Maya Rhodan passes along news of Obama’s “Christmas clemency”:
Obama granted 12 pardons to people convicted of various crimes from 1964 to 1997: possession of an unregistered distillery, counterfeiting, and conspiracy to transport a stolen car. Obama also commuted the sentences of eight federal prisoners serving lengthy sentences for drug crimes. None claim to be innocent, but they argued that they’ve served their time. In many cases, the crimes would not have received the same punishment if they were committed today. …
Matt Ford highlights Obama’s reluctance to exercise his pardoning power:
Presidential pardons have declined since World War II, excluding cases of mass amnesty like Jimmy Carter and the Vietnam draft-dodgers, but Obama’s sparing use still stands out: Until Wednesday, one in seven of his pardons had beenissued for Thanksgiving turkeys.
A 2012 investigation by ProPublica found that an applicant’s chance of receiving a pardon under Obama was only one in 5,000, compared to one in 1,000 under George W. Bush and one in 100 under Ronald Reagan. Obama seldom grants pardons beyond the traditional holiday-season batch. His April 15 commutation of Ceasar Huerta Cantu’s sentence is a rare exception. A typo had accidentally lengthened Cantu’s sentence by 42 months, and a court ruled that only presidential clemency could correct the error.
[C]lemency reform has never been a truly comprehensive approach to fixing the problems of our justice system. The president is unlikely to grant relief to tens of thousands of inmates. Rather, true reform will only happen by reworking sentencing rules so that we’re not locking people up for low-level crime to begin with.
The Smarter Sentencing Act would have been a modest step in this direction. It would have reduced, but not eliminated, mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. But despite bipartisan support, Congress left it on the table unfinished this year.
Matthew Cole reports on a key torture apologist at the CIA who “repeatedly told her superiors and others – including members of Congress – that the ‘torture’ was working and producing useful intelligence, when it was not”:
The expert was not identified by name in the unclassified 528-page summary of the [torture] report, but U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity confirmed that her name was redacted at least three dozen times in an effort to avoid publicly identifying her. In fact, much of the four-month battle between Senate Democrats and the CIA about redactions centered on protecting the identity of the woman, an analyst and later “deputy chief” of the unit devoted to catching or killing Osama bin Laden, according to U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations.
She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”
Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
Roberto Ferdman deflates some of the hype surrounding Cuban cigars, which Americans will soon be able to buy more easily:
Each year, Cigar Aficionado, the leading industry magazine, publishes a list of the top 25 cigars in the world. Last year, the number one cigar was the Montecristo no. 2, which is made in Cuba. But only two of the remaining 24 also came from the country. By contrast, 11 were from the Dominican Republic, and 10 were made in Nicaragua. The magazine has yet to reveal its top pick for 2014, but among the remaining 24 the vast majority are once again from countries other than Cuba. And a similar pattern can be seen in virtually every year that the publication has issued its rankings. “The playing field has been leveled,” said David Savona, executive editor of Cigar Aficionado.
Alison Griswold suspects that the storied tobacco derives its reputation from scarcity as much as from anything else:
“It’s a forbidden fruit,” explains Eric Newman, president of Tampa, Florida-based J.C. Newman Cigar Company, a cigar manufacturer. “The biggest market in the world prohibits them from entering the marketplace.” Rather than deterring U.S. consumers, that ban may have in fact proved the biggest selling point for Cuban cigars over the last 50 years. People in the industry compare their allure to that of Coors beer before it became easily available beyond the American west. So great was the East Coast’s unrequited love for Coors in the 1970s that the quest to bring the beer from West to East was depicted in the popular 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit.
With both Coors and Cuban cigars, the question has been whether the product is ultimately worth the hype surrounding it. “Coors isn’t a bad beer, but is it the best beer in the world?” [president of Corona Cigar Company Jeff] Borysiewicz asks. “Cuban cigars are kind of the same way.”
But Dylan Matthews relays some evidence that Cubans really are superior:
So Cuba produces some excellent cigars. But do they, on average, surpass those of other countries? A 2003 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Finance suggests yes. The University of Virginia’s David Freccia and Wesleyan’s Joyce Jacobsen and Peter Kilby collected Cigar Aficionado quality ratings and price data for 689 different cigars, and sought to identify determinants of both high prices and high ratings. They took into account a battery of subjective factors — did the Cigar Aficionado review describe the cigar as mild? as well built? as smooth? was it nutty or cocoa-y or creamy? — as well as national origins.
