Early in March, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos traveled to Cuba to tell Raul Castro that he could not invite him to the VI Summit of the Americas in Cartagena de Indias due to a lack of hemispheric consensus. Once back in Bogota, Mr. Santos said that Colombia had "put out a fire" and pledged to discuss Cuba's participation in the inter-American system at the summit in order to prevent this issue from flaring up again before the next presidential conference scheduled for 2015 in Panama.

The Colombian decision triggered reactions from both Cuba and the US. It's hard to say whose discourse was more anachronistic. The statements made by Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez read as an impassioned harangue to the revolutionary Tricontinental of 1966. Hillary Clinton's responses to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen before the House Foreign Affairs Committee appeared to be addressing a rest home for Cuban-Americans who landed in Miami in 1962. Instead of adopting a conflict resolution approach, Cuba and the US traveled back to the Cold War, to a multilateral inter-American system that no longer exists. With one swipe, they erased five decades of changes in the hemispheric balance of power and the adoption of standards such as ideological pluralism, non-intervention and democratic governance.

What’s the best way to gauge if anyone in Washington understands what’s going on in Havana?  Try to grill Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

More than once, I’ve complained about the Obama administration’s tone-deafness on the shifting political, social and economic climate in Cuba.  We (and by we, I mean they) were slow-to-absent in acknowledging and encouraging the 2010-2011 political prisoner releases brokered between Raul Castro, Cuba’s Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega and the previous (Zapatero) government in Spain, and President Obama himself has highlighted the ongoing economic changes in Cuba only to call them insufficient. 

So it was fascinating to watch this exchange at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing this week in which Cuban-American Congressman David Rivera pressed Secretary Clinton for any “tangible” progress towards democracy in Cuba thanks to the Obama administration’s policy toward the island:

By Arturo Lopez-Levy and Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado

Scarabeo 9, the semi-submersible oil rig contracted by the Spanish company Repsol completed its journey from Singapore to Cuba. Repsol’s rig will explore Cuba’s exclusive economic zone, an area in the Gulf of Mexico of about 112000 square kilometers. Oil exploration in the zone is being contracted to several foreign companies such as Venezuela’s PDVSA, Malaysia’s Petronas, and Vietnamese PetroVietnam.  Cuba’s Ministry of Basic Industry estimates the oil reserves in the zone are between 5 billion to 9 billion barrels of oil. CNN GPS host Fareed Zakaria referred to Cuba’s total oil potential as between 5 billion and 20 billion barrels of oil. 

The start of the oil exploration will not derail Raul Castro’s reform program. At a minimum, oil will not come from the offshore wells soon enough, while the reforms are needed immediately. The Cuban government needs to create jobs for the million and half workers that are supposed to leave the government sector in the next two years as part of the reforms program proclaimed last April by the Cuban Communist Party in its VI Congress. It must also alleviate critical situations of poverty in the five most eastern provinces, where unrest has been rising. With or without oil, the Cuban economy sorely needs to develop an environment in which businesses and individuals feel confident to invest.

I would like to share with the readers of the Havana Note this interview with Douglas Fehlen from Education-Portal.com. The direct link to the interview is at the end of the text:  

Scholar Advocates for Increased Academic Partnership Between U.S. and Cuba

By Douglas Fehlen

Education-Portal.com: In a ForeignPolicy.com article, you praised President Obama's January decision to ease restrictions on academic travel to Cuba. Why do you support this policy change?For decades, the United States has maintained no formal diplomatic relations with Cuba, enforcing severe travel and trade restrictions against the country all the while. Arturo López-Levy, Ph.D. candidate and research associate at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, is a longtime critic of American policy toward the Caribbean nation. The University of Denver scholar believes that recent changes in American policy - including relaxed regulations on educational, cultural and religious travel - have the potential to transform the relationship between the two countries.

Late Friday afternoon, Senator Marco Rubio revised the biography that appears on his office website.  He had no choice.  Throughout his political career, he has deceived Floridians, adoring Republican audiences and donors, journalists, fellow officeholders and others by claiming that his parents fled the Cuba of Fidel Castro.  This is a lie exposed by hard journalism in the Washington Post.

