Cuba and U.S. investment
Campa, Román de la
Relations between the United States and Cuba stumble from obsession to obsession. A few years ago, the reigning obsession was the flow of illegal Cuban immigrants to American shores—a flow now...
...The Helms-Burton Act, signed into law by the president during his re-election campaign, aims to block international investment in Cuba...
...The law clearly runs counter to the leitmotif of trade liberalization preached so exuberantly by America nearly everywhere else in the world...
...As in Chile, nonmilitary officials close to the current regime might preside over the transitional government...
...Still more speculatively, the idea of protecting the position of the Cuban military could also serve to finesse the most ticklish political aspect of the change—by permitting Castro to assume a Pinochet-like role in the transition period...
...It has racial divisions, but it is free of ethnic strife...
...Sanchez Santa Cruz endorsed 24 • DISSENT Politics Abroad the idea of allowing investments to flow more freely into Cuba, but questioned the requirement of dispensing with the present government prior to any type of transition regime...
...side, hard-liners in the Cuban-American community push Washington for more severe measures against the regime, even at terrible cost to their compatriots in Cuba...
...It is, after all, past the initial shock of economic dependency stemming from the demise of the Soviet Union...
...efforts at the total isolation of Cuba, the plan represents a radical departure...
...At the same time, many .xiles defy Washington's ban against travel to Cuba—not only for personal reasons, but also to invest in small ventures...
...This feature could be understood as an attempt to drive a wedge between the military and the rest of the government...
...A third, less transparent response came from Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, director of the Cuban Commission of Human Rights in Havana—a figure who amounts to an officially tolerated thorn in the regime's side...
...Castro accused the United States of trying to buy Cuba...
...Internal opposition organizations such as the Cuban Council and various groups of independent journalists are seeking reforms, though they have often been met with repression...
...Will the regime succeed in transforming itself into a Caribbean Singapore or will the shock of foreign capital undermine longstanding political arrangements...
...Cuba is more prepared for foreign capital investments than many former socialist societies of Eastern Europe and Asia...
...Castro's response to grant permission only to CNN is also a sign of movement...
...The document itself abounds—no doubt intentionally— with fascinating and contradictory implications...
...Some strains are already evident...
...It lacks heavy industry in need of overhaul...
...Yet it represents the most ambitious public plan produced by any Amer-:an administration to deal with Castro's regime...
...It is worth noting the widespread view that Castro's regime will change much sooner by facing the full onslaught of global exposure—that is, without the U.S...
...Even so, coming after years of U.S...
...If capital is indeed to be free to roam the world, why not allow it access to Cuba...
...foreign policy...
...Immediately after Clinton's second inauguration, the administration launched a new policy trial balloon—a report titled "Support for Democratic Transition in Cuba...
...3) The statement also offers some tantalizing hints regarding the United States's conflict with Canada and the European Community over Helms-Burton...
...And its health system remains above the norm, though it has been rapidly declining since 1989...
...Clinton's move to allow U.S...
...Nothing like this is spelled out, of course, but neither is it excluded...
...It goes to great lengths to appear sensitive to sovereignty questions that have historically divided Cuba and the United States—calling, for example, for negotiations on a possible return of the Guantanamo base...
...Sanchez Santa Cruz, head of the Human Rights Commission in Cuba, is willing to make that bet, and so are many other Cubans...
...This year's obsession is the Helms-Burton Act, and more generally the single-minded U.S...
...But amid all these public gambits, a potentially more important development has passed unnoticed...
...On the U.S...
...It also represents an acknowledgment that neoliberal reforms have worked quite well in concert with military authoritarianism—as in Peru, Chile, and Argentina...
...news enterprises to set up agencies in Cuba sidesteps some of the Helms-Burton prohibitions...
...Part of the eight billion dollar fund offer is meant to address the problem of confiscated property—either through direct payments or "transferable privatization vouchers"— thus resolving doubts that have clouded the investment climate for Canadian and European interests...
...It does this by asserting future rights over any property confiscated by Fidel Castro's regime from corporations and individuals now located in the United States...
...Some of the immediate reactions have been predictable...
...ft offers an inducement of eight billion dollars in investment funds—if Cuba installs a marketoriented transition government and holds multiparty elections within eighteen months...
...As one would expect, such a response has made Sanchez Santa Cruz persona non grata in Miami—even though he has served more than nine years in Castro's prisons and has recently characterized Cuba's government as both totalitarian and inept...
...On the other hand, the document abounds with stunningly naive—and patently propagandistic— statements about Latin America...
...Though the report was produced by the Agency for International Development, its preface carries the signature of President Clinton himself...
...Cuba continues to maintain tight internal control, banking on its ability to absorb the social repercussions of the foreign investments that it is now so actively seeking...
...embargo...
...The list of aggrieved parties is potentially endless—thereby casting serious doubts over the current climate of investment in the island...
...This country's latter-day anticommunist crusade is not only pushing Cuba to the wall, but also snarling U.S...
...SUMMER • 1997 • 25...
...Its workforce is more highly educated than most in Latin America...
...The document presents a scheme for a "transition gov:,rnment" in Cuba, following the model of other former socialist countries...
...All in all, "Support for a Democratic Transition in Cuba" offers some beguiling ironies in relation to other aspects of U.S...
...2) The document also bows to Cuba's deep nationalist spirit, which Castro has nurtured so assiduously over the past thirty-eight years...
...One senses that virtually anything is possible, provided Castro proves willing to define a new role for himself...
...News media in the United States have largely ignored the document...
...Cuban exiles, on the other hand, have mostly hailed the plan...
...relations with its closest allies...
...Finally, Cuba is accustomed to modern ways...
...Some recent accommodations between the regimes seem to reflect this same spirit...
...One suspects, however, that the plan is designed to leave room for a period of transition in which the most severe aspects of Helms-Burton are cautiously but continuously deferred— thereby providing Euro-Canadian investors room to operate while they pressure Castro for greater reforms...
...Consider a few: (1) It states that the Cuban military apparatus could remain intact during the transition period and beyond...
...Perhaps the most obvious declares that globalization will bring "Cuba into the ranks of prosperous democratic nations, where it will proudly join the other thirty-four countries in the hemisphere...
...Meanwhile, Castro's regime remains caught in its own internal contradictions...
...pursuit of its economic embargo...
...Neither Fidel nor Ratil Castro, it appears, would be acceptable as part of a transition government...
...A few years ago, the reigning obsession was the flow of illegal Cuban immigrants to American shores—a flow now stanched by tacit agreement between the two countries...
...In light of all this, one would imagine that the World Bank and the Clinton administration would come to the same conclusion drawn by investors in Europe and Canada—that Cuba provides the ultimate challenge for free trade...
Vol. 44 • July 1997 • No. 3
