Ping-Pong diplomacy changes little in Cuba
The Miami Herald
Friday, 09.09.11
BY FRANK CALZON
When pondering U.S. relations with Cuba and how to effect democratic change there, it helps to retain the perspective of history. Just sending athletes to Cuba to engage in some “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” won’t change Cuba.
In reading the recent spate of articles suggesting American athletes be sent to Cuba to supplement hard-nose diplomats, I was reminded of a story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward. The KGB had painted “Fresh Meat, Fresh Vegetables” signs on trucks taking victims of the Stalinist repression to Siberia. An American journalist returning to his hotel room, after attending an official reception, saw the trucks and the next morning sent a story to his newspaper that the distribution of fruits and fresh vegetables had improved recently in Moscow. A single glimpse often leads to false conclusions.
So, what is happening in Cuba? Do you know? Do you know about the increase in repression, about the police beatings of the protesting women, who dress in white and walk together on Sundays in quiet rebuke of the Cuban government’s repression?
And what was happening in the 1970s when ping-pong diplomacy captured public attention as China was splitting with the Soviet Union and then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and China’s Premier Zhou En-lai were laying the groundwork for President Richard Nixon’s visit? Might the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and subsequent economic reforms have had some influence on events?
During the 1970s, the Soviet Union was funneling billions of dollars in aid to Cuba, and Fidel Castro was dispatching tens of thousands of Cuban troops to Africa to fight in Soviet Union-supported wars. Castro was also supporting training camps for international terrorists. He had begun playing an active role in the anti-Israeli coalition at the United Nations. Could Castro’s long and documented record of anti-American actions and the continued domestic repression in Cuba today possibly account for and justify what is being denigrated as the “hard-line anti-Castro” views of Cuban Americans?
Why is it “hard-line” to demand the end of a murderous, anti-American dictatorship off the coast of the United States? Why isn’t it an “entirely reasonable” point of view? Was Martin Luther King Jr. an unreasonable “hard-liner,” when he insisted on “desegregation, now”?
No amount of agitprop suffices to obscure the facts: President Obama has made many conciliatory gestures, which have resulted in the Castro brothers’ regime receiving hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when Cuba was on the brink of bankruptcy and foreign companies doing business in Cuba were prohibited from withdrawing their funds from Cuba’s banks. Our president extended an open hand of friendship to the Castro brothers and asked in exchange that the Cuban government lower its high taxes on the remittances that Cuban Americans send to relatives and to initiate significant economic reforms. Havana ignored the president’s requests. It also continues to imprison an American, sentenced to 15 years by a kangaroo court for donating a laptop computer to a group of Cuban dissidents.
In order to believe Ping-Pong diplomacy will change Havana, one must suspend all critical faculties and be willing to ignore Havana’s alliances with Iran, Syria and North Korea. The fawning coverage given to Libya’s embattled despot Moammar Gadhafi by Granma, the Cuban government’s official newspaper is indicative of another of the unsavory and dangerous facets of today’s Cuban government.
It is Cuba that needs to catch up to the 21st Century. The island has been stuck in the 1950s not because of U.S. policy but because of economic and political decisions made by Fidel Castro.
Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Arlington, Va.
