Posted on 05/16/2002 3:18:00 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON - The White House rejected pleas by former President Carter and farm-state lawmakers to lift the trade embargo against Fidel Castro's Cuba on Wednesday, pledging an even tougher U.S. policy to undermine "one of the last great tyrants left on earth."
President Bush will hew to a hard-line stance against the Castro government while seeking ways to ease hardships on the Cuban people when he spells out the policy next week, advisers said. The president hopes to curb what aides concede is growing momentum to ease restrictions against Cuba.
"The president believes that the trade embargo is a vital part of America's foreign policy and human rights policy toward Cuba, because trade with Cuba does not benefit the people of Cuba - it's used to prop up a repressive regime," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
The White House has been put on the defensive by critics who say the four-decades-old embargo has failed to produce democratic reforms while making everyday life harder for the Cuban people. Bush also was accused of shaping his policy to win support of Cuban Americans, a force in Florida politics and thus a key to his re-election hopes.
Bush plans to unveil his Cuban policy at the White House, visit a Cuban-American community in Miami and headline a fund-raiser for his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush - all on Monday.
"The embargo should stay so long as there is no freedom in Cuba," the governor told reporters in Tallahassee, Fla.
With Carter still visiting Cuba, the president's brother said: "All I know about Fidel Castro is this: He manipulates people that come to the island. He uses them for his own purposes." In Washington, White House advisers expressed similar sentiments in private about Carter's trip.
Describing Bush's new policy in broad terms, aides said the president will seek to toughen U.S. action against the Cuban government and soften the approach toward the Cuban people. Measures aimed at the Castro government are designed to inject elements of democracy.
Bush will seek ways to plant seeds of free enterprise such as establishing government-business foundations modeled after an approach the U.S. took with Poland as that nation emerged from communism, one official said.
The president is likely to propose increased aid to dissidents and will seek to overcome jamming of Radio Marti and TV Marti broadcasts, according to outside activists who advise the White House. However, administration officials cautioned that those plans are not the focus of Bush's speech Monday, and noted that he made similar pledges last July.
The president previewed his remarks, aides said, when he told reporters Tuesday: "My message to the Cuban people is: Demand freedom, and you've got a president who stands with you."
While Secretary of State Colin Powell called Carter "straightforward and tough" for telling Cubans to embrace democracy, White House officials complained in private that the former president's anti-embargo rhetoric threatened to swamp Bush's message.
Their frustration was increased Wednesday when a group of 40 lawmakers announced support for easing the embargo.
"For over 40 years, our policy toward Cuba has yielded no results," said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a House International Relations Committee member. "Castro hasn't held free and fair elections, he hasn't improved human rights and he hasn't stopped preaching his hate for democracy and the U.S.
The House's Cuba Working Group proposed a nine-point program that called for repealing a travel ban, allowing unsubsidized exports of agricultural and medical products, communicating with Cubans through scholarships instead of TV and Radio Marti, cooperating on hemispheric security and environmental protection and settling property claims.
"This is not about foreign policy. We are talking about Florida politics," said Rep. Charles Rangel (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y.
Fleischer denied that politics played a role.
Earlier, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle emerged from a congressional leadership meeting with Bush to say the United States and Cuba "must tear down the barriers that do exist." He praised Carter for visiting Cuba.
Critics of Bush's stance point to the fact that he favors trade with China, a country accused of severe human rights abuses, and has joined in the war against terrorism with countries such as Malaysia with borderline democracies.
Fleischer said China has "been moving in the area of democratic reform" since it opened its doors to trade while the Cuban public has not benefited from trade between the government and its allies.
"The president believes that trade with Cuba ends up giving the government more resources to repress its people," Fleischer said. "Cuba is one of the last great tyrants left on earth."
Why does Jimmy Carter, arguably the smallest, meanest and most incompetent soul ever to be President, hold such views? One answer may be greed. Carter's motive in attacking Israel becomes clear the instant one sees how many millions of dollars his Carter Center in Atlanta has pocketed from Arab leaders and interests. Many wealthy multinational corporations are eager to profit from the end of America's trade embargo against Castro, and it would be fascinating to follow their money and see how much is going to the Carter Center and related groups and individuals.
But Mr. Carter, 77, also seems possessed by other demons, including Leftist ideology and loony idealism. "Jimmy Carter," said liberal journalist Mort Kondracke, "is [second only to Jesse Jackson] the biggest nuzzler of anti-American dictators in the country."
Among those in whose service Jimmy Carter has put his lips, as noted by National Review's Jay Nordlinger and Frank Gaffney, Jr., of the Center for Security Policy, are these: the Marxist dictator Ceausescu of Romania (of whom Carter said "Our goals are the same…."); Syrian mass murderer and Soviet ally Hafez al-Assad; Ethiopian mass murderer Mengistu; and North Korean Marxist madman Kim Il Sung [of whose totalitarian state with which we fought the Korean War, Carter said "I don't see that they are an outlaw nation."].