Every Cuban American knows the precise time and purpose of his family’s departure from Cuba.  The idea that Rubio never knew the facts until this moment – and that no family member ever bothered to correct the error before now –is absurd. While Rubio’s parents, Mario and Oriales, did adopt the anti-Castro position of many exiles who are opposed to the communist course taken by the Cuban revolution, the date of their emigration was not 1959 and the cause of their departure was not the current Cuban government.   They left Cuba in 1956 as exiles from a tyrannical regime; that of Fulgencio Batista Zaldivar, the right-wing dictatorship that Fidel Castro overthrew.

Despite the tensions associated with the upcoming 2012 election campaign in the US, a dialogue between Washington and Havana, as proposed by the Cuban Foreign Relations Minister Bruno Rodriguez, is also in the interest of the Obama Administration, which has nothing to gain from more conflicts in its relationship with Cuba. President Barack Obama's positions favoring dialogue without preconditions, increasing people to people contacts, and reaching mutually beneficial agreements on bilateral issues were never predicated on sympathy for Fidel or Raul Castro, but rather on the conviction that diplomacy and contacts between societies are the best ways to promote US national interests.

By that standard, the balance of the first three years of the Obama administration's relationship with Cuba is positive. The increase in cultural, family, humanitarian and religious travel to Cuba accelerates current reforms in Cuba, improves the image of the US in the hemisphere, and strengthens domestic political trends favoring an engagement policy that is less dependent on the Miami right and more consistent with democratic values and US strategic and economic interests.

The High Holidays are the expression of the supreme Jewish belief in reconciliation and every individual’s capacity to recognize his or her mistakes and change for the better. The Cuban government should view Alan Gross’ recent statement as expressing repentance for his unconscious participation in American government sponsored regime change policies that violated Cuban sovereignty. Mr. Gross, an American Jew from Maryland, interested in civil society development was arrested in Dec. 3, 2009 by the Cuban authorities. He had gone to Cuba five times as a subcontractor of Development Alternatives Inc (DAI), a private company serving contracts awarded by the Bush Administration under the Cuba program of USAID.

Five years after Fidel Castro’s separation from power, it is essential to examine the role that the former revolutionary leader has played in the current Cuban political system from his convalescence and retirement, and the consequences of this evolution.

The fundamental role of Fidel Castro in the Cuban political system today is two-fold: 1) In terms of government, Fidel Castro is the great counselor, to be consulted on strategic decisions or with respect to the appointment or removal of central leaders, as was the case in the termination of the political careers of his former associates Felipe Perez and Carlos Lage and in the constitution of the new Central Committee at the Sixth Congress, 2) In terms of ideology and international projection, particularly in Latin America, he is a Patriarch of the radical left, advising the new leaders, especially Hugo Chavez, and reflecting on some of the past mistakes made by this political sector (in his Reflections and interviews he has criticized discrimination against homosexuals, hostility toward the market, and Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitism that has been repeated in many of the anti-Israeli condemnations by the radical Latin American left).

What would Ronald Reagan’s policy towards Cuba be today?  Nobody can say for sure. It is certain that he would oppose and denounce communism, but would he support the travel ban and oppose educational, cultural and academic exchanges with Havana as Marco Rubio, Mario Diaz-Balart, David Rivera and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen do? In today’s post-Cold War environment, it is worthwhile to note that several members of Reagan’s team and many of the intellectuals who inspired his government such as Milton Friedman, Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of State George Schultz have supported a change in Washington’s policy. 

Twenty eight years ago, in March of 1983, President Reagan gave a historic speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando and called the Soviet Union, the "evil empire". Reagan’s words about communism did not allow for nuances. It was “us against them”.  Reagan’s clarity sent a meaningful message to average citizens of the democratic world and the many oppressed behind the iron curtain.

But Reagan’s speech to the Evangelicals in Florida should not be selectively cut from the whole of his general foreign policy approach to communism. Unfortunately, in the issue of foreign policy towards Cuba, supporters of the embargo use Reagan’s phrases to promote a “magical realism” version of what a moral policy towards communism should be. 

After a nearly three month-long leave, I've got lots of Cuba news catching up to do.  Much has happened.  And much has stayed the same.

