Harry Targ : Diplomatic Rejection at Cartagena Summit Reflects U.S. Decline

Is U.S. image fading? President Obama on giant screen at Americas Summit in Cartagena, April 14, 2012. Photo by John Vizcaino / Reuters.
Occupy Latin America:
Changing relations in the hemisphere

Latin America’s rejection of U.S. diplomatic dominance at the Cartagena, Colombia, summit signifies the decline of U.S. power in the region.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2012

The 2012 Summit of the Americas ended Sunday, April 15, without a closing statement as is traditional. In fact, it ended with acrimony.

Countries with political regimes as varied as Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia condemned the refusal of the United States to formally recognize Cuba, thus allowing that country to attend. Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, did not even attend the summit to protest Cuba’s exclusion. By the end of the meeting, Evo Morales, Bolivian President, made it clear that no future summits would occur if Cuba were not included.

Along with political conflict between the United States and Canada and the rest of the Hemisphere countries over Cuba, most rejected the decades-long violent and destructive “war on drugs” launched by the United States in the twentieth century to maintain a rationale for a pervasive military presence in the region.

Also, President Cristina Fernandez of Argentina left the meeting early to protest the lack of U.S. support for her country’s claims on the Malvinas Islands.

The Summit of the Americas was launched in 1994 by President Clinton to advance Hemisphere diplomacy beyond the traditional regional organization, the Organization of American States. Clinton and George Bush used the summits to lobby for a Hemisphere-wide free trade agreement, a North America Free Trade Agreement, writ large.

In 2003, the former Brazilian President, Luiz Inacion Lula da Silva, demanded that the United States end farm subsidies for U.S. products before Brazil would consider a trade agreement. Subsequently Brazil joined forces with Russia, India, and China (the BRICs) to challenge the hegemony of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan in the global economy.

While visible global political/military contests in the twenty-first century centered in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, significant changes have been occurring in Latin America. A continent pillaged by Spain, Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands for hundreds of years has been doggedly moving towards political autonomy and economic independence.

Colonialism came to an end with the Spanish/Cuban/American war in 1898. In its place, the United States established neocolonial control over the politics and economics of virtually every country in the Hemisphere. At first, from 1898 until 1933, the U.S. maintained control through repeated military interventions (over 30 in 35 years with long marine military occupations of Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua).

From the 1930s until the 1980s, U.S. control was maintained by putting in place and supporting military dictatorships in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. During the time Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton were in office, control was enhanced by so-called “neoliberal” economic policies. These demanded of countries, increasingly tied to international banks by crippling debt, the creation of open markets, foreign economic penetration, and reduced domestic spending for its own citizens.

During the years of dictatorship and neoliberalism, the primary example of resistance to U.S. economic imperialism and militarism was Cuba. For that reason, the United States put in place a policy of diplomatic isolation, an economic blockade, and a 50-year campaign to subvert and overthrow the revolutionary government.

As the 2012 election season approaches, presidential candidate Barack Obama, apparently felt he could not buck the declining but still influential counterrevolutionary Cuban Americans of South Florida, despite what Latin America thinks.

Latin America’s rejection of U.S. diplomatic dominance at the Cartagena, Colombia, summit signifies the decline of U.S. power in the region. The power of the newly formed Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), an organization promoting economic and political cooperation in the region constitutes one kind of challenge to the United States. Another is the trade regime, Common Southern Market or Mercosur, which has a membership of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay (with membership of Venezuela in process, and associate membership status for Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

More important, economic populist (some say 21st century socialist) regimes are in power now in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and, of course, Cuba. In addition center/left regimes rule in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Peru.

Hal Weitzman documents in Latin Lessons: How South America Stopped Listening to the United States and Started Prospering (Wiley, 2012) Latin America’s growing relationships with China and to a lesser extent Europe. He identifies a troubling contradiction in the U.S. regional relationship:

The longer-term trend is clear: while Latin America becomes an increasingly more important trade partner for the United States with every passing year, the United States is becoming less and less important to Latin America.

And finally, in advance of electoral shifts to the Left in the region, mass organizations all around the Hemisphere have emerged based on class, gender, and race. Also indigenous people struggling to keep their land in the face of expropriation by multinational corporations have risen up, even against what they regard as oppressive policies of populist regimes.

