Tag Archives: US-Cuba Relations

Robert Muse: “US PRESIDENTIAL ACTION ON CUBA: THE NEW NORMALIZATION?”

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Arch Ritter

Robert Muse, a Washington-based lawyer who has analyzed and written on US-Cuba relations for many years, has just published an article explaining how President Obama could use his executive authority to move towards normalization with Cuba.

The full article is published in “Americas Quarterly” here: http://www.americasquarterly.org/charticles/the-new-normalization/.

It would be truly gratifying if staff in the White House read and acted upon the Muse “road-map” towards normalization, finally ending the 50 year policy failure on the part of the United States towards Cuba. Unfortunately this looks increasingly improbable in the last two years of the Obama Presidency, in view of the negative position stated by a White House spokesman November 20, 2014.

(“Unless Cuba is able to demonstrate that it is taking significant steps, I don’t know how we could move forward in our relationship,” said Antony J. Blinken, deputy national security adviser, during a hearing in the US Senate, according to the Havana Times. )

Robert Muse is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. with substantial experience in U.S. laws relating to Cuba. Among his clients are major corporations engaged in international trade and foreign direct investment. He has testified on legal issues involving Cuba before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate; the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Standing Committee of the Canadian House of Commons; the Trade Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and the External Economic Relations Committee of the European Parliament (Brussels) as well as the Parliament’s inter-party group on Cuba (Strasbourg). Mr. Muse has delivered papers on the Helms-Burton Act and other U.S. embargo laws pertaining to Cuba at conferences sponsored by The Economist and various legal and international relations foundations based in London, Miami, Washington, D.C., Brussels, Toronto, Ottawa, Havana, Madrid, Barcelona, and Amsterdam.

Posted in Blog | Tagged US-Cuba Relations | 2 Comments

A CUBAN BRAIN DRAIN, COURTESY OF THE U.S.

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Arch Ritter

New York Times, THE EDITORIAL BOARD; NOV. 16, 2014

Leer en español (Read in Spanish) »

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 46,000, 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 allow 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.”

Cuban Doctors Arriving in Sierra Leone

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.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Emigration, Health, Medical System, US-Cuba Relations | Leave a comment

Lopez-Levy and Piccone: UNITED STATES, CUBA and EBOLA

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Arch Ritter

Fighting Ebola: A new case for U.S. engagement with Cuba

Original Article: http://tbo.com/list/news-opinion-commentary/fighting-ebola-a-new-case-for-us-engagement-with-cuba-20141028/

BY ARTURO LOPEZ-LEVY
Special To The Tampa Tribune; October 28, 2014

The simple fact that Cuba and the United States are in the same boat fighting the Ebola epidemics in Western Africa demonstrates how the level of conflict between the two countries is irrational. While Havana and Washington have considerable differences — and no parallel efforts against a common enemy as Ebola can bridge them — it is evident that narratives of suspicion and intransigence prevent such joint efforts for the benefit of both countries and the world in general.

But, words matter. The recent statements by John Kerry and Samantha Power praising what Cuba is doing to fight Ebola in Africa on behalf of the U.S. State Department — as well as the declarations by Fidel and Raul Castro that Cuba would welcome collaborative efforts on Ebola with the United States — show that a revision of the bilateral relations is long overdue.

President Obama now needs to apply the dictum of his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and not waste the opportunity presented by the Ebola crisis. Cuba and the United States should advance long-term cooperation in international health efforts under the auspices of the WHO.

Political leadership in the White House and the Palace of Revolution would transform a fight against a common threat into joint cooperation for the advancement of human rights (the right to health is a human right) all over the developing world and the national interests of the two neighbors.

Political conditions are ripe for such turn. Americans strongly support aggressive actions against Ebola and would applaud a president who put lives and medical cooperation with Cuba above ideology and resentment.

As more information comes out about Cuba’s international health effort, it is becoming clearer how unreasonable it is to assume that all Cuban presence in the developing world is damaging to U.S. national interests. The more than 40 000 Cuban doctors and health personnel working in 80 countries are playing a key role to improve human development and protect the world from the spread of Ebola and other contagious diseases.

