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
Inbox - MiamiHerald.com" -
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/14/4114774/cuba-trade-embargo-and-the-politics.html#storylink=misearch