[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 2 (Thursday, January 5, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S469-S470]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         SENSIBLE VIEWS ON CUBA

  Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I would like to bring to the attention of 
the Senate a very prescient and sensible article about Cuba which 
appeared in the Winter 1994 Newsletter of the Duke Family Association.
  The article, entitled Fidel Fading: U.S. Should Play Role in Cuba, 
was written by Biddle Duke, a journalist working in Santa Fe. He has 
visited Cuba twice in recent years, most recently last spring, when he 
served as an aide to two Washington-based public policy groups, the 
Appeal to Conscience Foundation and the Council of American 
Ambassadors.
  Mr. Duke makes a strong case for modifying United States policy on 
Cuba. The economic crisis there has become so acute, he says, that it 
can be used in effect as a lever for normalized relations. He 
recommends that the United States send humanitarian aid and lift the 
embargo at least partially. While offering a hand of conditional 
friendship we should push for a free and open Cuban society.
  I concur with Mr. Duke's views and I ask unanimous consent that his 
article be printed in the Record at this point.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:
            [From the Duke Family Association, Winter, 1994]

              Fidel Fading: U.S. Should Play Role in Cuba

                            (By Biddle Duke)

       Everywhere in Cuba one hears and sees the despair. A 24-
     year old engineer works three days a week as a building 
     supervisor for less than the equivalent of three dollars a 
     month, has two thin meals a day, meat once a week, and spends 
     much of his time hanging out on Havana's waterfront. On 
     Friday in April he is swimming off the rocks with this 
     brother.
       ``We've got schools and doctors, but what good is that 
     without food or medicine or jobs?'' he tell an American 
     visitor in Spanish.
       In the same breath, he asks, ``Can you spare some 
     dollars?''
       Then, sardonically, ``Viva la revolucion.''
       Throughout the country, people seem to be waiting for 
     something to happen.
       They are a people waking from the dream of communist Cuba's 
     heyday of the 1970s and '80s when Fidel Castro worked the 
     world stage like a master of the game, and his face and his 
     nation became synonymous with third world sovereignty and 
     nationalism; when Cubans fought proudly for working class 
     freedom around the globe.
       They are waking from the glorious delusion of Soviet 
     subsidies to the tragic anachronism of present-day Cuba. 
     Cubans are all in something of national pause, standing on 
     [[Page S470]] a cusp of their history, either dazed in the 
     disbelief that their dreams are shattered, or cynical or 
     despondent.
       In Cuba's dire economic crisis there is a tremendous 
     potential force for change. Basic foods, medicine, oil, 
     gasoline and electricity are strictly rationed. 
     Transportation is poor and undependable. Whole chunks of the 
     nation are regularly hit with black outs. Infant mortality is 
     up. So is suicide.
       Cubans in exile and those remaining in Cuba are ready to 
     listen and make some steps toward reconciliation. The country 
     is poised for change. And, most importantly, it is 
     vulnerable.
       Cuba's malaise has opened the door for the United States to 
     play a critical role in Cuba's future. In the mold of our 
     approach to China, Vietnam and South Africa, we should offer 
     a hand of conditional friendship while still pushing for a 
     free and open Cuban society.
       Our national and political conscience dictates that we 
     respond to Cuba's plight by at least encouraging humanitarian 
     aid shipments. And, in doing so, this nation can send a 
     powerful message: Our capitalist democracy works. Despite its 
     many shortcomings, the United States has the medicine and 
     food to spare for many in need, especially Cubans, so close 
     to us historically and culturally.
       Encouraging aid should be the Clinton administration's 
     first step in making friendly overtures to the Cuban people 
     and pushing Fidel and his intransigent Marxist Leninism into 
     obsolescence. The administration should initiate a bargaining 
     process over the embargo which should include a combination 
     of diplomatic overtures and policies to improve communication 
     between Cubans and Americans.
       Although Fidel might use U.S. aid to blow a little breath 
     into the dying corpse of his revolution, the U.S. free press 
     is easily more effective over the long run in spreading the 
     truth about the food and medicine that would be making it 
     into the Cubans' hands. Already, CNN and other TV stations 
     are captured by thousands in Cuba by pirate satellites. Radio 
     Marti, out of Florida, offers a daily diet of information 
     from the outside world to Cuban listeners. The message to 
     Cubans from all of these sources would be loud and clear: 
     What you are getting is American goodwill. And if it is not 
     reaching you, blame Fidel.