During the Bush administration and even under Obama, the United States spent lavishly to support groups in Miami that focus on undermining Cuba’s international health presence in Africa and Latin America.

The U.S Cuban Medical Professional Parole Immigration Program (CMPP) is reminiscent of the Cold War. The program encourages Cuban doctors to abandon their contracts in third countries and immigrate to the United States.

Washington’s ideology-driven hostility toward Cuba’s international health efforts has further divided the United States from other democratic countries. The trouble for Miami die-hard Cold Warriors is that examples of how Cuba shares the burden and merits of international health efforts with U.S. allies are expanding. Cuba is cooperating with several institutions of the European Union, Brazil, Canada and Norway in projects of medical education on the island, and in Haiti and other countries. The programs might even grow as result of the current negotiation in Brussels between the EU and Cuba for a comprehensive agreement on cooperation and political dialogue.

The good news is that two former U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have talked positively about Cuba’s health achievements and international programs. President Carter and former first lady Rosalyn even visited Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine in 2002. In a meeting with then Cuban minister of health Carlos Dotres, Mrs. Carter mentioned that their presidential center’s Global Health program would like to collaborate with Cuba’s international medical educational assistance. There is no moral, political or national security explanation for why such humanitarian endeavors are not happening already.

As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama was one of the loudest critics of looking at Cuba through the glasses of the Cold War. As a president, it isn’t enough for him just to retune the same policy of embargo implemented by his predecessors. He must adjust the official U.S. narrative about post-Fidel Cuba: It is not a threat to the United States but a country in transition to a mixed economy, and a positive force for global health.

Arturo Lopez-Levy is a visiting lecturer at Mills College in California and a PhD candidate at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Ebola Could Bring U.S. and Cuba Together

By: Ted Piccone, Brookings Institution

On October 28, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for the 23rd year in a row to condemn the United States’ tough embargo on Cuba as a unilateral interference in free trade. Coincidentally, the UN system is tackling the devastating spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa and urging states to contribute medical and financial resources to stem the outbreak.

Ironically, Cuba and the United States have led the world in responding to the call for help, rushing hundreds of medical workers, military personnel, equipment, and other resources to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea to treat Ebola’s victims and prevent the epidemic from spreading. Could this be the moment for both countries to set aside their differences and join forces for the greater good?

The answer is a qualified yes. The onerous U.S. embargo poses no obstacles to such cooperation, and in any event, bilateral assistance for humanitarian reasons, including food and medicine, is a well-established exception to the rule. So there is no legal reason why U.S. personnel could not work alongside Cuban doctors and nurses in a third country to provide humanitarian aid to the stricken.

Moreover, there are precedents for this kind of cooperation. In 2010, in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti, American and Cuban personnel worked together to provide emergency care, including the provision of U.S. medical supplies to field hospitals staffed by Cuban doctors.

Cooperation was so positively received that the two sides launched high-level discussions about a joint project to build a new hospital in rural Haiti to be staffed in part by Cuban medical personnel.

Yet, as in so many other instances, cooperation between Havana and Washington broke down. This time, the dispute concerned a Bush-era program allowing Cuban doctors and other health personnel easy immigration into the United States. Cuba insisted that the program be dropped.

Already, nearly 1,600 Cuban health workers have taken advantage of the enticement, which undermines Cuba’s well-regarded health-care system, a pride of the revolution.

Proponents of the expedited visa program, on the other hand, argue that these medical workers are forced to work for Cuba’s public health service under the island’s restrictive labor laws. Given their specialized medical training, they also have a much harder time than other Cubans gaining permission to leave the island, even under the more relaxed travel policies that Cuba adopted in 2012.

U.S. President Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to show the world that the United States can rise above old hostilities for the sake of saving lives. He can immediately use his executive authority to suspend the discretionary parole program for any Cuban medical worker who is deployed to West Africa in response to the Ebola outbreak, and thereby stem Cuba’s professional brain drain.