In Cuba, following the Sixth Party Congress in April, we're beginning to see some changes, rolled out one-by-one, with little fanfare (as Phil Peters pointed out was how countless needed reforms would come about).  For instance, the government is offering private entrepreneurs several tax breaks designed to help spur their growth - offering a payroll tax holiday for 2011 for businesses with fewer than five employees, and finally allowing private restaurants (known as paladars) to serve up to fifty customers at a time - up from 20, which was up from 12.  It's easy to see these and other recent reforms as overdue, and as playing too much at the margins. 

But, however slowly it moves ahead, this is a government that has committed itself to a long range reform process.  It's all here - in the very public, fully discussed and debated, 313 lineamentos or guidelines for reforms.  Oh, and let's not forget Raul Castro's embrace of term limits, which, if he honors it, will have tremendous implications for Cuban political leadership and reform in the next several years.

But it's this distinction, between the journey and the end, that President Obama failed to acknowledge in his recent interview with Univision's Jose Diaz-Balart (yes, brother to Lincoln and Mario, and nephew of Fidel Castro's first wife, Mirta).

(President Obama visiting the Ciudad de Deus (City of God) favela, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Sunday, March 20, 2011. Photo courtesy of the White House) 

Alan Gross

In an interview yesterday with Spanish-language television station Telemundo, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this about the situation of Alan Gross, the American contractor recently sentenced to 15 years in jail by the Cuban authorities for his work with USAID’s democracy assistance program in Cuba,

"We are working closely with Alan Gross's attorneys... We don't want to take any actions or say anything that will undermine the chances for this man to come home to his family," Clinton said.

Clinton also insisted that in the State Department’s view, Gross was not committing unlawful acts. Unfortunately, whether the U.S. State Department agrees with another nation’s laws or not, Americans are subject to them, a truth whose brutality often strikes the most innocent of victims.

Posada Trial

What is in many ways a groundbreaking trial involving former CIA asset, Luis Posada Carriles continues today in El Paso. Texas. Carriles, an infamous anti-Castro militant, is being tried on 11 counts of violating U.S. law. While most of the charges pertain to his illegal entry in to the United States in 2005, several are related to his alleged involvement in a series of bombings carried out in Cuba in 1997 in which an Italian citizen was killed.

Journalist Anne Louise Bardach has been forced to testify at the proceedings due to  interviews she conducted with Posada for a 1998 New York Times series about exile militants she co-wrote.  She will be cross-examined today. 

More on this later in the week.  

While we are anxiously awaiting news about the verdict in the trial of Alan Gross,  the jump in global oil prices last week got us thinking as well...

Cubans are feeling the aftershocks of turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa; not in the form of demands for greater democratization, perhaps, but at the pump, in the form of higher gas prices, as the price of a barrel of oil soars past the $100 market on global markets.

As reported by the Nuevo Herald, the Cuban government raised the price of regular gasoline from 1.15 ($1.06) to 1.20 CUC, ($1.11) last week, the second such hike in less than a year.  The majority of Cubans don’t own cars, because they are both astronomically expensive – the average Cuban makes about $20/month – and their purchase is tightly controlled by the government. But the price increase isn’t just about those who pay to pump. Those cinco centavos will trickle down, placing added strain on already taut Cuban incomes in another sign of what’s to come as President Raul Castro moves to decrease the state’s control over the island’s decimated economy.

The events in Tahrir Plaza have led some Cuba watchers to wonder if a similar civil society rebellion calling for democracy might erupt against the government of Raul Castro. 

Since democracy has many meanings, it is preferable to speak in terms of human rights, defined as an interdependent and indivisible set of universal legal norms rather than a menu from which to pick and choose. Civil and political rights are as important as economic, social and cultural rights.

Nobody knows whether Egypt will improve its record in this regard. The only thing that has happened so far is a transfer of government from the former dictator to a praetorian guard. Mubarak was the devil we knew, but the main opposition party to his government, the Muslim Brotherhood, is not the benign savior. Its goal of establishing a caliphate would extend oppression against those who profess other religions, non-fundamentalist women, and homosexuals, just to mention three examples. 

In Cuba, all independent and nonpartisan civil society organizations, such as the Catholic Church and other religious communities have emphatically declared their preference for gradual and peaceful changes. In addition, most of the political opposition, both on the island and in exile, has been explicit in its principled opposition to any violent path.

