Cuba trade embargo and the politics of deception

Posted on Wednesday, 05.14.14



Cuba trade embargo and the politics of deception

BY FRANK CALZON



The news media has reported on a campaign of posters on the Washington

Metro urging President Barack Obama to end the U.S. embargo against

Havana. The group behind the campaign, with the suggestive name of

CubaNow, has made a sudden appearance, and the only well-known name

among the few that the campaign mentions is that of Yoani Sánchez, the

courageous Cuban blogger who is persecuted by the regime and who has

received many international awards for her work. At the time that

CubaNow launched its campaign, Yoani Sánchez was in the United States,

and it was learned that she had not approved the use of her name and

photograph, prominently displayed next to a photo of President Obama, in

the poster campaign.



Sadly, the photo of Yoani Sánchez, copied from the Internet, has been

used without her permission on more than one occasion, and some have

published collections of her blogs despite her copyright over her work.



But to use Yoani Sánchez, without her permission, for a campaign that

presents a distorted vision of Cuba's reality, and which asks President

Obama to unilaterally lift sanctions against the Castro dynasty, is not

the only worrisome part of the CubaNow initiative.



The public face of CubaNow, Ric Herrero, refuses to make public the cost

of the publicity campaign, and more troubling, the source of the funds

that make it possible.



But Americans see a lack of transparency as an unforgivable failure in

politics. Americans demand and expect total transparency when it comes

to politics. For example, when a citizen makes a contribution to an

electoral campaign, the amount of the donation, the name of the donor,

his or her profession and his or her address become part of the public

record.



And if transparency in domestic politics is important, why not with a

campaign to influence U.S. policy toward a government that just three

week ago was once again identified by the Department of State as a

sponsor of international terrorism? The other countries on the list are

Syria, Sudan, and Iran. As early as June 1976, Fidel Castro, made his

position clear: "If the Cuban state were to carry out terrorist acts and

respond with terrorism to the terrorists, we believe we would be

efficient terrorists. Let no one think otherwise. If we decide to carry

out terrorism, it is a sure thing we would be efficient. But the mere

fact that the Cuban revolution has never implemented terrorism does not

mean that we renounce it. We would like to issue this warning."



The lack of information from the CubaNow campaign is troubling. The

image of young Cuban Americans, with sweet and adorable smiles, does not

answer the questions being asked. Herrero said that it is a group made

up of a new generation of Cuban-Americans, but did not say how many

members it has and said nothing about its history, how it was founded or

how it was organized.



We do know that he was the deputy director of the controversial Cuba

Study Group, headed by businessman Carlos Saladrigas. And that Herrero

was treasurer of the New Cuban-American Majority political action

committee, also founded by Saladrigas.



CubaNow says it favors a discussion on Cuba and U.S. Cuba policy and

there's broad consensus on that among all Cubans — although those who

live on the island have no possibility of participating on any debate on

the issue, and CubaNow has not included in its campaign one single

reference to repression or government abuse.



Anyone interested in learning about Cuba today has only to read the

posts in Generación Y, the blog of Yoani Sánchez. There, they will find

the reality of the Caribbean nation: the lack of freedom, the abuses

against dissidents, the misery, the poverty and the entrenchment of the

military gerontocracy in power.



Yoani has written: "At a time when newspapers are showing that

governments can not get away with secrecy, the conformist role of the

official Cuban news media is sad, to say the least."



On the national census, she wrote that "counting us is not the same as

counting on us." And she wrote about seeing on television "the faces of

those in this country who have turned a difference of opinion into a

crime and civic protest into treason."



On the death of Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, in a post titled "Rest in

Freedom, Oswaldo Payá," she wrote, "Payá suffered for many years the

constant vigilance on his house, the arbitrary arrests, the 'acts of

repudiation' by government-organized mobs and the threats. He never

missed a chance to denounce the condition of some jailed dissident, or

the unjust prison sentence of others."



CubaNow, the real Cuba of today that Yoani writes about, is the Cuba of

Oswaldo Payá.



If CubaNow were to reflect the issues that appear week after week in the

Generación Y blog of Yoani Sánchez, the images that would appear on its

posters would be different.



Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, based

in Washington, D.C.



Source: "Cuba trade embargo and the politics of deception - From Our

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