Cuba has sent more than 50,000 medical personnel to 66 countries (more than those deployed by the G7 combined), and is now the biggest single provider of health-care workers to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. For their part, the Cubans could address concerns about the nature of their highly touted medical missionary work by giving participants in their medical brigades the option of serving abroad as volunteers, not conscripts, at no cost to their careers if they say no, and with higher pay if they say yes.

The timing for such a move is ripe. Since Obama eased the embargo in his first term by allowing more Cuban Americans to visit and send remittances to their relatives, and facilitating other categories of travel to the island, people on both sides of the Florida Straits are reconnecting in myriad ways, slowly rebuilding the bridge that has long divided the two countries.

Both sides have begun cooperating in modest but pragmatic ways, in such areas as counter-narcotics, aviation security, marine environmental affairs, and migration. This would be one additional step on the path toward the reconciliation that a majority of Americans, including Cuban Americans in Florida, want and deserve.

The next steps, however, will be even more important. After the November elections, President Obama should signal his willingness to improve relations with Cuba by ending more travel and remittances restrictions, expanding support to Cuba’s emerging private sector, and engaging in high-level talks to remove Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Action on key cases involving citizens held in prison in both countries should be on the agenda as well, but not as a precondition for talks. And, assuming cooperation in West Africa goes well, President Obama should broaden the scope and timeline of the suspension of the medical parole program.

Now is the time to take these steps, before President Obama travels to the Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. There, he and Cuban President Raúl Castro should finally talk face-to-face, without preconditions, and set a path toward reconciliation through dialogue. It would be a great legacy for both presidents as they depart office in just a few years.

This piece was originally published by The Mark.

Posted in Blog | Tagged EBOLA, Health, International Relations, Medical System, US-Cuba Relations | Leave a comment

SECRET TALKS AND BACK CHANNELS PERVADED U.S. RELATIONSHIP WITH CUBA, An Interview With Authors PETER KORNBLUH and WILLIAM LEOGRANDE

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Arch Ritter

October 01, 2014

For five decades, the official U.S. policy on Cuba was one of silence. But the real U.S. relationship with Havana involved secret negotiations that started with President Kennedy in 1963, even after his embargo against the island nation, say the authors of the new book Back Channel to Cuba. In fact, nearly every U.S. administration for the past 50 years has engaged in some sort of dialogue with the Cuban government, they say.

Co-authors Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive and William LeoGrande of American University outline these relationships based on recently declassified, or otherwise obtained, documents dating back to the Kennedy administration.

The documents reveal a series of secret meetings that took place in hotels, airport lounges and restaurants from New York to Paris to Guadalajara and involved intermediaries like the chairman of Coca-Cola, who served as President Jimmy Carter’s representative, to Carter himself.

sat down with Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep ahead of the book’s release to discuss their findings.

Interview Highlights

On why the talks were secret

Kornbluh: [Officials] were worried that either the Soviets would be spying on their telephone conversations or the U.S. NSA would be spying on their conversations, so they worked out a way to communicate with each other without anybody else knowing. … This is a theme that runs through the entire history that we’ve recorded. Cuba issues are so sensitive that when high-level policymakers wanted to have a dialogue, they wanted to keep it secret from other parts of the bureaucracy that might object.

On Henry Kissinger’s secret negotiations and contingency plan

Kornbluh: Henry Kissinger really was the secretary of state who secretly, I think, really pushed hard to create a window of opportunity for normalizing relations with Cuba. … He told his emissaries that he was using the same kind of modus operandi to approach the Cubans that he had used with Chairman Lai in China. And, for a period of 18 months, there was a series of secret meetings, culminating in an actual negotiation session, a three-hour session in room 727 of the Pierre Hotel in New York.

Eventually, the political sensitivities about Cuba came back to haunt this effort. The Cubans had sent 36,000 troops into Angola, and for Kissinger that made things not only politically untenable, but for his strategic view of the world, he could not believe that this small country would disrupt the superpower kind of equilibrium as he was trying to play it. He was so angry; he actually ordered a set of contingency plans to attack Cuba if Cuba expanded its presence in Africa.