Jimmy Carter was a relentless supporter of the Castro-aligned Marxist Sandinistas of Nicaragua, doing all in his power to keep their leader Daniel Ortega in power and undermine President Ronald Reagan's attempts to restore freedom to this Central America nation. And both as President and since, Carter has befriended Fidel Castro and sought to end the bipartisan trade embargo against this country (the same kind of embargo Carter eagerly supported against non-Communist white-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa).
Carter has always claimed to favor "human rights." In the name of such rights he as President withdrew U.S. support for the Shah of Iran because the Shah had imprisoned (and in some cases tortured) about 3,000 people, many of them agents of the Soviet Union bordering his nation. Because of Carter, this pro-Western leader was replaced by the fanatic anti-Western Muslim theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeni.
The Ayatollah's dictatorship immediately put more than 20,000 pro-Western Iranians before firing squads. It reversed the Shah's opening to Western culture and rolled back the equal rights he had extended to women. And it promptly plunged Iran into war with neighboring Iraq, a war that never would have happened with the Shah in power - a war that killed more than 500,000 people. It also created the regional instabilities that led to Iraq's later invasion of Kuwait and to Operation Desert Storm, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands more.
And the Ayatollah's overthrow of a major American-aligned leader on the Persian Gulf inspired many thousands of Muslim fanatics to destabilize their own modernizing nations in hopes of likewise creating medieval theocracies and making women again submissive.
Jimmy Carter is therefore part of the reason why Osama bin Laden operatives slammed airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon last September 11th.
And yet, with the blood of perhaps a million people dripping from his hands, Jimmy Carter continues to stalk the world in his sick quest to be given a Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, Jimmy Carter arguably has done more to undermine and destroy world peace than any other human being now alive.
If, God forbid, New York City or Washington, D.C., are vaporized by a Muslim terrorist atomic weapon - or if such fanatics kill millions by unleashing a dread disease agent such as Ebola virus in Chicago, Houston, Miami, Seattle or Los Angeles - Jimmy Carter's demented politics should be held responsible for framing the fearful symmetry that caused such horrors.
Speaking from Cuba, Jimmy Carter denounced last week's assertion by U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton that "Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states [that]….could support BW [Bacteriological Warfare] programs in those states."
"I asked them specifically," said Carter of government officials who briefed him before his Cuba trip, "…'Is there any evidence that Cuba has been involved in sharing any information to any other country on Earth that could be used for terrorist purposes?' And the answer from our experts on intelligence was No."
Mr. Carter had been briefed by underlings with no expertise in biological warfare, as it turned out. As Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, even if Carter accurately represented what he had been told in what was supposed to be a confidential briefing, it contradicted nothing in Bolton's statement about the weapons potential in Cuba's technology sharing.
Carter made a show of touring one biotechnology facility in Cuba and then telling reporters he saw nothing amiss there. But as Associated Press observed, "the former American president had no biotechnology experts in his delegation."
In May 1998 Clinton Administration Secretary of Defense William Cohen warned of Cuba's biological weapons potential. This week Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich affirmed that "Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological weapons research and development effort, and has provided…biotechnology to other rogue states."
"There is plenty of reason to be very concerned about what the Cubans are doing in this area," said National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
"You can't show someone a biotech lab and be assured they're not creating weapons of mass destruction," Rice continued. "That's not how biotech weapons work. And they're actually very easy to conceal and you need multiple measures to make certain biotech weapons aren't being developed and transferred."
Among the nations with which Cuba acknowledges it is sharing biotechnology are Libya and Iran, both terrorist-supporting states like Cuba itself. Mr. Carter simply brushed these facts aside, saying he did not believe Cuba was providing terrorist assistance to either nation and calling Cuba's biotech relationship with
Iran one in which Cuba could be trusted to "prevent any illicit or improper use of the technology which they share."
A cynic might wonder how the likes of Jimmy Carter ever became President. The answer is Time Magazine, which put the obscure-but-liberal Georgia governor on its cover four times in a successful effort to play king-maker. (Johnny Carson likewise made obscure, failed Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and his saxophone a star on the Tonight Show, and has lately taken to voicing his distaste for patriotism associated with the War on Terrorism.)
Time nowadays owns CNN, popularly known as the Clinton and/or Castro News Network for its relentless far-Left slant. The Media Research Center recently described CNN as a "propaganda tool for Fidel Castro's government" and a "megaphone for a dictator." CNN, of course, is the half-brainchild of Ted Turner (former husband of Hanoi Jane Fonda), who once boasted aloud to Chinese leaders that he, like them, was a socialist.
CNN's Havana bureau, the only Cuba-based bureau of any network (even PBS, once parodied on Saturday Night Live with the words: "PBS: If we didn't bring you Fidel Castro's 60th Birthday Gala, who would?"), once described Marxist Cuba's elections as superior to America's because they "have no dubious campaign spending" and "no mud slinging."