Earlier this week, we noted that Cuban prosecutors plan to finally try an American citizen (and USAID subcontractor) held in Cuba during what appears to have been an exhaustive 14 month investigation for crimes against "the independence or territorial integrity of the State."  They plan to seek a 20 year prison sentence.

Right on the heels of that announcement, someone slipped Cuba's most celebrated independent blogger Yoani Sanchez - "Viva el Cubaleaks!" writes Sanchez - a copy of a Cuban Ministry of the Interior briefing describing how the United States's war against Cuba has moved into cyberspace.  In this video, the MINIT briefer describes how, since at least 2008 (and, notably, even today under the Obama administration) the United States has actively sought to place satellite communications networks in Cuba free from Cuban government control and recruit Cubans to maintain them.    And, right on the heels of that leaked video being posted by Yoani on her blog, Yoani now reports that the Cuban government has ceased blocking access to her blog from the island.

That's a lot of drama and intrigue for one week, but chances are this is only the beginning.  As Phil Peters notes in his excellent analysis of the MINIT video, this video looks less like a leak and more like the Cuban government's opening statement in the upcoming trial of Alan Gross.  (All the more ironic that the video was leaked to Yoani Sanchez, one of the subjects treated in the video and a blogger the Cuban government considers to be "manufactured" by the U.S. and allies in Europe.)  For those who want to skip the video, and even the transcription at Cafe Fuerte, or the translation available at Translating Cuba, and just get a synopsis of the main messages in the video, then I recommend you hop over to The Cuban Triangle here and  here.  Here's a taste of that analysis:

If you read the transcript, what Cuban government messages can you derive? I think they are these:

• To Latin American governments and publics, and beyond: “Obama is no different than Bush; same economic sanctions against Cuba, same attempts to bring down our Revolution.”

• To friendly governments: “You might want to check what USAID is up to in your country.”

• To international public opinion: “We have young people who are smart, tech-savvy, and as committed as any historico to defending Cuba.”
• 
  
  To USAID and its contractors and President Obama: “We’ve got your number."

Several former Castro’s government officials such as Cuba’s former Ambassador to the United Nations, Alcibiades Hidalgo and ex diplomat Juan Antonio Blanco, who worked in the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, have explained how Cuban leaders need enmity with the United States to derive their internal legitimacy and protect their authoritarian privileges. According to these former officials, every time there was a chance of lifting the embargo, Fidel Castro did something to keep it: Angola (1975), Ethiopia (1977), and the shoot down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996. 

Those views are an exaggeration of Cuba’s policy towards the United States but I don’t dismiss their evidences. For some in the Cuban leadership, “anti-imperialism”, manifested at its worst as “anti-Americanism”, is central to their identity. Cuban nationalists have a long list of historic complaints and grievances against U.S. interventionism, from the exclusion of the Paris Treaty in 1898 and the Platt Amendment in 1902 to the Helms-Burton Act in 1996.

For those who missed it, 60 Minutes aired a segment on last October's visit to Havana by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra earlier this week.  It’s a must-watch for jazz, Marsalis, Cuba and New Orleans enthusiasts alike.  (View the entire 13-minute segment here)  I hope someone in the White House caught this segment because it’s a deeply moving reminder of why promoting broad people-to-people contacts between the U.S. and Cuba is the right, sane and humane policy.

Picture this: Wynton Marsalis and members of the Orchestra leading a New Orleans style street parade with Cuban music students and passersby joining in.  Or the joyful grin on one Cuban man, who, with their baby in tow, accompanied his wife – and her horn - to the band’s hotel in hopes of getting a pointer or two from saxophonist Ted Nash (she did, and they jammed together).  And, of course, there’s a magic in seeing Cuban piano legend Chucho Valdes make some music with Marsalis at the home of U.S. Interests Section Chief Jonathan Farrar, which 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer notes was home to the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba – 50 years ago when we still had one.

“Cuba, that’s like your cousins,” New Orleans native Marsalis says.  And you can hear that closeness he’s talking about as he and a colleague mark the distinctive and incredibly similar New Orleans and Cuban clave beats.

