer of 1999. There are some
5 interesting sea stories we can talk about in terms of
6 congressional involvement.
7 The other functional relationship that I
8 want to talk about real quickly before I finish up and
9 talk about the future relationships is the exile
10 flotillas. Post-Brothers-to-the-Rescue shootdown,
11 there were a number of flotillas, memorial services,
12 and so forth, that were conducted near the Cuban
13 territorial seas. Obviously, this was a heightened
14 sense of concern that it would precipitate an
15 incident, that there may be some serious
16 repercussions, and I was right in the middle of those
17 types of relationships or those issues. Out of that
18 came some functional relationships.
19 I can't think of anything that would curl
20 your toes in terms of the functional relationships
21 that we had, but one of the things that we were doing
22 was during these flotillas we would have a liaison
23 with the Cuban border guard with the Coast Guard
24 counterpart there, so that we knew what they were
25 going to do. We knew what their reactions would be,
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1 and that they would have a better sense of what was
2 happening on scene. Believe me, from the person that
3 was on scene and running those operations, those
4 functional relationships lowered the tension
5 significantly and I think, frankly, prevented some
6 ugly incidents from happening.
7 The future of functional relationships, I
8 have a premise for those, that functional
9 relationships should meet one of two criteria. Either
10 the functional relationship should be in the U.S.
11 national interest or should serve to mitigate future
12 problems. You might say some of these are the same or
13 that those two are the same. I think there's a slight
14 difference.
15 I think we'll muddle along in our
16 functional relationships until there's a crisis, and
17 then we'll learn whether the functional relationships
18 have been beneficial or whether we've missed
19 something. I think migration, when that becomes a
20 crisis, that we will have functional relationships
21 that will be useful.
22 In looking to the future, I put terrorism
23 first, not because I think it's the most likely place
24 where we'll have a future functional relationship, but
25 because it dominates today's topics. I don't think
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1 it's a question of whether Cuba should be on the list.
2 I think there are a number of sticky issues that need
3 to be resolved. I agree with the previous panel that
4 there was an opportunity to fundamentally change the
5 relationship, the nature of the relationship, between
6 the U.S. and Cuba. I think that window has closed
7 significantly.
8 And then there's a question about whether
9 Cuba has enough information that we really care about
10 today. That was sort of brought up in the previous
11 panel. Is there enough there to cause us to want to
12 spend any time on it? We have a lot of things to
13 spend time on with counterterrorism that are much more
14 productive.
15 But even short of a fundamental shift in
16 the relationship, I think there's some very functional
17 relationships with respect to terrorism that could be
18 done. We alluded to the passenger control,
19 understanding who's passing through various borders,
20 tracking people, sharing some information. Whether
21 we'll get there or not I don't know. I'll address
22 that further if there are questions in the Q and A.
23 Counter-drugs, right now we -- I can't use
24 the word "cooperate," -- we work with the Cubans on
25 the tactical, to achieve tactical goals. We need to
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1 move beyond that to doing some investigative work. I
2 wouldn't go as far as General McCaffrey suggests in
3 terms of sharing intelligence. I would share
4 information and work on investigations.
5 A couple of other areas I'll just mention.
6 I think one area that is very fruitful, very ripe, is
7 money-laundering. That ties in with terrorism.
8 That's going to be a huge problem in the future.
9 Right now I don't think money-laundering is a huge
10 problem in Cuba. If you've been down there -- I tried
11 to spend a $20 bill out in the country, and they took
12 my passport number and the serial number off the bill.
13 I don't think that's an atmosphere that's conducive
14 to money-laundering, but it will be in the future, I
15 think. I think that we could establish functional
16 relationships today that would mitigate the problems
17 that are going to come with money-laundering in the
18 future.
19 Other areas, I'll just read the list and
20 then close: judicial with respect to organized crime,
21 nuclear and biomedical safety, public health,
22 transportation safety, airport and seaport security,
23 and agricultural issues. That last list is way out
24 there. I don't think that's anywhere on the horizon
25 right now.
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1 I think I've gone over my time, but I'll
2 close.
3 DR. FALCOFF: Thank you very much.
4 Alberto?
5 DR. COLL: Thank you, Randy. Thank you,
6 Mark.
7 Randy and I made an informal agreement
8 that we would have a division of labor. He would
9 cover a lot of the Coast Guard-related issues such as
10 narcotics trafficking, crime, and so on, and I would
11 stick with the more classical, high-level national
12 security issues.
13 I want to start out by making a disclaimer
14 because of my position at the Naval War College. The
15 views that I'm going to express here are solely my
16 own. They do not represent those of the U.S. Navy,
17 the U.S. Government at all. Okay, so they are my
18 views as an academic, panelist, and researcher.
19 There are two things I want to start out
20 by saying. One is that one problem with analyzing the
21 national security dimensions of Cuba today is that the
22 issue is very highly politicized. So it is not purely
23 an analytical issue, and you will see that as I
24 develop my points that inevitably come to light, when
25 you deal with other countries, this is not just a
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1 matter of looking at hard facts and figures.
2 Eventually what gets wrapped into it is political
3 concerns.
4 As I will argue at the very end of my
5 presentation, I think this is very unfortunate, and we
6 really need to break this. We need to look at two
7 different packages here.
8 One is there is a whole package of
9 political issues, human rights, democratization.
10 Everyone in this room agrees that the Cuban government
11 has to be pressured in those areas. I think that
12 that's where we should focus. Unfortunately, a number
13 of us who are concerned about those issues also then
14 reach out for the national security issues and want to
15 make Cuba a greater threat than it actually is, which
16 in my mind winds up weakening the credibility of our
17 very legitimate arguments with respect to the
18 political, human rights, democracy basket.
19 The second issue is the strategic context.
20 Whenever we look at Cuba's national security
21 dimension, we have to keep in mind that Cuba is
22 extremely vulnerable to U.S. military power, and the
23 Cubans know this. They have known this since the
24 Soviet Union collapsed. They are very vulnerable
25 today, and in my mind this explains why, in fact, they
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1 no longer do today the kinds of things that they were
2 doing in the seventies and eighties.
3 They have lost their Soviet patron. They
4 have lost all the economic subsidies. So they are
5 strapped financially. This year we will see even
6 greater economic retrenchment as a result of the
7 dramatic drop in tourism revenue, and also as a result
8 of the loss in income from the Lourdes facility.
9 Finally, the Cubans are very keenly aware
10 of what the United States did in Panama in 1989, when
11 Manuel Noriega became very heavily involved in drug
12 trafficking and became very much of a rogue dictator.
13 So the Cuban leadership is very determined not to
14 give the United States any excuses for an outright
15 military intervention. This helps explain why in 1991
16 Castro made his now well-known statement that Cuba was
17 no longer at that time supporting revolutionary
18 movements in Latin America.
19 Now let's look at a whole set of issues
20 here. First of all, is Cuba a military threat to the
21 United States or, for that matter, to anybody else? A
22 very well-known 1998 report concluded that it is not a
23 military threat, simply because the Cuban military has
24 basically collapsed. If you look at the dramatic
25 cutbacks in their armed forces, their army, their air
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1 force, their lack of fuel for basic training, what you
2 see here is a very diminished military that is unable
3 to mount any kind of serious threat.
4 Now this 1998 report, by the way, is being
5 discredited today as a result of the arrest of Ana
6 Belen Montes, suspected of being a highly-placed Cuban
7 spy in the DIA. I want to suggest to you that these
8 efforts to discredit the report are politically-
9 motivated, and that if you look at the way that report
10 was put together, it was not authored by Ana Belen
11 Montes. She was simply one of several individuals
12 who, as members of the intelligence community,
13 contributed to this report. In other words, if you
14 know anything about the way these reports are put
15 together, they are not the product of one single
16 individual; they are put together in committee
17 fashion. Ana Montes contributed to it, but so did a
18 lot of other people, very highly-intelligent,
19 critical-minded people.
20 I also can tell you that one of the key
21 players in that report was General Wilheim, CINC
22 South. He, of course, as you can imagine, had access
23 to the reports of U.S. military attaches throughout
24 the Western Hemisphere. These attaches interact with
25 Latin American military and intelligence officials,
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1 who in turn are in close contact in many cases with
2 what is happening in Cuba. General Wilhelm, publicly
3 in fact, agreed with the assessment of that report and
4 stated that, in his view, Cuba was no longer a threat
5 to the United States.
6 Now, as you know, when the report came
7 out, the two key Congressman in south Florida raised a
8 huge and cry about this. It was as a result of their
9 pressure that Secretary Cohen felt forced to insert a
10 letter at the opening of the report basically saying,
11 if you read the letter, basically, it says, well, on
12 the other hand, you know, Cuba could become a military
13 threat. They could reconstitute some of their
14 capabilities. They could pose a threat in the future.
15 But this letter was put in there by the Secretary and
16 the OSD staff as a result of tremendous political
17 pressures by Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen and
18 Congressman Balart on the Clinton Administration.
19 Now if Cuba is no longer a military
20 threat, the broader question is: Is Cuba a national
21 security threat to the United States or to anybody
22 else in the Caribbean or the Western Hemisphere? And
23 the answer by most national security professionals,
24 whether in uniform or civilian, is overwhelmingly, no,
25 Cuba is no longer a national security threat.
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1 Now we can look at a number of issues that
2 have been raised. First of all, the whole question of
3 biotechnology, the argument is often made that Cuba,
4 which does have for its size a sophisticated, though
5 small, biotechnology industry, could be involved in
6 the production of biological weapons. Recently, there
7 was a story in The Miami Herald about how Cuba had
8 sold some biotechnology products to Iran.
9 Now what I want to do is read to you from
10 that same story in The Herald, which was kindly made
11 available to me by the Cuban-American National
12 Foundation, and the statement of Jose de la Fuente, a
13 Cuban defector who had been the director of this Cuban
14 biotechnology research facility. He made it very
15 clear that, of course, you know, between 1995 and 1998
16 Cuba sold Iran the production technology for a
17 recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, an interferon use for
18 the treatment of some viral diseases and various types
19 of cancer, and streptokinase, used to treat heart
20 attacks and other thrombolytic disorders.
21 Now what you have to understand, of
22 course, as the article points out, is that many
23 technologies that are used to make medications are the
24 same technologies that could be used for harmful
25 intent, according to Amy Smithson, a biological
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1 weapons expert at the Harry Stimson Center in
2 Washington.
3 Now this is basically the same problem
4 that we have with regards to many western
5 pharmaceutical companies from Switzerland, France, and
6 Germany, which have sold to Iran and to other
7 countries around the world pharmaceutical products
8 which, of course, are used to make vaccines and many
9 good medications, but also could be used for
10 biological weapons purposes. In other words, this is
11 a global problem that has to do with a global
12 pharmaceutical industry.
13 Now "Mr. de la Fuenta, the Cuban defector,
14 went on in his own statement to say that he has no
15 reason to think that Cuba's sale of the technology to
16 Iran was malicious. `The reason for the sale,' he
17 said," and I'm quoting from that article, "`was
18 simple, money, Cuban's desperate need for hard
19 currency.'"
20 Which brings up the point that, if we're
21 really worried about who Cuba is selling this
22 biotechnology to, one way to deal with the issue might
23 be to allow Cuba and to engage in negotiations with
24 Cuba designed to allow Cuba access to American
25 pharmaceutical companies, and some of these
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1 pharmaceutical companies might be interested in buying
2 products from Cuba's biotechnology industry in
3 exchange for Cuba not selling some of its products to
4 certain countries that we might think are
5 problematical.
6 In fact, I would argue that from the point
7 of view of a future post-Castro democratic Cuba, we do
8 want Cuba to have a vibrant biotechnology industry,
9 because this would be a very important source of
10 revenue for a future Cuban market economy.
11 In other words, we have no evidence
12 whatsoever that Cuba is involved in the production of
13 biological weapons or in any kind of illegal
14 activities related to its biotechnology industry.
15 The next issue is terrorism. Cuba is
16 included on the terrorism list. Cuba has been there
17 since the early eighties, and it was placed there in
18 the early eighties because at that time Cuba was
19 involved, providing weapons and money and very active
20 support to a number of revolutionary guerilla groups
21 in the Western Hemisphere.
22 If you look at the State Department's
23 rationale for keeping Cuba on the terrorist list
24 today, you see that, from an objective standpoint, it
25 makes no sense whatsoever. For example, the three
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1 main reasons the State Department gives:
2 There are some old fugitives from the ETA
3 living in Cuba today. By the way, this is a matter
4 that I would think would affect principally the
5 government of Spain, and I have yet to see the
6 government of Spain imposing an economic embargo on
7 Cuba on the basis of Cuba keeping these old fugitives
8 from ETA there. Obviously, Spain does want them
9 returned, and I know that this is part of the
10 diplomatic tapestry between both countries.
11 Secondly, there are some fugitives from
12 the United States living in Cuba, all of them, by the
13 way, from the early seventies. These are people who
14 committed crimes in the United States in the
15 seventies. They went to Cuba at the time when the
16 Castro government was harboring these kinds of people,
17 and they're there. Obviously, the United States
18 Government wants them back; I want them back. We
19 should get them back.
20 I suggested earlier on that one way to get
21 them back was perhaps to engage in negotiations
22 designed to a mutual exchange, in which in return for
23 Cuba returning these old fugitives, they would get
24 back some old fugitives of their own.
25 Then, thirdly, the State Department
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1 mentions that the FARC and the ELN have political
2 offices in Havana. I find this very clear because the
3 State Department does not say that Cuba is giving
4 money or weapons or any kind of support to the FARC or
5 ELN, the way that, for example, Syria or Iran are
6 charged with providing this kind of support to
7 Hezbollah or the way that, for example, Sudan was
8 harboring actual today's terrorists there.
9 The FARC and the ELN have political
10 offices in Havana. Now there is a legitimate issue
11 here. Should Cuba be on the terrorism list because it
12 allows the FARC and the ELN to have political offices
13 in Havana? One could argue that very near my home
14 town in Boston, Massachusetts, there are political
15 offices of the IRA and various fronts that have been
16 operating there with a great deal of freedom. You
17 could also argue that the State Department, in
18 addition to having the FARC and the ELN on its list of
19 terrorists, also has the umbrella group of the right-
20 wing paramilitaries in Colombia as a terrorist
21 organization. This umbrella group, by the way, has
22 political offices in Colombia itself.
23 Finally, as was pointed out, the fact that
24 the FARC and the ELN have political office in Havana
25 has not prevented the Colombia government from
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1 welcoming -- indeed, encouraging -- the participation
2 of the Cuban government in the Colombia peace process.
3 So I suggest to you that while there are
4 some legitimate issues that need to be taken up
5 between Cuba and the United States on the question of
6 terrorism, I think that putting Cuba on the terrorism
7 list in a way denies, decreases, diminishes,
8 trivializes the credibility of our offense against
9 terrorism today and against people like Al Qaeda,
10 which, for example, we suspect that there are Al Qaeda
11 cells in Ecuador and in the tri-border region of
12 Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina. This is where we
13 need to be focusing our attention when we talk about
14 the terrorism list.
15 Then, finally, there is the question of
16 espionage, just to go through the list of potential
17 national security threats that Cuba poses to the
18 United States. Clearly, Cuba is involved in espionage
19 activities against the United States. The Ana Montes
20 is the most recent case, and a very serious one. I
21 think that this is a very serious problem that the
22 United States needs to address, the threat of
23 espionage.
24 I would argue that it is a national
25 security problem. I am not sure that it is a national
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1 security threat, and certainly relative to Chinese or
2 even Russian espionage. It is not at the same level.
