What’s so sinister about a Cuban citizen receiving or having a laptop or a cell phone?, asks Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, and former director for Latin America at the National Endowment for Democracy.
“Nothing — unless the government is maintaining a chokehold on power by holding its citizens frozen in the past,” he writes.
He criticizes recent commentaries that insinuate that efforts to support independent civil society actors amounts to a sinister intervention in Cuba or compromise efforts to engage the communist regime.
Sabatini notes that when with NED, he helped distribute pencils, paper, and reading materials, along with documents detailing internationally recognized human and labor rights, efforts that precipitated a curious response on the part of the media:
Sadly, rather than lauding the effort to bring change to Cuba, the media harangued NED with constant questions about why we were meddling in another country. It is a question, I hasten to add, that no journalist would have asked when NED provided the same goods to similar groups in Chile under the strong arm of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Advocates of engagement with Havana could learn something from examining the European Union’s overtures to the regime.
As our friends at Global Europe note, Spain wants to use its current presidency of the European Union to normalize the EU’s relations with Havana. But Spanish socialist MEP Luis Yanez was denied entry into Cuba after declaring his intent to meet with dissidents.
Madrid summoned Cuba’s ambassador on Tuesday and expressed its dismay”, the BBC reports. “But Spain – currently holding the EU presidency – said it would still try to get the EU to ease its stance on Cuba.”
Will they ever learn?
On his trip to Cuba last year, Louis Michel, the European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, refused to meet with the dissidents’ relatives group Women in White (Damas de Blanco) and declined requests to raise the issue of political prisoners. The Women in White, recipients of the European Parliament’s Sakharov prize, are regularly harassed by government supporters.
Another delegation member, Spanish socialist Miguel Martinez, a Vice- President of the European Parliament, not only refused to meet dissidents’ relatives or any other members of the democratic opposition or civil society, but happily met with families of Cuban agents imprisoned in the United States.
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