When asked, Marsalis declined to offer his opinion on the troubled US-Cuba political relationship.  He figures that’s not what he’s there to do.  Instead, he traveled to Cuba to “bring people together.” 

You can’t blame him for not wanting to enter the hornets’ nest on that one, but maybe he wasn’t evading at all.

It would be hard to imagine a better opportunity to improve the people-to-people contacts between Cuba and the United States than the last two years.  Barack Obama won the presidency with a foreign policy platform emphasizing soft power and dialogue with friends and foes alike over hostility and unilateralism. The Democratic Party enjoyed a significant majority in Congress, with real chances of passing legislation allowing more travel and relaxing the conditions for the sale of foods and medicines to the island. Washington aside, on February 24, 2008, Fidel Castro stepped down from his government responsibilities and new winds of economic reforms and social liberalization began to blow in Havana.

Yet by the end of 2010, as the House of Representatives is changing hands, Mr. Obama’s Cuba policy has not offered up an alternative agenda, based on engagement and U.S. national interests, forcing the promoters of the status quo, in Havana, Washington and Miami to defend their intransigence. The changes in U.S-Cuba relations have been minimal and essentially driven by Obama’s gestures toward the politics of Cuban American community not by a new policy towards Havana.

The lastest Wikileaks cable on Cuba offers up hard truths that sound an awful lot like what experts outside of government have been saying for years.  Reuters' Havana Bureau Chief Jeff Frank reports on the cable, which was published Thursday by El Pais:

U.S. Interests Section chief Jonathan Farrar said [in the cable] the dissidents deserved backing as the "conscience of Cuba," but Washington "should look elsewhere, including within the government itself, to spot likely successors to the Castro regime."

"We see very little evidence that the mainline dissident organizations have much resonance among ordinary Cubans," Farrar said. Without changes, he said, "the traditional dissident movement is not likely to supplant the Cuban government."

Farrar's comments, made in a cable dated April 15, 2009, raise questions about the wisdom of the United States' longtime policy of supporting Cuban dissidents as an alternative to the Communist government that has ruled the island since a 1959 revolution put Fidel Castro in power.

Despite claims they are supported by thousands of Cubans, Farrar said "informal polls we have carried out among visa and refugee applicants have shown virtually no awareness of dissident personalities or agendas."

He described the dissident movement as largely ineffectual, due to factors including internal conflict, outsized egos, preoccupation with money, outdated agendas and infiltration by the Cuban government.

"The greatest effort is directed at obtaining enough resources to keep the principal organizers and their key supporters living from day to day," Farrar wrote.

This is a Guest Post by Romina Ruiz-Goiriena

After fifty years with a single-party government and more than half the Cuban population born after the triumph of the Revolution, many followers of Cuba  have fixated themselves with hopes of an emerging generation "hungry for change." However as I pointed out in an article for El Mundo that analyzed the state of opposition movements ten years after Oswaldo Paya launched the Varela Project, clearly delineated dissident movements have been ineffective in galvanizing an increasingly alienated and politically apathetic Cuban youth.

While scholars and analysts believe there are multiple reasons for this rift, for the younger generation; their formative years on the Island were marked by the demise of the U.S.S.R. The fall of the Berlin wall not only symbolized an end to Communism as they knew it but with it economic subsidies, education opportunities to the Eastern Bloc and the realization that their ideological identification with a bigger political movement had been obliterated. While their parents or grandparents had enjoyed the fruits of the Soviet-Cuban relationship, they would have to battle out brutal economic strife and a passé political narrative that had failed them--alone.

Youth looked elsewhere and Cuban hip-hop was born.

In a commentary featured on CNN.com's Opinion and Analysis page today, fellow THN contributor Arturo Lopez Levy and I teamed up to ask the question, if Cuba is beginning to pursue what looks a lot like a Vietnam-style economic restructuring over the coming months, why not pursue a Vietnam-style policy toward the island nation?

"As Havana prepares for its first Communist Party Congress in 14 years in April, the United States should seize the opportunity to positively influence the economic blueprint the party is expected to approve.

The Party Congress, usually held every five years, is the ultimate conclave when Cuba's Communist leaders set the direction of the country for the next five years. A document released ahead of the congress shows that the Cuban leadership is considering ideas without precedent in the Cuban revolution's political debate. It essentially proposes moving away from Cuba's command economy and adopting an economic system closer to the ones in Vietnam and China."