3 The FBI's affidavits suggest that Ms.
4 Montes was gathering intelligence related to possible
5 U.S. contingency planning toward Cuba as opposed to
6 the kind of espionage that Chinese and Russian agents
7 have carried out in the United States, which has to do
8 with strategic issues; for example, the functioning of
9 our nuclear weapons arsenal.
10 Now, clearly, I think that we have a
11 problem here. We don't want Cubans penetrating our
12 intelligence system. I suggest that this is a problem
13 that needs to be dealt with at two levels. There's
14 obviously the level of enforcement. We need to
15 increase the protection of our intelligence systems
16 against Cuban espionage, but we also need a negotiated
17 approach to the problem. We need a diplomatic
18 approach.
19 The fact is that, of course, we also
20 target Cuba with intelligence agents. I mean, this is
21 public knowledge. We send spies there to collect
22 intelligence, to penetrate the Cuban government. So
23 we are in a Cold War relationship here with regards to
24 espionage.
25 I think also that the Cubans get very
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1 worried when they hear a prominent American like the
2 Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
3 Mr. Helms, talk during the invasion of Haiti about the
4 fact that we were invading the wrong country; the
5 country that we should be sending the forces to should
6 have been Cuba, or when he says that the Head of State
7 of Cuba, Mr. Castro, we will get rid of him vertically
8 or horizontally.
9 Now we laugh about these things, but if
10 you are in the position of the Cubans, you have reason
11 to expect that there is a degree of hostility here and
12 that there could be an invasion of Cuba in the future,
13 not because the U.S. military wants it and not because
14 reasonable people want it, but because in a crisis
15 situation a President might be pressured by political
16 interest groups to do something against his better
17 judgment.
18 So, in essence, I think that when we look
19 at the espionage problem, there is a problem there,
20 and I think we need a two-level approach. We need to
21 increase our security measures to thwart Cuban
22 penetration over intelligence mechanisms, and at the
23 same time we need a broader diplomatic approach to
24 address this question, and perhaps to engage in some
25 confidence-building measures: reciprocity, and so on.
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1 So, in conclusion, I would like to suggest
2 that what we have here is fundamentally the absence of
3 a national security threat to the United States.
4 Those of us in this room who deplore, as I do, the
5 Cuban government's policies on human rights, the
6 problem of the absence of democratization in Cuba, the
7 lack of pluralism, that this is where we need to focus
8 our attention, and that, in fact, we diminish the
9 credibility of our efforts when we create these bogus
10 threats for which there is very little evidence.
11 I also want to suggest that we need to
12 handle Cuba as we do other non-democratic
13 authoritarian societies that we're trying to
14 influence; for example, China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia
15 -- that is, through negotiation, through diplomatic
16 and political pressures and through influence-
17 building, not through embargoes or pressure cooker
18 strategies.
19 I would like to suggest, in closing, that
20 in fact the pressure cooker strategy that we have in
21 place right now, the strategy of maintaining this very
22 tight economic embargo on Cuba as a means of making
23 the Castro regime crack, could lead to a future
24 national security threat from Cuba, as Richard Nuccio
25 has suggested, and that is, it could lead to a future
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1 situation of instability, breakdown, and disorder,
2 which then would create the kinds of threats to our
3 security that we want to avoid and that we need to
4 start preventing right now through a different
5 diplomatic strategy towards Cuba.
6 Thank you.
7 DR. FALCOFF: Thank you very much.
8 Well, we've had two excellent
9 presentations. Let's open the floor. Who will be
10 first? Yes, Richard.
11 DR. NUCCIO: Randy, now that you're
12 retired, I wonder if you could talk about -- well, my
13 question concerns the phrase, "Mother, may I?", which
14 those of us who worked at the State Department are
15 quite familiar with, understanding that phrase to
16 refer to the relationship between political/diplomatic
17 authority and the functional authorities of the U.S.
18 Government, defense, Coast Guard, the service, and so
19 on.
20 You indicated without dwelling on it that
21 the atmosphere surrounding the functional
22 relationships affects what can be done, when it can be
23 done, whether it can continue or deepen, whether
24 sometimes maybe it's reversed, although you didn't
25 give us any examples of a functional relationship
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1 going backward or being taken away. Would you be
2 willing to talk more about that?
3 Obviously, the Coast Guard doesn't make
4 decisions about the overall state of U.S./Cuba
5 relations. Those decisions are made at a higher
6 political level. But can you talk a little bit from
7 your experience about how this works? Is there an
8 interaction here? When you wrote your memo, did you
9 force a decision that might not otherwise have been
10 taken by political authority? Did the functional
11 people always just sit and wait, and always say,
12 "Mother, may I?" or do they sometimes -- Jack Sheehan
13 was referred to earlier -- do they sometimes take
14 steps which political authority has to, shall we say,
15 catch up with subsequently?
16 I understand that I'm putting you in a
17 delicate area, and I don't want to make you
18 uncomfortable, nor make you say things you don't want
19 to say, but I wonder if you would just explore what
20 you were really referring to and hinting at, that
21 there is a dynamic relationship between those who are
22 managing the functional relationship and those who are
23 managing the overall political atmospherics between
24 the two countries?
25 CAPTAIN BEARDSWORTH: Yes, I'm not sure
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1 that it will be particularly exciting. I'm retired,
2 but recently retired. Also, I have intentions to go
3 back into government.
4 But, yes, I will address that on a couple
5 of fronts. You have to remember, too, that even
6 though I have a tremendous amount of operational
7 experience and pulled my hair out on a number of these
8 issues, asking "Mother, may I?", I also spent some
9 time on the policy side of things, NSC pulling my hair
10 out at operators that just absolutely refused to
11 coordinate with the Interagency and caused tremendous
12 problems in the policy world. So I think there are
13 two sides of it, and I happen to be one of those
14 people that has seen both sides of it.
15 There was tremendous frustration,
16 particularly on the drug issue, when we kept seeing
17 these aircraft going over Cuba and we couldn't pick up
18 the telephone and just call the Cuban Border Guard and
19 say, "What can you do? What can we do? How can we
20 make this work, so that you can use your resources
21 tactically to solve this problem?"
22 I understand why, particularly one living
23 in Miami, in the Republic of Miami, for a while and,
24 two, having worked at the National Security Council
25 staff, I understand why Cuba is such a lightning rod
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1 politically. So I'm of two minds. So I'm not going
2 to give you a lot of meat there.
3 But the one thing that I will say is that
4 I think there are two ways of dealing with the
5 functional relationships and moving them forward with
6 respect to Cuba. The way that I chose to work was to
7 try to move the system, to change policy. This
8 letter, these ideas that I had percolated about
9 confidence-building measures, and so forth, not only
10 did we send up, but we managed to talk about it or I
11 managed to talk about these ideas with people in the
12 State Department, with people at the NSC, and the
13 policymakers could see that there were some good ideas
14 here.
15 There were a lot of people that wanted to
16 make the change. I think it was very much of an
17 activist role of some of the functional operators, if
18 you will, to try to push the policy forward. I think
19 you could constantly feel the brakes on it though.
20 The other way to operate that you alluded
21 to is to push forward without the "Mother, may I?",
22 and I've seen that work. It's easier to get
23 forgiveness than permission, but with Cuba it's such a
24 lightning rod that I just, in my world, saw that as a
25 non-starter.
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1 DR. FALCOFF: This gentleman in the back
2 and then the woman, since I don't know your name, I'm
3 going to have to just say, in the purple sweater.
4 Yes, sir?
5 MR. LEVY: First of all, my name is Delvis
6 Fernandez Levy. I'm with the Cuban-American Alliance
7 Education Fund.
8 One issue that has not been touched today
9 is the issue of the Cuban Adjustment Act. This is an
10 act which pretty much puts Cubans in a unique,
11 privileged position to come to the United States.
12 Given the attention that we're now placing on
13 terrorism, especially with the way in which some of
14 these terrorists came to the United States through
15 phony student visas, isn't it time to take a look at
16 that act and say, you know, this is actually working
17 against the best interest of the United States when
18 you allow a person from another country to come here
19 and say, "I am simply an anti-communist or I am a
20 Freedom Fighter," whatever it is, and you have carte
21 blanche to do whatever you want in this country. It
22 seems to me that we are really creating a very
23 dangerous situation for our own country.
24 DR. COLL: Well, I think the Cuban
25 Adjustment Act made sense logically before 1994
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1 because at that time the United States basically was
2 willing to take any Cubans that wanted to come here.
3 However, in 1994-95 we signed a migration accord with
4 Cuba, and we very specifically have said that we will
5 only take so many Cubans who peacefully and legally
6 apply in Havana to come to the United States.
7 By keeping the Cuban Adjustment Act as
8 legislation, what we're saying -- this is a fact,
9 whether you like the law or not -- is we're saying to
10 the Cubans in Cuban, we're saying to them, legally, if
11 you want to leave Cuba, you've got to stand in a very
12 long queue in the U.S. Interest Section, and if you're
13 lucky, you'll get on the lottery that year; if not,
14 you're going to have to wait until next year.
15 However, there is another way you can come, and that
16 is illegally, risking your life. I see that as a very
17 severe contradiction. However, the law is probably
18 going to stay on the books for a long time because
19 it's an act of Congress, and I don't think Congress is
20 going to repeal it anytime.
21 DR. FALCOFF: If I could just add, the
22 Elian Gonzales case would never have occurred if it
23 weren't for those two contradictory, I don't know
24 whether you want to call them "laws", or whatever.
25 He kind of fell between those two stools. Otherwise,
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1 there would have been no case. He would have been
2 returned immediately.
3 Yes?
4 CAPTAIN BEARDSWORTH: I'm probably going
5 to tread where I shouldn't tread here, but I think the
6 Cuban Adjustment Act is sort of irrelevant in terms of
7 what the issue is. I've had this discussion with a
8 number of people. If you're a Cuban and a Haitian,
9 you walk up on the beach together side by side; you
10 both go to KROM. The Cuban gets a ticket that says,
11 "Soon you'll have a resident alien card." The Haitian
12 gets a ticket that says, "Three weeks from Wednesday
13 come back for your first hearing." And the Haitian
14 disappears. If you do away with the Cuban Adjustment
15 Act, the only difference in that scenario is that the
16 Cuban is going to disappear and not show back up. So
17 I don't think it's going to make any difference.
18 Just as a figure, the greatest threat of
19 illegal migration in south Florida is not from Cubans
20 and it's not from Haitians. It's across I-10 coming
21 from the southwest border.
22 Another little figure: INS detains right
23 now 20,000 people, illegal migrants. The Detention
24 and Removal Section is responsible for 765,000 illegal
25 migrants that have already come into the United
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1 States, gone through the detention process, and are
2 out there waiting to show up for their hearing three
3 weeks from Wednesday. Of that 765,000, 106,000 of
4 those have already received their final deportation
5 orders and have disappeared.
6 The problem with illegal migrants or
7 dangerous migrants coming from Cuba, that's not where
8 the threat is when you're talking about national
9 security. Now from different perspectives, we could
10 talk about migration policy, and so forth.
11 DR. FALCOFF: Yes?
12 MS. RATCHFORD: I'm Marina Ratchford from
13 the American Association for the Advancement of
14 Science.
15 Since September 11th, there's been a
16 number of allegations about the dangers of scientific
17 and academic exchanges with the enemies, especially
18 now since the anthrax cases started to appear. I
19 guess this relates to both presentations, because in
20 terms of the scientific community, there's two
21 positions: one, that in terms of responding to these
22 allegations, that it's better to continue the
23 functional relationships that already exist, such as
24 the ones that you commented on in terms of
25 environment, in marine science.
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1 But then there's also the position that
2 wants to respond to these allegations, especially in
3 terms of biotechnology, and the danger of if we're
4 going to be looking at what can possibly be done with
5 the biotechnology capabilities that Cuba has, then
6 you're going to be going into an area that is very
7 difficult to draw a line with.
8 So my question is, do you have any advice
9 to the scientific and academic communities in terms of
10 responding to these allegations, especially in terms
11 of biotechnology?
12 DR. COLL: I think the allegations are
13 baseless. I mean, there is no evidence whatsoever for
14 any of the allegations. That's what they are. I even
15 quoted to you from the Director of Research and
16 Development, who defected to this country from Cuba,
17 that he never saw any evidence that there was anything
18 improper being done with the products of this
19 biological facility.
20 There is no evidence at all that we have,
21 classified or unclassified, at all on this issue. So
22 all that we're saying is, using the old tactic, you
23 know, if you spread a rumor long enough, people will
24 start believing it.
25 I would argue a couple of things. One is
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1 that we want Cuba to develop a biotechnology industry
2 because in the future, in a post-Castro future, this
3 could be a very important, healthy part of their
4 economy. Secondly, we may want to think of offering
5 to Cuba a deal similar to the one we offered to North
6 Korea, which, by the way, was far greater a threat to
7 the United States than Cuba has ever been or will ever
8 be. That is to say to them, "Look, we're a little
9 worried about your biotechnology industry. We'll give
10 you a deal. We'll give you access to U.S.
11 pharmaceutical companies. We'll give you access to
12 all these kinds of scientific exchanges, and in return
13 for that, would you agree to some kinds of
14 international standards for supervision, just to make
15 sure that these things don't wind up in the wrong
16 hands?" That seems to me like a reasonable way to go.
17 DR. FALCOFF: Dennis?
18 MR. HAYS: Dennis Hays from the Cuban-
19 American National Foundation.
20 First, Alberto, I'm pleased to hear you're
21 reading our material that we're sending you. I
22 encourage you to read all of the material we send you.
23 (Laughter.)
24 DR. COLL: I read all of your material,
25 Dennis.
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1 MR. HAYS: Hopefully, we can talk about
2 some of these things that you've raised here.
3 DR. COLL: Yes.
4 MR. HAYS: Going through the various
5 presentations, a lot of things came to mind, but let
6 me, Randy, hit one that I was surprised I didn't hear
7 you talk about in the functional area, which it seems
8 to me is one of the largest and most important. That
9 is Coast Guard's role in the forcible repatriation of
10 migrants detained at sea.
11 As a side on that, if you remember, the
12 migration accord that was signed in 1995 specifically
13 said that the United States guaranteed that returning
14 migrants would not suffer adversely and that they
15 would have full protection of the United States, in
16 addition to the government of Cuba, when they were
17 returned to Cuba. To my knowledge, that, in fact, has
18 never happened. There are cursory inspections that
19 are made, but there is no followup and, in fact,
20 people are imprisoned, detained, fired, what have you,
21 when they return to Cuba.
22 My point is that I recently read the
23 language that the Coast Guard reads to migrants as
24 they're being returned, and the section where the
25 United States guarantees those rights has been
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1 deleted. So, Alberto, I'm going to go back to you and
2 say, if, in fact, human rights is one of the things
3 that we care about and part of our national interest,
4 clearly, we have foregone an important human right in
5 the interest of expediency of keeping the migration
6 accord on.
7 So what other of our national interests
8 are you prepared to give away in the expediency of
9 reaching agreement and what would the value of that
10 be?
11 DR. COLL: Is that a question for Randy or
12 for me?
13 MR. HAYS: I'll start with you.
14 DR. COLL: Okay. Look, I think, as you
15 well know being an experienced diplomat that you are,
16 U.S. foreign policy has to do with balancing competing
17 goals and objectives. There's no such thing as an
18 absolute goal. A cursory look at the way we deal with
19 China, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia suggests that very
20 clearly.
21 So I think that human rights has to be
22 part of our agenda toward Cuba. In fact, I would
23 argue that that is one of our core legitimate concerns
24 with Cuba, and that is one issue on which I don't
25 think there's any factual disagreement, unlike the
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1 whole issue of biotechnology or terrorism, or so on.