On the use of intermediaries and informal channels

LeoGrande: Peggy Dulany, David Rockefeller’s daughter, carried a message from Fidel Castro to George Shultz during the Reagan administration, in which Fidel said he was willing to be constructive in trying to help settle the conflict in southern Africa. … And we actually have a Cuban document in which Fidel is talking to the president of Angola and explaining why he used Peggy Dulany, as opposed to just going through normal diplomatic channels. And he says to the president of Angola, “You know, when you send a message through the [diplomats] it takes months before you hear anything back, and sometimes you never hear anything at all.”

Posted in Blog | Tagged US-Cuba Relations | Leave a comment

WHAT SHOULD CANADA DO ABOUT CUBA’S PARTICIPATION IN THE AMERICAS SUMMIT?

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Arch Ritter

By Stephen Baranyi, Professor, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa, and Chair, Latin America and Caribbean Study Group of the Canadian International Council’s National Capital Branch.

See the original at: http://cips.uottawa.ca/what-should-canada-do-about-cubas-participation-in-the-americas-summit/#sthash.RUA0hXpt.dpuf This commentary reflects the public remarks and off-the-record

discussion with officials at the forum on Cuba, the 2015 Americas Summit, and Beyond: Obstacles and Opportunities, which was co-sponsored by CIPS on September 4, 2014.

Most Latin American and Caribbean states have indicated they will not attend the Americas Summit planned by Panama for April 2015 unless Cuba is invited. Canada and the United States have expressed reservations about Cuba’s participation on the grounds that it would gravely weaken the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Yet neither Ottawa nor Washington can afford to see the summit fail. In an age of emerging regional powers and increasing involvement by external heavyweights like China, North Americans are rightly concerned about being left on the margins of new hemispheric relationships.

From the moment it joined the OAS in 1989, Canada has made the protection and promotion of democracy a cornerstone of its hemispheric engagement. This commitment informed Canada’s hosting of the Americas Summit in Quebec and engagement in helping negotiate the Inter-American Democratic Charter, as well as the Harper government’s current Americas Strategy. Ottawa played a key role in drafting the Democracy Clause of the Quebec Declaration, which states that

“any unconstitutional alteration or interruption of the democratic order in a state of the hemisphere constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the participation of that state’s government in the Summits of the Americas process.”

Recognition of the different and often difficult paths to democracy provides an opening for productive dialogue, even between ideological foes, on ways of assisting Cuba in its construction of more democratic institutions. While Ottawa has maintained respectful relations with Havana since 1959, it definitely sees the Cuban regime as not meeting the standards of liberal democracy codified in the Democratic Charter. On that basis, it is understandable that Ottawa does not favour moves that might lower the bar on democracy in the region—at the summit or in other Inter-American fora.

Yet Canada does not wish to be left out in the cold, especially if Washington decides to go along with the majority view on Cuba’s participation. The Inter-American system, with the OAS at its centre, remains important because those are the only hemispheric institutions which include Canada as a full member (unlike the new Latin American and Caribbean Community (CELAC). Saving the Americas Summit is thus part of safeguarding Canada’s presence in the hemisphere. The tricky part is finding a way to save the summit and enabling Cuba to participate, without compromising Charter norms.

How might Canada contribute to that outcome?

First, Ottawa could see Cuba’s participation in the Americas Summit as a confidence-building measure rather than as a clear dilution of Inter-American democratic norms. Cuba’s participation in the Panama Summit would move it further along the path to reincorporation opened up at the San Pedro Sula General Assembly of the OAS in 2009. Yet it would not nullify the need for many other steps, by Havana and others, before Cuba could become a full member of the Inter-American system. As such, for Canada there would be little cost (and some possible benefits) in accepting Cuba’s participation in the Panama Summit.

Second, Ottawa could quietly support the construction of a summit agenda around a less controversial theme, such as the cooperative management of migration flows. Panama is not the place to reopen the Democratic Charter, with Cuba in the spotlight. Yet Ottawa could support a lower-profile discussion elsewhere on ways of breathing fresh life into the Charter.