The World Social Forum, launched as a dialogue among the poor and oppressed in Porte Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, was a forerunner of the Occupy movements of our own day.

In short, the rejection of United States policies at the summit signifies the fundamental transformation of U.S/Latin American relations. The winds of change are becoming gusts.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Margarita Alarcón : 50 Years of Cuban Embargo is Enough

Cuban president Raul Castro at Cuba's National Assembly in Havana. Photo by Ismael Francisco /AFP/ Getty images.
'Four Riders' and the Cuban embargo:
Fifty years should be enough

By Margarita Alarcón / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2010

In 1992, a little over 19 years ago during one typical hot summer season in New York City as the calm was smothering midtown and Murray Hill and the lethargic heat made it almost impossible to lift even an Italian Ice, four guys jokingly referred to as the Four Riders of the Apocalypse conceived of a work plan to fill up those slow muggy afternoons.

(The "Four Riders" were my father, the ambassador, and the three men below him in order of rank, while they were all at the UN during Cuba's tenure in the Security Council as a non-permanent member, 1990-1992.)

There really wasn’t much to do in those days; the first Gulf War was “over,” the sanctions were in place, Saddam Hussein was still president, and the Iraqi people were suffering the after-effects of war and would do so till this very day; the Israeli Palestinian conflict was still going to be an issue one way or another; Puerto Rico was not going to be an independent island (at least not yet); North Korea and Iran had not yet made a peep over nukes.

Life was pretty slow in the UN. Well, for most, it was slow.

There were those who called them crazy -- almost harebrained -- given the extreme circumstances and what they were up against. To others it was remarkable how this particular topic had never been put forth.

Finally by the end of the summer, right as autumn was turning the Central Park leaves from green to the bright hues of auburn and yellow, they presented their plan to the largest world audience around, the United Nations. So it was that Resolution 59/11 of the United Nations General Assembly was adopted during the fall of the year 1992.

The way UN resolutions work is pretty simple. A nation -- or a group of nations -- get together and present a draft resolution which is then voted upon by the entire body of the General Assembly in order to become a topic of each year’s GA agenda. If it receives enough votes, it continues on the agenda.

Not very complicated, pretty straight forward, really not rocket science. As far as the rules and the regulations of the UN charter are concerned, member states have rights and responsibilities. One of the responsibilities is to adhere to the democratic voting process of the organization, its Charter, and its Security Council -- whichever the case may be.

The United States of America is a founding member of both the General Assembly and the Security Council and has used both privileges on many occasions.

For almost two decades now, in what appeared to be a slow rise at first and has now become unwavering, the General Assembly has been voting in favor of resolution 59/11. Each year, gaining votes in favor, and losing abstentions with the same two nations voting against.


187-2-3

This year, the vote on resolution 59/11 on October 26th was once again described by the media as “an overwhelming majority” in favor of the resolution. Of the 192 member states that make up the entire body of the United Nations, 187 voted in favor of the resolution, Two -- Israel and the United States -- voted against it. And here is the punch line for geography buffs: the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Micronesia decided to abstain.

Resolution 59/11 is entitled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” This is basically a fancier and nicer way of stating the following: put an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

This is a legislated issue within the United States and thus does not fall automatically in the hands of the president. It isn’t President Obama’s embargo. Technically it belongs to Congress. Under law the only way the U.S. embargo against Cuba can be lifted is if two-thirds of the United States Congress (both houses) vote to do so. This has been a given since President William Clinton signed the Helms Burton Bill into law in 1996 serving at the pleasure of the Cuban American National Foundation and a few legislators.

It’s not President Barack Obama's Embargo; it belongs to Congress and to the voters in the United States.

The irony is that Cuba is a Third World nation which has never had -- and has never expressed -- any intent of harming the people of the United State. Though unable to acquire practically anything on the open world market, this island has managed to achieve a 78-year life expectancy rate and an infant mortality rate at birth that would be the envy of any First World nation.

This is even more interesting if you take into account that the embargo has been around as long as the Cuban Revolution, so the “punishment” was not inflicted because of anything Cuba did or did not do to the United States or anyone else, but rather as a response to its sheer existence: radical social change 90 miles off the coasts of Florida.