2 Now the question is, what means do you use
3 to press that issue? I think that I would
4 differentiate between some means such as the economic
5 embargo, which I think only worsened the situation in
6 Cuba, and other means, such as diplomatic, political
7 pressure, working with allies, which, by the way, we
8 would have more credibility creating a coalition on
9 human rights with our allies if we dropped down the
10 embargo. That could be another grand bargain that we
11 could offer our allies. We could say, "Okay, look,
12 we're prepared to drop the embargo. The quid pro quo
13 for this is we drop the embargo and then we do form a
14 united front with regards to human rights issues and
15 long-term diplomatic pressures on Cuba," and all kinds
16 of suasion and forms of influence-building, which, by
17 the way, is a very effective instrument over the long
18 run to achieve our objectives. So that would be my
19 answer to you.
20 I mean, finally, I do want to point out
21 that you are in as much of a bind as anybody else is
22 because looking at the Cuban Adjustment Act, the
23 problem that we have is, okay, if conditions in Cuba
24 are really so bad that when a Cuban touches your soil,
25 automatically he or she gets to stay, then why not
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1 allow a lot more Cubans legally to come every year to
2 the United States? But, obviously, there are lots of
3 people in this country who don't want to see that.
4 So the question is, let's not be
5 hypocritical about this. Let's have a consistent
6 policy based on the reality that, yes, a lot of people
7 come from Cuba for political reasons, but a lot of
8 people also are coming from Cuba for economic reasons.
9 I would argue, in fact, if Fidel Castro
10 were to die tomorrow and you would give Cuba, let's
11 say, a 10-year interval to strengthen its economy, 10
12 years from now you would still see a large number of
13 Cubans desirous of immigrating to the United States
14 for economic reasons, because the United States will
15 always be a very powerful magnet to the population of
16 Cuba. That's a long-term issue that we have not even
17 begun to think about yet.
18 CAPTAIN BEARDSWORTH: Dennis, I'm not sure
19 that there was a question really embedded in your
20 comment about the Coast Guard, but I'll make a couple
21 of comments.
22 Yes, the Coast Guard returns migrants that
23 are rescued or interdicted, depending on which
24 political term you want to use, at sea, just like they
25 do with Dominican migrants and Haitian migrants, and
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1 they're returned, according to U.S. law and U.S.
2 policy, to the country from either which they came or
3 from which they originally came. In the case of Cuba,
4 that's Cuba. As you know, that's all part of the
5 migrant accords that were designed to regularize
6 migration, to avoid people making -- trying to
7 discourage people from making the dangerous journey.
8 We have found historically just
9 operationally that when you take people back, that's a
10 big deterrent from making that journey. There are
11 regular methods to enter the United States.
12 MR. HAYS: The question was, why did the
13 Coast Guard drop the language where the U.S.
14 guaranteed the rights --
15 CAPTAIN BEARDSWORTH: I don't know. I'm
16 curious about that. I'll check and find out. I was
17 not aware of it.
18 DR. FALCOFF: Susan?
19 DR. PURCELL: Yes, Susan Purcell, the
20 Americas Society.
21 I want to ask you a question about the
22 future viability of the Castro government. You know,
23 in the first panel they cited interesting statistics
24 about economic decline, how the dependent the economy
25 has been on tourism, et cetera. I mean, clearly, Cuba
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1 is at the beginning of a very dire economic decline at
2 this time, it seems to me.
3 Now in the past, right after the Soviet
4 Union collapsed or a couple of years after the Soviet
5 Union collapsed, economic decline created pressures,
6 political/economic pressures, that led to some kind of
7 reform and some kind of opening up, and then once
8 there was some kind of recovery after the adjustment,
9 very clever in terms of welcoming foreign investment,
10 then there was a crackdown.
11 It seems to me, though, I guess I'd like
12 the panelists' opinion as to, with this severe
13 economic decline that's beginning now, what are the
14 possibilities that the Castro regime may not be able
15 to deal with pressures for change that start
16 percolating? We all know that the military capacity
17 these days is considerably less than it was about a
18 decade ago.
19 Then I wanted also to add to this question
20 Alberto's earlier comment about how it's not really in
21 the U.S. interest to see this kind of political
22 instability now which might end up worsening the
23 national security problems of the United States. I
24 want to disagree with that. Perhaps in the very short
25 term you're right, but the long term it would be
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1 greatly in our interest to have Castro out of power.
2 DR. COLL: Well, let me take the pieces
3 one at a time. I disagree with Mr. Cason that the
4 current economic crisis in Cuba, which I think will
5 intensify, by the way, over the course of this year,
6 will lead only to more austerity measures. The odds I
7 think are at least significant that the Cuban
8 government, in addition to posing austerity measures,
9 which I think you're right about that, will also
10 probably consider another round of economic reforms.
11 That's based on my view that, exactly as
12 you said, that's what they did in the early nineties.
13 By the way, they did not crack down and roll back all
14 those reforms later. They rolled back only to a very
15 small degree. I mean, there are still today 150,000
16 small entrepreneurs in Cuba, and there are still
17 changes that have not been rolled back.
18 I think that the chances are very high
19 that there is right now in fact a very strong tension
20 between those who want to maintain things the way they
21 are or even roll back the reforms and those people who
22 do want to advance the reforms, and there are quite a
23 few of those people throughout the party leadership.
24 I think the odds are pretty good that those people
25 could get the upperhand in terms of moving into
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1 another phase of economic reforms. This is all, of
2 course, pure speculation. But there is a good chance
3 of that happening.
4 Now is it in the interest of the United
5 States to have Castro out? Well, in the abstract,
6 yes, but is it in the interest of the United States to
7 have Castro out together with a major explosion inside
8 the country that leads to civil chaos and the flight
9 of several hundred thousand refugees to the United
10 States? The answer is no.
11 So this is the problem with what I call
12 the pressure cooker strategy, that you basically are
13 creating the conditions for an explosion or a crack,
14 and the consequences of that are not all that good. I
15 would disagree with you, in fact, that long-term this
16 would be even good, because what often happens in
17 these situations, if you look at the Eastern European
18 experience, for example, the countries that were able
19 to move most effectively into a more democratic form
20 of government were the ones that had a peaceful
21 revolution, Poland and Czechoslovakia, to mention two
22 of them. The ones that had the greatest difficulty
23 and the ones where there was the greatest degree of
24 corruption and resistance to change were precisely the
25 ones in which the revolution was accomplished through
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1 violence, Romania --
2 DR. PURCELL: Because of the nature of the
3 government that was in place before the revolution.
4 DR. COLL: Exactly, and that's what you
5 have in Cuba in terms of Fidel Castro, is if you have
6 a very violent revolution, you don't know who's going
7 to come out on top. The odds could be that whoever
8 comes on top is not going to be somebody very
9 favorable to the values that you and I hold. There is
10 a better chance if we have a peaceful revolution in
11 which -- and we will disagree on this, but I just want
12 to make sure that we don't underestimate the
13 tremendous human and material cost of a revolution.
14 I mean, the history of Cuba, by the way,
15 does not offer very promising scenarios. If you look
16 at the history of Cuba, there has been no effective
17 peaceful democratic change in Cuba in history at all.
18 The years between 1902 and 1959 were rife with
19 corruption, gangsterism, political violence, and
20 dictatorships. From 1959 to the present, we have had
21 a very harsh authoritarian regime.
22 This is not a very good recipe for a
23 pressure cooker strategy. I think what we need,
24 instead, is a strategy that encourages reconciliation,
25 gradual evolution, if you want to avoid the kind of
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1 explosion that will have very unfortunate costs both
2 for the people of Cuba and even for the United States.
3 DR. FALCOFF: Wayne?
4 MR. SMITH: Wayne Smith, Center for
5 International Policy.
6 I was going to follow on Alberto's
7 comment, but before I do, let me just elaborate on one
8 thing you said earlier about the Basque and Cuba. You
9 know, they came originally as the result of an
10 agreement between the Feliipe Gonzales government in
11 Spain and the Cuban government. The present Spanish
12 government doesn't consider that agreement to
13 continue, and some other Basques have come. But the
14 crucial thing is that the Spanish government has not
15 asked for the extradition of any of the Basque in
16 Cuba. You said of course it wants them back. Well,
17 maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, but it hasn't
18 asked for their extradition. I think that's
19 meaningful.
20 Going on, the question of a peaceful
21 transitional process, I think that's certainly what
22 the Cuban people want. I think, as you were saying,
23 Alberto, all of us in the room here would agree on
24 what our overall objective should be: We should want
25 to see Cuba move toward a more open society with
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1 greater respect for human rights, and so forth.
2 When I go to Cuba, I always go to see the
3 leading human rights advocates: Elizardo Sanchez and
4 Hector Palacios and Manuel Cuesta Morua and a series
5 of other, who all feel that our policy wrong, that it
6 is an impediment to movement in the right direction,
7 because so long as the United States is threatening
8 and pressuring, and so forth, the Cuban government
9 will react defensively and demand internal discipline,
10 and so forth. It is a very authoritarian government
11 and it will react in that way.
12 We could accomplish a lot more by relaxing
13 and beginning some degree of engagement and use
14 diplomatic means rather than the sort of Cold War
15 means that we've been using for the past 40 years.
16 I would conclude on that. We're supposed
17 to be a pragmatic nation. When a policy or an
18 instrument hasn't worked in 40 years, I mean if you
19 were the CEO of a company and your tactic hadn't
20 worked in 40 years, you'd be out; you would change it.
21 But this policy just seems to go on forever, failing
22 as it does.
23 DR. COLL: I want to say I find it very
24 puzzling that we totally ignore the fact that the
25 overwhelming majority of Cuban dissidents in Cuba,
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1 along with the Catholic church, believe that our
2 policy is counterproductive, and that the end of the
3 embargo, in fact, would be very beneficial for the
4 long-term goals of democratization and pluralism.
5 This is the overwhelming majority of people in Cuba;
6 dissidents believe this, and so does the church. It
7 ought to have some bearing on our own views on the
8 matter. Unfortunately, it does not.
9 DR. FALCOFF: I think we have time for a
10 couple more questions, if there are any. Yes, sir?
11 Professor Griffith?
12 DR. GRIFFITH: I've got a question for
13 Randy. Randy, you mentioned an interesting case of
14 the Limerick. I'd like to know if my memory -- if
15 that's the case with the cocaine, the U.S. Coast Guard
16 testimony in Miami? Speak a little bit to some of the
17 dynamics of walking the Republic of Miami politics in
18 the context of that and whether or not there's been a
19 similar case since. How did the Coast Guard work in
20 conjunction with the State Department? How did you
21 have that delivered? I know there was a lot of
22 animosity in Miami that we are allowing Fidel to send
23 people to testify. Speak to that a little bit, if you
24 will.
25 CAPTAIN BEARDSWORTH: Yes, briefly, the
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1 case was the Coast Guard was boarding a ship off the
2 south coast of Cuba. The ship started to scuttle
3 itself. We had to withdraw. It was nighttime and
4 dark.
5 The ship drifted into Cuban territorial
6 seas, and then started via fax, before we could pick
7 up the telephone and talk to the Cubans, we sent them
8 a fax saying, "Hey, can we come in and get this boat?"
9 And the Cubans said no.
10 Then it went up on the beach, and the
11 Cubans said, "Well, we're going to salvage it." We
12 said, "Can we come help? We have some equipment on
13 the boat." And the Cubans said no.
14 Then they started to tow it off the beach
15 and we asked them again, and they said no, and they
16 took it to Santiago de Cuba. We asked them, at this
17 point we said, "Well, we think that there are probably
18 drugs on here and we'd like to maybe help you find
19 them." And the Cubans said, "No, thank you."
20 I think we made another overture on the
21 facts, and finally we got a fax back from the Cubans
22 that said, "Can you tell us where the drugs are?" And
23 we sent them a little diagram where we thought they
24 were. An hour later they came back and they had found
25 them.
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1 Then they searched the vessel for some
2 weeks later, and we, the U.S. Government, wanted to
3 prosecute this case, and we managed to get counsel
4 down to the ship as well as investigators and, working
5 with the Cubans, managed to arrange for some of the
6 Cubans who had found the drugs to come up to Miami to
7 testify.
8 As far as I know, that was kept fairly
9 much under the radar scope. I was surprised there was
10 some consternation, but it didn't blow up. It was
11 done professionally, quietly, through appropriate
12 diplomatic channels, and so forth.
13 There have been a couple of other cases
14 like that. That was the one that was obviously the
15 most successful.
16 DR. FALCOFF: One last question.
17 MR. ALEXANDER: Hi. Brian Alexander.
18 A question for Captain Beardsworth: We're
19 speaking of confidence-building measures and sort of
20 areas of potential cooperation between the United
21 States and Cuba. I'm wondering from your experience
22 -- we've discussed problems in the United States as
23 sort of the "Mother, may I?" syndrome that was
24 addressed.
25 Could you imagine or speculate, based on
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1 your experience, an answer to Richard Nuccio's
2 question from the point of view of Cubans at your
3 level and the type of cooperation, assistance,
4 resistance that they met from their superiors? Thank
5 you.
6 CAPTAIN BEARDSWORTH: The Cuban side would
7 make our side look like sliced bread. We have a
8 counter-drug or an interdiction specialist in the
9 Interest Section in Havana. The idea is that he will
10 contact his counterparts and work with his
11 counterparts.
12 As frustrating as the "Mother, may I?"
13 system has been in the U.S., the visibility that --
14 I'm out of government now, so I'm seeing them from a
15 distance -- but the problems internal to the Cuban
16 government, the conflict between or the power struggle
17 between the Ministry of Interior and the Foreign
18 Ministry and I think MINFAR in terms of having access
19 and cooperation in doing things is just horrendous;
20 plus the fact that at least here it's much easier for
21 people like me that are in the field to make
22 impassioned arguments to the right people and to get
23 through, and that just simply doesn't happen there.
24 So, yes, it's much more frustrating on the Cuban side.
25 DR. FALCOFF: We want to thank both of our
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1 panelists for a very interesting hour and a half.
2 (Applause.)
3 DR. GRAY: We have lunch, which you'll see
4 behind you. Everyone is invited.
5 We are going to allow our lunch speaker to
6 actually eat something before we ask him to make his
7 remarks.
8 (Whereupon, the foregoing matter went off
9 the record at 12:19 p.m. for lunch.)
10
11 DR. GRAY: We're going to start a little early, and
12 if, by chance, someone stumbles in at 2:15 thinking we
13 were starting then, we'll offer them a coupon for a
14 free soft drink.
15 (Laughter.)
16 I appreciate those of you who are staying
17 on. I think we have an interesting panel here. I'd
18 like to say that I'm very pleased with the panels we
19 did this morning, and thank you very much, all of you
20 who are involved in that.
21 I'll turn this over to our moderator,
22 Susan Kaufman Purcell, who I think needs no
23 introduction, and I'll let her take over.
24 DR. PURCELL: Thank you very much. I'm
25 very pleased to be here, and we have two excellent
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1 speakers this afternoon on the panel called "Security
2 Options for the Future." They're Rick Nuccio at the
3 Pell Center for International Relations and Public
4 Policy and -- how do you pronounce the name of the
5 school?
6 DR. NUCCIO: Salve Regina.
7 DR. PURCELL: Salve Regina University.
8 DR. NUCCIO: Obviously no Latin classes in
9 your high school.
10 (Laughter.)
11 DR. PURCELL: Obviously not. What can I
12 tell you? I went to Brooklyn.
13 (Laughter.)
14 And the other panelist is Anthony Maingot
15 of Florida International University. Both our
16 speakers have been working on Caribbean issues, plus
17 others of course, for a long time. They're each going
18 to speak for 20 minutes, and that will give us plenty
19 of time for questions, discussion, et cetera,
20 afterwards.
