Category: International
Cuban brain drain, courtesy of the USA
| November 18, 2014 | 10:19 pm | Analysis, International, Latin America, National | Comments closed
NYTimes: A Cuban Brain Drain, Courtesy of U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/opinion/a-cuban-brain-drain-courtesy-of-us.html?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article

Secretary of State John Kerry and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, have praised the work of Cuban doctors dispatched to treat Ebola patients in West Africa. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently sent an official to a regional meeting the Cuban government convened in Havana to coordinate efforts to fight the disease. In Africa, Cuban doctors are working in American-built facilities. The epidemic has had the unexpected effect of injecting common sense into an unnecessarily poisonous relationship.

And yet, Cuban doctors serving in West Africa today could easily abandon their posts, take a taxi to the nearest American Embassy and apply for a little-known immigration program that has allowed thousands of them to defect. Those who are accepted can be on American soil within weeks, on track to becoming United States citizens.

There is much to criticize about Washington’s failed policies toward Cuba and the embargo it has imposed on the island for decades. But the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which in the last fiscal year enabled 1,278 Cubans to defect while on overseas assignments, a record number, is particularly hard to justify.

It is incongruous for the United States to value the contributions of Cuban doctors who are sent by their government to assist in international crises like the 2010 Haiti earthquake while working to subvert that government by making defection so easy.

American immigration policy should give priority to the world’s neediest refugees and persecuted people. It should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation at a time when improved relations between the two countries are a worthwhile, realistic goal.

The program was introduced through executive authority in August 2006, when Emilio González, a hard-line Cuban exile, was at the helm of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Mr. González described the labor of Cuban doctors abroad as “state-sponsored human trafficking.” At the time, the Bush administration was trying to cripple the Cuban government. Easily enabling medical personnel posted abroad to defect represented an opportunity to strike at the core of the island’s primary diplomatic tool, while embarrassing the Castro regime.

Cuba has been using its medical corps as the nation’s main source of revenue and soft power for many years. The country has one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita in the world and offers medical scholarships to hundreds of disadvantaged international students each year, and some have been from the United States. According to Cuban government figures, more than 440,000 of the island’s 11 million citizens are employed in the health sector.

Havana gets subsidized oil from Venezuela and money from several other countries in exchange for medical services. This year, according to the state-run newspaper Granma, the government expects to make $8.2 billion from its medical workers overseas. The vast majority, just under
6,000, are posted in Latin America and the Caribbean. A few thousand are in 32 African countries.

Medical professionals, like most Cubans, earn meager wages. Earlier this year, the government raised the salaries of medical workers. Doctors now earn about $60 per month, while nurses make nearly $40. Overseas postings allows these health care workers to earn significantly more. Doctors in Brazil, for example, are making about $1,200 per month.

The 256 Cuban medical professionals treating Ebola patients in West Africa are getting daily stipends of roughly $240 from the World Health Organization. José Luis Di Fabio, the head of the W.H.O. in Havana, said he was confident the doctors and nurses dispatched to Africa have gone on their own volition. “It was voluntary,” Mr. Di Fabio, an Uruguayan whose organization has overseen their deployment, said in an interview. “Some backtracked at the last minute and there was no problem.”

Some doctors who have defected say they felt the overseas tours had an implicit element of coercion and have complained that the government pockets the bulk of the money it gets for their services. But the State Department says in its latest report on human trafficking that reported coercion of Cuban medical personnel does “not appear to reflect a uniform government policy.” Even so, the Cuban government would be wise to compensate medical personnel more generously if their work overseas is to remain the island’s economic bedrock.

Last year, the Cuban government liberalized its travel policies, allowing most citizens, including dissidents, to leave the country freely. Doctors, who in the past faced stricter travel restrictions than ordinary Cubans, no longer do. Some 20,000 Cubans are allowed to immigrate to the United States yearly. In addition, those who manage to arrive here in rafts or through border crossing points are automatically authorized to stay.


The Cuban government has long regarded the medical defection program as a symbol of American duplicity. It undermines Cuba’s ability to respond to humanitarian crises and does nothing to make the government in Havana more open or democratic. As long as this incoherent policy is in place, establishing a healthier relationship between the two nations will be harder.

