http://www.counterpunch.org/sandels01132009.htmlSubversion Through Trade?
Cuba and the Obama Administration
By ROBERT SANDELS
The incoming Obama administration is being bombarded with suggestions on how to deal with Cuba. In the main, they favor relaxing or ending the blockade (embargo) and travel ban. The principal argument is that trade and diplomatic relations will nudge Cuba toward democratic capitalism, a policy adjustment that differs from the current regime-change strategy mainly in its tactical considerations.
The recommendations are being advanced while both the incoming and outgoing administrations in Washington are abandoning all but the pretense of a competitive free market. Through policy inertia, it seems, memos keep going out to other countries urging them to stick resolutely to the free-market model.
A recent report from the Partnership for the Americas Commission of the Washington-based think tank the Brookings Institution proposes a broad range of generally positive reform initiatives for Latin America and Caribbean policies in such areas as environment, energy, migration, and international cooperation.<1>
The advice on Cuba, nevertheless, follows the pattern set earlier this year by the Council on Foreign Relations, which repackaged President George W. Bush's Cuba overthrow policy and placed it back on the shelf as "A New Direction for a New Reality."<2>
The Brookings recommendations, among others, propose a soft version of traditional US hegemony tactics in the guise of democracy promotion. Democracy promotion as a policy tool has been strengthened during the Bush years most notably at the 2001 Quebec Summit of the Americas where Bush insisted on a declaration making democracy inseparable from a market economy.<3>
Linking the two in this way allows overthrow advocates to skip lightly over the part about destroying economies and undermining governments and to justify economic warfare by insisting that sanctions help populations in target countries achieve democracy.
Democracy promotion in Latin America and elsewhere is what replaced the more indelicate policy of maintaining US hegemony through direct support of military regimes. The soft version includes such practices as funding "party-building" and "electoral education" by channeling funds through the National Republican Institute (NRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other US-government front organizations to co-opt civil society in target counties.
Failing to confront the real policy underneath the official blather about democracy and freedom leaves these reports the sole option of criticizing "errors" of phantom policies.
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