Castro Saved Reagan from assassination in 1984

This is an interesting story. MSNBC reports that an essay published Wednesday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma says that the Cuban government gave information to the American FBI that headed off an attempt on President Reagan's life in 1984.

The only source for this information is the Cuban newspaper report, but it states that

Castro said Cuban authorities learned the FBI had arrested several people in North Carolina and he said several days after that Robert C. Muller, the U.S. security chief at the U.N., expressed America’s thanks to the Cuban official over lunch. Castro didn’t identify the Cuban official.

Reagan visited Charlotte on a campaign stop Oct. 8, 1984, accompanied by Sen. Jesse Helms, and he attended a reception for local Republican leaders, according to Reagan’s presidential papers.

So far this is the plot for a thriller, and little more. Current FBI special agents in North Carolina have released no acknowledgement that they are aware of such an event.

It looks to me like there are at least two significant questions about this report beyond just its veracity. The first is, assuming the event occurred, why would the Cubans warn the U.S.? My bet would be fear of being blamed for it. American reaction to the assassination of Reagan could have been as extreme and irrational as the invasion of Iraq following 9/11.

Second, and more interesting, is why put out this information now? My bet here is that they are attempting to improve the public relations between Cuba and the U.S. in anticipation of Castro's death. A worst case scenario for that would be if the Cuban Exiles (who still train in South Florida for an invasion of Cuba) were to attempt to take over the Cuban government when Castro dies, and they are trying to get American public opinion on their side well in advance of such an eventuality.

Just guessing. I have no real information on the background to this report.

Sen. Dodd proposes a rational Cuba policy

Sen. Chris Dodd provides a short essay on what a workable Cuba Policy should look like.

It is my opinion that most of the problems that Castro has caused for the U.S. resulted from his efforts to defend himself and Cuba from American predation. Castro's revolt against the Batista and American Mafia dominated dictatorship in the late 1950's was a very rational response to an extremely nasty government.

It is also my opinion that Castro adopted Communism primarily because the Soviet Union was the only powerful government willing to help him protect his revolution from American forces. The Bay of Pigs invasion was proof of how dangerous the American government was to the Cuban Revolution, but it was only the most obvious of many similar efforts to destroy Castro's government. Without the threat from the U.S. he might have been Socialist, but most of the governments of Europe have been Socialist at one time or another. None of those have become authoritarian in the way that the USSR was - or Argentina, Chile, the Philippines and Peru have been.

Does Castro head an authoritarian government? Sure he does. Such governmental extremism is a natural response to a major outside threat - as the Bush administration's response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America has proven. No, that is not the only cause of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but it is an extremely important one. But the United States has been the single most powerful threat faced by the Cuban government for 46 years. Do they dare ease up on efforts to control their own population as long as the government of the United States wants to overthrow their government? I wouldn't if I were Castro.

As an aside - At least the threat to Castro is actually existential. The U.S. if not prevented would easily overthrow the Castro government, eliminated the health and education benefits available to every Cuban as a matter of human Right and give the hotels and Casinos in Havana back to the previously (mostly Mafia) owners. Does anyone really think that any small group of religious fanatics (other than Christian ones) could possibly take control of America and the American government? The Shiite extremists could never have taken control of Iran if the Shah hadn't run one of the most brutal regimes in the Middle East - and he was doing that primarily out of fear of being overthrown.

Castro is on the way out through the normal process of aging. American right-wingers are salivating at the chance to get back into Cuba and exploit that nation economically. Cuba needs to protect itself from those people, but reenter the global economy to rebuild the economy of Cuba. The U.S. government should begin to put policies into place that ease that transition, at the same time recognizing that the American forms of free market economics are likely to be damaging to the Cuban people.

Sen. Dodd's proposal is an early version of the needed American policy. "Staying the course" leaves America on the sidelines as a stable Cuba with a well-educated workforce builds its economy only 90 miles off our coast. We are their natural best customer, just as Cuba offers real opportunities for our business people. We need to begin engagement now, without demanding that Cuba change to suit us. They have spent 46 years proving that they reject such demands.