They found that the single most important determinant of both prices and ratings was whether or not the cigar originated from Cuba. Being from Cuba bumped up a cigar’s rating by 4.05 points on a 100-point scale, on average; by contrast, being described as “well built” only gained a cigar 1.28 points, and being “leathery” only resulted in a 1.87 point gain.
I can’t stop thinking about Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart’s essay identifying with macho or misogynistic male authors and protagonists:
I’d always understood I was a she, and I never wanted to be otherwise. And yet somehow I was convinced that the disparaging things my male heroes said about women didn’t apply to me, not because they were untrue about females generally, but because I must not be the sort of female they were talking about. Being a strange kid helped—I had the overdeveloped intellect and underdeveloped social skills that precocious children of all genders seem to share. Since I was comfortable with being different, the masculine aspects of my personality were one more oddity among many. These oddities allowed me to nod comfortably along with sections of a novel where the author paused a moment to explain that women were like such-and-so, and then got back to the important parts, which had men in them. …
It took high school and part of college before I began to grow out of this mentality, but eventually I appreciated that the basic difference between me and other women wasn’t that they were dumber and more frivolous than I was. Dating other women helped—unlike straight men, lesbians aren’t allowed to get away with the assumption that they’re superior beings compared with the objects of their affections.
It also dawned on me, albeit slowly, that the rest of the world largely saw me as a woman like any other. I mourned this, wishing for the first time that I’d been born a boy so my combative conversational style and my impulse to dominate and destroy all comers could be met with approval, rather than dismay, from peers, teachers, and family members. But, I also recognized that the same disapproval and dismay was squelching the self-expression of women generally, not just butch lesbians.
While the headline reads, “A Lesbian Dilemma,” as Urquhart herself notes, there’s nothing specifically lesbian about the feelings she describes. Identifying with the man and not the woman in a story is, I suspect, a common female experience. That’s because – as comes up somewhere in the comments to the piece – male characters in fiction are just characters, whereas female ones are woman characters. Indeed, the sense that one is somehow different from all those silly females is its own meme: “other girls.” And one that’s readily obscured by contemporary discussions of gender identity. While there are certainly unique experiences of masculine identification among transmen, butch lesbians, and other gender-non-conforming biologically-female individuals, there’s also plenty feeling-the-guy among feminine-seeming straight women and girls. Remember Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”? That’s what she was getting at.
And that sense of oneself as an agent in one’s own life isn’t merely something that can be experienced by a straight woman or girl. It can extend to a female experience of heterosexuality. I think back to my own experiences as a girl who knew from a fairly young age she liked boys. I remember experiencing my crushes the way I was told – from books, movies, society – that a boy who liked girls should be experiencing this. I’d think, gosh, he’s gorgeous. I wasn’t particularly interested in being thought gorgeous myself. I saw how being thought attractive would be useful for a crush to be reciprocated, of course, but it was never the main hope. The gaze that interested me was that of the protagonist. Was my gaze, then, a male gaze, or just a human one? Whatever the case, I had to learn not to pursue. Which can be a tough thing to unlearn later in life, in other arenas.
I have no interest here in delving into exactly how much of gender is socially constructed and how much comes down to biology. But I have some interest in mentioning a recurring theme on “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” a reality show about a high-powered businesswoman who sets up rich men with trophy wives. On the occasions when the client being set up is a (straight) woman, the entire project of the show will be to rid the “millionairess” of her “masculine energy,” which is off-putting to men, or at least to the hyper-masculine men that (surely) a woman would prefer. Now, these are not masculine-of-center women by any means. One, I believe, ran a hair salon, another a clothing company. They’ve got long hair, heaps of makeup – the Bravo usual. “Masculine energy,” in this context, means the will to run a company, to be a boss, to get things done.
It could well be that fewer women than men have the “energy” in question. But it seems unavoidably true that many women have experience learning to tone theirs down.
Chris Mooney flags a troubling new study finding that the world’s oceans now contain more than five trillion pieces of plastic, weighing more than 250,000 tons:
With a global population of about 7.2 billion, that’s nearly 700 pieces per person.
The study, published in the journal PLOS One by Marcus Eriksen of the Five Gyres Institute in Los Angeles and a large group of colleagues, is based on data from 24 separate ocean expeditions, conducted between 2007 and 2013, to sample plastic pollution. Plastic was either observed from boats, or hauled up from the ocean by nets, in 1,571 locations. The data were then used to run an ocean model to simulate the amount and distribution of plastic debris.