So, I must ask the readers of The Rag Blog to urge the current President to advise his Congress (and yours) to lift this unjust, insane, ludicrous, and internationally condemned policy that is leading nowhere.

Those Four Riders of the Apocalypse didn’t spend their summer months writing in vain. Don’t let this president become the eleventh administrative head responsible for yet another year of unjust punishment of Cuba -- for its simple desire for independence and sovereignty, something the forefathers of your own great nation also achieved through that “evil” word: revolution.

[Margarita Alarcón Perea was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in New York City. She studied at Karl Marx Stadt in East Germany and Havana, and is a graduate of Havana University in linguistics. She has taught English translation and North American Twentieth Century Literature, and worked in the Cuban music industry. She is currently a news analyst for Cubadebate in Havana and contributes to The Huffington Post. Margarita's father is Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly.]

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Cuba-U.S. Talks : No Preconditions Required

Graphic circa 1902.
U.S. and Cuba to restart negotiations without preconditions.

The fact is that Cuba does not pose any danger to the United States. A continuation of the embargo and failure to normalize relations, does nothing to protect the United States. All it does is hurt both countries economically, and make the U.S. look foolish...

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2009

It looks like the United States and Cuba are about to take the first small feeble steps toward normalizing the relationship between the two countries. This is a good thing, and should have happened years ago.

Recently, the United States had asked Cuba to resume negotiations regarding the immigration of Cubans to the United States. Last weekend, Cuba sent a diplomatic note to the U.S. government accepting the invitation to restart the talks. I hope these talks are successful, so other negotiations can be conducted and relations finally normalized.

One reason these talks are going to happen, is that neither country put any preconditions on holding the talks. This should be a lesson to both countries, especially the United States. The U.S. is still requiring preconditions before having more substantial talks and before re-admitting Cuba to the Organization of American States.

The whole idea of preconditions for talks is ridiculous. First, no country has the right to demand another country alter their government. We would be aghast if Cuba demanded we alter our way of governing ourselves before they would talk to us, and yet we seem to think it's fine for us to do the same thing to them. How can we possibly believe we have the right to do something we would not allow Cuba to do to us?

Also, having pre-conditions before negotiating is like demanding the other country give up before negotiations have even begun. We would not give in before negotiations have begun, so how can we demand it of others?

But not only are the preconditions wrong, they will probably soon put the U.S. in an unsustainable and untenable position. The Organization of American States is scheduled to meet very soon, and the feeling is that the huge majority of the members are in favor of re-admitting Cuba. They may well do so in spite of what the United States wants, or whatever preconditions the United States has imposed.

True diplomacy requires both countries to negotiate in good faith. The differences between the two countries are the matters to be negotiated. To demand for one country to submit to the wishes of another before negotiating is not diplomacy -- it is hubris, or worse.

The fact is that Cuba does not pose any danger to the United States. A continuation of the embargo and failure to normalize relations, does nothing to protect the United States. All it does is hurt both countries economically, and make the U.S. look foolish -- especially since most other countries, including our allies, have resumed normal relations with Cuba.

It is time for President Obama to drop all preconditions to negotiating the normalizing of relations with Cuba. There is no reason the United States and Cuba cannot be friends, who work together for the common good of both countries.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Oil: The Equalizer in US/Cuba Relations?

Cuba's Undersea Oil Could Help Thaw Trade With U.S.
By Nick Miroff / May 16, 2009

Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, an end to the 1962 U.S. trade embargo against Cuba may be lying untapped, buried under layers of rock, seawater and bitter relations.

Oil, up to 20 billion barrels of it, sits off Cuba's northwest coast in territorial waters, according to the Cuban government -- enough to turn the island into the Qatar of the Caribbean. At a minimum, estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey place Cuba's potential deep-water reserves at 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, stores that would rank the island among the region's top producers.

Drilling operations by foreign companies in Cuban waters are still in the exploratory stage, and significant obstacles -- technological and political -- stand between a U.S.-Cuba rapprochement eased by oil. But as the Obama administration gestures toward improved relations with the Castro government, the national security, energy and economic benefits of Cuban crude may make it a powerful incentive for change.