Many medical professionals, like a growing number of Cubans, will continue to want to move to the United States in search of new opportunities, and they have every right to do so. But inviting them to defect while on overseas tours is going too far.
Hillary the Warmonger
| November 18, 2014 | 8:28 pm | Analysis, International, National | Comments closed

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS      COUNTERPUNCH

Glenn Greenwald has revealed that Hillary Clinton is the presidential candidate of the banksters and warmongers.    Pam and Russ Martens note that Elizabeth Warren is the populist alternative.    I doubt that a politician who represents the people can acquire the campaign funds needed to run a campaign.  If Warren becomes a threat, the Establishment will frame her with bogus charges and move her aside.
Hillary as president would mean war with Russia.  With neocon nazis such as Robert Kagan and Max Boot running her war policy and with Hillary’s comparison of Russia’s president Putin to Adolf Hitler, war would be a certainty.   As Michel Chossudovsky and Noam Chomsky have written, the war would be nuclear.
If Hillary is elected president, the financial gangsters and profiteering war criminals would complete their takeover of the country.  It would be forever or until armageddon.
To understand what we would be getting with Hillary, recall the Clinton presidency. The Clinton presidency was transformative in ways not generally recognized.  Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party with “free trade” agreements, deregulated the financial system, launched Washington’s ongoing policy of “regime change” with illegal military attacks on Yugoslavia and Iraq, and his regime used deadly force without cause against American civilians and covered up the murders with fake investigations.  These were four big changes that set the country on its downward spiral into a militarized police state with massive income and wealth inequality.
One can understand why Republicans wanted the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it was Bill Clinton who signed it into law.  “Free trade” agreements are devices used by US corporations to offshore their production of goods and services sold in American markets.  By moving production abroad, labor cost savings increase corporate profits and share prices, bringing capital gains to shareholders and multi-million dollar performance bonuses to executives.  The rewards to capital are large, but the rewards come at the expense of US manufacturing workers and the tax base of cities and states.
When plants are closed and the work shipped overseas, middle class jobs disappear.   Industrial and manufacturing unions are eviscerated, destroying the labor unions that financed the Democrats’ election campaigns.  The countervailing power of labor against capital was lost, and Democrats had to turn to the same sources of funding as Republicans.  The result is a one party state.
The weakened tax base of cities and states has made it possible for Republicans to attack the public sector unions.  Today the Democratic Party no longer exists as a political party financed by the union dues of ordinary people.  Today both political parties represent the interests of the same powerful interest groups:  the financial sector, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, the extractive industries, and agribusiness.
Neither party represents voters. Thus, the people are loaded up with the costs of financial bailouts and wars, while the extractive industries and Monsanto destroy the environment and degrade the food supply.  Elections no longer deal with real issues such as the loss of constitutional protections and a government accountable to law. Instead the parties compete on issues such as homosexual marriage and federal funding of abortion.
Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was the initiating move followed by the removal of more constraints that allowed the financial system to transform itself into a gambling casino where bets are covered by the public and the Federal Reserve. The full consequences of this remain to be seen.
The Clinton regime’s attack on the Serbs was a war crime under international law, but it was the Yugoslavian president who tried to defend his country who was put on trial as a war criminal.  When the Clinton regime murdered Randy Weaver’s family at Ruby Ridge and 76 people at Waco, subjecting the few survivors to a show trial, the regime’s crimes against humanity went unpunished.  Thus did Clinton set the precedents for 14 years of Bush/Obama crimes against humanity in seven countries.  Millions of people have been killed, maimed, and displaced, and it is all acceptable.
It is easy enough for a government to stir up its population against foreigners as the successes of Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama demonstrate.  But the Clinton regime managed to stir up Americans against their fellows as well.  When the FBI gratuitously murdered Randy Weaver’s wife and young son, propagandistic denunciations of Randy Weaver took the place of accountability.  When the FBI attacked the Branch Davidians, a religious movement that split from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with tanks and poison gas, causing a fire that burned 76 people, mainly women and children, to death, the mass murder was justified by the Clinton regime with wild and unsubstantiated charges against the government’s murdered victims.
All efforts to bring accountability to the crimes were blocked.  These were the precedents for the executive branch’s successful drive to secure immunity from law.  This immunity has now spread to local police who routinely abuse and murder US citizens on their streets and in their homes.
Washington’s international lawlessness about which the Russian and Chinese governments increasingly complain originated with the Clinton regime.  Washington’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” originated in the Clinton regime, as did the goal of “regime change” in Iraq and Washington’s illegal bombings and embargoes that costs the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children, lost lives that Clinton’s Secretary of State said were justified.
The US government had done wicked things in the past.  For example, the Spanish-American war was a grab for empire, and Washington has always protected the interests of US corporations from Latin American reformers, but the Clinton regime globalized the criminality.  Regime change has become reckless bringing with it danger of nuclear war.  It is no longer Grenada and Honduras whose governments are overthrown.  Today it is Russia and China that are targeted.
Former parts of Russia herself–Georgia and Ukraine–have been turned into Washington’s vassal states. Washington-financed NGOs organize “student protests” in Hong Kong, hoping that the protests will spread into China and destabilize the government.  The recklessness of these interventions in the internal affairs of nuclear powers is unprecedented.
Hillary Clinton is a warmonger, and so will be the Republican candidate.  The hardening anti-Russian rhetoric issuing from Washington and its punk EU puppet states places the world on the road to extinction.  The arrogant neoconservatives, with their hubristic belief that the US is the “exceptional and indispensable” country, would regard a deescalation of rhetoric and sanctions as backing down.  The more the neocons and politicians such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham escalate the rhetoric, the closer we come to war.
As the US government now embraces pre-emptive arrest and detention of those who might someday commit a crime, the entire cadre of neocon warmongers should be arrested and indefinitely detained before they destroy humanity.
The Clinton years produced a spate of books documenting the numerous crimes and coverups–the Oklahoma City bombing, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the FBI crime lab scandal, Vincent Foster’s death, CIA involvement in drug running, the militarization of law enforcement, Kosovo, you name it.  Most of these books are written from a libertarian or conservative viewpoint as no one realized while it was happening the nature of the transformation of American governance.  Those who have forgotten and those too young ever to have known owe it to themselves to acquaint or re-acquaint themselves with the Clinton years.  Recently I wrote about Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton.  Another book with substantial documentation is James Bovard’s Feeling Your Pain. Congress and the media aided and abetted the extensive coverups, focusing instead on the relatively unimportant Whitewater real estate deals and Clinton’s sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton and his corrupt regime lied about many important things, but only his lie about his affair with Monica Lewinsky caused the House of Representatives to impeach him.  By ignoring numerous substantial grounds for impeachment and selecting instead an insubstantial reason, Congress and the media were complicit in the rise of an unaccountable executive branch. This lack of accountability has brought us tyranny at home and war abroad, and these two evils are enveloping us all.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is How America Was Lost.
Venezuela: Nicolas Maduro anuncia promulgacion de cinco nuevas leyes
| November 16, 2014 | 7:27 pm | International, Latin America | Comments closed

