Castro’s Miami Nemesis Is Gone; Now What?

Years ago I came to the sad conclusion that this country’s fundamentally flawed policy toward Communist Cuba would not change until the Cuban strongman whose rigid politics helped create it was dead.

Unfortunately, the stubborn Cuban political leader I had in mind was Fidel Castro--not Jorge Mas Canosa, the controversial Miami businessman who was Castro’s archnemesis.

The founder and chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, Mas Canosa died last weekend of lung cancer. It says all you need to know about him that most Cuban Americans simply assumed he would be Cuba’s first democratically elected leader after Castro’s inevitable, if still unpredictable, demise.

Established in 1981, CANF is easily the most influential organization in the politically potent Cuban American community. And Mas Canosa, a millionaire exile who made his money building telecommunications systems, was its principal voice.

He always denied having any ambition to become Cuba’s president, but it was hard not to envision Mas Canosa in that role as he spoke enthusiastically about one or another of the reports CANF researchers had prepared, outlining plans for financial investment in a post-Castro Cuba.

Is was also hard to imagine anyone else in the Cuban exile community who could even aspire to the role. Outside the fields of music and sports, no other Cuban exile is as well-known on the island as Mas Canosa was. That is largely because no other Cuban American was so demonized by the Castro government.

I disagreed with Mas Canosa’s views on how best to reopen Cuba to American influence, but I respected him. While his fiercely anti-Castro politics gave him a reputation for being combative, he was personally charming and intelligent. Few other Latino leaders in this country have been as politically effective.

To some extent, Mas Canosa’s success stemmed from good timing. He created CANF shortly after Ronald Reagan had been elected president. He realized sooner than most that the stage had been set for a new phase of the Cold War, with Central America and the Caribbean Basin as a key battleground. But cold, hard cash also underlay Mas Canosa’s success.

The Center for the Public Interest, a Washington-based group that monitors the influence of organized money on U.S. politics, reported earlier this year that among all the lobbying organizations in the nation’s capital, CANF is, “dollar for dollar, arguably the most effective.” The center’s researchers estimated that $4.4 million had been poured into the U.S. political system since 1979 by donors with a direct interest in the future of Cuba. Of that amount, about $3.2 million came from individuals linked to CANF.

Little wonder that Mas Canosa and his organization had an almost unbroken string of political achievements to show for only 16 years in business. Their first and still most visible achievements were convincing the U.S. government to underwrite Radio Marti and, later, Television Marti, which broadcast anti-Castro propaganda to the island.

But Radio and TV Marti are mere irritants in U.S.-Cuba relations. Mas Canosa and CANF, and their single-minded obsession with Castro, did far worse damage to U.S. foreign policy two years ago with enactment of the Helms-Burton law.

Drafted with help of CANF, Helms-Burton seeks to tighten the U.S. embargo against Cuba by punishing foreign firms doing business there. This raised such a fuss among important U.S. allies, particularly Canada, Mexico and the European Union, that the Clinton administration has held off implementing it. The official explanation for the delay, now 18 months and counting, is that it gives our allies time to pressure Castro to allow more democracy in Cuba. In fact, it puts off a lot of messy and needless trade wars.

The administration and Congress have shown so little creativity on dealing with Cuba that no one should expect them to revisit Helms-Burton now that its foremost proponent is dead.

But Mas Canosa’s death should serve as a useful, if sad, reminder to everyone who looks toward a time when Cuba will no longer be the last nation in the Americas ruled by a caudillo. No one lives forever. Not even Fidel Castro.

A sound U.S. foreign policy will ignore all the impediments to a Washington-Havana dialogue that exist today and plan for the future with the same optimism one sensed in discussing--or debating--Cuba’s future with Mas Canosa.