Limited commercial ties between U.S. businesses and the island's communist government have been quietly expanding this decade as Cuban purchases of U.S. goods -- mostly food -- have increased from $7 million in 2001 to $718 million in 2008, according to census data.

Thawing relations could eventually open up U.S. investment in mining, agriculture, tourism and other sectors of Cuba's tattered economy. But the prospect of major offshore reserves that would be off-limits to U.S. companies and consumers has some Cuba experts arguing that 21st-century energy needs should prevail over 20th-century Cold War politics.

"The implications of this have the potential to be a sea change, literally and figuratively, for the Cubans," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who studies Cuba's energy sector.
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At a House subcommittee hearing last month on U.S.-Cuba policy, former oil executive Jorge Piñón told lawmakers that the United States has a strategic interest in helping Cuba tap its potentially vast hydrocarbon stores and that U.S. companies should receive special permission to do so.

"American oil and oil equipment and service companies have the capital, technology and operational know-how to explore, produce and refine in a safe and responsible manner Cuba's potential oil and natural gas reserves. Yet they remain on the sidelines because of our almost five-decade-old unilateral political and economic embargo," said Piñón, a member of a Brookings Institution advisory group on Cuba policy reform.

Cuba has said it welcomes U.S. investment, but American companies remain largely silent on the issue, at least in public, bound by trade sanctions that were established under the Kennedy administration. When Cuban oil officials and U.S. companies attended a joint energy conference at an American-owned hotel in Mexico in 2006, the Bush administration forced the facility to expel the Cuban delegation, attempting to thwart any potential for partnership.

"Until trade barriers are removed, Chevron is unable to do business in Cuba," said Chevron spokesman Kurt Glaubitz. "Companies like us would have to see a change in U.S. policy before we evaluate whether there's interest."

Robert Dodge, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, said his organization is not lobbying for access to Cuba, and Texas congressional representatives with ties to the oil industry said they are focused on opening U.S. territorial waters to drilling. But observers of U.S.-Cuba relations say American companies haven't been sitting on their hands and remain in conversations with Cuban counterparts.

At the 2006 Mexico energy conference, U.S. oil companies "all had plans to move forward as soon as the U.S. government gives them the go-ahead," said Benjamin-Alvarado, who attended the conference.

If that go-ahead is granted, American companies would be entering a drilling contest crowded with foreign competitors. Several global firms, including Repsol (Spain), Petrobras (Brazil) and StatoilHydro (Norway) are exploring in the Gulf of Mexico through agreements with the Castro government, and state companies from Malaysia, India, Vietnam and Venezuela have also signed deals.

Sherritt International, a Canadian company, has had oil derricks pumping heavy crude along Cuba's north coast for more than a decade, extracting about 55,000 barrels a day, mostly for Cuba's domestic energy consumption.

But most of Cuba's undiscovered reserves are thought to be in two offshore areas. The oil and gas that make up the USGS estimate lie in an area known as the North Cuba Basin, a short distance off the island's northwest coast.

The larger deposit is thought to be in a section of the gulf known as the Eastern Gap, to which Mexico and the United States also have a claim. Cuban officials believe there are 10 billion to 15 billion barrels of crude stored there under more than 5,000 feet of seawater and 20,000 feet of rock-- costly to extract but accessible with existing technology. By comparison, U.S. proven reserves total 21 billion barrels.

The Eastern Gap area is also coveted by American companies, but in Florida, where anti-Castro and anti-drilling sentiments run high, the Cuban government's energy ambitions have alarmed lawmakers who see the threat of ecological calamity in Cuba's plans to drill in that part of the gulf.

"They'd be drilling right in the Gulf Stream," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said in a telephone interview, describing a nightmare scenario in which ocean currents could carry spilled crude into Florida's marine sanctuaries and blacken beaches along the Eastern Seaboard.

"There would be a monumental disaster," he said. "There simply should not be drilling out there."
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Other U.S. lawmakers said oil deals with the Cuban government would throw a lifeline to the island's feeble economy and the 50-year rule of Fidel and Raúl Castro. They also question how reliable a partner Cuba would be.

"What if we make those investments and then U.S. assets are nationalized?" Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) asked after last month's subcommittee hearing.