Glenn Greenwald Speaks – Ottawa – 10/25/2014
| November 11, 2014 | 9:37 pm | Analysis, International, National | Comments closed

Colombian Prisons and Prisoners Mirror Class Struggle
| November 11, 2014 | 8:29 pm | Analysis, International | Comments closed

by W. T. Whitney Jr.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/whitney111114.html

Prisoners in Colombia have recently gained new visibility.  Prisoner protest actions are one factor.  Another is discussion at the Havana peace talks of prisoners as victims of armed conflict.  November 2014 marks the two-year anniversary of talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government.

Beginning on October 20, hunger strikes and rejection of prison rules spread throughout 14 Colombian prisons.  Spokespersons for the National Prison Movement (Movimiento Nacional Carcelario — MNC), organizer of the demonstrations, denounced overcrowding, miserable healthcare, impediments to family visiting, poor food, filthy sanitary conditions, and contaminated and scarce water.  They accused prison authorities of torture, reprisals, and corruption.  Guards at Cómbita prison bent on intimidation placed political prisoners in isolation.  Tramacúa prison in Valledupar was cited as the “the number one center for torture and systematic violation of human rights.”  Tramacúa, some say, is the “Guantanamo of Colombia.”

Earlier the MNC called for a declaration of humanitarian emergency; passage of Law 082 which reduces sentences by 20 percent; eight-hour family visits; “real, definitive, and immediate” solutions for the prison healthcare crisis; and no more extraditions (a Colombia-U.S. agreement provides for extradition every month of 15-20 Colombians — most facing drug trafficking charges — in return for a U.S. subsidy).

The MNC had also organized hunger strikes in multiple prisons in April 2013, too.  The MNC’s demands at that time included prevention and education instead of incarceration, reduced or alternative sentencing, and recognition of special status for political prisoners.

