What I find interesting, as a foreigner, is how many American policies show so little faith in the power and influence of American business and culture. If there's anything that's helped transform the world in the past fifty years, it's American culture. If Cubans had more baseball, Hollywood, hip hop and Andy Warhol over the past 4 or 5 decades, I'd bet we'd be looking at a much different situation. Alone they won't turn Cuba into a model democracy. But cultural and economic exchange is a good start, and a great way mitigate tensions and hostility between nations.
What do America's policies towards Cuba say about Americans' own belief in the transformative power of their culture? Do they really have faith in free markets and free cultural exchange as democratizing agents?
As the first generation of Cuban exiles is passing leadership onto the next, with the Cold War fading out of recent memory, and the prospect of Castro's imminent death, hope for a more sane Cuba policy has begun to poke its head out from beneath the red-baiting, electoral cowardice we've come to know and love. The perennial "sanctions on Cuba are idiotic, counterproductive to democratization, and inhumane" re-assertment of obvious fact might actually gain some traction.
But no. As if to reaffirm its fucked-up priorities in the most blatant, middle-finger to the concept of justice sort of way, the Bush administration has enabled Luis Posada Carriles to walk out of prison. Carriles is a violently anti-Castro paramilitary who parlayed his CIA training into a central role in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed 73 people. While potentially innocent people remain deprived of legal recourse in Guantanamo, the Bush administration's refusal to extradite or aggressively prosecute Carriles for political sensitivity reasons has let a murderer walk out on bail.
Earlier today, for lack of compelling reason for continued detention, an appeals court allowed the release of Carriles.
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What do America's policies towards Cuba say about Americans' own belief in the transformative power of their culture? Do they really have faith in free markets and free cultural exchange as democratizing agents?