Because it would take three or more years for Cuba to fully develop its energy resources, according to Piñón, U.S. participation in the island's energy sector could benefit a Cuban government not necessarily led by Fidel, 82, or Raúl, 78. Helping Cuba develop its own reserves, he said, would allow the island to gain the political independence and economic footing needed to negotiate a reconciliation with the United States without outside interference.

"Since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, Cuba's communist government has had to largely rely on foreign providers -- first the Soviet Union, now Venezuela -- to fulfill its energy needs," Piñón said.

Cuba's "petroleum dependency" on Hugo Chávez's government "could be used by Venezuela as a tool to influence a Cuban government in maintaining a politically antagonistic and belligerent position toward the United States," he said.

Source / Washington Post

Thanks to Jeff Segal / The Rag Blog

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Peter Coyote in Cuba : A State of Grace With the Requisite Complexities

"Jose Marti Dove Hands," Oil on Canvas portrait of Jose Marti by Rene Mederos from the Hernandez-Miyares collection. Marti was 'widely revered as a poet and an intellectual, a soldier and resistance fighter, a lover of women, and a politician.'
Does the U.S. embargo help the Cuban government?

...every system is a series of interlocking, intractable problems, where consequences, intended and unintended, inevitably wall off potentially desirable effects from delivering their intended promises. I cannot think of a system, certainly including my own, which is not beset by contradictions and dilemmas which are the direct results of policies designed for the best of reasons.

By Peter Coyote / March 2, 2009

HAVANA -- Interesting and informative as it may be, meeting virtually the entire world of cigars, running around relentlessly, speaking another language, eating different food and writing hundreds of words a day is exhausting and it's time for a day off. I decide to visit the town of Coghinar, the site Hemingway chose as the setting for "The Old Man and the Sea." I thought it might be nice to sit in the sun, on a beach.

Leaving Havana, on a wide clean road, in a car that appears to be a relatively new Audi A-6, the absence of any evidence of shock absorbers serves as a reminder to "stay awake" and "be observant," transmitted through my lower back and kidneys like body-blows.

Driving on roads with virtually no traffic is like being returned to a state of grace in America of the 1950s. The way is wide and broad and there is absolutely no advertising. It's refreshing. There are the odd signs of propaganda -- reminding us of the plight of the Cuban 5, that Che and his example lives forever, that Chavez of Venezuela is a good friend to Cubans etc. Despite being clear and bright and usually cryptic, a few are too dense for me to grab in my limited Spanish. One for instance, announces that "two hours of the blockade would" (and here I lost it for the instant it took to drive by) "all the Braille in Cuba."

For the most part however, Cubans have not considered the concept that all "public" space be made available for private exploitation, which, if you think of it, is exactly what advertising accomplishes. Before Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, used his uncle's work to delve into the unconscious of consumers (dedicating his skills to successfully convince women to begin smoking) and before he had come up with the idea of re-branding his efforts as "public relations," folks simply called it what it was quite nakedly -- propaganda. In its most elemental form, it allows a corporation to place between you and the view of any scenery or vista a psychologically adroit argument (in visual coding) to buy something you probably do not need. Since it's public space and "free," and since Americans are a freedom-loving people, there appear to be no limits on the concentration of media messages allowed even if an actual forest is replaced by a virtual forest of brand-name exhortations. It's "free."

In Cuba however, the road is lined with dense green woods, or pastures, shanties, sometimes stately homes, herds of goats, or lines of distant palms. These views are uninterrupted by bright, colorful, sexually suggestive photographs of attractive people interacting with sexy products. Perhaps it's because there appears to be so little money here, but I barely saw an inducement to buy anything, and, for one, found it restful. All the Cubans I saw were clothed, shod, and well-fed. (Though to be fair, I never saw a fat person in Cuba -- unless they were a foreign visitor.) They must have purchased these items somewhere, but except for my granddaughter's present, I saw very few stores. Cuban cars, in many cases, were newer than the hand-painted relics I find so attractive here and remember fondly from my youth. They too came from somewhere, but I never saw any of those "where's" or any of the automobile brands advertised.