21 We'll start in the order in which they're
22 listed. So, Rich, you can go first.
23 DR. NUCCIO: Thanks, Susan. I'm delighted
24 to be here and see old friends again, those of you who
25 managed to survive the rest of the day. I know that
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1 Tony, both in what he says and the accent in which he
2 says it, will delight everyone. So I'm glad I'm going
3 first.
4 Those of us who have worked on Cuba
5 policy, and we're usually gray or bald or both for
6 having worked on Cuba policy, see Cuba go through
7 cycles of interest, and usually closely followed
8 thereafter by disappointment and disillusioned, to be
9 followed sometime later on by another cycle of
10 interest again. I guess we're in another cycle of
11 interest.
12 I want to congratulate the Stanley
13 Foundation for trying to put a view of Cuba in a
14 regional context. It certainly doesn't explain all,
15 but I've thought for some time that some of the
16 differences between the way I look at Cuba and
17 U.S./Cuba relations and others, who I consider to be
18 trying to do so of goodwill but reaching different
19 conclusions than I, that some of that difference is
20 the fact that I approach Cuba as a Latin American from
21 a Latin American/Caribbean perspective. I think it
22 does lead you to measure or judge Cuba somewhat
23 differently than if you approach Cuba sort of sui
24 generis or as a case of a communist state.
25 What I want to talk about are what I think
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1 to be the basic interests of the United States in the
2 Latin American/Caribbean region, and I was pleased,
3 maybe surprised, but mostly pleased to see that at
4 least this point in the new Administration the way
5 those interests are defined officially by the State
6 Department is awfully close to the way they were
7 defined at the beginning of the Clinton
8 Administration, when we went through a PRD process.
9 That's pleasing and maybe a little
10 surprising because these clusters of U.S. interests
11 that I'm going to talk about in a minute were are very
12 different from the way we had defined U.S. interests
13 for the previous 40-plus years. In 1993, when we did
14 this internal exercise, what is our policy and what is
15 it trying to accomplish, it was the first time that
16 communism and part of Latin America being viewed
17 through the lens of the U.S./Soviet conflict was not
18 in the PRD process.
19 Dennis Hays, who was a colleague of mine
20 at the time, may remember that I spent a little while,
21 tried to get Alec Watson to make history by declaring
22 that the Monroe Doctrine no longer applied to the
23 Latin American/Caribbean region because we have
24 overcome all external threats to the United States
25 from the region.
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1 MR. HAYS: He wisely ignored you.
2 DR. NUCCIO: Yes.
3 DR. PURCELL: It sounds like the end-of-
4 history argument.
5 DR. NUCCIO: Yes. At any rate, the fact
6 is, although the word "terrorism" may start to be
7 substituted for communism in some dialogue, the set of
8 interests that Jim Cason outlined before are the basic
9 ones that we identified at the beginning of the
10 Clinton Administration all those many years ago.
11 Part of the reason I think for the
12 continuation of the way we defined those interests is
13 what one of the earlier speakers, Professor Griffith,
14 who I guess has gone, defined with his "C's," I guess.
15 I got lost in his alphabet sometimes. But I think one
16 of the "C's" was this extraordinary convergence of
17 interests between the United States and the Latin
18 American/Caribbean region.
19 I want to emphasize something that I think
20 is not emphasized enough, which is that this
21 convergence was a convergence; it wasn't a
22 coincidence. It didn't just happen in the early
23 1990's that the United States and the Latin
24 American/Caribbean region started to think in similar
25 ways about the same problems or to develop the same
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1 language to talk about the same problems. I don't
2 think this was an accident or a coincidence. I think
3 it was a result of U.S. policies and a success for
4 U.S. policy.
5 Now, obviously, the Latin
6 American/Caribbean region had its own process that
7 brought it to its own place, but I believe it's
8 important to try to remember that there were specific
9 things that the United States did, some things that we
10 stopped doing, that made it possible for our region to
11 make declarations about democracy, human rights, free
12 trade, and free markets, and not have those imposed as
13 part of an imperial scheme, but have them quite
14 genuinely flow from a coincidence and convergence of
15 definitions of what we faced.
16 One of the other things I used to
17 unsuccessfully argue to my bosses at the State
18 Department was that, if you wanted a model for what
19 U.S. foreign policy should be after the Cold War,
20 U.S./Latin American relations was not a bad first
21 draft. What would you do if you wanted the rest of
22 the world someday to be in the situation that we found
23 ourselves in the early 1990's in the U.S./Latin
24 American relationship? That is, with a strong
25 convergence of interests.
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1 What were the lessons one could learn
2 about how we got there and what were some of the
3 pitfalls that could be avoided? I still think those
4 are questions that are relevant for U.S. policymakers
5 as we face this new period in which we are going to
6 define a new foreign policy for the United States,
7 this time under an emergency situation.
8 Well, back to those clusters of interest
9 that represent the convergence that I talked about
10 earlier. They have been defined somewhat differently
11 by different people today, but the way I'm talking
12 about it is the way it was talked about in the PRD.
13 There's a lot of overlap.
14 One cluster dealt with democracy and human
15 rights, promoting democracy, protecting human rights.
16 A second cluster dealt with free trade and free
17 markets, not the same thing, different with different
18 consequences and costs attached to them. And another
19 cluster of issues that were unique because they were,
20 by their very nature, multilateral, cooperative issues
21 on which the United States had no hope of being
22 successful if it did not produce cooperation from the
23 rest of the region: issues like illegal migration,
24 issues like the battle against narcotics trafficking,
25 and the protection of the environment, and I guess
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1 today we would add terrorism in there.
2 These are issues which, by their very
3 nature, by the very definition of the issue, simply
4 cannot be addressed unilaterally by the United States.
5 Well, I guess I could say we could try to address
6 them unilaterally. We could build a 30-foot wall
7 across our border with Mexico and equip it with laser-
8 guided machine guns, I suppose, but in fact most of
9 the unilateral options one could think of to try to
10 address an issue like migration or narcotics
11 trafficking would very quickly fail.
12 Well, in 2001, after what happened on
13 September 11th, what are the challenges to this happy
14 convergence of values and interests between the United
15 States and the Latin American and Caribbean region? I
16 would also say that, for the same reason I emphasized
17 that the convergence was a result, to some extent, of
18 the U.S. policy successes, I think most of the current
19 challenges to this convergence are the result of U.S.
20 policy failures.
21 We have in the region a number of failed
22 or failing democracies. Really for the first time in
23 10 years, we need to be worried that there are
24 countries that are very close to falling out of the
25 category of democratic polities.
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1 Yet another thing I used to argue about
2 unsuccessfully was that, having only two categories
3 for Latin America was too restrictive, that the
4 difference between a democratic Mexico and a
5 democratic Costa Rica was awfully far; that we should
6 have had an intermediate category of civilian-elected
7 government on its way to a full democracy, but that
8 was another one of these academic niceties that I was
9 concerned about that got left behind.
10 Places like Ecuador, Paraguay -- I'll come
11 back to Colombia later, but, obviously, it's near the
12 top of the list of failing democracies. We have some
13 authoritarian reversions from democratic practices in
14 Peru, in Venezuela. Of course, we have the
15 perpetuation of the rejection of the whole idea of
16 convergence and of these hemispheric values by Cuba.
17 The question I want to ask is whether the
18 war on terrorism itself, the way we mount that war and
19 conduct it, poses a possible threat to this existing
20 convergence, which again I underline makes the Western
21 Hemisphere a much happier place for U.S. policymakers
22 than it's been for a very long time.
23 I am concerned about the way we may
24 conduct this war on terrorism, as presenting a problem
25 for the current condition of our relations. A big
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1 part of the problem in the Cold War, or a big part of
2 what created problems for us in the Cold War, was the
3 mistaken identity many times in U.S. policy of all
4 local social and political conflicts as needing to be
5 related to, and inextricably linked to, the
6 U.S./Soviet competition.
7 You can read things like CIA official
8 histories of our intervention in Guatemala in 1954,
9 for example, to find the argument made by CIA
10 historians that the intervention itself and its
11 dramatic consequences of civil war, hundreds of
12 thousands of deaths and military dictatorship in
13 Guatemala, were the consequences of a misreading by
14 policymakers of what was actually involved. We have
15 the case, I think, that most people would be happy to
16 accept the so-called radical regimes of Mossadegh in
17 1952 in Iran or of Arbenz in 1954 and Guatemala
18 compared with what we wound up getting eventually as a
19 result of the U.S. intervention.
20 I'm also concerned about what I consider
21 to be a very broad, overly broad, definition of
22 terrorism as essentially being the same thing as
23 political violence. I believe that it is not just a
24 semantic debate or scoring debating points to say one
25 person's Freedom Fighters are another person's
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1 terrorists.
2 The way I read the current State
3 Department definition of terrorism, the Boston Tea
4 Party was a terrorist act, because it's defined as
5 political violence, very broadly, the attempt to
6 produce political results through violence. Well, the
7 Tea Party was mostly violence against property, but
8 there are lots of things in the U.S. revolutionary
9 history, and we are a revolutionary country, which
10 argue that there is a difference between acceptance of
11 tyranny and rejection of tyranny, and that rejection
12 of tyranny can involve lawful -- indeed, sanctioned --
13 violence that, indeed, is an inalienable right of
14 human beings to struggle against domination and
15 repression.
16 Yet, we have a definition right now
17 guiding this massive worldwide effort that essentially
18 equates all acts of political violence as being the
19 same thing as the destruction of thousands of civilian
20 lives wantonly, as occurred on September 11th.
21 Well, if the Latin American/Caribbean
22 region today has this convergence of interest with the
23 United States, what is its potential as a future
24 threat to those interests, what I sort of understand
25 to be the theme of this panel? I think that it is
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1 actually a minor problem, still a problem, but a minor
2 problem the way that we are sort of applying the
3 terrorism grid to the Latin American and Caribbean
4 region, or being worried about cells in the tri-border
5 area or connections between renegade IRA people and
6 FARC guerrillas. I think those things are things we
7 should be worried about, but I don't think that any of
8 those things are major threats to U.S. security or
9 U.S. interests.
10 What I think would be such a threat, such
11 a major threat, that would reconvert the Hemisphere
12 into a region that we would have close to the top of
13 our national security priorities is if one of those
14 failed states or candidates for failed state status
15 falls into the category of failed states and is taken
16 over by forces that are hostile to the United States
17 and, to some extent, therefore, sympathetic to the
18 sort of ideological agenda that some of the terrorists
19 have of opposition to a modern, secular culture, of
20 opposition to market forces, and to the whole last two
21 decades of an increasing globalization of social,
22 political, and economic forces in the Western World.
23 Well, I mentioned that certainly today the
24 principal candidate for falling into that failed state
25 status is Colombia, that it's the most worrisome. To
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1 get on that other soapbox I was riding a little bit
2 earlier, I believe that what's going on in Colombia is
3 clearly the result of U.S. policies in the past,
4 particularly the way we have conducted ourselves with
5 regard to the Samper government and the kind of pique,
6 almost personal pique, that we allowed to govern our
7 policy during that period.
8 I think Colombia is especially worrisome,
9 given the drug connection, to the financing of a
10 guerilla war in Colombia and to the peculiar
11 relationship between drugs and the Taliban and the
12 current funding of all kinds of activities based in
13 Afghanistan. If there are international linkages
14 among terrorist groups, we certainly know there are
15 linkages among narcotics traffickers, and I think that
16 is an especially worrisome one about Colombia.
17 Well, what about the Caribbean region?
18 Are there candidates for failed state status in the
19 Caribbean region? As Alberto mentioned earlier, and
20 one of his requirements as a Senior Fellow at the Pell
21 Center is that he cite at least one of the Director's
22 publications in every public appearance he has -- we
23 pay him a huge salary to do that (laughter). I'm
24 kidding when I say all that.
25 I've thought for a long time, I worry
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1 about Cuba and about the thrust of current U.S./Cuba
2 policy is that we are potentiating the possibility of
3 a disastrous transition in Cuba. Again, I want to
4 underline that the United States is not responsible
5 for everything that happens, good or bad, in the
6 world, but I do think that we can make contributions
7 to making things better and making things worse.
8 Why do I think Cuba is one of the best
9 candidates, if "best" is the right word to use there,
10 for becoming a failed state? Because it has by far
11 the weakest civil society in the Caribbean region. It
12 is a society that deliberately, by the intention of
13 its rulers, has been kept out of this trend of modern
14 secularization, that has done so much to provide the
15 base for democratic forces in other parts of the
16 world.
17 In contrast to that desperately weak civil
18 society, it has a very strong military. I'm not
19 saying that it has a military strong enough to attack
20 the United States, of course. It just has a military,
21 battle-trained, dramatically armed, sitting on top of
22 piles and piles of conventional weapons.
23 Now someday we'll find out how many of
24 those things have rotted in all the caves that they've
25 been stashed away in for that eventual U.S. invasion
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1 that the Cuban government has been preparing for for
2 so long, but I think that, if state authority were to
3 disintegrate in Cuba and a civil war were to break
4 out, the level of violence that would be sustainable
5 in the country, because of the military training of
6 ordinary Cubans and because of the weapons available
7 to ordinary Cubans, could be extraordinary.
8 I also think that Cuba is a good
9 candidate, a worrisome candidate, for failed state
10 status for some of the other reasons that were
11 referred to in earlier panels that Alberto mentioned:
12 that Cuba has little, if any, democratic tradition.
13 In fact, it has, if anything, negative traditions to
14 bring to the status of a democratic transition, of a
15 kind of politics which has been violent, almost
16 gangsterist in its practices for decades, and which
17 has been submerged by the Castro dictatorship, but
18 perhaps not modified in any fundamental way.
19 Well, then the last question I want to
20 address is, could changes in U.S. policy contribute to
21 reducing Cuba's predisposition to becoming a failed
22 state? Again, of course, Cuba could do something
23 about reducing that predisposition. The Castro
24 government could do things to lead Cuba towards a
25 softer landing, and it should, but the question I'm
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1 trying to address, as a former U.S. policymaker and as
2 a U.S. citizen is, is there anything we can do instead
3 of just waiting for Cuba?
4 Or, to put it another way, and almost
5 facetiously because I'm not sure that any of what I'm
6 about to say could ever be possible, is there anything
7 about the current war on terror that would give U.S.
8 policymakers the incentive to treat Cuba as a foreign
9 policy problem rather than a domestic policy problem?
10 I must say that I'm prompted to go through
11 the exercise I'm about to go through in my last two or
12 three minutes by listening to a not-for-attribution
13 discussion, so the person will remain unnamed, but a
14 person who deals with terrorism issues in a U.S.
15 agency saying that Cuba has nothing to offer the
16 United States on a terrorism front; they don't know
17 anything; they don't have anything that would be of
18 value to the United States. So maybe if they did, we
19 might be interested in engaging it, but since they
20 don't, we aren't. We all know the reason we aren't
21 going to engage them has nothing to do with what they
22 have to offer. But that prompted me to try to make a
23 list of what they would have to offer, just in case.
24 I'll say one other thing, again, without
25 revealing people's identities, because I want them to
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1 keep their jobs. I did get a phone call from someone
2 who will be working in a very senior position in the
3 Administration who said, "Gee, do you think there's
4 anything we can do on Cuba in this new environment
5 after September 11th?" And this person wasn't saying,
6 "Could we drop some of those B-52 loads on Havana on
7 our way over to Afghanistan?" Quite the contrary,
8 this person came out of an exercise of looking at
9 states -- the language we used to use was "states
10 formerly known as rogue." I guess now we're re-
11 roguing them.
