Pressure Points

Several weeks ago I wrote an "Expert Brief" for the Council on Foreign Relations titled "Time to Tighten the Screws on Cuba?" There I argued that the one-sided and unfortunate concessions the Obama administration made to Cuba had helped the regime but not the Cuban people, and urged the Trump administration to go even further than it has already gone in reversing those concessions. Americans' travel to Cuba was one of the topics I covered: The Trump administration has left most of Obama’s major changes intact, despite the new president’s tough rhetoric. “The previous administration’s easing of restrictions on travel and trade does not help the Cuban people—they only enrich the Cuban regime,” President Trump said in June 2017. Under Trump’s leadership, the United States has restricted commerce with Cuban entities owned by the military and security services, such as hotels owned by the Cuban army, and it has ended individual travel. The State Department also warned Americans not to visit Cuba following attacks first reported in 2017 on U.S. diplomatic personnel there that left two dozen with serious and unexplained health problems. However, Trump has not altered regulations covering commercial flights and cruises to Cuba or travel by tour groups. It is too early to judge whether Trump’s policies will have a significant commercial impact. Cruise ship passenger arrivals appear to be rising, but multiple airlines have canceled flights from the United States due to low demand. The net effect on U.S. citizen travel to Cuba will have to be calculated after another year or two. Now we have some preliminary information about U.S. citizen travel to Cuba, and it suggests a substantial reduction. Reuters has just published a story titled "U.S. visits to Cuba plunge following Trump measures." The story quotes the Cuban Ministry of Tourism’s commercial director, Michel Bernal, saying that "The total of U.S. clients is only 56.6 percent of what it was in 2017." This is a larger drop than I anticipated and suggests that the Trump administration's steps are having a substantial impact.  Last week Raul Castro stepped down as president of Cuba, leading some journalists and analysts to believe that real change had come to the island. It has not. Raul Castro remains head of the Cuban Communist Party and the Cuban armed forces, and other members of the Castro family hold critically important and powerful posts. For example, Raul’s only son, Col. Alejandro Castro Espín, heads intelligence and domestic security for the army and interior ministry. The new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, is surrounded--but that may not matter very much because Diaz-Canel is himself an apparatchik with a long history of service to the Castros and to the Communist party. As an article in The Atlantic noted, immediately after being sworn in Diaz-Canel said “I affirm to this assembly that comrade Raul will head the decisions for the present and the future of the nation. Raul remains at the front of the political vanguard.” In this at least Diaz-Canel spoke truthfully. That's why the Trump administration was right to judge the Obama opening to Cuba as a gift to the Castros: “The previous administration’s easing of restrictions on travel and trade does not help the Cuban people—they only enrich the Cuban regime,” President Trump said last year. And it is why reversing those concessions was right and should go further. The regime is vulnerable, especially now that Venezuelan help is no longer available to it. Pressure (something the Obama administration never really tried) might elicit some human rights concessions. At the very least, the United States should demonstrate that we realize Cuba remains a communist tyranny, and that we remain entirely on the side of the Cuban people in their long struggle for freedom. 

The Latin American summit meeting in Lima, Peru this coming weekend occurs just a week before Raul Castro "steps aside" and Cuba has a new president. But consider this anomaly: Venezuelan president Maduro has been excluded from the Summit because he is trying to turn Venezuela into a new Cuba--while the head of the actual Cuba is allowed to attend. It makes no sense. Now, 34 Latin American heads of state and heads of government have joined together to protest Castro's presence and to urge that his "successor" not be recognized as the legitimate leader of Cuba. After all, there has never been a free election in Castro's Cuba, and the Cuban people had no say whatsoever in selecting Raul's "successor." I keep using quotation marks because Castro himself will remain head of the Cuban Communist Party, so how much power he is actually giving up remains to be seen.  The 34 Latin leaders should get U.S. support. The Miami Herald story says this: Former Latin American presidents on Wednesday urged participants in the upcoming VIII Summit of the Americas to reject the new Cuban government scheduled to take power next week. The former leaders of Costa Rica, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, and of Bolivia, Jorge Quiroga, issued the statement on behalf of the 37 former heads of state and government that are part of the Democratic Initiative in Spain and the Americas. They urged summit participants to “reject the presidential elections called by the dictatorship” and “refuse to recognize as legitimate the newly elected members of the National Assembly, the Council of State and its president because they do not represent the will of the people.” The declaration, read from the halls of the Peruvian congress, also demands an end to the Cuban government's repression of opponents and the release of political prisoners. Vice President Pence will represent the United States at the Summit. His remarks should note this appeal from the 34 Latin American democratic leaders, and back it. Raul Castro should never have been allowed to attend, and there should be no recognition of what former Bolivian president Jorge Quiroga correctly called “dynastic succession … a change of tyrants in a dictatorial system” in Cuba. The Herald reports that "the former government leaders also endorsed a proposal for a binding plebiscite on whether Cubans want 'free, just and pluralistic elections' pushed by the Cubadecide coalition headed by Cuban opposition activist Rosa María Payá." So should Mr. Pence, who should equally back the call to release all political prisoners in Cuba. If hemispheric solidarity for freedom is the central theme of his remarks, this could be a historic speech.  