A short hop off the main road, we pulled onto a sandy knoll in the La Playa del Este region, under a palm tree, near a little bohio that sold pop. The vista is decidedly Fellini-esque with large open spaces, a single inexplicable industrial-sized building off in the distance, and a single person crossing an expanse of dried lawn. There were one or two other cars about, but no surf shops, condos, jet-ski rentals, scuba-tours, marlin tournaments, or motorboats advertised. The sand was fine and white and extended as far as I could see in two directions and the water was a magnificent collision of two bands of very distinct color next to the shore -- a milky jade green; and approximately 15 feet out it turned immediately into an intense lapis lazuli extending to the horizon. I could sense the whetting of corporate knives as international hotel executives plotted to turn such a beach into a replica of the Zona de Hoteles in Cancun I found so depressing. All that potential capital going to waste; all that beauty unexploited. "These Cubans are too dumb to realize what they have, Fred."

I rented a chair from the owner of the bohio for a peso and plotzed to look at the horizon awhile. To my left, about a hundred yards away, two men body-surfed in the swells with evident relish. To my right, an equal distance away, two people lay on the sand taking the sun. That was it. Sun, sand, gorgeous water, an old white plastic beach chair, y nada mas, as they say down here. The wind was brisk, and occasionally grains of sand stung my cheeks, but I sat for a lovely uninterrupted, unhurried hour. The week to date, however, had generated too much internal momentum to sit longer. I returned the chair and moved on.

We arrive in Santa Maria de la Mar, which may be where all the ugliest housing projects that the Russians ever gave to Cuba came to die. They are impersonal, vast as projects in the slums of the States, only more decrepit. It is unsettling to see them and hard to consider how anyone could be happy or even dream of beauty in such an environment, but my guide, catching my cultural assumptions, reminds me they are "Mejor que nada," much better than the "nothing" that most poor Cubans possessed before the Revolution. I realize that once again, attempting to view Cuba through lenses appropriate to the United States can easily lead one astray, and that for people who grew up on dirt floors and under palm-thatch and open walls, even gray-concrete with running water and a bathroom is an improvement. Once again, I remember that I have not seen one homeless person in all of Cuba, and if it takes these ugly Russian buildings to accomplish that, I will shut my mouth about it.

From Santa Maria we descend into the little fishing village of Coghinar. Two men are playing guitar and singing on a porch opposite where we park. One is a wiry man with honey-colored skin about 50. His companion is white and stooped, probably in his late 70s. They play and harmonize beautifully, and the darker man acknowledges my interest with a lifted-chin salute and a smile.

The main street slopes down to the sea, and even from several hundred yards away, I can see the white pergola with pink-trim, which David tells me houses a bust of Ernest Hemingway. I start in that direction, when an old woman stops me. Pointing to my cigar she says, "Hay una Cohiba." I stop to chat and show her the black band of the Gran Reserva, which she has never seen. (When the cigar went out last night, I put the remaining half in a Bolivar aluminum tube and saved it for today.) She tells me that she worked in the Cohiba factory for 25 years, wrapping the bands on the cigars and that she thought it was fine. Life now is hard, she confesses, and shows me her swollen feet and says something about "adult diabetes." We listen to the music a bit together, and she waves goodbye as I walk on.

A bit farther down the street, a house is having some construction done. There are concrete blocks and piles of sand and cement blocking the driveway of a sweet and modest house in good repair. A handsome man in his early forties stops me and points. "You're an actor," he says and I nod, yes. Laying his hand lightly on my shoulder as a request to wait, he calls loudly to his wife inside to "come out and see who this is." A younger woman with an open and expressive face comes out and smiles in surprise. She takes my hand and we chat a moment. Both she and her husband know some of my films, and the TV series, "The 4400," is currently playing on Cuban TV. (Of course, because the U.S. refuses all relations with Cuba, they simply download such shows off the satellites and see them for nothing.)

The man's wife then says with evident pride, "My husband is José Modesto Darcourt." David explains that José was a champion Cuban baseball player who pitched for a team called The Industrials. I am embarrassed to have had the advantage of the distribution machinery of American culture. He knows who I am because America's reach extends into his living room, yet because we have no reciprocity with them, I had no idea I was in the presence of a hero. I was just "well-known," in Cuba, he was once a god.

We talked awhile and when I told him why I had come, he pointed down the hill in Hemingway's direction, smiled and shook my hand again. His wife smiled too, clutching her apron, and moved sideways to stand beside José, proud of her husband, proud of her house, and perhaps even proud to live in a town where neighbors serenade one another and "movie stars" can suddenly appear in the street.