12 Looking at Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba,
13 that list, is there anything -- we're going to be
14 doing things with these other countries that we never
15 could have thought of doing before September 11th. Is
16 there anything that we can do on Cuba to move it into
17 this category of a foreign policy problem, just treat
18 it, as Mark has this great phrase in his forthcoming
19 book, to treat it as an ordinary country, to treat it
20 like we would another country, not with some special
21 political connotation to it?
22 Well, is there anything Cuba could offer?
23 Yes, amazingly, perhaps amazingly enough. What's the
24 other place in the world where we might someday be
25 worrying about getting people out of caves? Cuba. As
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1 part of its preparations for that inevitable U.S.
2 invasion that Castro dreads, wishes for, I'm not
3 exactly sure, Cuba has engaged in an extensive effort
4 to burrow in, to protect itself, to try to raise the
5 cost to the United States of any military action
6 against Cuba.
7 I won't have much more to say.
8 After the shoot-down in February of 1996
9 of the two airplanes, President Clinton discovered
10 that he had almost no standoff options, laser-guided
11 missiles, and so on, to use against Cuba. One,
12 because Cuba had put all their command-and-control
13 facilities in civilian-populated areas and, two,
14 because they had hardened their silos to such an
15 extent that to take out the Cuban air force would
16 require much more threat to U.S. forces than it did
17 for us to take out the Iraqis air force. Indeed, the
18 Cubans spent a lot of time in Iraq after the Gulf War
19 studying our bombing and tactical procedures and how
20 they could protect themselves. Maybe some of that is
21 relevant to getting into Afghan caves these days.
22 The other thing -- and I'll end here -- is
23 Cuba's intelligence service. We've mostly been
24 reading about our ability to penetrate it lately, but
25 the fact is that for the previous decades before that
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1 it was one of the best intelligence services in the
2 world. It rolled up virtually every activity of the
3 United States aimed at Cuba.
4 I wonder if they would be in touch with
5 some of the people that we would like to get. I
6 wonder if there are circumstances under which they
7 would be prepared to give up some of the people we
8 would like to get. My answer to that question would
9 be probably, if there was something in it for Castro.
10 I don't think he has particular scruples about such
11 things.
12 I have to say I would support it, doing
13 such a deal, only if there was something in it for us,
14 only if we could get help in the war on terrorism and
15 if it would do something inside Cuba that would help
16 us prepare for Cuba's transition. But does this new
17 atmosphere offer an environment in which you could try
18 to do something to treat Cuba as an ordinary country?
19 I think the answer is yes.
20 Sorry.
21 DR. PURCELL: Thank you very much.
22 Tony?
23 DR. MAINGOT: Well, I'll tell you a true
24 story. After the Pope's visit to Cuba, a Cuban
25 Catholic is in conversation with a Cuban communist,
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1 and the Cuban Catholic tells his communist friend,
2 "You know, I believe every word, but I do not go to
3 church functions." And the communist says, "Que
4 extrano!", "How strange, I go to all the party
5 functions, but I don't believe a word."
6 (Laughter.)
7 The reason I give that is because we've
8 got to be careful in the contemporary world to learn
9 how to read subtext, subplots. This is not original
10 to me. Joseph Nye had a wonderful essay quite a few
11 years ago in Foreign Affairs in which he said, "Look,
12 our intelligence services are still operating as if
13 they were in the Cold War, where you send people out
14 to discover secrets." He says, "In today's world it's
15 not secrets you want. It's the unraveling of
16 mysteries, the mysteries of ethnic relations, the
17 mysteries of religious relations, the mysteries that
18 move people that go way beyond anything we had in the
19 Cold War."
20 And he said -- he was head of the National
21 Security Agency at the time -- he said, "I'm trying to
22 convince my people that they have to learn to tell
23 stories. Stories have a plot, they have subplots,
24 they have characters, and their outcomes are not
25 always like Hollywood movies, which always end up in
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1 marriage."
2 They're not always happy endings. And I
3 say this because it seems to me, looking at the
4 Caribbean -- and I like to look at the Caribbean
5 generally, the whole Caribbean -- there are some
6 subplots there, subtexts, which are worth looking at.
7 Let me give you an example drawing on this morning's
8 conversation.
9 This morning there was an issue as to the
10 what we call Syrian-Lebanese communities in the
11 Caribbean, and somebody said, "Well," -- who is it
12 that said -- "Well, they're Christians; they're
13 Catholics," which is true. The vast majority of the
14 Arabs, "Turcos, as they call them in Latin America
15 because they came from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, are
16 Catholic, as are 45 percent of the Arabs that live in
17 the United States, they are Catholics.
18 But don't get that confused with the fact
19 that they're against what is going on right now. In
20 fact, there is a very powerful anti-American current
21 among these communities. Let me give you some
22 examples.
23 The most blatant one was the recent
24 declaration of the Syrian-Lebanese community in Haiti,
25 which is very powerful. I don't have time to go into
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1 the history of it, but President Solomon, the history,
2 got rid of the mulatto elite and substituted them with
3 Lebanese and Syrians. They're very powerful there.
4 You read that declaration and you realize where they
5 stand. They blame the United States for the
6 Palestinian issue and, consequently, they're opposed
7 to any American action in Afghanistan.
8 Interesting editorial in the Trinidad
9 Guardian, which is owned by a Lebanese, calling for
10 the United States to go slow vis-a-vis the supervision
11 of the offshore banking interests in the Caribbean,
12 not surprisingly, a Caribbean where Syrian-Lebanese
13 merchants are now the new economic elite.
14 What I'm going to suggest to you is that
15 the subtext here is anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitism
16 that goes deep into the roots of Catholic education in
17 these islands, of which I am a product. I went to
18 Catholic schools. I know the teachings. The church
19 then is not the church now.
20 These are subtexts that are very, very
21 crucial. So when you're talking about the tri-state
22 area in Paraguay or you're talking about the fact that
23 Ecuador is dominated by the Syrian-Lebanese community,
24 as are so many others, that in the Dominican Republic
25 you have now had three Presidents of Syrian-Lebanese
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1 background, you're talking about a very serious
2 element there, especially as it has to do with the
3 banks.
4 Now I'm not suggesting that we undertake
5 any particular action of this sort, not at all. What
6 I am suggesting, if this is a war over people's hearts
7 and minds, let's fully understand where those hearts
8 and minds are.
9 Now I also realize, of course, that I'm
10 very much influenced by a compatriot of mine,
11 Vidiadhar Naipaul whose book, Among the Believers, and
12 his most recent one, very much attacked, is not
13 exactly very kind with the Islamic community because
14 Naipaul, being a Hindu, points out, you see, that
15 three-quarters of the Islamic community of the world
16 is non-Arab, and he might be right or wrong in
17 pointing out that these non-Arabs in Indonesia,
18 Malasia, Pakistan, et cetera, et cetera, 300 million
19 in India, and so many of the parts of the world,
20 including Trinidad, where the fastest-growing sector
21 of the Muslim population are black converts who have
22 deep ties with black Muslims in the United States,
23 these are the new elements.
24 Now I don't want to make a conspiracy out
25 of this. I want to tell you that if this is a battle
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1 over minds and hearts, we have some things to look at
2 that are taking place in the world. I'm not at all
3 surprised to find out that six of the leaders of the
4 Muslimeen uprising in Trinidad, which nearly took over
5 the state in 1990, six of those were members of the
6 Black Power Movement 10 years before. There is a
7 transition there, and one has to look at these things
8 and ask the questions, why? What are some of the
9 reasons for this?
10 Now having said that, what I want to do is
11 organize the rest of my talk on four points, four
12 beliefs of mine as to the way American foreign policy
13 has changed and then look at the possible impacts on
14 the Caribbean of these changes.
15 First, the shift from the original
16 unilateral emphasis of the Bush Administration, coming
17 in talking unilateral -- I need not go into all the
18 different treaties, the Kyoto Treaty, et cetera, et
19 cetera, that they dropped out of, the rhetoric of
20 Condoleeza Rice vis-a-vis China and Russia, et cetera,
21 all that's gone. Now the new message is
22 multilateralism. What is the consequence of that to
23 the Caribbean, if anything? Does it extend to the
24 Caribbean?
25 Secondly, a change of heart vis-a-vis
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1 nation-building. You will recall during the campaign
2 Bush said they're not involved in nation-building;
3 this is wrong. The two cases they always pointed to,
4 of course, one was Haiti, which was regarded, quite
5 correctly, as a failure of nation-building, and the
6 other was Somalia. That has now changed.
7 Now you have Tony Blair, who is our most
8 articulate spokesman in this war, saying, "We have to
9 look at Afghanistan after this." Now it could be, as
10 Fariq Zakarria just said in Newsweek, saying, "It has
11 to be nation-building ‘lite.’" I love that phrase.
12 He says, not the full nation-building, just "lite,"
13 you know, less calories.
14 Well, I'm wondering if you could get
15 involved in nation-building and know just how deep
16 you're going to go, once you start to go in. That's
17 the second area.
18 The third change of heart is the role of
19 the state. All the talk of, you know, somebody like
20 Adam Smith, the role of the "invisible hand" driving
21 people's interest in capitalism, all that's changed.
22 Now the state is deeply involved. Just look at the
23 big debate. I don't know if the House has voted today
24 on the question of federalizing airport staff, and
25 whatnot, but that makes sense, because if that is a
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1 security issue, which it is, then all security
2 agencies are federal. The Senate voted 100 percent in
3 favor of that.
4 But there is a big fight going on in the
5 House, but, you see, the question is the involvement
6 of the state. New circumstances now shift your
7 emphasis. You say the state has to be involved. How
8 is that going to play out in the Caribbean where the
9 whole message is: Take the state out of affairs; let
10 the private sector run things. That's the important
11 thing.
12 Within this context, very importantly, the
13 role of the United States state vis-a-vis offshore
14 banks, you will remember when Secretary of the
15 Treasury Paul O'Neill came in, he says, "No, no, we're
16 not into that. We're not into prying into people's
17 accounts." The two bills which tried to tighten the
18 money-laundering legislation were defeated by Texas
19 and politicians not favoring it. Suddenly, now the
20 war on terrorism has fundamentally to do with offshore
21 banking.
22 Now we're discovering the BCCI confusion
23 which had deep roots in the Caribbean, deep roots in
24 Panama and the Caribbean. Now it is one of the things
25 we're looking at.
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1 I've been writing about this for a long
2 time because I've been trying to track some of the
3 monies illicitly gained by these corrupt politicians
4 in the Caribbean, and they favor these offshore banks.
5 Now we might be able to move against places like
6 Dominica, St. Kitts, St. Vincent. Can we move against
7 Cayman Islands? That is a big issue because Cayman
8 Islands represent what I call American money protected
9 by the British flag, you see. That is a very big
10 issue.
11 The fourth point is military strategy. Is
12 the Powell doctrine of massive intervention with clear
13 strategy, entry and exit strategy, still viable or are
14 we now in an era where we say these are long-term
15 involvements which involve fundamentally intelligence,
16 quick strikes, perhaps greater use of Delta Forces,
17 which were used, by the way, in Trinidad. This is not
18 well-known. Six Delta Forces went into Trinidad.
19 These are the ones that provided the Trinidad army
20 with the intelligence to listen to the communication
21 between the rebels in Parliament and the ones on the
22 TV station. Without that, who knows what would have
23 happened in my island?
24 Does it mean that we're going to have more
25 now FBI who now have more supervision authority? In
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1 fact, there's an interesting exchange. Countries are
2 asking that the CIA leave and let the FBI come in.
3 This is a very interesting case. This is the case of
4 Trinidad. It's the case of the Dominican Republic.
5 There's a greater faith in the FBI than there is in
6 the CIA, which has something to do with Cold War
7 years, and whatnot.
8 But, clearly, a role for U.S. intelligence
9 which extends to areas such as customs, immigration,
10 control over aviation, and, indeed, an acceptance of
11 the U.S. Coast Guard now patrolling cruise ships,
12 which is the fastest sector of our tourism industry,
13 and none of the talk of the shiprider agreement and
14 all of these issues are to be heard anymore.
15 So if those are four changes that I see,
16 how do they play out in the Caribbean? Let's go point
17 by point, four points then.
18 First, there's going to be a differential
19 impact on the Caribbean. Those parts of the Caribbean
20 which are still European might be small; they're not
21 inconsequential. The French parts, the French model
22 such as Martinique and Guadeloupe and Guiana, French
23 Guiana, crucial because the French have the best
24 intelligence in the eastern Caribbean. That's a very
25 important thing. If I had more time, I would tell you
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1 some of the complots that the French have revealed to
2 governments such as those of St. Lucia and Dominica
3 and even to Barbados.
4 Not surprisingly, the French have shifted
5 the French Foreign Legion headquarters to Guiana, to
6 French Guiana. Of course, that is where European
7 rocketry is. That is not unimportant.
8 The British are now reinforcing their
9 effectives in the rest of their territories; i.e.,
10 Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and
11 Montserrat.
12 The Dutch are doing the same thing in the
13 Netherlands Antilles, including Aruba, where they're
14 putting considerable pressure on the Aruba free trade
15 which was a major area of the peso/dollar exchange
16 rate, which was one of the large money-laundering
17 operations of the Medellin Cartel.
18 So what we see here is in a way a return
19 of Europe to the Caribbean and not opposed by the
20 Caribbean in any way. A consequence of this is that
21 any movements that we have seen of local nationalism
22 to push for independence, such as, for instance, the
23 most celebrated, the Vieques issue, Vieques has now
24 disappeared from the Puerto Rican frontlines. Nobody
25 is talking about Vieques anymore. Now it is perfectly
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1 fine for the United States to carry out their
2 operations, and everybody is behind this now.
3 DR. PURCELL: Can I just interrupt for a
4 second? Why are they behind us?
5 DR. MAINGOT: Why is who behind us?
6 DR. PURCELL: The Caribbean governments.
7 DR. MAINGOT: Because the Caribbean people
8 have always been pro-American.
9 DR. PURCELL: Okay.
10 DR. MAINGOT: Always. I always remember
11 when George Lemming, who Alex Santratero, the Cuban
12 writer, just said should have been given the Nobel
13 Peace Prize because he doesn't like Naipaul and he
14 likes Lemming, who is on the left. Lemming is saying,
15 "I'll be damned. We just can't make anti-Americans
16 out of these people." I quote that in one of my
17 writings, because, you see, this is part of the whole
18 thing.
19 Now other things come with that: much
20 greater dependence. We are now seeing the tremendous
21 dependence on American tourism, and it's Cuba, too.
22 It's fine to get these planeloads of Germans who pack
23 their own lunch in Germany and come and eat them on
24 the islands. It's Yankees who spend money. Just
25 travel around the Caribbean and ask the people.
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1 Yankees spend money. This is something that sinks
2 through, especially if this is such a vital part of
3 your economy.
4 You see, it's not just the Caribbean.
5 Mexico, you can think of Mexico without tourism? Can
6 you think of Spain without tourism? Can you think of
7 Florida without the 22 million tourists that we used
8 to get? Tourism is a major industry in a world in
9 which we have more leisure and more money to spend.
10 So that created dependence. Now
11 remittances are in question. They've dropped vis-a-
12 vis Cuba. They've dropped vis-a-vis Jamaica. They've
13 dropped vis-a-vis the Dominican Republican.
14 Now the whole question of immigration
15 visas, this is not to be taken lightly, the question
16 of immigration visas is not a trivial matter. Ten
17 percent of every Caribbean island exports, every
18 Caribbean island exports 10 percent of their labor
19 force. There is no economic model on earth that could
20 create jobs for 10 percent of your workforce.
