High Fidelity

When the news first broke about Fidel Castro's health crisis (which, considering the political nature of his country, probably means impending death), a couple things struck me as curious. One was how weirdly optimistic the Miami crowd got, as if anything was going to change for the better. There's no reason to think that, unless we show some willingness to modify our stance and bring Cuba along the way we have with, to pull a completely random example, China, the new Cuban regime will not be just as hardline (if not more so) than the current Fidelist regime.

Whatever Castro's manifold evils, he apparently has some talent for finding sponsors, just as our regime has a brilliant knack for making (and keeping) bitter enemies out of potential entente partners. So you have new Mercosur partner Hugo Chàvez, flush with oil money and a huge chip on his shoulder at the Bushies' failed coup in '02, cutting deals with China and Iran, and bankrolling Castro. As always, nicely done, values voters, for this completely unnecessary and entirely preventable thorn in our side. Stick your vaunted "principles" in Tabasco and suck on them already, would you please?

The other thing that struck me as a bit hinky was how unaware we seemed to be at this occurrence. Castro is 80 years old, and we've tried to kill him countless times, spent inordinate amounts of time and energy propgandizing the area to keep the Miami Cubans politically solvent, and we operate a full-time concentration camp at the tip of the island. Yet Bush, always the proverbial deer in the foreign-policy headlights, seemed to have his pants around his ankles at this new development.

And since our "serious" news organizations, per usual, are too busy sniffing the ass of every two-bit crackpot over whether or not this most recent spate of 6,000 years of Middle East unrest is the absolute for-realsies this-time-we're-not-full-of-shit sign of Armageddon, we naturally have to turn to the German media for some insight on intel developments 90 miles from freakin' Florida.

"The president's comment was that everybody was caught by surprise, and we'll have to wait and see," reported US senator Robert Bennett, who discussed recent developments in Cuba with Bush on Tuesday.

"Wait and see" -- Bush's fecklessness shines through even in the official language. "We don't know what the condition of Fidel Castro is; we don't know the exact facts of this," White House spokesman Tony Snow said clumsily at a press briefing Tuesday. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack spoke in similar terms. "I don't think there are too many people outside that small core group of people who run Cuba who really know what is going on," he said Thursday.

So now -- as history arrives at the moment a whole generation once wished for -- the end of Castro's reign threatens to become a lost opportunity. Instead of reaching out to a new Cuba and playing a constructive role in the state's transformation, Washington is relying on old, unsuccessful recipes: blockade, sanctions and a hardline approach.

"U.S. policy is going to remain the same irrespective of whether it's Fidel Castro or Raul Castro in power," sighs Daniel Erikson, a Cuba expert at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank. Pride leads to stubbornness: "If the Cuban government implements a smooth transfer, that would indicate a failure of U.S. policy," Erikson says.

The fact of the matter is, there is no policy, besides merely leaving the long-standing policy on autopilot, because it is electorally convenient. This is a disservice all the way around -- to the people living under Castro's thumb, to Cuban-Americans letting themselves be played by cynical interests, and to the rest of Americans, who can do nothing but sit and watch as a senseless, counterproductive policy perpetuates itself. You want to know what the U.S.' Cuba policy is, watch the cake-cutting scene from Godfather II.

I have no illusions about Castro's workers' paradise, though perhaps there is something useful to be gleaned from Cuba's very competitive rates of literacy, infant mortality, and health care. But as with Israel and many other places, we get bogged down in false equivalences of self-styled "morality", when every single one of us knows that, if Cuba had oil or cheap labor or something else for us to exploit, we would find a way to deal with them. We find a way to deal with repulsive dictators like Teodoro Obiang, a man known to literally stake dissidents to anthills. We launder his money and enable his vicious oppression, because he has oil, and we want it.

This is why I have no patience for moral arguments that loudly proclaim "clarity" and eschew "nuance", yet are precisely the opposite when examined on substance. Castro is a goner, and we have a real opportunity here. There is nothing to be lost by figuring out what we want, sending an envoy to Cuba to talk to Raul Castro and his henchmen, and starting a dialogue. They want something, we want something. That is the beginning of negotiations.

Or we can continue the morally craven stance of pretending to be morally superior, so a claque of party activists can keep their congressional seats secure. I have absolutely no doubt as to which path we will choose. The past, as always, is prologue.