The publications around the 10th anniversary of the Charter in 2011 (including the work of Canadian scholars like Maxwell Cameron and Thomas Legler) generated many ideas for strengthening the application of the Charter. Those range from compendia of best practices to the establishment of a special rapporteur on democracy. That conversation might interest Cuba and its allies, if it is broadened to include a consideration of how the participatory and substantive dimensions of democracy could be enhanced—as a complement to the mostly liberal, procedural dimensions codified in the Charter. This is complex and it will take time, much longer than the months leading up to the Panama Summit.

It will require adaptation in Cuba but also a considerable degree of conceptual and operational innovation on the OAS side. For those who think that the Harper government is unlikely to support that approach, let me cite the words of Foreign Minister Baird at the OAS General Assembly a few months ago. “Democracy”, he noted in Asunción, “is a journey, not a destination. There is no single outcome. Every democracy will look a little different, coming from a different set of experiences and from a different journey.”

This recognition of the different and often difficult paths to democracy provides an opening for productive dialogue, even between ideological foes, on ways of assisting Cuba in its construction of more democratic institutions. That could be timely, given the creation of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD), which merges the democracy promotion and development mandates into one department.

Finally (and probably also quietly, since Ottawa has learned that megaphone diplomacy does not work on this file), Canada could continue supporting home-grown democratic development through technical cooperation with Cuban institutions. This could be done by supporting greater citizen participation in municipal governance; funding Cuban (quasi) civil society organizations working to enhance tolerance of diversity and the peaceful management of disputes; and backing Cuban researchers exploring ways to promote more governmental accountability.

Several Canadian non-governmental organizations are already engaged in such initiatives. More could be done to expand those efforts over the coming years, on the safe assumption that they will converge with internal processes such as generational change, as well as with the renewal of democratic norms in hemispheric fora.

See more at: http://cips.uottawa.ca/what-should-canada-do-about-cubas-participation-in-the-americas-summit/#sthash.TO8hwHTb.dpuf

Stephen Baranyi

Posted in Blog | Tagged Cuba-Canada Relations, International Relations, Organization of American States, US-Cuba Relations | Leave a comment

WORKING CONDITIONS IN VENEZUELA SENDING CUBAN DOCTORS TO U.S.

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Arch Ritter

CHRIS KRAUL, 11 September 2014 – Los Angeles Times –

Original article: http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-venezuela-cuba-doctors-20140911-story.html

Worsening conditions in Venezuela are causing increasing numbers of Cuban medical personnel working there to immigrate to the United States under a special program that expedites their applications, according to Colombian officials who help process many of the refugees.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Washington said the number of Cuban doctors, nurses, optometrists and medical technicians applying for U.S. visas under the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program is running as much as 50% ahead of last year’s pace, which was nearly double that of the year before. At the current rate, more than 1,500 Cuban healthcare workers will be admitted to the United States this year.

For geographical reasons, neighboring Colombia is a favored trampoline for Cubans fleeing Venezuela, whose leftist government has struggled to rein in runaway inflation, shortages of goods and services and rising social unrest.

Cuba, which prides itself on a comprehensive healthcare system and has long exported doctors and nurses to friendly countries, maintains an estimated 10,000 healthcare providers in Venezuela. The medical outreach program is intended as partial payment for 100,000 barrels of oil that President Nicolas Maduro’s government ships to the Castro administration each day.

Nelia, a 29-year-old general practitioner from Santiago de Cuba, arrived in Bogota last month after what she said was a nightmarish year working in Venezuela’s Barrio Adentro program in the city of Valencia. She declined to disclose her last name for fear of reprisal back home. Nelia said her disillusionment started on her arrival in Caracas’ Maiquetia airport in mid-2013. She and several colleagues waited there for two days, sometimes sleeping in chairs, before authorities assigned her to a clinic in Valencia, she said.

“It was all a trick. They tell you how great it’s going to be, how you will able to buy things and how grateful Venezuelans are to have you. Then comes the shock of the reality,” Nelia said. Her clinic in Valencia had no air conditioning and much of the ultrasound equipment she was supposed to use to examine pregnant women was broken.