Humanitarian Crisis

Recently Bogota’s El Tiempo newspaper published a report, with photos, documenting Colombia’s prison scandal.  One learns that, as of June 2014, Colombia’s 138 prisons originally built to accommodate 76,553 prisoners were housing 117,018 prisoners — or 40,465 over the limit.  The medium security prison in Riohacha, in Colombia’s northeast, has 538 prisoners occupying space for 100 prisoners.

According to the report, 34.5 percent of prisoners, some imprisoned for six years, have yet to be convicted or sentenced.  Mentally ill prisoners are part of the general prison population, 108 children live with their imprisoned mothers, and employment is available for only 1,441 prisoners.  Re-socialization and educational activities are impossible because 117,018 prisoners must share 544 prison common areas.

Expressions of FARC solidarity with the protests added to public awareness.  In an October 28 statement, the FARC peace delegation “raise[d] its voice in solidarity with the prisoners and political prisoners involved with a hunger strike and peaceful disobedience.”  The FARC backed MNC demands and named five prisoners who died without adequate medical care.  The statement condemned “death and destruction” following a recent fire in the Barranquilla prison and denounced violent repression of peaceful demonstrators at the Cómbita prison.  The FARC urged “solutions for the structural problems and the deep crisis of the decadent and crumbling national prison system converted [now] into a scene of torture, crimes, and flagrant violations of human rights.”

Victims of Class Conflict

The FARC negotiating team provides reports on its “Minimum Proposals” on various agenda items, the most recent being on the question of victims.  Political prisoners — both captured insurgents and imprisoned non-combatant dissenters, the FARC claims — are “victims of the conflict.”  FARC negotiators seek establishment of a “special study commission regarding the situation of political prisoners.”  The commission “would identify victims of the state’s justice system subjected to judicial sham for political reasons.”

Successive Colombian governments have lumped armed resistance groups and peaceful dissenters, jailed insurgents and non-violent prisoners of conscience, all together as enemies of the state.  By doing so they made the main schism within Colombian society readily apparent.

Colombian governments have long primarily served big landowners, as well as business and financial elites.  Governments have sought to protect their use and control of land.  Those attempting to speak and act on behalf of Colombia’s majority population are on the other side.  Thus the context within which the fate of prisoners is shaped is one of conflict between social classes.

The list of victims of that conflict is long: hundreds of striking banana workers murdered in Ciénaga in 1928; thousands of land-hungry small farmers killed prior to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s assassination in 1948; 200,000 rebellious peasants killed over the following ten years; and tens of thousands of political dissidents, real and imagined, killed after 1964 when the FARC came into existence.  FARC insurgents originally were small farmers defending their right to land.  Millions of Colombians displaced from land are victims too.

In one set of their “Minimum Proposals,” FARC peace negotiators name the parties responsible for creating victims.  That the U.S. government is one of them further confirms the class-based nature of victimization of prisoners.  That government’s hostility to working or poor people’s mobilizations is well known.

The FARC negotiating team recognizes “the central responsibility of the United States in the origin, persistence, and dynamics of expansion, escalation, and intensification of the conflict, in different phases and facets.  The result has been to generate processes of systemic victimization.”

A Prisoner’s Video Testimony

In recent weeks, delegations of Colombian victims traveled to Havana to testify before the peace negotiators.  The fourth such delegation consisting of 11 former prisoners did so on November 3-5.  An empty chair at their hearing would have been occupied by jailed FARC guerrilla Tulio Murilla had Colombian authorities not refused permission for him to travel and testify.

A video rendition of Murillo’s testimony became a dramatic highlight.  As reported on Pacocol.org, the Web site of the Colombian Communist Party, Murillo gave “voice to prisoners demanding that the humanitarian crisis in Colombian prisons be overcome.”  They are in prison, he charged, because of vague allegations of “rebellion” or “terrorism” and because criminal proceedings yield “judicial false positives.”

The Colombian army captured Tulio Murillo during combat operations.  Torture in prison caused wounds that led to his leg being amputated.  The video rendition of his testimony, recorded in the Cúcutaprison amidst a crowd of prisoners, shows images of prison life.