We walk down to the wharf at the end of town and I bow to Hemingway and take a photo of his statue with a dog sleeping at its base. Unlike Odysseus, who traveled the world and returned home and whose dog died upon recognizing him, it is this fine writer, immortalized all over Cuba, who has died, and the skinny, dusty, and undernourished dog endures, much like the rest of Cuba.

On the way back to town, we pass more cheerless, three-story concrete Russian apartments, stained with a dark grey mold. Cultural bias aside, I can't understand how the Russia that produced Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Turgenev and Gogol and Chagall and Kandinskii, Moussorgsky and Rachmaninoff and Rostropovich and the Bolshoi Ballet; poets like Anna Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam; which constructed the fanciful multi-colored, turreted buildings of Moscow and St. Petersburg -- how could it have contributed such ugliness to the world? I'm stunned by it, will never accept it, but I can understand why it appeared to be a necessity. For that reason, at least in Cuba, I'll keep my opinions about them to myself.

Back in Havana, we walk awhile at the Plaza de José Marti, a popular gathering spot where people argue sports and politics in loud and energetic exchanges. It's hard to estimate the meaning of Marti for Cuba. Widely revered as a poet and an intellectual, a soldier and resistance fighter, a lover of women, and a politician, Castro acknowledged him before the entire country when he addressed it after the Revolution and told the Cuban people that he had simply finished what was begun by Jose Marti.

Born in 1853, he lived a full, active, politically engaged life, 10 years of which he spent in New York City. Statues of him are everywhere, and even the dictator Batista had a statue of him in his office. (Hypocrisy is the tax that vice pays to virtue.) He dedicated his entire life to ending imperialism and driving the Spanish from Cuba, but incidentally found much about America's freedom and immigrant society to love even as he feared its global reach. He died in a suicidal two-man charge against Spanish positions at the Battle of Dos Rios and when the Spanish soldiers discovered who they had killed, they were afraid to burn his body for fear that his ashes would enter their throats and choke them.

No me entierren en lo oscuro
A morir como un traidor
Yo soy bueno y como bueno
Moriré de cara al sol."

("Do not bury me in darkness / to die like a traitor / I am good, and as a good man / I will die facing the sun.") -- Marti.

We have lunch at a restaurant, in another barrio which was called (I think) La Paila, though the waiters wore aprons embroidered with other names like "Casillero del Diablo." As we nibble on the traditional fried Malanga crouquets, a slender American man with a beard, casually dressed, in his 50s introduces himself as Bob Israel. I'm momentarily befuddled until I realize that his son Jesse is one of my son's best friends in New York. Bob sits a moment and explains that he's here with a group from Dreamworks Studio (think Stephen Spielberg), being led on a tour by one of their executives who loves Cuba and loves introducing people to it. They are here under license (meaning that the government cannot fine them or confiscate their property) doing some sort of humanitarian work, but I am too surprised by the sudden intrusion of Hollywood into Havana to fully register what it was. We chat about our kids, thousands of miles away, until his food arrives and he rejoins his group, and my other friend (who I'll leave nameless due to the nature of our conversation) and I pick up a thread we've been discussing throughout my trip.

Orelio (a name as good as any other) has previously explained to me that Cuba now imports sugar and tomatoes, crops which would grow here effortlessly, along with a host of other things that require them to spend precious currency. I cannot understand why. Why grow tobacco and not tomatoes? Is it only a question of which brings in the most currency? If there were more food available obviously the state would require less money. Why not grow it?

Orelio drops his voice -- and I get the first intimation of why some refer to it as "a police state," though I have seen no evidence of surveillance, or oppressive police presence, or any undue deference of the people to their fellows in uniform. Still, his gesture was reflexive, defensive in nature and I did not understand the situation fully enough to know whether he was keeping our conversation private out of respect for the people at other tables who might hold other opinions, or because he was in some way afraid.