My Communist Party overseer when I was in Cuba long ago to do a piece for the Los Angeles Times expressed puzzlement that I was an editor at Skeptic Magazine, which featured debates among those on different sides of an issue.
"Here," my government shadow told me, "we do not confuse the people with debate. The Communist Party decides what the correct view of an issue is, and then it tells the people what that is." No wonder Castro and his bootlicks like former Turner Books author Wayne Smith are furious that Bush Administration visitors to Cuba hand out free shortwave radios. When I was in Cuba, all the radios lacked tuning dials, giving listeners instead only buttons tuned to the government stations, rather like what Leftists try to impose on American university campuses.
The recently deceased great international economist Peter Bauer, if my memory serves, once said: "By the year 2050 there will be only two True Believing Marxists left on Planet Earth - and they will be two nuns in Brazil."
In year 2002 one other True Believer in the ultra-Left continues as a specter haunting our world, and his name is Jimmy Carter. Carter would deny this, fancying himself a "Liberal." But as P.J. O'Rourke so rightly put it, nowadays "Liberalism is just Marxism sold by the drink." [End]
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9-11 PM Eastern Time (6-8 PM Pacific Time) that can be heard on 218 stations and via TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
House Group: Ease Cuban Sanctions (Cuba Policy Foundation: Smith Bagley)*** "The embargo denies Americans the right to trade and travel and has not brought freedom and prosperity to Cuba," said Cowal in a statement. "For 40 years, the embargo has failed to lead to political and economic reform in Cuba. When a policy this old fails to produce the intended results, it is time for a new policy." The Cuba Working Group has 20 House Republicans and 20 House Democrats committed to lifting the travel ban, allowing normal exports of agriculture and medical products and improving human rights for Cuban citizens.
In the Senate, Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan., have led the charge for an easing of U.S. restrictions on trade and travel. The Cuba Policy Foundation, said spokesman Brian Alexander, "is a centrist organization that shares the U.S. goals of freedom and prosperity for the Cuban people. We just don't believe U.S. policy has served to advance those goals, and we do believe it has had a negative impact on the U.S. economy and does not prepare Cuba for a peaceful and stable transition" to a free society.***
[Mostly it's to get U.S. guaranteed loans to help subsidize trade with Castro and shore up his communist regime]
Perfect!
Even more perfect!!
You can take it to the bank that when Castro and his brutal dictatorship is history, the Left will give credit to Carter not to Bush or Reagan.
Ronald Reagan brought the Soviets to their knees by driving their military spending through the roof in a futile effort to keep up with our missile defense program, collapsing the oil market and supporting their foes in Afghanistan. It was Ronald Reagan, the Pope and Lady Margaret Thatcher who, like the three musketeers, fought and won the battle against communism but the Left gave the credit to Gorbachev. When the Soviets went under, Castro became a dead man walking. The Left will never forgive Ronald Reagan, Lady Thatcher, the Pope, and the Catholic church by extention, for being right.
President George W. Bush sees the Ronald Reagan way is how you deal with communists, not the Jimmy Carter way.
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Jimmy Carter visits social service groups, Protestant clergymen before farewell dinner with Castro [Excerpts] While the Roman Catholic church is by far Cuba's largest, Protestant denominations have been growing across the island after losing most of their pastors immediately after the 1959 revolution Castro led.
……………While local communist party functionaries sometimes clash with new churches that bubble up without official permission, Ebenezer's pastor, the Rev. Raul Suarez, said that 1,176 once-illegal congregations have been legalized in recent years as the government has shifted from open hostility to a wary embrace of religious organizations. Suarez said another 600 were pending.
The clergymen presented Carter with a Spanish-language Bible, flowers and a painting - as well as rousing hymns during a service in his honor that ended with an English-language rendition of "We Shall Overcome."
Carter said he had read the Bible nightly in Spanish for years, and he used that language on Wednesday. He quoted St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, saying "the things that are most important of all in life" are "the things that cannot be seen, that cannot be measured."
"It is not education. It is not electricity in the house, it is not money in the bank," he said.
Instead he spoke of "cooperation, friendship, love" and said that among citizens of the United States and Cuba there should be "justice, peace, humility, service, compassion. These are very simple things, but the most important."
Earlier in the day, Carter visited social service programs, including a special education school for children, a housing construction project and a family medical clinic - the kind of efforts that Castro's communist government is proud of.
Scores of Cubans greeted Carter in the town of Frank Pais outside Havana with chants of "Car-TER! Car-TER!" when he arrived to tour a family medical clinic.
The night before, Carter told Cubans that their country does not meet international standards of democracy and repeatedly promoted a grass-roots campaign for greater civil liberties.
Cuban newspapers on Wednesday underscored Carter's criticisms of Washington's policies toward Havana, as well as his call for an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba, but they did not mention Carter's references to a lack of liberties. [End Excerpts]
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