The result not only yielded the estimate of over 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the global ocean — it also cast light on how plastic changes within the ocean (breaking down into smaller pieces) and circulates around the globe. Pieces between 1 millimeter and 4.75 millimeters in size were by far the most prevalent class of plastic in the ocean. However, by weight, really large pieces of plastic, greater than 200 millimeters in size, were the most significant.
Katy Steinmetz touches on efforts to rein in microbeads – the tiny bits of plastic found in exfoliating body washes and face scrubs – which contribute significantly to this problem:
These little orbs, introduced to replace harsher exfoliants like pumice, are so small that after they’re washed down the sink or tub, they sneak through sifters at water treatment plants and end up in the ocean and other bodies of water. Once in the ocean, researchers have found, these plastics act like sponges for toxins, and can be accidentally ingested by fish, thus ending up in the food chain. Several states considered bills to ban microbeads last session, but only Illinois passed a law, becoming the first state to do so. Now lawmakers in at least three states are gearing up for another go in 2015.
“We were outgunned,” says Stiv Wilson, associate director at 5 Gyres, a non-profit dedicated to fighting plastic pollution. In California, the industry group Personal Care Products Council—which represents companies like Johnson & Johnson and Clinique—lobbied members to oppose a bill that would have banned the use of microbeads, saying it was “overly aggressive and unrealistic.” The bill failed by one vote. The same state assemblyman who proposed that bill, Richard Bloom, plans to try again, with what Wilson says will be a “much broader coalition” of supporters.
Previous Dish on microbeads here and plastic more generally in the oceans here.
In the midst of the hustle and bustle of yesterday’s Cuba and Sony-centric news, one of America’s ghosts shimmered into view in the background. It was the spirit of a black fourteen-year-old named George Stinney. He was executed in 1944 for the murder of two young white girls in Alcolu, South Carolina. The only evidence of his guilt was a confession he said he’d been coerced into making. There was no physical evidence, but he became the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century anyway.
Judge Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule that the conviction of Mr. Stinney for the murder of two white girls in the town of Alcolu was wrong on the merits. She did find, however, that the prosecution had failed in numerous ways to safeguard the constitutional rights of Mr. Stinney, who was black, from the time he was taken into custody until his death by electrocution.
The all-white jury could not be considered a jury of the teenager’s peers, Judge Mullen ruled, and his court-appointed attorney did “little to nothing” to defend him. His confession was most likely coerced and unreliable, she added, “due to the power differential between his position as a 14-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.”
The order was a rare application of coram nobis, a legal remedy that can be used only when a conviction was based on an error of fact or unfairly obtained in a fundamental way and when all other remedies have been exhausted.
Just to compound the awful picture of the American criminal justice system this provides, allow me to add that the time from crime to Stinney’s execution was unusually swift, a mere 83 days.
Here’s the thing: I know it’s tempting to tuck this case away in a drawer. I know it’s tempting to classify it as a product of its time and place, to say that Jim Crow laws are over, that we don’t allow executions of minors, that this is an America of the past. Problem is, the America of the present stands atop the America that convicted Stinney on the flimsiest grounds. When people qualifiedly sing the praises of the American justice system, they are singing the praises of the system that killed him in 83 days. And they are being a bit blasé about how it took more than a half-century for that same system to say they regretted doing it.
Aaron Blake flags one argument that won’t get much traction – that Cuba is a genuine national security threat:
Despite Cuba’s proximity to the United States (about 90 miles from Florida) and its alliance with other antagonistic countries like North Korea and Russia, Americans have grown progressively less and less concerned that the island country actually poses a threat to the United States. A CNN/Opinion Research poll earlier this year, in fact, showed that just 5 percent of people viewed Cuba as a “very serious threat” and 21 percent said it was a “moderately serious threat.” Another 72 percent said it wasn’t a threat at all or “just a slight threat.” Back in 1983, two-thirds of Americans viewed Cuba as at least a “moderately serious threat,” but that numbers has fallen steadily since then.
Zack Beauchamp notes that another favorite talking point of anti-Cuba hardliners – calling the country a state sponsor of terrorism – is a bit outdated:
The US government designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism in 1982, which imposed financial penalties on the Cuban government. At the time, the US accused Cuba of supporting the Spanish Basque terrorist group ETA and the FARC militants in Colombia. Though the US continues to label Cuba a terrorism sponsor, that’s just transparently untrue. According to the State Department‘s most recent annual review of terrorism worldwide, “there was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups.”