She described the workload as “crushing.” Instead of the 15 to 18 procedures a day she performed in Cuba, she did as many as 90 in Venezuela, she said. Crime is rampant, the pay is an abysmal $20 per month and Cubans are caught in the middle of Venezuela’s civil unrest, which pits followers of the late President Hugo Chavez — whose handpicked successor is Maduro — against more conservative, market-oriented forces. “The Chavistas want us there and the opposition does not. And there are more opposition people than Chavistas,” said Nelia, who was interviewed in a Colombian immigration office in Bogota.

A 32-year-old Cuban optometrist who identified himself as Manuel and who also fled Venezuela to apply for U.S. residency said that at his clinic in Merida he was prescribing and grinding up to 120 pairs of eyeglasses a day, triple his pace in Cuba.

“As a professional you want to be paid for what your work is worth. What we were getting, $20 a month, was not enough to pay even for food and transportation, much less a telephone call to Cuba now and then,” Manuel said. “That’s the main reason I want to go to Miami, to earn what I’m worth.”

Cubans have long had favored status as U.S. immigrants. Virtually any Cuban is guaranteed automatic residency and a path to citizenship simply by setting foot on U.S. territory, legally or not. The Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program gives medical personnel a leg up by allowing them to apply for residency at U.S. embassies. Though some Cubans apply at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, others say they fear being seen there. Also, airfare to the United States from Colombia is much cheaper than from Venezuela.

The increasing flow of Cuban doctors is only part of a rising tide of Cubans seeking to reach the United States, many through Colombia. Lacking the special status of medical personnel, many U.S.-bound Cubans first land in Ecuador, where the government requires no visas. They then typically pass through Colombia to Panama with the help of coyotes, or human traffickers. However, many are detained in Colombia. Of 1,006 illegal immigrants detained in Colombia from January through July of this year for failing to have proper visas, 42% were Cuban, according to Colombia’s immigration agency director, Sergio Bueno Aguirre. The flow of Cubans had more than doubled from the year before.

One Colombian Foreign Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity said the U.S. policy of allowing Cubans immigrant status simply by arriving in the United States has fed organized crime in Colombia and in other transit countries.

“Coyotes helping the Cubans transit through Colombia often use the migrants to carry drugs or submit to prostitution,” the official said. “Or the coyotes will just abandon them at a border, creating a big headache for the Colombian government, which has to take care of them or send them back home.”

Posted in Blog | Tagged Cuba-Venezuela Relations, Health, Medical System, US-Cuba Relations | Leave a comment

CUBAN-AMERICANS AGREE: TIME TO END THE EMBARGO

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Arch Ritter

The Cuban Research Institute of Florida International University has just released its 2014 Poll on Cuban-American views towards U.S. policy towards Cuba.

The complete write-up of the poll can be found here: 2014-fiu-cuba-poll

Majority of Cuban Americans want sanctions loosened: poll

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/17/us-usa-cuba-poll-idUSKBN0ES1CQ20140617

BY DAVID ADAMS

MIAMI Tue Jun 17, 2014 4:30pm EDT

(Reuters) – A survey of Cuban Americans in Miami shows eroding support for hardline Cold War-era policies adopted by the United States against Cuba, with a narrow majority in favor of closer ties with the communist-ruled island.

The poll, released on Tuesday by Florida International University (FIU), found that 52 percent of 1,000 Cuban Americans surveyed in Miami-Dade County oppose continuing the five-decade-old trade embargo against Cuba. That figure edges down to 49 percent among registered U.S. voters.

An even greater majority of those surveyed – 68 percent – favor diplomatic relations with Cuba. A similar number – 69 percent – favor lifting travel restrictions to Cuba for all Americans, according to the poll, which had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. Current U.S. policy allows visits to the island only under tightly controlled licenses for cultural and academic tours.

The results highlight the shift among members of the Cuban diaspora who fled the island nation to the United States to escape the rise of communism in the 1960s and show opinions have grown far less monolithic due to demographic changes.

Conducted between February and May as part of a periodic survey of Cuban Americans dating back to 1991, the poll found that younger exiles who left Cuba more recently were more favorable to changing policy than those who came in the 1960s.

The survey was funded by the Trimpa Group, a Democratic-leaning consulting firm based in Denver that promotes social change, and Open Society Foundations, which funds public policy causes and was founded by billionaire investor George Soros.

