As early as today, President George W. Bush will spell out what his administration plans to do. The wisest course would leave U.S. policy alone and concentrate diplomatic efforts on nations in Europe and Latin America that now trade with Cuba without regard to its dismal human-rights record.
Tightening the U.S. embargo by making family remittances or direct travel to Cuba illegal would only encourage people to go through third countries to reach family. Most Cuban-Americans want more family contacts, not less.
No, the best U.S. course is to focus on Mexico, Chile, Spain, France, Italy, Canada and all the other countries with businesses on the island. Most of their leaders, including Mexico's President Vicente Fox, already have given the dissidents credibility by meeting with them while visiting the island. European diplomats in Havana, particularly those from Spain, often invite dissidents to partake in their national celebrations. That has put Cuban officials on notice that creating a civil society that values diverse viewpoints is not a U.S.-manufactured plot but a universal goal, spelled out in the United Nations' own declaration of human rights.
If Bush focuses on what's best for the Cuban people, he would mount a diplomatic campaign for the European Union and the Organization of American States to put pressure on Cuba and free the dissidents.
Cuba's crackdown on dissent merits more than world condemnation, more than protests against the communist regime in Spain or France or, as are planned for this weekend, in New York and Washington. The Europeans and Latin Americans wield the big stick of trade if they care to use it. If not now, then when?***
Years later, Turner was still swooning for the strongman. "Everyone in Cuba likes him," he told The Washington Post in 2001. That's clearly the impression you would get from watching CNN. During the first five years of the Havana bureau's existence, ordinary Cubans interviewed by the network were six times more likely to express agreement with the regime than they were to disagree with it. That finding comes from a Media Research Center report examining all 212 prime-time news stories produced by the Havana bureau through the first part of 2002. Other data were just as striking: For instance, Castro and his spokesmen were six times more likely than regime critics to provide soundbites for the network, and only seven of the 212 stories focused on dissidents. (Jordan insists the MRC was "misleading and unfair" because its prime-time figures didn't include every report CNN has filed from Cuba.)
THIS comes as no surprise to people who know Lucia Newman, CNN's Havana bureau chief. "When we heard CNN got a Havana bureau, we knew right away who would be going there," says Paul Scoskie, a retired ABC News producer who first met Newman in the 1980s, when they both were covering Central America. (Newman started with CNN in 1986, as its bureau chief in Managua.) "We used to watch Lucia file her stories from Nicaragua, just amazed at how she reported some events." Adds Peter Collins, a former ABC and CNN foreign correspondent: "There were reporters you could always rely upon to follow the Sandinista line, and she was one of them."***