21 The United States, which is the most
22 liberal country in terms of immigration policy in the
23 world, because Britain, I mean, just look at the
24 figures. Jamaica, I'll give you the 1999, 18,000
25 Jamaicans migrated legally to the United States, 420
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1 to Great Britain. This is where they're coming. That
2 means a tremendous safety valve for them. That is an
3 issue.
4 Now, finally, the issue of nation-
5 building. Is this going to mean that the United
6 States is going to take greater interest in nation-
7 building? I have my very serious doubts. I think
8 that's going to depend country and country, and what I
9 want to do is to give you four examples of Caribbean
10 countries and see whether you agree with them at all.
11 A country which surprisingly has suddenly
12 become the most active country in the Caribbean is the
13 Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republican, as you
14 probably know, was completely closed off under the 31
15 years of Trujillo, all the five presidencies of
16 Joaquin Balaguer, who is still there. He's blind;
17 he's deaf; he can't even sit up straight, but he's
18 running for the presidency again. This is something
19 to keep in mind if you're looking at Fidel Castro.
20 Balaguer is 94; he is still calling the shots. Don't
21 get rid of these guyagos. Guyagos, as I say, if they
22 survive age 5, they survive for very long periods of
23 time, and this is so.
24 You know, Franco, who was Fidel's great
25 friend, used to write him letters saying, "Fidel, a la
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1 gringos dalas duro." "Hit the Yankees hard."
2 (Laughter.)
3 Here is fascist and a -- well, he's not a
4 communist; he's a Fidelista because I don't think he
5 ever read a page of Marx. He used to read Diego de
6 Rivera when he was in the Jesuit school.
7 But the point is that the Dominican
8 Republic is now playing a very critical role. What I
9 am interested in is the Dominican's bridge as the only
10 one who's bridging Central American and the CARICOM
11 islands, as the one with the most active Chamber of
12 Cuba, Dominican Commerce through which, by the way, a
13 lot of Miami interests flow, a lot.
14 I ask the question, where do all these
15 Bertrams and Hatteras yachts that you see in all these
16 havens and Cuba, where do they come from? Cuba
17 doesn't -- the ex-Soviet republics don't produce these
18 luxury things. These things are produced in Florida.
19 How do they get to Cuba? It used to be Panama before
20 we closed down that tremendous operation that the de
21 la Guardia brother twins set up in Panama. Understand
22 that the realities are taking place and that these
23 things go on.
24 So the Dominican Republic is going to be
25 favored by the United States because I think the
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1 Dominican Republic, a little bit like Mexico, is seen
2 as a third party intermediary. I'm speculating.
3 You're entitled to attack me on my speculations.
4 Second, Haiti I believe is out. Haiti,
5 through Aristide, has burned its bridges.
6 "Il la brule les ponts" is one of the declarations of
7 the Haitians in Florida circulated, ferocious attack
8 on the Aristide element as being a narco-state, et
9 cetera, et cetera. Haiti I believe has missed the
10 boat, and very sadly because it's the most desperate
11 country.
12 Jamaica is an interesting case. Jamaica
13 is an interesting case because Jamaican economy is in
14 a structural crisis. Jamaica suffered more through
15 NAFTA than the Dominica Republic because of the
16 particular way their garment industry was set up.
17 They didn't read the legislation carefully enough.
18 Interestingly enough, they have more exports than does
19 the Dominican Republic. The problem is that the
20 Dominicans let loose their private sector, a very
21 aggressive new private sector in the Dominican
22 Republic, trained in the United States, instead as
23 before in Paris and Madrid and all these places.
24 Now the private sector in all these 54
25 Free Trade Zones in the Dominican Republic are
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1 American-trained, young hustlers. That is a very
2 important thing because they help the government
3 interpret some of these treaties.
4 But Jamaica is a place that one has to
5 help, first of all, because it has an extremely
6 important diaspora in places like New York and
7 increasingly in Miami. But, secondly, because
8 Jamaica, because of its expertise in diplomacy and
9 negotiation, is one of the key countries in the third
10 world, APC -- African, Pacific, Caribbean --
11 countries. In all these negotiations that are taking
12 place in the post-Lome period, Jamaicans are vital on
13 this score.
14 So the question is, what does each country
15 offer in terms of a new world that is now a
16 multilateral world? And Jamaica offers that.
17 There is, of course, the issue of the drug
18 wars, and we now know that the Jamaicans possess,
19 through Siendesa Provincia,a direct link to the
20 Colombian mafias.
21 How am I doing for time? Four minutes,
22 all right.
23 Now the point is we're now left with Cuba,
24 and I'm not going to repeat anything that Rick says,
25 and I agree with most of it. Some of the things that
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1 were said today, I thought the presentations were very
2 good.
3 I would merely point out some
4 contradictions and see how the Caribbean stands vis-a-
5 vis that. Interestingly enough, the Republic Bank of
6 Trinidad and Tobago, which is a privately-owned bank,
7 just opened a window of 40 million U.S. dollars to
8 subsidize and turn out exports to Cuba. This is going
9 on everywhere. In island after island they're going
10 to Cuba, not always happy.
11 I talked to a Dominican, not from the
12 Dominican Republic, but from the Isle of Dominica, who
13 went to visit the students there, and he says they
14 were all crying. It was miserable. They were out,
15 you know, blah, blah, blah, but they're going because
16 it's the only chance they have.
17 If at one time the United States gave
18 Grenada 125 senior scholarships, it's zero now. So
19 nobody should be surprised if they take up the
20 scholarships offered by the Cubans, you see.
21 Let me give you some of the
22 contradictions. Here is the Nuevo Herald from Miami,
23 October 26th, 2000: "The House/Senate Conference
24 withdraws proposal not to penalize Americans traveling
25 to Cuba." Fine. I was being pushed by certain
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1 Members of the House; it makes sense, 130,000 Cuban-
2 Americans go every year to Cuba. On the same page
3 there is a story that says, "American Airlines, United
4 Airlines, Continental Airlines announced that they're
5 increasing their charter flights from New York to
6 Cuba."
7 So, on the one hand, your government is
8 taking one action; on the other hand, the pure public
9 pressure to go to Cuba is creating another one. I
10 will leave it up to you to decide whether it's good
11 for a country to have its people contravening its
12 laws.
13 Last example that I would give, which has
14 to do with something that I have some affinity for
15 because I happen to be a rum collector and follow the
16 trade in rums and the geopolitics of rums, which is
17 very interesting. You can understand a lot about
18 international global trade by looking at one
19 commodity.
20 DR. FALCOFF: It's interesting to drink
21 it, too.
22 DR. MAINGOT: Well, Mark, I don't drink it
23 anymore, unfortunately.
24 (Laughter.)
25 So it collects there and it's becoming
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1 bigger. I have over nearly 500 varieties now.
2 So the thing is I'm interested in,
3 however, in a case that has implications way beyond
4 rum. That is the Havana crew conflict between the
5 Bacardi company, which is the most powerful Hispanic-
6 American company, and the Cuban government. Now this
7 is what is important about it: They stand in
8 violation of international copyright laws. The WTO
9 has already decided on that. We've got to be very
10 careful because there are 600 American commodities
11 registered in Cuba with copyrights. Does it mean that
12 we are willing to trade the interest of the Bacardi
13 company for 600 other American concerns who Cuba has
14 already said, "Well, we will just eliminate their
15 copyrights and start manufacturing their soaps," et
16 cetera?
17 And if you want to see the number of goods
18 that are there, I would recommend that you take a look
19 at the last issue of U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic
20 Council. There are a number of American commodities
21 which are already being traded in Cuba, including the
22 government giving permission to go to the trade fair
23 that was just held in Cuba. Now, naturally, a lot of
24 American agricultural interests are there, the rice
25 people, other people like that, but also Del Monte.
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1 It's a very interesting story of how these goods are
2 coming in because Cuba doesn't have any place to turn,
3 so they are turning to the one place can provide,
4 which is the United States of America. Now they're
5 going to have to do through the back door, but they
6 will do it anyway.
7 Finally, I would say the following: Like
8 any novel, it has characters, and clearly the
9 character who has dealt, if we consider each American
10 Administration has one installment of the novel, the
11 one who has dealt in every one of the 11 novels --
12 i.e., 11 American Presidents -- is Fidel Castro. Now
13 he is in the 11th novel dealing with George Bush, and
14 here's the point: We social scientists tend to
15 minimize what during the Romantic Era they considered
16 the heroes, what Nietzsche called the "Superman."
17 We take Marx's notion that men don't make
18 history, at least they don't make it in the way they
19 think they're making it, and all this stuff. Men do
20 matter, men and women more and more in the Caribbean,
21 by the way, thank God, do matter. Fidel Castro
22 matters.
23 On this score, he is intrinsically "al
24 ultimo hueso" anti-American. He got that from his
25 father. He got that from the Jesuit school. Find out
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1 who the professors were in the Jesuit school where
2 they came from, the same ones that I had in Costa
3 Rica: Germans, Spanish, et cetera. There's a deep,
4 deep element here.
5 So I am not minimizing the difficulty of
6 dealing with this character. What I'm saying is the
7 following: When you have a situation where the Bush
8 family seems to be compelled to be involved in the
9 politics of the Cuban community -- this is the final
10 line in the novel; I'm certain you want to see how the
11 novel ends (laughter).
12 Here's a column written by the Governor of
13 Florida, the younger brother of our President, which
14 is a raw piece of political propaganda about the
15 Nicaraguan elections, calling Ortega, who's probably
16 going to be the next President, "a friend of
17 terrorists," blah, blah, blah, and "Bolanos, our great
18 friend of the United States". What is the Governor of
19 the State of Florida doing? I must tell you that this
20 article now has become grist for the political mill.
21 Did we learn our lesson in Argentina,
22 where a letter from the American Ambassador led to the
23 election of Peron? We've got a problem. We've got a
24 problem of a family that is deeply in the political
25 bed with the Cuban-American community in Miami, who
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1 feel the need to write a column like this in the paper
2 because of his links with that community. Now I have
3 lived in Miami for 30 years. I married a girl who was
4 raised in Cuba. My son is married into one of the
5 major exiled political families. No problem. Some of
6 my best friends are Cubans.
7 (Laughter.)
8 But I'll tell you something, friendship is
9 one thing; national interest is another. And here
10 there are subtexts which are very complicated, and I'm
11 afraid we're in for a very rough time in terms of
12 Cuba.
13 Thank you.
14 DR. PURCELL: Thank you very much. It's
15 interesting that you ended with the letter involving
16 the Nicaraguan election because I was going to ask you
17 both a question before opening it up to the audience
18 that had to do with the Caribbean more broadly
19 defined, and I was going to ask whether Rick's comment
20 about how in the Cold War we tended to see anything
21 sort of -- he didn't say "left of center," but sort of
22 social movement, you know, whatever, in terms of it
23 being somehow allied with communism, et cetera. And
24 you've got coming up this Nicaraguan election, and you
25 already have in power Hugo Chavez.
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1 So, Rick, you could start. I don't know,
2 Tony, if you want to add anything, please feel free.
3 What do you think U.S. policy -- or how will U.S.
4 policy post-September 11th play out in terms of
5 Nicaragua and Venezuela?
6 DR. NUCCIO: Well, there is this
7 coincidence -- I think it's a coincidence in this case
8 -- that most of the people who fought the Central
9 American wars are about to be reinstalled in the same
10 policy positions 15 years later. I mean it looks like
11 an alignment of -- it's like a convention of an old
12 team or something that.
13 DR. PURCELL: Are you thinking Maisto?
14 DR. NUCCIO: Maisto at the National
15 Security Council, Otto Reich perhaps, if he gets
16 confirmed.
17 DR. PURCELL: Oh, do you think he's going
18 to be confirmed?
19 DR. NUCCIO: The answer to that question
20 would align me with the pro- or the anti-Otto forces.
21 DR. PURCELL: Oh, okay.
22 DR. NUCCIO: Shall I pull a Fulton
23 Armstrong and say, "I'm just an analyst."?
24 (Laughter.)
25 I believe Otto is going to get a recess
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1 appointment, whether he's confirmed or not. I'm told
2 -- I didn't read it myself -- I'm told that "In the
3 Loop" this week in The Washington Post said that when
4 Powell appeared before Senator Helms this week, Jesse
5 said, "Hey, while we're all here, what about Otto
6 Reich? Let me see hands. Who wants to vote for Otto
7 Reich?" And three hands went up, which means it
8 clearly is time for Senator Helms to retire, if he
9 doesn't even -- his staff hasn't counted noses on his
10 own Committee for him.
11 My understanding was that they had the
12 votes on the Committee and that the principal strategy
13 was to prevent a hearing, so as not to test that
14 proposition. If this really occurred, and they don't
15 think Otto even has the votes, then maybe they will
16 just go ahead and do a recess appointment and fight
17 this again at the end of this First Session. It
18 largely depends on whether certain staffers retire
19 before Otto does.
20 I hope not. I mean Daniel Ortega is one
21 of the wealthiest former Marxist-communists I know,
22 who is deeply into business as a way of life and
23 certainly has no interest in undercutting global
24 trends. He's probably watching stock portfolios
25 tumble every day and wondering how he's going to pay
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1 for kids' education here in the United States.
2 You know, Daniel is not running on
3 anything like even a social change agenda for
4 Nicaragua. So if we manage to somehow wildly read
5 into what's going on in Nicaragua as some rerun of us
6 versus the Soviet Union, or in this case us versus
7 terrorism, we would be making the same mistakes.
8 DR. PURCELL: What do you guess though? I
9 mean, do you think that there's a high likelihood that
10 the Bush Administration will see it as a replay or
11 that they're kind of a different mind?
12 DR. NUCCIO: There are people in the
13 Administration who will see it as a replay. It will
14 be politically salient in Florida up through Jeb
15 Bush's re-election decision.
16 But John Maisto, for example, went through
17 just the opposite experience when he got to Nicaragua.
18 He learned that the so-called Watson Doctrine of not
19 picking sides and pulling back from trying to manage
20 Nicaragua's domestic politics had very positive
21 results for democratic forces in Nicaragua.
22 So some people will be giving sound
23 advice; others may be vowing that the mistake made
24 before will not be allowed to happen again in
25 Nicaragua. I don't know who's going to win that
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1 battle.
2 DR. PURCELL: Okay, Chavez, anyone want to
3 say something about Chavez?
4 DR. MAINGOT: Well, I remember lunch with
5 John Maisto. He said, "Look what Chavez does, not
6 what he says." Since he's always saying things and
7 digging his grave deeper all the time, I think that's
8 very wise advice. I mean, Chavez depends on oil. His
9 one market for that oil, because the oil he gives to
10 Cuba is done on a deal which is such a sweetheart deal
11 it's unbelievable -- he needs the United States. So
12 he can talk all he wants; there is the United States.
13 Now I must tell you one thing about
14 leftists in the Caribbean. In my forthcoming book I'm
15 talking about some of the ex-leftists.
16 DR. PURCELL: What's your book on?
17 DR. MAINGOT: Why is the United States in
18 the Caribbean. It's a follow-up to the other one.
19 They are the most interesting people in
20 the Caribbean. Let me give you some examples. Trevor
21 Monroe, ex-Secretary General of the Communist Party of
22 Jamaica, man, you couldn't find a greater ally than
23 Trevor Monroe. Even D.K. Duncan, who used to be
24 incandescent with his anti-Americanism, just came out
25 saying, "Mea culpa, mea culpa," "I'm sorry I was anti-
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1 American." Unbelievable. Jim Hector in Antigua,
2 Ralph Gonsalves, the new Prime Minister of St. Vincent
3 just came from a meeting with Bush saying, "What a
4 wonderful guy. I love the guy."