“Cuba’s ties to ETA have become more distant, and that about eight of the two dozen ETA members in Cuba were relocated with the cooperation of the Spanish government,” the report reads. And “throughout 2013, the Government of Cuba supported and hosted negotiations between the FARC and the Government of Colombia aimed at brokering a peace agreement between the two.” That doesn’t sound much like a state sponsor of terrorism.
In fact, FARC announced a unilateral ceasefire yesterday, possibly (though not necessarily) pointing the way to peace in Colombia. Richard McColl wonders whether these two events were connected:
How much influence Cuba had in the decision taken by the FARC is up for speculation since Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has been making conciliatory overtures in his statements to the press in recent weeks. Now the question in Colombia, is, will a bilateral ceasefire be announced in coming days? In the past, Santos has been stubbornly opposed to a bilateral ceasefire, but his position on the issue may be shifting. In an interview with W Radio in Bogota on Wednesday morning before the news about Cuba broke, he said that he was waiting for concrete actions from the FARC that would enable a deceleration of the conflict. Less than six hours later, the FARC potentially came good on the challenge.
Larison pushes back on the notion, per Elliott Abrams, that Obama’s opening to Cuba will embolden other enemies of the US:
Restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba isn’t going to have negative “repercussions” around the world. For one thing, persisting in a useless policy towards Cuba doesn’t tell us anything about Washington’s willingness to back up its guarantees elsewhere in the world. It does hint that the U.S. is eventually capable of recognizing policy failure when it is staring it in the face, and that has to be modestly reassuring to our allies and regional neighbors. If there are any repercussions from this decision, they are all likely to benefit America. Latin American governments will have less of a reason to fault U.S. policy towards Cuba. The U.S. will be able to demonstrate that it is still capable of resuming relations with states that it has previously treated as pariahs, and that might make U.S. diplomacy more effective in other places.
Ishaan Tharoor finds it odd that Republicans who tout the benefits of trade liberalization everywhere else don’t extend the same optimism to Cuba:
It’s a strange irony that some of Washington’s biggest proponents of free trade don’t want to see the United States enable such liberalizing changes in Cuba. Closer ties to Cuba, including trade links, will ideally lead to a deepening of Cuba’s own curtailed civil society. That, at least, is the current message of the Obama administration. The more open Cuba gets, the more access its people may have to the Internet and to outside channels of information. That, the hope goes, may speed political reform in Havana.
Critics may point to countries like China and Vietnam, where decades of economic development and free enterprise have yet to yield any real liberal, democratic dividend. But Cuba is fundamentally different; it exists in the U.S.’s shadow and its links to the American mainland, including some 1.5 million Cuban Americans, mean that even the most dogged authoritarian leader will struggle to inoculate the regime from American influence — that is, once Washington finally chooses to engage with Cuba.
Those who favor a continuation of our failed Cuba policy are a reflexive lot with a muddled argument. They’re the usual myopic tough guys–John McCain and Lindsey Graham immediately jumped on the President after his Cuba announcement today–who have no idea of the seductive power of the American way of life in the rest of the world. I can understand why the corroding Iranian regime would want to keep us out (a sign in Tehran: “When the Great Satan praises us, we shall mourn”). I’ve always thought: then let’s recognize the hell out of them. Let ‘em mourn. Let the Revolutionary Guard try to fend off Kanye West and Star Wars. Good luck with that.
Rich Lowry, however, insists that easing trade restrictions won’t spur the growth of free enterprise in Cuba, but rather will only enrich the Castro regime:
Consider tourism. The Cuban military has a enormous holding company called GAESA. One of its companies, Gaviota, operates an extensive network of hotels and resorts from which it earns a bonanza of foreign exchange, according to the strategic consultancy Stratfor. Imagine if the Pentagon owned the Radisson, Marriott and Hilton hotel chains. That is the Cuban tourism industry in a nutshell. If tourism were the key to empowering and eventually liberating the Cuban people, the country would be a robust democracy by now. About a million Canadian tourists go to Cuba every year. In total, more than 2 million tourists visit annually, and yet the Castro regime is still standing.
