Draft Copy 1 THE STANLEY FOUNDATION

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POLICY FORUM ON SECURING THE THIRD BORDER: , 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, 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, 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 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 ,

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 , 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 ?

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

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 "."

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 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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