Miami represents the heart of the Cuban American community. “The Cuban enclave is changing at all levels,” Guillermo Grenier, an FIU sociology professor who helped lead the survey, told a news conference.

“The trends are clear,” Grenier said, noting that older exiles were dying while 20,000 new Cubans arrive in the United States every year under a migration accord with Cuba.

Only 8 percent of Cuban Americans ages 18 to 29 support continuing the embargo, compared to 60 percent of those ages 65 and older, the poll showed. In 1991, 87 percent of those surveyed backed the embargo compared to 48 percent now. Still, the latest poll found that a majority of Cuban Americans – 63 percent – support keeping Cuba on the United States’ annual list of state sponsors of terrorism, along with countries like Iran, Syria and Sudan.

“The results show that the (Cuban) government and the (Cuban) people are seen differently,” said Grenier. “There’s a certain willingness to throw the embargo under the bus, if there’s an alternative way to exert pressure on the government,” he added.

Asked if they would vote for a candidate who advocated replacing the embargo with support for private businesses in Cuba, 57 percent of registered voters said yes.

A larger majority – 81 percent – of registered voters said they would support a candidate who advocated replacing the embargo with a policy that increased pressure on the Cuban government over human rights.

Critics accused the FIU pollsters of ideological bias, highlighting the Trimpa Group’s lobbying ties to efforts to loosen the Cuba sanctions and promote travel to Cuba.

Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of the pro-embargo group U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, pointed to a recent poll conducted for the Miami Herald newspaper that found Cuban Americans support the embargo by a 56 percent to 36 percent margin. That poll, conducted by Miami firm Bendixen & Amandi International, involved a smaller sample of 300 voters with a 5.6 percent margin of error.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Cuban Diaspora, Embargo, International Relations, US-Cuba Relations | 1 Comment

As Cuba eases investment rules, many Cuban-Americans turn against the embargo

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Arch Ritter

Apr 5th 2014 | MIAMI |

From the Economist here: As Cuba eases investment rules

AT THE outset of Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, “Back to Blood”, the muscled hero, a 25-year-old Cuban-American cop called Nestor Camacho, seethes when his fat and disdainful Americano (Anglo) colleagues stereotype him as a Cuban. He has never set eyes on the island, he says. His Spanish is poor. At home, his parents’ hatred of Fidel Castro flies over his head. His world revolves around Miami, not Cuba.

Unsurprisingly, the book is not universally liked in Miami (it skewers everyone, from Anglos to Cubans to Haitians to Russians). But in at least one respect it is spot on. Younger Cuban-Americans are less obsessed with Cuba than their exiled elders. Like other Americans, pollsters say, they now think more pragmatically; Cuba is not the only voting issue that they care about.

In fact, they are more likely to be pouring money into Cuba than shunning it. Remittances, as well as travel, have risen since President Barack Obama eased restrictions in 2009 and 2011 (see chart). Much of the money has found its way into restaurants (known as paladares), hairdressers or other small businesses run by relatives in Cuba. That has given Cuban-Americans an increasing, albeit hidden, stake in the island’s economic future.

The laws of both the United States and Cuba have forbidden such money to be treated as investment. But on March 29th Cuba’s parliament approved a new foreign-investment law that for the first time allows Cubans living abroad to invest in some enterprises (provided, according to Rodrigo Malmierca, the foreign-trade minister, they are not part of the “Miami terrorist mafia”). The aim is to raise foreign investment in Cuba to about $2.5 billion a year; currently Cuban economists say the stock is $5 billion at most.

The law, which updates a faulty 1995 one, is still patchy, says Pavel Vidal, a Cuban economist living in Colombia. It offers generous tax breaks of eight years for new investments. However, it requires employers to hire workers via state employment agencies that charge (and keep) hard currency, vastly inflating the cost of labour. It enhances the right to establish fully owned foreign businesses, although existing private firms, such as paladares, are still forbidden from taking foreign capital. Much, including whether or not Cuban-Americans can invest, will depend on how the government implements the law. “It’s still very discretionary,” Mr Vidal says.