Michael Daly, meanwhile, points out that Cuba still harbors a number of American fugitives, including the infamous Assata Shakur:
Among the roughly 80 other American fugitives in Cuba is Ishmael Ali LaBeef, who hijacked an airplane after he and four buddies murdered eight innocents during a robbery at a Virgin Islands golf course in 1972. There is also Victor Gerena, who is wanted in connection with a $7 million armored car robbery in Connecticut in 1983. And then there is William Morales of the Puerto Rican independence group the FALN. He lost most of both hands while assembling a device in an FALN bomb factory in 1979, but managed to escape from a hospital ward where he was being fitted for prosthetic hands after being convicted of weapons charges and sentenced to 99 years.
Libby Copeland tells the story of Tamara Loertscher, “a woman arrested for drug use even though she says she stopped when she realized she was pregnant, brought to court and twice refused lawyers (even though her fetus was given one), and then sent to jail for 17 days, where she was placed in solitary confinement, denied prenatal care even as she began cramping, and not given her thyroid medication for two days, according to the woman and her lawyers”:
[Y]ou can’t consider Wisconsin’s punitive approach to pregnant women—which purports to protect “unborn children”—without first considering how the state has failed to promote actual family values.
Loertscher, who suffers from hypothyroidism and depression (they are often linked), says she quit her job last February during a depressive episode and then found herself without insurance. Wisconsin is one of the states that turned down the Medicaid expansion tied to Obamacare that might have made it easier for people in her situation to get health insurance. She says she started using meth and marijuana in an attempt to self-medicate for the fatigue and depression she was experiencing, using meth two to three times a week and marijuana less often. She also took an over-the-counter supplement for the thyroid problem.
Wisconsin is far from the only state to subject pregnant women to a different set of rules and the threat of arbitrary detention. Earlier this year, Tennessee became the first state in the nation to criminalize pregnancy outcomes, though other states have used existing child abuse laws to detain pregnant women.
Between 1973 and 2005, National Advocates for Pregnant Women have documented 413 documented cases in which a woman’s pregnancy was a necessary factor in criminal charges brought against her by the state. There have been an additional 350 cases documented within the last decade. In each of these cases, women have been deprived of due process, the right to legal counsel and other basic constitutional protections because they were pregnant.
The number one cause of death in Tennessee is drug overdose, surpassing the number of vehicle accidents fatalities in 2013. And pregnant women aren’t immune from addiction: approximately 900 babies were born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) in the state last year, a ten-fold increase from a decade ago. NAS is caused when mothers continue their opiate or narcotic drug use through pregnancy; babies can usually be weened off the drug within a few weeks after birth and there are no known long term effects.
However, Tennessee officials have declared NAS an “epidemic” and took action this past July with the implementation of Public Chapter 820. The law makes it possible for a woman to be charged with assault for the use of a narcotic drug while pregnant if her child is born harmed by the drug. An assault conviction is punishable by a fine and anywhere from one to 15 years in prison. So far, around 9 women have been charged under this law. The law has been controversial, with opponents saying it’s counter-productive to put a drug-addicted mother in jail.
Erik Voeten notes that, in one respect, Cuba isn’t the only country that’s been internationally isolated by the US embargo:
The United Nations General Assembly has voted since 1992 on an annual resolution on the “necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” In 1992, with the Cold War just ending, fewer than 50 percent of all member states voted in favor of the resolution (more than half abstained). The graph above shows how quickly any semblance of support for the embargo evaporated. In its latest iteration only Israel joined the Americans in voting against the resolution, although, to its credit, the United States did get the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau to abstain.
U.N. General Assembly resolutions have mostly symbolic value as they do not create binding legal obligations. Yet, U.S. isolation probably undermined the effectiveness of the embargo.
Juan Carlos Hidalgo applauds Obama’s decision to re-establish relations:
The president’s move should be uncontroversial. U.S. policy toward Cuba has been a blatant failure. It has not brought about democracy to the island and instead provided Havana with an excuse to portray itself as the victim of U.S. aggression. It has also served as the scapegoat for the dilapidated state of Cuba’s economy. Moreover, according to government reports, the embargo has also become somewhat of a U.S. security liability itself. As for the economic measures, they are significant in symbolism, yet limited in their likely impact as long as Cuba retains its failed communist economic system. The 114th Congress should pick where the president left off and move to fully end the trade embargo and lift the travel ban on Cuba.