Academician Francisco Javier Tolosa, himself a former political prisoner, points out that: “In the midst of the acute prison and judicial crisis the country is going though . . . we, eleven thousand political prisoners, do exist in Colombia.”  Furthermore, “we require recognition as such, and also as victims of this social, armed conflict.  We must have an actual voice in the building of a stable, long-lasting, and democratic peace.”1

Prisoner victims of class struggle got an internationalist boost recently from a letter sent by poet Marcos Ana from Spain.  A steadfast anti-fascist, Ana spent 23 years in prisons of the Franco dictatorship and was twice condemned to death.

Ana wrote: “Solidarity has no borders or distances and all of us know of your existence and we are proud of your struggle and your sacrifices. . . .  We shall pull you out of the shadows and return the light of day to you and the freedom they snatched from you.  Let peoples by the hundreds come calling and looking for you with their red lamps advancing from the five parts of the world!”

David Ravelo, a leader of Colombia’s Communist Party, is serving an 18-year jail term.  Ana sent him a book of his poems.  Inside, Ravelo found a message inscribed: “They wounded us, struck us down, even killed us, but they never turned us.”

 

Note:

1  The quote is from Tolosa’s new book titled Colombia on the Road to Liberty and Peace, Chapter Two.

W. T. Whitney Jr., a retired pediatrician, is a Cuba solidarity activist and member of Veterans for Peace.  He writes on Latin American issues.

The New York Times Admits US Interference in Cuba
| November 10, 2014 | 9:38 pm | Analysis, Cuban Five, International, Latin America, National | Comments closed
Washington, Nov 10 (Prensa Latina) For the fifth time in less than a month, The New York Times published a long editorial on Cuba, in which it listed the countless destabilizing efforts by the United States to overthrow the Cuban government.

In an article entitled “In Cuba, Misadventures in Regime Change”, the Editorial Committee of the influential New York-based newspaper on Sunday reviewed Washington’s countless plans against national stability in Cuba since the approval of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 to date.

The New York Times notes that these subversive plans only served as the foundation for the US government to spend 264 million dollars over the past 18 years, in an effort to instigate alleged democratic reforms on the island.

The newspaper admits that far from having achieved their goals, the initiatives were counterproductive, as those funds “have been a magnet for charlatans, swindlers and good intentions gone awry”.

“The stealthy programs have increased hostility between the two nations, provided Cuba with a trove of propaganda fodder and stymied opportunities to cooperate in areas of mutual interest,” adds the newspaper.

It accuses the US Agency for International Development (USAID) of carrying out cloak-and-dagger missions to implement illegal projects in Cuba.

The editorial notes how “spending on initiatives to oust the government surged from a few million a year to more than $20 million in 2004”, during the first years of the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009), when “most contracts were awarded, without much oversight, to newly formed Cuban-American groups”.

The New York Times explains how one of those groups invested the money “on a legally questionable global lobbying effort to persuade foreign governments to support Americaâ�Ös unpopular embargo” (blockade), which the United State has imposed on Cuba since 1962.

Another group sent loads of comic books to the American diplomatic mission in Havana, bewildering officials there, says the newspaper, adding that “the money was also used to buy food and clothes, but there was no way to track how much reached relatives of political prisoners, the intended recipients”.

According to a report published in November 2006 by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), “one contractor used the pro-democracy money to buy ‘a gas chain saw, computer gaming equipment and software (including Nintendo Game Boys and Sony PlayStations), a mountain bike, leather coats, cashmere sweaters, crab meat and Godiva chocolates,’ purchases he was unable to justify to auditors.”

The New York Times adds that despite the results of the GAO probe in 2006, Congress appropriated $45 million for the programs, a record amount, in 2008.

“In December 2009, Cuban authorities arrested an American subcontractor who traveled to the island five times on USAID business, posing as a tourist to smuggle communication equipment,” notes the newspaper.

After that, “senior officials at USAID and the State Department were startled by the risks being taken, and some argued that the covert programs were counterproductive and should be stopped. But Cuban-American lawmakers fought vigorously to keep them alive”, says the editorial.

“After Mr. Gross’s arrest, the aid agency stopped sending American contractors into Cuba, but it allowed its contractors to recruit Latin Americans for secret missions that were sometimes detected by the Cuban intelligence services.”

The newspaper recalls that “an investigation by The Associated Press published in April revealed a controversial program carried out during the Obama administration. Between 2009 and 2012, Creative Associates International, a Washington firm, built a rudimentary text messaging system similar to Twitter, known as ZunZuneo, Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet.”