When President Trump thought about acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the arguments against it were familiar—and had persuaded previous presidents. The secretary of state, Rex Tillerson at that time, argued that the negative Arab reaction would be large, swift, and significant.  In the event, there was not much of an Arab reaction. Remember the riots and huge demonstrations from Casablanca to Cairo to Baghdad to Jakarta? No, because there were none. Nor was the reaction from Arab governments very big.  All opposed the decision, but used words like unjust or unfortunate or unhelpful, which are not exactly declarations of war.  This past Friday and the Friday before that, Hamas organized very large demonstrations at the Gaza/Israel border. Last Friday, perhaps 20,000 people turned out. Many more (perhaps twice as many) had shown up on March 30th, and that decline must be a worry to Hamas.  The word “demonstrations” is actually wrong: there were armed men among the crowds, and their purpose was not ultimately to “demonstrate” but to crash the border fence so that thousands of Gazans could enter Israel—where some who were Hamas soldiers would no doubt have committed acts of violence including murder, arson, and kidnapping. The death toll ten days ago was 18 (or up to 23; accounts vary) and last Friday 10 more, according to Hamas. These events have elicited the predictable denunciations, not least from Arab capitals, and cautions and calls for restraint, not least from UN officials. The United States had to block a UN Security Council resolution on Saturday, April 7 (proposed by Kuwait, the Arab representative on the Council) because it did not demand that Hamas stop these dangerous attempts to storm the border and because it called for an international investigation. Israel’s and our experience with such “investigations” is that they are unfair, biased against Israel, and achieve nothing.  But once again, where are the riots and large and spontaneous demonstrations in the Arab world (or anywhere else for that matter)? Absent. Arab governments do not like to encourage very large demonstrations because they always run the risk of getting out of hand and turning violent or turning against the regimes themselves. Moreover, those regimes are simply tired of having Palestinian politics interfere with their own. Still, if there were a huge popular reaction it would need to be respected and channeled into some large public protests. Apparently it is absent as well. (1500 Arab Israelis marched peacefully in Sakhnin, in the lower Galilee, on Saturday.) Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas alleged Israel was “murdering defenseless, peaceful protesters” and called on the world to stop “the barbarism and killing of the occupation army.” But he is an enemy of Hamas and wants to see its new tactic of border clashes defeated; his statements are meant to palliate Palestinian public opinion, not to evoke public protests. His problem is that he appears to be doing nothing while Hamas is making news.  Citizens of Gaza have plenty to protest about, starting with misrule by Hamas and the terrible economic situation in which so many Gazans find themselves. Hamas tends to react by seeking more violence, attacking Israel with rockets or with this kind of dangerous clash at the border. Of course none of that helps Gazans. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have actually made a constructive proposal: in exchange for a decision by Hamas to avoid any more such border violence, the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza would be opened. Egypt has often kept Rafah closed, sometimes to punish Hamas for suspected collusion with terrorists in Sinai, sometimes at the behest of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah (which wants to be in control of the crossing). The Saudi and Egyptian proposal marks out a sensible path forward. Misery in Gaza is not in Israel’s interest. It is as likely to strengthen as to weaken Hamas. The lack of electricity means sewage goes untreated, and when it enters the Mediterranean contaminated waters can spread north to Israel’s ports and beaches. A lack of medical supplies and working hospitals could even some day lead to an epidemic that can cross into Israel, as the Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea has pointed out. The Trump administration understands this point perfectly well, which is why it convened a conference on Gaza in March. Israel, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar were among the attendees, who also included the EU and eight European countries, Canada, and Japan. Notice who’s missing? The Palestinian Authority, which refused to attend. Misery in Gaza is not President Abbas’s real concern.  U.S. Middle East negotiator Jason Greenblatt said at the conference that politics should be put aside in the search for “realistic and practical solutions” that do not “put the security of Israelis and Egyptians at risk” and “do not inadvertently empower Hamas, which bears responsibility for Gaza’s suffering.” That’s the right approach, and one the Saudis and Egyptians understand. Perhaps it will be impossible to make progress, but the effort should be pursued—for practical as well as humanitarian reasons.  As with the Arab protests against President Trump’s Jerusalem decision, protests about Gaza are not large and will probably disappear soon. But the problem that Gaza represents to Israel and Egypt will not, so these efforts to figure out a way to avoid more misery without strengthening Hamas should go forward. The Palestinian Authority does not like them and Hamas presumably has very mixed views of them. But for the rest of the world, this path rather than the standard denunciations of Israel and unbalanced UN resolutions makes far more sense.