Despite their failings, Cuba’s new rules are a reminder of how inflexible United States law remains. Because of the 53-year-old embargo against Cuba, some Cuban-Americans fear they will be left behind as investors from Brazil, China, Russia and Europe move in. Already Tampa, on Florida’s west coast, is vying for a greater share of Cuban business when the embargo is lifted. “Every day we’re missing opportunity,” says Bob Rohrlack, head of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce.

In Miami people talk of a tipping point. Alberto Ibargüen, a former publisher of the Miami Herald, says demographic trends that began decades ago have finally softened the mood towards Cuba (though “absolutely not” towards the Castro regime). If American restrictions on all tourism to the island were lifted, “you’d get a couple of letters to the editor.”

Some Miami Cubans have managed to squeeze through cracks in the embargo. Hugo Cancio, who left the island in the Mariel boatlift of 1980, owns a website and magazine, OnCuba, written mostly by Cubans, which plays down repressiveness and plays up commerce and culture. He has a newsroom in Havana but despite his entreaties, American law forbids him from paying its staff. Tony Zamora, a semi-retired Miami lawyer who was jailed in Cuba for taking part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, has also recast himself as a promoter of investment in the island. After 40 trips to Cuba, he calls the embargo “almost a total failure”.

Many Cuban-Americans put their faith in Mr Obama to soften the embargo, even if Congress will not lift it. They note that more than 60% of Miami-Dade County, where they predominate, voted for the president in 2012, many more than in the previous election, even after he eased policy towards Cuba. If Charlie Crist, a Republican-turned-Democrat who is running for a second turn as Florida governor and supports lifting the embargo, wins in November, it will help their cause.

Even so, the old guard cares more about keeping the embargo than younger Cuban-Americans do about getting rid of it. Most Cuban-American congressmen in Washington, DC, remain avid backers of it. Mauricio Claver-Carone, who heads a pro-embargo lobby group, argues that all foreign investment still goes to monopolies run by the Castro regime, which helps prop it up. The stakes have been raised by the jailing of Alan Gross, an American citizen convicted in Cuba of smuggling communications equipment to dissidents. Few believe the Obama administration would risk a bold move without his release.

The embargo’s days are nonetheless numbered, not least because Raúl Castro, the 82-year-old president, and his brother Fidel, 87, will not live for ever. In the meantime, it increasingly seems like a relic, as outdated as the Castros’ Cuba.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Embar, Foreign Investment, US-Cuba Relations | Leave a comment

Demandas De Propiedad Entre Cuba Y Los Estados Unidos. Una Revisión De La Literatura. (Property Claims Between Cuba and The United States. A Literature Review.) By Jesus V. Bu Sr. Attorney at Law, Independent, Havana, Cuba

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Arch Ritter

By Jesus V. Bu Sr. Attorney at Law, Independent, Havana, Cuba

February 8, 2014

Original Essay: Property Issues US and Cuba, A Review of the Literature
This excellent survey of the literature on the issue of property and compensation claims between the US and Cuba is of major importance in outlining the differing views on this contentious and complex issue. This article is comprehensive, well-organized and clear. Unfortunately it is still available only in Spanish.

Abstract:

Spanish: Este artículo es una revisión de la literatura sobre las reclamaciones de la propiedad pendientes entre Cuba y los Estados Unidos, con el objeto de resumir el estado actual del conocimiento académico. Este artículo examina las reclamaciones entre las partes, los mecanismos legales diseñados para solucionar las demandas y los remedios para cada tipo específico de demandante.

English: This paper contains a literature review designed to summarize the state of academic knowledge surrounding the outstanding property claims between Cuba and the United States. This paper examines the claims between the parties, the legal mechanisms designed to solve the claims and, the remedies tailored for each particular type of claimants.

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Posted in Blog | Tagged Compensation issue, Property Claims, Property Market, US-Cuba Relations | Leave a comment

Publication of the Papers from the 2013 Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Arch Ritter

The proceedings of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy’s 23^rd Annual Meeting entitled “Reforming Cuba?” (August 1–3, 2013) is now available. The presentations have now been published by ASCE at http://www.ascecuba.org/.

The presentations are listed below and linked to their sources in the ASCE Web Site.