The Bloomberg View editors argue that Obama’s move will hasten the end of the Castro regime, especially if (as is unlikely) Congress plays along and lifts the trade embargo:
The opening of embassies will also have beneficial effects diplomatically. It sucks some air out of the most fevered denunciations of the U.S. by fellow Cuban travelers such as Venezuela, makes it easier for the U.S. to partner with countries such as Brazil, and helps transform the doddering Castros from symbols of resistance to minor diplomatic players.
Of course, as long as the U.S. embargo remains in place, the Castros will retain some of their revolutionary cachet, not to mention their grip on Cubans’ livelihoods. For that to go away, and for Cuba to leave socialism and its 1950s Chevrolets in the rearview mirror, the U.S. Congress must act: Under the terms of the Helms-Burton Act and other laws, the embargo can’t be fully lifted without its concurrence.
Fallows calls the embargo the stupidest American policy of the last 35 years:
I choose “at least 35 years” as the demarcation point for undeniable irrationality because that is when the U.S. fully normalized its relations with mainland China. If successive Republican and Democratic administrations could see the merit of trying to engage (rather than exclude) a one-party repressive communist-run state, even when that state had four times as many people as the U.S. did, and is nuclear-armed, and is a regional rival of several U.S. allies, how much more obvious is the case for a tiny little island practically within eyesight of the American mainland and certain to fall under the sway of U.S. cultural and economic influence if given a chance?
Not to mention that recognizing the People’s Republic of China meant cutting off America’s relationship with the people and government of the Republic of China on Taiwan, which itself has twice the population of Cuba and nearly 10 times as large an economy. There is no comparable tit-for-tat cost for the U.S. in normalizing relations with Cuba.
Keating wonders, however, what Castro’s motives are:
“I do think that they’re trying to lay the groundwork for a process of change in which they can keep their scalps and guide the country toward a more sustainable political system,” Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director and chairman of the Cuba Working Group at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, told Slate.
The other big factor at play here is the turmoil in Venezuela. The South American nation threw the tottering Cuban economy a lifeline during the regime of Hugo Chávez, providing the island with 100,000 barrels of oil per day. Today, in the aftermath of Chávez’s death and bruised by political turmoil and the plummeting price of oil, Venezuela’s economy is in chaos and the government is on the verge of defaulting on its debt. “You don’t need to be a capitalist to realize that Venezuela’s economy is in very dire straits,” said [Christopher] Sabatini. “It’s getting worse literally by the day. So they’re going to lose that benefactor.” Add the Venezuela situation to the Castros’ advancing years and you can understand what’s driving Raúl toward a more accommodating stance.
Jason Koebler highlights what a big deal it will be for Cuba to finally get the Internet:
What’s this all have to do with the internet there? Well, the submarine cable system that connects much of the world with fiber optics has basically bypassed Cuba. Instead, the country has been relying on extremely old and slow satellite technology to give its people (limited and censored) internet access. Obama specifically said he will allow American telecom companies to work with Cuba. …
That’s huge. Internet access in the country is abysmal. Only 5 percent of Cubans have internet access, and barely anyone had internet in their homes until this year, when the state-owned Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba began offering very limited, very slow internet connections to some residents. Before that, the internet was only available at 118 kiosks, where residents had to pay $4.50 an hour (an astronomical sum in Cuba) to use computers.
Responding to that clip, Allahpundit finds that notion entirely fatuous:
This is exactly what it sounds like, a guy seemingly willing to trade away greater prosperity for Cubans if it means Americanizing the island in return for preserving the quaint, simple culture that decades of authoritarianism and economic retardation have produced. It’s basically the “noble savage” view of economics. What doth it profit a Cuban to gain a middle-American depot for cheap building materials if he lose his cheap-rum-making soul? Where are we going to go to watch people riding around in 60-year-old Studebakers now?
Ryan Kearney accuses those afraid of “spoiling” Cuba of fetishizing poverty:
When Americans daydream about visiting Cuba before it’s “spoiled,” they’re implying that the island today is some kind of paradise. I have been there. It is not a paradise.
The buildings in Havana are literally crumbling, many of them held upright by two-by-fours. Even the cleanest bathrooms are fetid, as if the country’s infrastructural bowels might collectively evacuate at any minute. And the streets are riddled with potholes, some large enough to swallow a Russian Lada. The country isn’t so much frozen in time as in a state of perpetual rot, which is exactly what the 1961 embargo was designed to do.
But the cars! Yes, let’s talk about those cars. Cubans don’t drive American antiques because they love American antiques as much as we do, but because they have no choice.