CNN's publishing rules only allow me to excerpt that short introduction to the commentary, so I hope you'll visit the website to read the entire piece.

The piece reflects not only on the changes going on in Cuba and their similarity to steps taken in Vietnam, but also looks back at the U.S. approach to a country in which the American people lost significant blood and treasure, and yet our government has, with marked success, been willing to engage constructively.  We're certainly not the first analysts to point to examples of American constructive engagement with countries with which we have profound differences. 

But it bears repeating that, given the depth and breadth of discussions ongoing in Cuba right now, the United States has an absurdly excellent opportunity right now to exercise its influence - whether by helping the government directly pursue its reforms, or whether through more indirect means, such as working to reduce the extent to which a hostile U.S. policy remains a dominant domestic political factor in Cuba.  The question on so many people's minds now is, "Where is the Obama Administration?" 

On Friday, November 5, Foreign Policy published my article “Not Your Father’s Cuba”. In it, I argued that the election of Cuban American Senator Marco Rubio and the rise of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to lead the Committee of Foreign Relations of the House of Representatives did not mean that the Cuban American community, much less the American people, were giving Congress a mandate to implement their ideas about U.S. policy towards Cuba.

The HMS Manchester, the first Royal Navy warship to stop in Cuba has arrived in Havana this week.  As part of its efforts throughout the Caribbean to combat illegal drug trade, the Navy expects this visit to help "strengthen collaboration on counter-narcotics and disaster relief."  The BBC reports:

"Cuba lies in a strategic position spanning the main sea routes between South America and the United States.

The communist-run island has long cracked down on both drug use and smuggling.

There is some co-operation with the US but Washington has yet to respond to offers from the Cuban government to formalise and expand these arrangements.

Naturally, the British Royal Navy visit serves as a painful reminder that our closest ally works to enhance anti-narcotics cooperation in the Caribbean (and what many Americans view as our backyard), the U.S. continues to insist - who knows why - on limiting our cooperation to a case-by-case basis. 

Though it seems paralyzed to advance concrete security interests such as this, the Obama administration seems to have at least opened up space for artists and musicians to travel to and from the island.  For more than a year now, a steady stream of American and Cuban artists have been performing in eachother's countries.  Just recently, the America Ballet Theatre Company made its first trip to the island in over fifty years, and Wynton Marsalis and members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra gave concerts in Cuba too.  And, in an interesting bit of timing, the day after the calamitous (for the Democrats) mid-term elections, the New York Philharmonic finally received permission to perform in Havana and bring funder/docents along with them.  Global Post's Nick Miroff writes about the disconnect between this gusher of cultural diplomacy and the lack of political movement on anything more than that:

The unfortunate decision by Rep. Howard Berman to postpone the mark-up of the Cuba travel bill, led to diverse interpretations.

There was poorly reasoned speculation about the postponement in The Hill which was then cited in other publications, including Laura Rozen's Politico blog.

Lacking the votes necessary for passage, a House panel has postponed action on a bill that would lift travel restrictions to Cuba....

Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.) has been trying to secure 24 votes on the 47-member panel to approve the bill, but an analysis by The Hill shows only 16 members have publicly committed to it.

Nothing in the Hill article sustained the reporters' opinion that travel reform proponents faced defeat. 

 

Members of the Committee who had not cosponsored travel legislation were prepared to support it in mark-up, among them Gary Ackerman of New York (as reported in the New York Daily News).

"Berman told me he would not bring the measure up to lose," said Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens, L.I.), "but that with my vote, the measure would pass."

Ackerman, who always voted against easing travel restrictions, said this time is different.

"After giving it a lot of thought, I have changed my position," he said. " I plan to vote in favor."

After nearly 50 years of failure, Ackerman said, it was time to move in another direction.

Recalling a night-long meeting with then-President Fidel Castro in 1994, Ackerman said that he "made a case with him" for human rights.

"It didn't happen then," Ackerman said. "But Cuba is addressing many of those issues now. Besides, if there is no travel ban on Iran, why do we have one on Cuba?"