He points out that the revolution will not allow brokers of any kind. Consequently there is no agency, public or private, to buy food from the farmers and sell it to the state. They have been forbidden, because they would inject profit into the process of sustenance and, inevitably raise the price of food and create a class that "lives off the work of others." Food must, for a number of reasons, be kept cheap, and so the state buys directly from the farmers at a very, very small margin. This lack of ability to make money from their work acts as a disincentive for the farmers from growing much more than they need, or working overly diligently for so little money. It is honestly, the first time I have ever given any credence to Republican assertions that without money as an incentive people will not work. It never made sense to me because I enjoy writing and performing, by and large, and so do most of my friends. We have all done our work free before, and so the "incentive" argument has always seemed like a thin soup. As in most things, I can see that no one side of an argument ever owns the entire truth.

Farmwork is tough. It demands long hours, patience, dedication, endurance and hardship and it is pretty clear that people work for more than the simple human pleasures of interacting with the soil. It is intractable. If the government allows markets to develop and the price of food to rise, food may be plentiful, but it will also be too expensive for the majority of Cubans. It will also become plentiful at the expense of creating hierarchical classes of people, a condition which is anathema to the sentiments of Fidel's revolutionary generation. Remember again the natural opposition of "freedom" and "equality."

It's clear that every system is a series of interlocking, intractable problems, where consequences, intended and unintended, inevitably wall off potentially desirable effects from delivering their intended promises. I cannot think of a system, certainly including my own, which is not beset by contradictions and dilemmas which are the direct results of policies designed for the best of reasons. Take the car, for instance. Who could have predicted that this vessel which offered freedom and independence, generated millions of jobs, virtually an entire economy, and nearly uncountable national wealth would wind up controlling our lives, architecture, transportation design, poisoning the planet, threatening our national security and independence and collapsing a major wing of our economy?

Americans have been trained to criticize socialist countries for their problems, but those cultures arrived at their problematic conditions the same way we did…pursuing ideologies and intentions that ensared them in unintended consequences. I'm not trying to make all problems equal, either morally or practically, but one can understand, just by examining the question of sharing food, that the dilemmas are universal.

Orelio continues, shocking me by suggesting that the embargo may serve the Cuban government with a ready-made excuse for its failures. "As things stand now, the embargo actually helps the government," he suggests, by being the source of all things miserable in Cuba. Should it end suddenly, then people may wonder why buildings are so decrepit, why the environment is not better cared for as it should be, or why Cuba is forced to import so much of what they need. He is open, of course, to the possibility that ending the embargo might also change all those examples for the better, but he offers as evidence the following story:

A Miami Cuban counter-revolutionary group had been flying into Cuban airspace, filing false flight plans with our government, and dropping propaganda leaflets over the population for many years. The Cubans did not like it and complained to the United States for years about these violations of international law, and airspace. They were very very patient about this insult to their sovereignty. One day, however, they had enough and shot down two planes killing all aboard. "When did they shoot down the planes?" he demands. When Bill Clinton was in office and there were talks afoot to relax travel and remittances and the like, he said. Clinton was going to support liberalization of relations and it was then that the Cubans shot down the plane. That act made it impossible for Clinton to continue his liberalization efforts and gave sustenance to all Castro's enemies in Congress, insuring (according to Orelio) that the embargo remained in place. Knowing the degree to which Clinton was dependent on the Cuban vote in Florida for his presidency, it's hard to believe he was intending to be too liberal, but even the fact that this hypothesis is believed by (at least one) of the Cuban people, it's informative of tensions and difficulties in the system.

"America could invade Cuba any time it wanted without a problem," he continues. "They never will. They don't want to take care of 11 millions Cubans" for one thing, and for another, Cuban boats patrol the maritime borders -- one every five miles to interdict drug runners and (according to Orelio) escapees to the United States. "Do you know how much it would cost the United States to do such patrolling to keep drugs away? Do the math."

Orelio is persuasive and it is less important whether he is correct than it is that he is highlighting facets and complexities of the American-Cuban interface that are never publicly discussed. There are others who probably have direct access to the information which could prove or disprove these assertions, but without open dialogue and frank exchange they never surface into public discourse and citizens of both cultures are the losers.

© 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.

[Peter Coyote is an actor and author. He was active with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers in Sixties San Francisco. Sleeping Where I Fall, his memoir of the 1960s counter-culture, will be re-released in May 2009. This article was originally posted by Peter Coyote on Feb. 26, 2009.]

Source / SFGate

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