We need to get them to want to accommodate America, not obey America. Our sales people will succeed where our CIA and military forces have failed for over four decades.

Cuba's medical foreign aid vs. American's military foreign aid.

If you want to make friends with the top government leaders of a nation, you will rarely go wrong giving them military foreign aid. But Cuba has shown that there is a way to get the people of foreign nations to be our friends. This is from Steve Clemons (as I promised a while back):

Cuba used to export soldiers, weapons, and the ideology if not entirely the reality of Fidel and Che style revolution.

Today, Cuba exports doctors. More on that another time -- but just as a quick aside, Cuba has exported tens of thousands of doctors to some of the poorest and most remote parts of Latin America as well as other parts of the world. Cuba actually maintains a highly successful bartering arrangement of doctors for oil with Venezuela. This is clearly a page out of the 'spirit' of the John F. Kennedy initiated Peace Corps. (For other dimensions of Cuba's international medical "public diplomacy", a great resource is MEDICC.)

President Bush, in contrast, offered during his recent trip through Latin America to those in medical need some treatment on the USNS Comfort, an American warship outfitted to provide medical support at "ports" that the ill would need to travel to.

Specifically, the USNS Comfort will make port calls in Belize, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname. President Bush's offer is a somewhat commendable, first step -- but in contrast, Cuban doctors are deployed in small villages and remote mountain regions. They are embedded in countries much like Peace Corps staff are. But American style relief comes on a war ship with the needy making their way to us, not us doing more to reach them.

While too much of American foreign policy has become over-militarized, Cuba's, quite remarkably, has become more humanized and more reflective of the hard gains that can come from Joe Nye's notion of "soft power."

The only nations that need military aid are those with aggressive neighbors and those who want to use the military to protect their government form their own people. But almost all nations need additional health care services, and those services are best provided close to the customers.

There is also the fact that military equipment and personnel are a drain on every nation that pays for them. They provide nothing positive economically. This is very unlike spending on health care services. A healthy populace is a highly productive populace.

This looks like a really good idea to me. Of course, American conservatives will hate it. They don't like people helping others. All they like is leaders helping other leaders oppressing and otherwise ignoring the hoi polloi.

Advance notice of Steve Clemon's discussion of Cuba.

I really just found Steve Clemon's teaser about what he is going to write about really fascinating, so I wanted to share his teaser.

I need to tell what I learned about Cuba's current political climate, the impact of America's embargo and travel ban, the lives of normal folks I met, and the business activity I saw beginning to hit a higher pitch. I have some thoughts on Hugo Chavez and Hemingway, on Martin Luther King's followers in Havana and how America is screwing over some very good social work, and how Fidel's master plan of forsaking military exports in favor of shipping out doctors to nations in need around the world was a stroke of genius that has outmaneuvered America's over-militarized response to most problems.

Both former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson and I went to Cuba legally -- under the license provisions that allow researchers to travel there -- and even had my passport officially stamped, which I understand many do not do.[PPS Editor - underlining is mine.]

This should be really interesting.

I really like the focus on castro's export of Doctors rather than soldiers. Anyone remember the US Peace Corps? Same idea. What are the two largest problems of poor nations around the world? Health, hunger and education. If the members of the Cuban diapora had started sending out Doctors to South and Latin America instead of trying to invade Cuba, Castro would have lost power years ago. Instead, American right-wingers and Cuban refugees attempted to regain power by invading Cuba - and lost.

But they had to use military methods and the embargo because the Cubans wanted to regain their wealth and high status in Cuba, something the Cuban Refugees could not do unless the Castro Revolution were totally erased from the Island. Since the Cuban Revolution was a reaction to the Fulgencio Batista authoritarian government, Cubans are not going to go back.

[Please note: I in no way support the authoritarian government of Castro's Cuba. My point is that our use of force and the military was totally ineffective in changing the authoritarian Communist direction it took. The embargo clearly extended Castros rule long after it would have collapsed without the American pressure.]