       The powerful message of freedom already is carried via the 
     vibrant but informal links that exist between the 1.2 million 
     American Cubans and their friends and families in Cuba. The 
     administration should encourage this exchange by negotiating 
     for direct postal and telephone service between our two 
     nations; the exchange of students, teachers, artists, writers 
     and other professionals; allowing travel to Cuba by American 
     tourists; and permitting U.S. journalists to be stationed 
     there.
       Underlying all these proposals should be a request by the 
     administration to begin official discussions on the embargo 
     with Havana and an agreement to raise the level of the U.S. 
     envoy if Cuba does the same. The ultimate goal would be full 
     diplomatic relations.
       The rest, and perhaps most significant elements of the 
     embargo, principally the prohibition of the U.S. investment 
     in Cuba, as well as a prohibition on most commerce, could be 
     lifted over the long term if political conditions in Cuba and 
     the nation's human rights record improve.
       Setting the stage for negotiations would put the United 
     States in command, no matter what Fidel's reaction would be. 
     If he balked, Castro would have difficulty explaining to his 
     hungry people why he turned down food and medicine, the 
     scarcity of which define the embargo to most Cubans. If he 
     agreed to a gradual opening of relations, the irrepressible 
     forces of capitalism and social reform, some of which are 
     already evident, in all likelihood would sweep the nation.
       Cubans are proud and patriotic, and Fidel plays on this. As 
     long as the United States is inflexible on the embargo, we 
     remain the imperialist enemy in their minds, and the 
     revolution, the Cuban struggle to get out from under our 
     thumb, goes on. But if the administration allows aid 
     shipments and sets up a bargaining table, and Fidel does not 
     step up, he will look like the defiant, stubborn dinosaur 
     that he is. And something of a hypocrite, since he 
     continually is calling for an end to what he calls the 
     ``blockade.''
       The administration has so far taken the least politically 
     taxing course on Cuba, which is to maintain the antagonistic 
     status quo. And that's unlikely to change until after the 
     1996 election. In order to carry Florida, many believe 
     Clinton must let the conservative wealthy Cuban American 
     National Foundation dictate Cuban policy, which pushed for 
     the strengthening of the embargo as recently as 1992.
       The truth is that many exiled Cubans want the embargo at 
     least partially lifted, enough to help those left on the 
     island through these tough times. And many Americans wonder 
     why the embargo, which was imposed in 1962 by President 
     Kennedy, wasn't dissolved with the end of the Cold War.
       A growing number of conservatives and liberals and some of 
     the nation's leading newspapers already have advocated an end 
     to the embargo, saying that it is an antiquated policy that 
     is hurting Cubans, not Fidel's regime. They argue rightly 
     that Cuba and the spread of communism no longer are threats 
     to our stability or the stability of the hemisphere. 
     Communism and the Cuban revolution are indisputable failures.
       Interestingly, Fidel is not a complete failure to Cubans. 
     He's all they have; just Fidel, who thumbed his nose at the 
     United States and put Cuba on the geopolitical map. But 
     that's not enough anymore.
       A young Cuban woman told me this story of two old brothers 
     who lived together in the hills. They had fought in the 
     revolution and believed in it. Now, hungry and old and 
     crushed by the reality of the revolution's failure, one of 
     them hanged himself with his belt in the rafters of his 
     house. When the guardia came to take his body away, the other 
     man asked that the belt be left behind to remind him of his 
     brother and the reason he took his life. After the guardia 
     departed, the second brother used it to hang himself. These 
     are the stories of Cuba these days.
       Optimism drives us all, and the future of Cuba, the dreams 
     of almost two generations of Cubans who've grown up both in 
     exile and under the delusion of the revolution, could be 
     realized in coming decades. Second to the Cuban people, the 
     United States is the most important force for positive change 
     on the island. Americans have a choice: between provoking 
     change with obsolete and misplaced hostility or encouraging 
     it, as we did in South Africa, as constructive, engaged 
     critics.
       There is a chance that we could strangle Cubans into a 
     violent revolution. And there is a chance that we could offer 
     them some choices and hope, and help them make the right 
     decisions.
       Biddle Duke has been to Cuba twice, most recently this 
     spring, as an aide to Washington-based public policy groups, 
     the Appeal of Conscience Foundation and the Council of 
     American Ambassadors. He is a journalist working in Santa Fe 
     and is a former reporter for The New Mexican.
     

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