We are at a time of testing.  Are the institutions of government in the US finally able to overcome well funded special interest exile politics to chart a rational course with Cuba?

The White House dismally failed the first round.  It generated excitement that it would use executive authority before Congress returned from the August recess to reverse Bush era restrictions on non-tourist travel.  News stories suggested the breadth and administrative implementation of the new policy would go beyond the Clinton era, just as Obama did for Cuban American travel.

Predictable hostility came from the Cuban American quintet in Congress, supported by their indefatigable ally Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the same people who oppose even unrestricted family travel.  Just as in April 2009, the White House buckled under largely one-sided pressure, this time reportedly after new regulations had actually been approved by the President and the Secretary of State. 

The President’s political advisers decided that opening up dialogue between the people of the US and Cuba would have to wait once again, this time until after the mid-term election on November 2d.  Another opportunity for Presidential leadership was squandered, contributing to further disillusionment in the Democratic base and among independents who had voted for change.

Congress looked to be doing no better.  House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Howard Berman declined to use his authority to cede jurisdiction which would have allowed the travel and ag sales bill to go to a floor vote in July after approval by the Agriculture Committee.  Some feared he would lack the votes and determination to carry the travel section of the bill through his committee.

Who doesn't love Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column in The Washington Post? His scoop is always well researched and substantive, while bringing a little bit of much-needed levity to the news about town. So naturally I chuckled when i read today's bit on Cuba, which began thus:

"He may be the last one to figure it out, but Fidel Castro's recent observation to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic that the Cuban economic model "doesn't even work for us anymore'' was nonetheless stunning."

But while Al Kamen keeps us in the loop on so many matters, he was a bit off the mark in the case of Alan Gross, the American who traveled to Cuba on a USAID sub-contract, and, as Kamen writes, remains "imprisoned in Cuba for the crime of distributing cellphones and laptops in Cuba's tiny Jewish community."

To better understand the circumstances around Mr. Gross's plight (he's been in prison since last December), Kamen need have looked no further than the September 3rd edition of the venerable Jewish weekly The Forward (or visit its sister publication, The Daily Forward). In it, Arturo Lopez Levy, a Cuban Jew who immigrated to the United States via Israel several years ago but still maintains close contacts with Cuba's Jewish community, wrote:

"Gross was not arrested because he is Jewish, nor is it likely that he was imprisoned because of his efforts to help Cuba’s Jewish community with communications technology. Rather, Gross appears to be a victim of failed American policy toward Cuba and a paranoid Cuban government that is holding him without trial.

From Deepwater Horizon Response photostream

The blame for the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is now flowing almost as freely as the oil, and even after a month, the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon disaster won't be known for some time. The explosion and the futility of efforts to stanch the flow have sounded a nightmarish alarm for the United States, Mexico and Cuba.

These three countries not only share the coastline of the Gulf, we share (to decidedly different degrees) the pain of recession. Only days before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, the Obama Administration moved to open new areas of the East Coast to oil drilling, in part in response to the siren song of jobs and profits for American companies. The American Petroleum Institute claimed that "exploring for and developing our nation's offshore resources could help generate more than a trillion dollars in revenue and create thousands of jobs to add to the already 9.2 million jobs supported by today's oil and natural gas industry."

What a difference a few weeks makes. While the debate about drilling will continue in the United States, Cuba is in a different position, and their economy in a different place: not facing mere recession, but a free fall. Cash-starved Cuba's drilling in its Economic Exclusive Zone is not a question of if, but when. And with U.S. law prohibiting any meaningful cooperation not only on exploration and extraction but also on disaster preparedness and mitigation, the future may hold more Deepwater Horizon disasters, and even less capacity to handle them.

The Spanish oil company Repsol has contracted with an Italian company to bring a deepwater drill rig into Cuban waters. If that's not ominous enough, the rig is being assembled in China, a country that does not enjoy a reputation for quality control. That may be unfair, but it is fair to say that many people who might not have been that concerned about such an operation before the Deepwater Horizon incident are paying close attention now.

Today's New America event U.S. -- Cuba Engagement in the Gulf: Lessons from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill asked the questions: Are we prepared? What's at stake? And, where should the Obama Administration go from here? The answers: no, a lot, and forward with alacrity.