5 (Laughter.)
6 DR. FALCOFF: Rene Theodore?
7 DR. MAINGOT: Rene Theodore now is in the
8 Consertacion, you know, opposing Aristide. Badeo
9 Panday, my Prime Minister, Basdeo was on the extreme
10 left. Basdeo now is the man. You see, he's signs
11 everything, shiprider agreement, anything you want.
12 DR. PURCELL: Does this have to do with
13 sentiments toward the United States or a great degree
14 of pragmatism post-September 11th?
15 DR. MAINGOT: Pragmatism.
16 DR. PURCELL: Okay.
17 DR. MAINGOT: No, this is not post-
18 September 11th.
19 DR. PURCELL: No, it's not. It's before.
20 DR. MAINGOT: This goes before. In other
21 words -- this it the point I tried to make -- do not
22 underestimate the goodwill that this country has.
23 That's one of the subtexts.
24 On the other hand, if you try to come in
25 -- what did Churchill say about Ernest Bevin? "He's a
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1 bull that carries his china shop around with him."
2 (Laughter.)
3 You can't be that. You've got to be
4 subtle.
5 I love Brazilian diplomacy. Randy knows
6 something about -- where is the Brazilian? Well, he's
7 left. Look, Bautize in Suriname, the Dutch tried
8 because the biggest drug runner on that coast,
9 everybody tried. The Brazilians just undercut him.
10 The Brazilians just drew him in, just cut his legs
11 from underneath him.
12 There is the need for subtlety. I
13 understand the United States is a very young country
14 compared to Britain and other --
15 DR. PURCELL: Subtlety is not one of our
16 strong points.
17 DR. MAINGOT: Well, no, no, but it's
18 amazing how things are learned. I think General
19 Powell is showing some of that subtlety. It's a
20 diplomacy which people have learned.
21 DR. PURCELL: And he was born in Jamaica.
22 DR. MAINGOT: No, he was born in the
23 States.
24 DR. PURCELL: Oh, he was?
25 DR. MAINGOT: Oh, yes. His parents were
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1 born in Jamaica, although he's a hero. I was there in
2 Jamaica with him. He is an absolute hero in Jamaica.
3 I mean, I've never seen it, but he's a subtle guy.
4 He's a guy with great finesse.
5 DR. PURCELL: Good. Well, that gives us
6 plenty to talk about. We will now open it up for
7 questions from all of you. Now that I've said there's
8 plenty to talk about, I hope you all have questions.
9 MR. LEVY: I just had a question for --
10 DR. PURCELL: I'm sorry, could you say who
11 you are?
12 MR. LEVY: Oh, yes, Delvis Fernandez Levy
13 with the Cuban-American Alliance.
14 I just had a question for Richard Nuccio.
15 As you probably know, you're known as the architect
16 of Track 2. I don't know if you deserve that title,
17 but that's what people say and sometimes things stick.
18 I was struck by one of the sentences, one
19 of the statements that you made in terms of what Cuba
20 has, in other words, in combatting terrorism, what
21 does Cuba have to offer for us? If I quote you
22 correctly, you said something about that there should
23 be a deal or we should support a deal, I guess in
24 terms of extradition or in terms of having, I guess, a
25 return of terrorists, if there was something for us.
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1 Then you added something that struck me that says,
2 "And if we could do something inside of Cuba," what do
3 you mean by that. What would you like to do inside of
4 Cuba?
5 DR. NUCCIO: Okay. I was running out of
6 time there, so I abbreviated. So thanks for giving me
7 a chance to go back to it.
8 I was, again, partly facetiously, asking
9 the question, if we wanted to treat Cuba the way we're
10 treating other rogue states or formerly rogue states
11 or re-rogued states, what are some of the things that
12 would be on the agenda? And I think that there are
13 concrete things for very specific application in the
14 case of the war in Afghanistan that the Cubans might
15 have information that would be useful to us about.
16 But what I then went on to say was that I
17 would not support that; I would not be recommending
18 it, if it were only to be for the purpose of an
19 instrumental thing in Afghanistan, that I would also
20 want it to be connected to the what should be the
21 ultimate U.S. objective with regard to Cuba, which is
22 increasing the possibility that the transition, when
23 it comes in Cuba, will be more peaceful and more
24 democratic than it might be, based on current
25 conditions in Cuba.
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1 So the reference -- I don't know if I said
2 "inside Cuba," but that we would want, if we were de-
3 legitimizing Cuba, which is something the Cuban
4 government desperately wants from us, by engaging with
5 them as part of this battle against terrorism, in
6 exchange for that legitimization, de facto
7 legitimization of Cuba, I would want to put on the
8 agenda with Cuba something that would be important to
9 us in terms of that eventual transition. That might
10 be in the wildest fantasy that Castro would give some
11 indication that, indeed, he was prepared to lead such
12 a transition.
13 In more modest terms, that there would be
14 more space created inside Cuba for a legitimate
15 opposition than there is today, since, presumably, we
16 would be lowering the threat to Cuba by engaging with
17 Cuba on issues related to terrorism, that in
18 compensation for that lowered threat, Castro should do
19 something internally that represented the fact that he
20 felt less under siege by the United States than he
21 might have been before. That's the kind of thing I
22 was talking about.
23 What I mean by Track 2 is so-called
24 people-to-people exchanges, trying to work with Cuba's
25 civil society, whether the Cuban government favors it
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1 or opposes it. But certainly one of the things that
2 Cuba as a government could do to show more interest in
3 what happens after Castro is to let its own civil
4 society deal with the outside world under less
5 controlled conditions. Whether that's with the U.S.
6 or just everybody but the U.S. is of less importance
7 to me than that greater freedom be permitted to
8 nascent civil society.
9 So, no, I didn't have any sort of secret
10 $100 million plan to do things inside of Cuba.
11 DR. PURCELL: The two things you
12 mentioned, sort of a kind of quid pro quo or
13 conditionality and then sort of increasing space for
14 civil society or nascent civil society, I mean, Castro
15 has always said he adamantly opposes any kind of
16 conditionality, unless you believe that he says that
17 but still does it, and the same with civil society. I
18 mean this isn't exactly something that has been dear
19 to his heart.
20 Do you think that somehow the new global
21 context or his old age, or whatever, will somehow or
22 has led him to change his thinking or even maybe not
23 change his thinking, but maybe change his behavior on
24 these two issues?
25 DR. NUCCIO: Probably not. No, I don't
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1 think that, but I should also say that, when I say
2 things like this, I often get accused of being naive:
3 Don't I realize that he's always turned us down? And
4 that's not really the point. Every generation of U.S.
5 policymakers has an obligation in the U.S. national
6 interest to try to do things that would re-offer that
7 opportunity to Castro, whether he takes it or not,
8 because it's in our interest that there be a more
9 peaceful and a more democratic transition in Cuba.
10 Therefore, when I was a young assistant
11 professor at Williams College, I always hated it when
12 the Department Chair would say, "Yes, well, we tried
13 that in 1946 and it didn't work." That's not the way
14 you run governments. Because you tried it once and it
15 didn't work, you should be mindful of that, but if
16 it's in your interest, as I believe it is, to have a
17 peaceful, democratic transition in Cuba, we have a
18 moral -- not "we"; I have nothing to do with
19 government anymore, but those in government who care
20 to listen would get the advice from me that they have
21 a moral obligation to retest that proposition every
22 chance they get.
23 Because, of course, we know everything we
24 say about Castro leads us to believe that he wishes
25 the worst for his own people. So, of course, we
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1 operate on that assumption, but that's not why we do
2 things with other countries in the world. We do
3 things with them because we want results that are in
4 our interest, and that's what we should keep trying to
5 offer to Cuba. We have to offer Cuba a way out. If
6 it keeps rejecting it, that's the Cuban government's
7 fault; it's not ours, but we must keep offering Cuba a
8 way out of the dilemma it's in right now, I believe.
9 DR. PURCELL: Tony?
10 DR. MAINGOT: Well, I think that setting a
11 specific item agenda with Cuba as a quid pro quo is a
12 bit dangerous. Take, for instance, some of the things
13 that we have said before. The Huragua Nuclear
14 Facility, in Miami they'll go crazy, a danger. All
15 right, it's stopped; it's finished. It's not
16 operative anymore
17 The Lourdes Russian Electronics Station,
18 gone, finished. The military missions overseas, these
19 are all issues that were set up as conditions. There
20 are no military missions overseas anymore. The
21 internacionalismo is a joke in Cuba. You must
22 understand that the young people in Cuba, they think
23 the "viejo" they're "loco." I mean, the jokes you
24 hear in Cuba, I wish I had more time, I'd tell you a
25 few of them.
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1 (Laughter.)
2 But drug trafficking, well, I mean they
3 took care of it. The de la Guardia brothers who set
4 up that will think, I am sure, my feeling is, with
5 state approval, but they were finished after they
6 found out that the CIA had penetrated the whole
7 operation, and whatnot.
8 In other words, a whole series of things.
9 My preference is, just like I said, that the United
10 States is trying to set up laws to prohibit things
11 which the American people, American interests,
12 agricultural, are doing anyway. Do exactly the same
13 thing in Cuba. Castro has been overwhelmed by the
14 dollarization, by the popularity of American rap, by
15 the popularity of Americans, by the fact that
16 everybody wants to interact with Miami. Radio Marti,
17 for instance, is a joke. That's a joke. What the
18 young people in Cuba listen to is WQAR and some of the
19 stations from Miami. You don't need Radio Marti.
20 It's too heavy. It's like trying to kill a fly with a
21 sledgehammer.
22 Overwhelm him with the reality, the
23 goodwill which is there. Just do it. Open up the
24 gates, so to speak, and he is going to be unable to do
25 anything about that. That's my preference, but I
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1 understand the domestic politics side of it very well.
2 DR. PURCELL: Questions? Well, let me ask
3 a question. In this post-9/11 context, you know, we
4 used to say that the U.S. policy toward Latin America
5 was very focused on the Caribbean or the Caribbean
6 Basin. In fact, in more recent years the Assistant
7 Secretaries of State ended up spending most of their
8 time on the Caribbean, or so they say; I don't know if
9 it's true.
10 But with what's going on now in Argentina
11 and Brazil, too, in a somewhat different way, do
12 either of you think that in a way the Caribbean is
13 going to get lost? I mean, first of all, with what's
14 going on globally, there's a question if Latin America
15 falls off the radar screen. That's one question, and
16 the second is, if Latin American doesn't fall off the
17 radar screen, does the Caribbean fall off in
18 comparison to South America?
19 DR. NUCCIO: Well, I think there is a
20 danger that the Hemisphere will be taken for granted.
21 I think there was tremendous positive benefit for our
22 standing in the region from this perception, accurate
23 or not, that President Bush didn't know much, but he
24 knew where Mexico was and he kind of liked it.
25 Those of us who work inside the government
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1 know how this sort of message from the top permeates
2 the way everybody does things. I mean, all of us in
3 agencies who never have a chance that we will ever be
4 pulled aside and told by President Bush or President
5 Clinton, or whichever President, "Well, this is what I
6 really want you to do, by the way," you watch all of
7 these signals, and there's this amazing mobilization
8 that goes on when people look up and see that the wind
9 is blowing a certain direction and they finally know
10 what way to go.
11 That was what was happening for Mexico
12 and, sort of more broadly, for the whole region.
13 Okay, Mexico's next to Texas, and they speak Spanish
14 in Mexico. So all this region must be in the
15 President's eye, and some of the first visits -- it
16 took more than that; it took concrete expression with
17 some of the first visits being for people from Latin
18 America and the Caribbean, heads of state from Latin
19 America and the Caribbean.
20 And, yes, I think that there is a real
21 danger that, since all you hear about from the
22 President now is the war on terrorism and against the
23 "Evil One," that now the wind is blowing in a
24 different direction, and everyone will re-orient
25 themselves differently.
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1 The thing that used to drive the
2 U.S./Latin American relationship in the nineties was
3 the globalization of the economy, that there was this
4 invisible line around about at Caracas where the
5 engine of the U.S. economy was driving all of the
6 countries above that line closer and closer towards
7 the United States. Whether we liked it or not, or
8 whether the governments of that region liked it or
9 not, it was a kind of an inevitable force that was
10 pushing/pulling those economies towards us, and there
11 were political and cultural consequences of that.
12 The failure to get Fast Track approved in
13 the Clinton Administration was a first huge break on
14 that development and led to some of the failing
15 democracies that we have, because the democracies were
16 not able to fill the promise of well-being to their
17 people that eventually their populations thought they
18 were entitled to. Once you're free and you're not
19 being jailed anymore, what else have you done for me
20 lately? Well, you've grown my economy. So thanks.
21 That hasn't happened in too much of the region before
22 September 11th, and a part of the reason was our
23 failure to get Fast Track authority and push the FTAA
24 forward.
25 Now, since September 11th, as our economy
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1 goes down, there are all these ripple effects that
2 many speakers have talked about today. I think that,
3 in addition to a change in our orientation, you will
4 have more drift away from the United States or more
5 countries able to imagine that they have alternatives
6 to a relationship with the United States because of
7 the diminished pull of the economy. So I think there
8 are lots of things working in the wrong direction to
9 unhinge this convergence or undermine this convergence
10 and let Chavez' and the other ideas that have always
11 existed get some traction that they might not have had
12 in a more prosperous kind of climate than we face
13 right now.
14 DR. PURCELL: Just before I turn to Tony,
15 you mentioned Fast Track. What do you think is going
16 to happen with Trade Promotion Authority, which is the
17 new name now? Because the Administration, of course,
18 has repackaged it in terms of being important now.
19 It's now a security policy, that free trade becomes
20 very much in the interest of the United States,
21 security interest of the Hemisphere. Do you think it
22 will go through?
23 DR. NUCCIO: Well, I have my doubts
24 because, what has been the impact on the U.S./Mexico
25 border relationship of September 11th? Does anyone
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1 imagine that we're going to have an agreement to have
2 Mexican trucks driving into the United States the way
3 we would have before September 11th? Free trade and
4 security to some extent to me work at opposite
5 purposes to each other.
6 Until we go through some sort of
7 adjustment period where we either lower our security
8 expectations or, more likely, develop procedures that
9 allow the security inspections to be more fluid and
10 rapid, I see trade being very negatively impacted by
11 this. Whether we pass the legislation or not, I don't
12 think the world is going to experience the kind of
13 growth in trade that we would have before September
14 11th.
15 DR. PURCELL: Tony?
16 DR. MAINGOT: Well, I think the times are
17 going to be rough. Of course, the Caribbean, if you
18 hear the old folks from the Caribbean, they always
19 quote Dickens, "The best of times, the worst of
20 times." Maybe it has something to do with the history
21 of slavery, that the Caribbean people are accustomed
22 to good times, bad times, and maybe the fact that
23 crops sometimes are good, sometimes they're bad.
24 There is a spirit there, an enduring spirit, in the
25 Caribbean which cannot be underestimated, if we don't
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1 underestimate people, which is an important point.
2 But the preferential protocols with Europe
3 are coming to an end. I mean that is very clear. You
4 just take the case of rum again. The moment we open
5 up competition, Brazil that produces more alcohol for
6 rums is going to slump the Caribbean, slump, because
7 rum doesn't have that cache appeal that wine does.
8 People just buy rum. That's why they buy Bacardi.
9 They don't know the difference. But you know a good
10 Caribbean rum -- this is just bananas, rums,
11 manufacturing, you name it, cocoa. Difficult times.
12 The Free Trade Area of the Americas for us a
13 tremendous threat: How are we going to compete with
14 all these places?
