INTRO NOTE by Walter Lippmann

What's wrong with handing out high-tech gear in Cuba?

The first thing that's wrong is that it is illegal under Cuban law. The agent
who entered Cuba on a tourist visa could not have brought the satellite
telephones and laptops in his luggage. Cuban customs would have prevented that
on his arrival. Someone must have supplied them to him once inside the island.
Who supplied these things to him?

Oh, and these aren't the cell phones that you and I normally have here in the
United States to call friends and family. These are cell phones with an
international capability which cost upwards of a thousand dollars a MONTH.
Here are some of the details:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2824.html

Who is paying for this and what do they expect to receive for these services?

Under the terms of the Helms-Burton, Torricelli and other laws, US policy is to
help organize the overthrow of the Cuban government and the social system which
that government defends. Washington budgets tens of MILLIONS of US taxpayer
dollars per year toward this "regime change" project for Cuba

It shouldn't come as any surprise to learn that the Cuban authorities don't take
such activity lightly or lying down.

Sabatini claims that the US helped opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship in
Chile, but that's utterly false. In fact the US helped Pinochet to impose his
dictatorship and to maintain it through the years. But contrast, Washington is
doing everything it can to overthrow the Cuban government.

In time we should expect to learn something more about what this agent was
doing, who was funding him, and what he was distributing and to whom during his
operations in Cuba.

Then we may be better able to answer the question of what's wrong with such
activities, beyond that it's just wrong in the first place.

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FOREIGN POLICY
Our Hapless Man in Havana
For a month, Cuba has detained a USAID contractor for passing out laptops. It's
time for the U.S. to send over a whole lot more.
BY CHRISTOPHER SABATINI | JANUARY 7, 2010

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/07/our_hapless_man_in_havana

For the last month, the Cuban government has detained an American contractor for
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing him of secretly
distributing laptops and other communications devices in Cuba and calling it
espioniage. Unfortunately, the incident has occasioned the usual, tired debate
about what the United States is doing in Cuba and why. What this incident really
should spark is a close look at Cuba's retrograde political repression and the
United States' policy paralysis when it comes to its island neighbor.

The very fact that Cuba arrested the USAID contractor for doing nothing more
than handing out laptops says more about Cuban paranoia than U.S. policy. In
what other country in the hemisphere would it be considered a crime for a
foreigner to give out a cell phone, laptop, or any other modern tool of
communication? Brazil? Argentina? Mexico? Venezuela? Of course not. In fact,
Americans passing out free cell phones and computers in those countries are
called, appropriately, humanitarians. Let's be clear: The Castro regime is
isolating its citizens from not just news and information, but from modernity.
It is one of a handful of governments on Earth still attempting such a
comprehensive level of repression. Sadly, though journalists do report this
simple fact, the surreal level of Cuban repression often takes a back seat to
criticism of U.S. policy.

In these cases, U.S. articles often insinuate that Washington must be up to
something sinister in Cuba when describing such events. Just last week, the
hoary commentator on all things Cuba, Wayne Smith, lobbed a predictable partisan
criticism. He argued that President Barack Obama's administration is continuing
the policies of his predecessor, fomenting rebellion in the communist country
while severely restricting trade with the island. (Never mind that the policy of
providing assistance to independent civil society groups in Cuba started under
Bill Clinton.)

But what's so sinister about a citizen receiving or having a laptop or a cell
phone? Nothing -- unless the government is maintaining a chokehold on power by
holding its citizens frozen in the past. Now, full disclosure here: I used to be
the director for Latin America at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
where I proudly helped distribute basic communications tools to
independent-minded citizens and groups inside Cuba. We provided simple things
like pencils, paper, and reading materials -- and we're not talking about
anti-Castro screeds. We supported the distribution of documents about
internationally recognized human and labor rights.

Sadly, rather than lauding the effort to bring change to Cuba, the media
harangued NED with constant questions about why we were meddling in another
country. It is a question, I hasten to add, that no journalist would have asked
when NED provided the same goods to similar groups in Chile under the strong arm
of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. But today's Cuba is repressive in a way all Americans
should consider shocking. Take, for instance, the "Black Spring" of 2003, when
the Havana government arrested 75 dissident leaders and sentenced them to prison
terms averaging 18 years for doing nothing more than holding a meeting of
like-minded citizens in their homes.

The truth is that the U.S. media too often forgets to ask whether possessing a
laptop or a pamphlet merits a decades-long spell in a squalid prison cell. Nor
does the media recognize that U.S. programs in Cuba aren't cloak-and-dagger.
There is no dagger -- and to consider basic communications tools the legal
equivalent of an anticommunist weapon is to take the deranged, power-obsessed,
atavistic view of the Cuban government. As for the cloak: The Cuban regime's
absurd abrogation of its citizens' rights to information makes it necessary.

Ultimately, though, last month's arrest of the USAID contractor demonstrates the
ineffectiveness of Obama's much-heralded April announcement of opening up
telecommunications with Cuba. In his speech, Obama called for a change in U.S.
policy, allowing private companies to develop direct contacts with the Cuban
people. It sounded nice, but unfortunately something got lost in the translation
from presidential directive to governmental regulation to reality.

The final regulations that resulted and were released in September did little to
advance any of Obama's lofty rhetoric. The sale or construction of
telecommunications infrastructure to Cuba by U.S companies -- necessary to allow
the famously antiquated island to have digital contact with the rest of the
world -- is forbidden. Instead, what is allowed are donations, something Cuba
already permits.

Simply put, Obama's plan is not enough to unleash the initiative and potential
of private businesses to open up the island. Imagine a board meeting at a
telecom company considering Cuba's potential. "Ladies and gentlemen, while we
can't sell our equipment to the island, I propose donating cell-phone towers,
handsets, routers, and other equipment," the executive might say, "because
someday in the unforeseeable future we may be able to invest there -- and in the
meantime, we'll give it away."

Even the much-vaunted promise of allowing the laying of a fiber optic cable to
Cuba -- which would provide Cubans with access to high-speed Internet -- didn't
foresee the infrastructure requirements necessary to make it work on the island.
You can't plug a fiber optic cable in like a toaster. The Obama team's sole
effective change has been to allow executives to travel to Cuba on
telecommunications-related business.

None of this matters for the poor American contractor who spent Christmas in a
Cuban jail, a political pawn in a sorry game. That what he did is a "crime" is
the fault of the Cuban regime. But the fact that he was tasked with such a
low-level activity, handing out communications devices, is the fault of the
broader framework of U.S. regulations. I do not advocate a wholesale lifting of
the U.S. embargo on Cuba. But, I do believe Washington should create the
regulatory scenario in which the U.S. private sector can do its transformative
best. Sadly, given the September regulations, we're not there yet.

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WALTER LIPPMANN
Los Angeles, California
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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