“A second AP report revealed in August that USAID had been sending young Latin Americans to Cuba to identify ‘potential social change actors,’ under the pretext of organizing gatherings like an HIV prevention workshop,” points out The New York Times.

The editorial notes that instead of stealth efforts to overthrow the government, American policy makers should find ways through coordination with the Cuban government.

“Washington should recognize that the most it can hope to accomplish is to positively influence Cuba’s evolution toward a more open society. That is more likely to come about through stronger diplomatic relations than subterfuge,” concludes The New York Times.

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Modificado el ( lunes, 10 de noviembre de 2014 )
The election results and U.S. policy toward Cuba
| November 10, 2014 | 9:33 pm | Analysis, International, National | Comments closed

PROGRESO WEEKLY

Jesús Arboleya •
ProgresoWeekly

HAVANA — In the days prior to the midterm elections, a media campaign was launched, urging President Obama to change U.S. policy toward Cuba.

It is obvious that the promoters of that campaign could foresee that the results of the election would translate into a Republican victory, as indeed they did. So, the question arises:

How could the Republican victory influence this dynamics?

As I see it, very little. Before the Democrats lost control of the Senate, everybody knew that the President could not count on Congress to modify U.S. policy toward Cuba, so they were asking Obama to make use of his executive powers, something that they will continue to do in the immediate future.

In fact, as Álvaro Fernández and others have commented, the issue could become simpler for Obama, because of the weakening of pressures within his own party, given the replacement of Democrat Bob Menéndez as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Now, Obama’s main enemies will be the Republicans, but that will be a constant in all of his government’s actions. Therefore, the topic of Cuba is inserted into the political polarization that has characterized Obama’s administration and everything will depend on his willingness to act in this scenario.

For a long time now, Obama seems to have forgotten his intention to become “the president of all Americans” and seek some accommodation with the Republicans. Now, his options are more drastic: either he decides to act against his adversaries — with the political implications that this carries — or subordinates himself to their designs and becomes a “dead weight” in the nation’s politics, as some analysts predict.

The President’s level of unpopularity is seen as responsible for the electoral disaster suffered by the Democrats. It is true that this happens quite regularly in second presidential terms, but Obama’s case has other connotations because of the social impact his election originally made.

It remains to be seen if, aware of his historical responsibility, Obama is willing to revert the situation and wage battle, at least on the issues that define his “legacy” — not many of them, for sure.

Within this logic, the Cuban issue acquires some relevance. I say “some” because, compared with the enormous domestic and foreign problems facing U.S. policy, the topic of Cuba is of lesser importance.

However, it has a symbolic value that exceeds its real connotations and could help the President improve an image that has been seriously impaired by the lack of determination he has shown in many instances.

In fact, a policy change wouldn’t be a difficult decision, because

even Republican sectors would support it;
a new policy would be welcomed by the international community, especially by Latin America, where the Summit of the Americas will be held next April with Cuba in attendance; and
a new policy would have a special impact on the state of Florida, with a view to the 2016 elections, something that constitutes a priority for the Democratic Party.

According to exit polls on Nov. 4, a majority of Cuban-Americans supported the Democratic candidate for governor, Charlie Crist (50-46 percent), which confirms a trend that was expressed in the 2010 presidential election.

Most analysts attribute that support to the differences between the contenders regarding the Cuban issue. In a comparison with the 2010 results, Republican Gov. Rick Scott lost 20 percentage points among Cuban-Americans and lost in all counties with a high concentration of Cuban-Americans. This could also be an indicator favoring the Democrats in the 2016 elections.

Although a Crist victory could have helped propel a change in policy toward Cuba, his defeat does not substantially alter the equation prior to the elections. The same happens in the case of Rep. Joe García (D-Fla.)

In the end, the opponents are the same as before, and it is doubtful that their influence will increase substantially thanks to the Republican victory.

Even more importantly, the Republican triumph does not alter the objective factors that justify the criticism aimed at the current U.S. policy toward Cuba.

It is a tired policy, incapable of achieving the objectives for which it was designed, counter to the United States’ own interests, and rejected by a majority of U.S. public opinion, including Cuban-Americans.

Nor does it alter the fact that Obama is the president who has been in the best position to change it, and probably the president who will benefit most by so doing.

To quote the title of an old Cuban radio series: “Fate is in his hands.”

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