15 That is why we have to start thinking of
16 new diplomacy. When I said that the other day, one of
17 the West Indian -- I won't mention which island -- I
18 said, "Look, let me give you some examples of new
19 diplomacy. The greatest diplomat the American
20 Republic has doesn't work for the government. His
21 name is Oscar de la Renta, the designer. Do you know
22 why? Because he has a private plane, and every two
23 weeks he takes a planeload of distinguished Americans,
24 virtually always Henry Kissinger, to La Romana for a
25 vacation. He is the greatest diplomat that country
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1 has, and they recognize that."
2 The greatest diplomat Jamaica has is Butch
3 Stewart of Sandals, who also has his private plane,
4 who is always influencing people. We have to think
5 imaginatively. Eric Williams, with whom I worked for
6 three years, used to say, "Leaders of small states
7 have to be on their toes all the time." They've got
8 to see which way -- the Brazilians call that the
9 "panolina," life is like a sauce pan; you have to have
10 a trampoline, an ability to jump from here to there.
11 Big countries don't have to do that; small countries
12 do.
13 That is why that whole period of Marxist
14 dependency theory just froze us into a stultifying
15 inability to move. Thank God we're moving out of
16 that.
17 So I am not totally pessimistic, but the
18 times have changed for us. That all the preferential
19 treatments are out of the window, I have no doubt.
20 DR. PURCELL: Questions from any of you?
21 Anybody have a question? Alberto?
22 DR. COLL: Yes. Thanks. I wanted to
23 follow up on Professor Maingot's comments and say that
24 I agree with you on this strategy of overwhelming Cuba
25 with investment, ideas, people, and that over time
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1 this will have a more transformative impact than what
2 we're currently doing, which is nothing. If anything,
3 it's isolating Cuba.
4 It leads to me to the point that today we
5 have a Castro-centric policy, and we've made it very
6 clear that we will not change our Cuba policy unless
7 Castro changes, which we know he won't, which
8 effectively means we will not change our Cuba policy
9 until he dies.
10 In all seriousness, I want to ask both of
11 you a question. What happens if Castro lives on for
12 another 15 to 20 years? Have we thought through that?
13 DR. PURCELL: And also factor in the
14 change in Jesse Helms' seat.
15 DR. NUCCIO: Even if the laws of Nature
16 don't operate there, they do here.
17 DR. MAINGOT: You know, my good colleague
18 at RAND, when I was at RAND, Eduardo Gonzalez, I
19 always remind him that he wrote a book in 1964 called,
20 Castro: The Limits of Charisma, and that's the same
21 time when -- what was the name of this chap, Bernstein
22 was writing The Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro. Was it
23 Bruce. No, not Oppenheimer. Maurice Halperin, The
24 Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro.
25 Then my good friend Andres Oppenheimer,
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1 who's really a good friend -- we have lunch every two
2 weeks and whatnot -- he wrote a book, Fidel's Final
3 Hour. And he tells me, "Well, that's because
4 Churchill had his greatest hour, too," you know, the
5 four years of the War. So everybody has an out
6 rhetorically, which I like. It's a good play on
7 words.
8 He could be there. In the 30 years that I
9 have been in Miami, and before that I was head of the
10 Yale Research Program on Cuba, we were always waiting
11 for his death. One time there was a picture of Fidel
12 with a Rolex on his left wrist and a Rolex on his
13 right wrist, and all the psychiatrists at Yale were
14 consulted, and they said, clearly schizophrenic.
15 (Laughter.)
16 He'll outlive us all, you and me. I think
17 it's absolutely the wrong thing to do, the wrong thing
18 to do. We didn't do it with Franco.
19 DR. PURCELL: But that wasn't the
20 question.
21 DR. MAINGOT: The question is, what if he
22 lives 15 years? And we keep the same policy?
23 DR. PURCELL: Yes.
24 DR. MAINGOT: Well, I think we will have
25 -- let me see, 15 more years, that's five more novels
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1 with five more American Presidents. I'm very serious.
2 What is charisma? You see everybody goes
3 back to Max Weber to study charisma. They really
4 should go back to Robert Michaels who wrote on
5 charisma. In fact, Max Weber took a lot from
6 Michaels. They were very good friends.
7 There you see that charisma is not a
8 particular quality. It can be a transforming thing.
9 If you have a situation where there are no forces
10 because there is no civil society -- people say, well,
11 the embargo worked on South Africa. That's a
12 ridiculous comparison. In South Africa you had a
13 white, partly Jewish bourgeoisie which was hurt.
14 In Cuba you have no private sector other
15 than these quinta propistas, you know, which is
16 pathetic. The most educated market in the world is
17 the Saturday and Sunday market in Havana where medical
18 doctors, Ph.D.'s in physics are selling things they
19 make at home. That could go on for a very long time.
20 I tell you, unless our policy changes, I
21 don't see any change. Fifteen years, that's a long
22 time, because remember right now 65 percent of the
23 Cuban population didn't experience the revolution.
24 It's like the fact that 95 percent of Indians never
25 experienced the British Empire, but I tell you
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1 something, I have never met more pro-British people
2 than the Indians. That's the only place where you see
3 in the telephone "Rutkah Singh, Oxford Failed."
4 (Laughter.)
5 They put it in there because it was
6 important to put in the fact that he went to Oxford
7 even though they flunked out.
8 (Laughter.)
9 Now the theory has gone back to culture.
10 I'm using my sociology development seminar, the
11 Huntington and Harrison book, Culture Matters. I
12 think it's important. Culture matters, and if we
13 study culture, we realize that it's quite
14 unpredictable in certain ways, predictable in others
15 In the case of Cuba, I think it's quite
16 predictable that as long as he's breathing, even if
17 he's not breathing -- do you remember that film with
18 Heston, "El Cid," where he's dead and they put him on
19 the horse and he's riding out. I have a feeling that
20 bin Laden is dead and they've just propped him up
21 there in the door of a cave somewhere, you know, and
22 there he is. These are tricky things.
23 DR. PURCELL: What's the culture that
24 leads you to follow a charismatic leader endlessly
25 into oblivion?
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1 DR. MAINGOT: Susan, look at Latin
2 America. Look at Dr. Francia. Look at the number of
3 people. Balaguer used to say, "Give me a balcony and
4 I'll be like the President," and he was saying this
5 until he was 90 years old. He was elected six times,
6 Balaguer. What is these things? These are not meek
7 people. Like I say, los Dominicos no son cobardes.
8 They're not cowards. Yet, they love Balaguer.
9 DR. FALCOFF: Why?
10 DR. MAINGOT: Why? Mark, you study it
11 more than I do. You tell me. It's time for you to
12 talk.
13 DR. FALCOFF: Balaguer eludes me.
14 DR. MAINGOT: But it's not just Balaguer.
15 Look at the number of people that come back. Odria
16 came back in Peru. Peron came back in Argentina. Go
17 down the line. They come back. They come back.
18 Right now with all this crime and whatnot,
19 there is this thing. You hear it in Venezuela,
20 "Durante Juan Vicente Gomez, there was no crime." You
21 hear it in the Dominican Republic, "Rafael Trujillo,
22 there was order here."
23 What are these "mysteries"? That's why I
24 like the word Joseph Nye used, "mysteries." We have
25 to start thinking of these things to find ways to ride
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1 with them, overwhelm them, if you wish, rather than
2 going head on.
3 I don't know if I'm making any sense among
4 the people, but there should be no eternal -- you know
5 Max Lerner had a wonderful saying once. I remember he
6 used to say, "Be careful not to make the enemies of
7 our privileges the enemies of humanity." What Lerner
8 was saying, there is broader thing called humanity,
9 and the moment we make the enemies of our privileges
10 the enemies of humanity -- and I think this is
11 especially important right now -- we're finished
12 because then we are immobilized. Then we are frozen
13 in a particular policy.
14 Having said that, I understand all the
15 difficulties of an American Administration having to
16 deal politically in Florida, a most important state;
17 New Jersey. Because, you see, Cubans are not
18 reactionaries, not even Cubans in Miami, because Cuba
19 had no right-wing party. Every Cuban is populist.
20 Batista was a populist. Everyone was a populist.
21 Just follow the voting of people like
22 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and, oh, Diaz-Balart, or
23 especially Menendez, of course, who's a Democrat. In
24 social welfare issues, they vote left, what we would
25 call left in this country. It's on Cuba that they are
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1 hard, hard line.
2 And this is something that I have always
3 said, "Look, be careful." There were no fascists.
4 Well, there was, through Diablo de la Marina, a little
5 Spanish group in Cuba.
6 DR. FALCOFF: They were irrelevant to the
7 politics.
8 DR. MAINGOT: No, irrelevant. Cuban
9 politics was always populist. It was always
10 centralist through the Autenticos or a little bit on
11 the left like the Ortodoxos, to which Fidel belonged.
12 What do you do with a reinterpretation,
13 reconstruction? I don't like that because it sounds
14 post-modernism, which I think is an absurdity.
15 Mark, do you agree with me that this
16 stands for some kind of re-evaluation? You've written
17 about that. Speak up.
18 DR. FALCOFF: Yes, I think you said
19 something really important about the history of Cuba,
20 which is there was no right-wing party in Cuba. What
21 would be right was on the wrong side of the War of
22 Independence, the Spanish community, the rich
23 merchants, the army, the Spanish army which withdrew
24 after independence.
25 You're absolutely right. I've seen
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1 surveys, by the way, of Cubans that come to this
2 country and they're interviewed in the first three
3 months. These are people that come in out of the
4 migration agreements, and between 89 and 95 percent of
5 them -- these are people who are presumably unhappy in
6 Cuba or they wouldn't leave. Nonetheless, they want
7 to keep the same system of education and health in
8 Cuba after Castro is gone.
9 DR. PURCELL: Well, wouldn't you? It's
10 free.
11 DR. FALCOFF: Yes, of course. Of course,
12 But my point is this points to a continuity in Cuban
13 thinking that transcends the Castro/anti-Castro
14 divide, although it also does point to a problem in
15 the future, which is the Soviet Union essentially paid
16 for that for 30 years. It isn't being paid for now
17 and it's not doing very well. You have a whole
18 generation, or two generations, of people raised on
19 the expectations that these government service are
20 going to be free, and that is a problem for the
21 future.
22 In the last section of the first chapter
23 of the book I'm writing, I ruminate on this, but
24 anyway I've enjoyed hearing --
25 DR. PURCELL: When is your book coming
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1 out?
2 DR. FALCOFF: I hope next spring.
3 DR. PURCELL: Oh, okay, good.
4 Rick, did you want to say anything?
5 DR. NUCCIO: I can't say it more
6 eloquently than Tony did, and I agree with everything
7 he said. Just in sort of more specific policy terms,
8 I think it's laziness on the part of U.S. policymakers
9 to make the statement that we can't do anything while
10 Castro is alive, so we'll just wait. If I am known as
11 the architect of Track 2, I'd much rather be known as
12 the architect of the phrase, "We can't focus our
13 policy on Castro," which Madeleine Albright started to
14 say in the second term of Clinton, but which was part
15 of my rhetoric when I was Special Advisor for Cuba.
16 There are 12 million or so people in Cuba,
17 and our policies should be directed at them. They are
18 living, dying, learning, being educated or not, every
19 day now under U.S. policy, and the policy should
20 always be focused on them. We should be doing
21 everything we can to reach them through, around, over,
22 behind, above the Cuban government, if that's the only
23 way we can get to them. That's what we should be
24 talking about all the time.
25 The other problem, the reason it's lazy
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1 and sloppy to say, "Well, we'll just wait until Castro
2 dies and then we'll do something" is this sort of
3 built-in assumption that he's like he is and that he
4 isn't anymore. I think Franco had 31 doctors when he
5 finally died. You could sort of judge how sick he was
6 and how close death was by how many doctors they added
7 each week. You could sort of read in the newspaper.
8 I lived in Spain under the Franco period.
9 What if Castro doesn't just go on
10 perfectly like he is and then drop dead suddenly, and
11 then the transition begins? What if he hangs on in
12 some reduced capacity for a long, long time and does
13 get partially stuffed and put out on display? I think
14 what worries a lot of Cubans who support the regime,
15 and the ones who talk about the need for Castro to
16 lead the transition, is the fear that, once Castro's
17 authority starts to recede, there is going to be this
18 intense fratricidal exercise of who's going to replace
19 him and who's going to get their hands on the reins of
20 power.
21 What we know about other transitions is
22 that when charismatic leaders go, there's an attempt
23 at collective leadership, and that most of the time
24 that attempt fails. It is either followed by a new
25 charismatic leader or by some degeneration into open
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1 conflict, sometimes civil war.
2 DR. PURCELL: Don't you think that may be
3 the situation now, and that, as you put it, Castro may
4 already be partially stuffed at this point?
5 DR. NUCCIO: Well, you hear this all the
6 time, and I've grown immune, as I guess Tony was
7 saying, to the "bullas", the Cuban phrase, of the
8 rumor that something is really happening. But I think
9 U.S. policy should not be focused on the assumption
10 either that he is always going to be there or that we
11 can't do anything as long as he is there. It should
12 be focused on the intrinsic interest we have in a
13 different kind of Cuba than the one that is there now,
14 and constantly working toward that objective.
15 This will really get me branded as an
16 idiot, but "Star Trek" has these fields, and when the
17 fields are attacked, the way they adjust them is to
18 vary the frequency of the shield. Well, that's what
19 our embargo is like. It's like putting this shield
20 around Cuba, and it lets Castro manage the thing under
21 a static condition, which is favorable to him. That's
22 what he likes.
23 We should be every day -- I don't happen
24 to support the embargo, but every day we have any sort
25 of sanctions against Cuba in place, we should be
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1 examining them so we can vary the frequency and
2 constantly change the environment within which Cuba
3 has to operate, so that we have a chance of
4 intervening in that adjustment process and moving it,
5 helping to move it -- it's principally Cuba's
6 obligation and Cubans' obligation -- helping to move
7 it towards a more peaceful, more democratic outcome.
8 DR. PURCELL: Are there any questions or
9 shall we wrap it up?
10 Questions?
11 MR. LEVY: Just a quick comment: So much
12 of your policy discussion has been centered on Cuba
13 and Castro. In Miami, where I think so much of Cuban
14 policy really is made, and I would just like to let
15 you know that not all Cubans-Americans think the way
16 you characterize them. I'm a Cuban-American, and I
17 know there are people all over this country that would
18 prefer more of that people-to-people, that engagement,
19 that opening the floods. Even in Miami they exist.
20 DR. PURCELL: Well, on that note, which I
21 guess is optimistic or pessimistic, depending on your
22 point of view, I think I'll bring the panel to a
23 close.
24 I want to thank Rick and Tony for really
25 superb presentations and discussion, and won't you
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1 join me in thanking them?
2 (Applause.)
3 DR. GRAY: I'd like to thank all of you
4 for participating in this event. Speaking for myself,
5 I found all three panels fascinating and will be in
6 touch with all of you, I think, later about some other
7 activities that we'll be doing.
8 One of the things that I find really
9 striking about this is who you are who have come to
10 this. We sent out hundreds of invitations, and
11 probably half of those went to people who are in the
12 security community, because we have a longstanding
13 relationship in the security community, and I see that
14 none of them came. I think that's a very clear
15 indication right now they are very busy, that the
16 American security community is not particularly
17 fascinated by the Caribbean.
18 This mirrors, by the way, some activities
19 that I did several years ago on Central Asia, where it
20 was very difficult to get anyone to pay attention to
21 Central Asia. I can tell you right now the security
22 community is now brushing up on Central Asia, and I
23 hope we can encourage them to pay a little more
24 attention to the third border. So thank you all.
25 (Applause.)
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1 (Whereupon, the foregoing matter adjourned
2 at 3:38 p.m.)
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