On how to topple Castro

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): American policy towards Cuba has long been a sub- tropical playground for the ill-informed, the ill-advised and the ill-intentioned, and here we go again. President Bill Clinton is facing both ways at once on Cuba. Is that the way to topple Fidel Castro? If that is the first question, the second is: does he need to be toppled anyway?

Faced with a new Congressional onslaught by the anti-Castro crusaders, Clinton seems relaxed about going along with a tightening of the unilateral American embargo, despite the fact that the Europeans, Latin Americans, Canadians and Caribbean neighbors punch more holes in it by the day, particularly now that the regime is rather more open to foreign investment. A tighter policy seems essential to ensure the Florida vote, with its large number of Cuban emigres, in next year's presidential election.

At the same time, the president fears that too sharp a squeeze will promote a new refugee crisis, while tying his hands on what, apparently, he privately views as necessary in the process of loosening Castro's totalitarian grip; the free traffic of American scholars, student exchanges, journalists and non- governmental activists that can help, as was done successfully in western Europe, in fertilizing "the foliage of dissent". After all, no man is an island, even in communist Cuba.

But why such a mix should topple Castro is unexplained. After 35 years, is he more vulnerable to embargoes or fresh ideas than he was? America has got so wrapped up in the significance of its own embargo that it forgets that it is not a blockade and that the rest of the world doesn't go along with it.

This single-mindedness in America's policy towards Cuba is reminiscent of Louis XVI in a famous cartoon published during the meeting of the Estates General in the run-up to the French Revolution. "My dear beasts," said the king, "I have summoned you together to discuss the best sauce in which to cook you."

"But we don't want to be cooked," objected the beasts.

"You wander from the point," replied the king.

But the point, indeed, is that the Cuban people as a whole -- at least a majority of those that remain -- are unambivalent about one thing, that whatever the failings of the regime, they don't appear to want it to be "cooked" by Washington.

There remains in Cuba, despite the exodus of a large segment of the middle class, an enormous pride in what their country has done in the last 35 years. After all, this was a country that has never been truly itself before the revolution; it was either a colony or else living in the shadow and at the beck and call of its 90-miles-away neighbor.

This explains the popular, almost holy, reverence for Cuba's enormous strides in education, health care, child survival and longevity that put most of the rest of the Third World countries, relative to their state of development, somewhat in the shade.

There is a pride, too, in Cuba's military role in Africa, particularly in repulsing white South Africa's attempt to win the Angolan war for Jonas Savimbi. And there is, whatever the doubts about the ruthlessness of the regime in keeping a suffocatingly tight lid on free expression, an admiration for its determination to keep Cuba free of becoming a little finger on the big hand of America, even while it hungers for American markets and investment.

Of course, there is a counter current in Cuba -- this is not just an "island in the stream" -- that wants to see the end of the monopoly of power of a family clique. And it's not just students singing in a Havana cinema This Man Is Crazy. He Thinks He Rules The World. There is, by all accounts, a widespread feeling of malaise that has accelerated as Soviet subsidies have been withdrawn, exposing the inefficiencies of a state economy for all to see. Cuban policy makers and academics may be engaged in a vigorous debate on whether to go the Chinese way and deregulate the economy, while holding tight the political reins, but each year that passes with more such hot air disillusions a populace visibly getting poorer.

There's no quick fix to this, even if the government doesn't know it. So desperate is it for an exit to its cul-de-sac that its playing the once-forbidden, and seductively dangerous, tourism card for all its worth.

If Cuba really counted for something, strategically or economically, it might be worth taking advantage of this growing weakness and slamming it up against the wall. But there's never been, even at the height of the cold War, unanimity in the western camp about this. And now that Castro is "behaving" himself abroad so well, there is even less. The Che Guevara posters are down and no one is inclined to stick them back up again.

Unless something untoward happens, the American debate over tightening or loosening the embargo is almost irrelevant; it's certainly not going to bring down Castro. The only thing that might undermine him would be a total relaxation of the embargo. Such a precipitous change could be, perhaps, destabilizing. But who in the White House is going to dare that?