Bush Is Out of Step on Cuba

A Miami audience Monday gave President Bush’s fiery speech on Cuba ovation after ovation. But television viewers could not help but focus on the repetitive, gaping yawns of the children behind the president’s lecturn.

There was symbolism in those young people’s boredom. These days, young Cubans ponder the easiest way to swap digitized Los Van Van timba tracks with their American cousins. But Bush sounded like a scratched 45, stuck replaying tired ‘60s mambo.

In his speech to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first Cuban republic, the president said he would work with Congress to ease the ban on trade and travel between the two countries--but only after opposition parties in Cuba had “the freedom to organize, assemble and speak, with equal access to all airwaves.”

Bush also demanded the release of all political prisoners and that human rights organizations be allowed to visit Cuba to ensure free parliamentary elections in 2003. If Richard Nixon had applied the same criteria to China in 1972, after the U.S. first decided to engage in Ping-Pong diplomacy with the communist regime, that nation probably would have remained cloistered and far more impervious to democratic change.

Clearly, the solid arguments of the 20 Democrats and 20 Republicans who constitute Congress’ Cuba Working Group have failed to show the president the pragmatic advantages of looking ahead instead of back. Nor did his speech reflect the thrust of current opinion. Sixty-three percent of Americans think people should be able to travel freely to Cuba, according to a May 16 Fox News Poll. Human Rights Watch contends that lifting the trade embargo now would help to ease Castro’s grip on Cubans. And even some of that nation’s leading dissidents, including Vladimiro Roca and Elizardo Sanchez, who are struggling to wrestle new freedoms from Castro, fear that Bush’s continued support of trade sanctions could hurt their efforts to force a democratic opening.

That opening, of course, is already far bigger than Bush cares to officially recognize. Despite supposedly tight limits, for instance, Cuban Americans send more than $700 million back to the island each year. And thousands of Americans already travel to the nation annually, ignoring restrictions.

Bush’s speech did not go astray in blasting Castro as a tyrant--which he is--but rather in painting him as the strongman he was when he took power 43 years ago. In truth, his power is slipping, and the fastest way to accelerate the erosion is to give Americans free reign to travel to Cuba to freely sell Cubans their products and ideas.