There is, however, a real argument to be made that opening up the Cuban economy could have negative consequences. As Neil Irwin elaborates, “one of the biggest risks might be moving too fast”:
That is a conclusion of some scholars who very much favor economic liberalization of Cuba — but want it done right. Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Barbara Kotschwar, scholars at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, published a book this spring looking at the hard task of reintegrating the two economies as Fidel and Raúl Castro fade from the political scene. Their conclusions suggest it would be foolhardy to imagine a rapid return to the days when American tourists frequented the Tropicana, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had an office in Havana.
There is, they argue, a model for how not to make the transition, a prime example being Russia’s “shock therapy” approach to privatizing industries and introducing democratic government after the demise of the Soviet Union. … Cubans — and Americans wanting to do business there — will be better off if they instead emulate Vietnam and China, two countries that have migrated from Communism to a hybrid system that is nominally Communist but practices free-market capitalism to a large degree. That has allowed them to become more fully integrated into the global economy and helped millions of their citizens escape poverty over the last generation without bloodshed or revolution.
Likewise, Dougherty warns that embracing free markets – which Cuba hasn’t exactly signed on to anyway – won’t magically heal the damage done by half a century of communism:
Law and order can make markets appear. But it is civil society and a culture of social trust that make free markets tolerable. And it is precisely this social trust that communism so effectively destroys. “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” became a de facto motto for the late Soviet Union. Cuba, like East Germany or the Czech Republic, has a memory of a modern civil society before communism. Some even remember when it was a relatively wealthy nation. But the memory is an ever-more distant one. The news of normal diplomatic relations is to be welcomed, as is the end of a useless American policy. But Cuba’s restoration will require something that an army of policy experts cannot provide.
Clive Irving, meanwhile, focuses on the environmental drawbacks of opening up Cuba to more tourism:
[B]efore a new tide of tourists can flow from Miami to Havana, Cuba will need to build more runways. The two airports taking the most tourist traffic, Havana and Varadero, are already at near capacity in peak season with flights from Canada, Europe and Latin America. More runways, more hotels, more roads, more infrastructure? The island faces an environmental challenge of huge proportions. With more than 3,000 miles of coastline, Cuba is the Caribbean’s largest island and the most ecologically diverse. There are six UNESCO biosphere reserves and nine UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Although tough environmental controls were put in place in 2000, enforcement has been haphazard. Surging coastal development has destroyed natural protection—mangroves and wetlands, just at the time when Cuban scientists calculated that climate change would wreak havoc.
It’s also worth noting that the possible transformation of Cuba into an tourist mecca for Americans may not come about due to the baleful depredations of free-market capitalism, but might just as well come about through centralized state planning. Responding at length to Jeremy Scahill’s tweet that “I’m glad I got to visit several times before US tourists try to turn it into Cancun,” Josh Barro observes:
Cancun isn’t a symbol of free market capitalism, and American tourists didn’t make the place what it is today. An arm of the Mexican central bank did, in perhaps the largest and most successful example of central economic planning in North American history. Cuba should be so lucky as to have made its planned economy work as well as Cancun’s.
Barro’s account of the way Cancun got to be Cancun is fascinating, but it seems he missed Scahill’s gist.
The point is I don’t want the infant mortality rates to go up, free eduction and health care to be abolished in Cuba
This is point worth taking very seriously. Socialists have a terrible habit of romanticizing the Cuban dictatorship, and whitewashing its crimes. Still, as repressive totalitarian regimes go, the quality of life in Cuba is remarkably high.
According the United Nation’s Human Development Index – which takes into account a life-expectancy, education, and per-capita GDP – Cuba ranks 44th in the world, while Mexico ranks a 61st. 61st isn’t bad (there are 187 countries in the index), but 44th is pretty good! One might reasonably wonder about the credibility of Cuba’s national statistics, but if they’re in the neighborhood of the truth, this level of human development is a remarkable achievement for such a low-income country, a real outlier, and it would be a pity if opening up Cuba led to a reversal health and education. But I’m not too worried. I think I also agree with Scahill about this:
The assumption that Cuba–with or without the Castros–will overwhelmingly embrace neoliberal economic policies is laughable
Neoliberal or not, opening up Cuba ought to make it a good deal wealthier. If the Cubans are able to use that extra money to shore up the policies and institutions that already work surprisingly well, then loss of a little undeveloped shoreline, and a little Cancunification, will be a small price to pay.
The Dish 