On a Friday evening in late March, over 100 people jammed into the back room at Tampa’s Mise en Place restaurant for the beginning of a two-day conference on U.S./Cuba relations. Many in the audience had come to hear the keynote speaker, Miami Democratic Congressman Joe Garcia.
Garcia failed to appear as scheduled, but it’s doubtful his comments would have resonated as much as the remarks by Tampa’s own Kathy Castor. The congresswoman stunned many in the audience when she forcefully declared that the U.S. government’s 51-year restrictions on travel and trade with Cuba no longer made any sense — going further in condemning the sanctions than any Florida lawmaker has ever gone.
Alluding to the fact that significant issues still remained, Castor insisted that they could be dealt with diplomatically.
“I am confident that change is on the horizon,” she began. “Think about what can happen at the Port of Tampa, ports all across the Southeast. All across America. These are values that we share as Americans — trade, travel and the ability to have a productive dialogue. There’s no reason any longer that it should not move forward.”
Among those cheering Castor that evening was Nation magazine contributor Peter Kornbluh of the D.C.-based National Security Archive. He now calls Castor a “trailblazer for a new, modern, post-Cold War policy towards Cuba,” and says the four-term congresswoman can be the catalyst to redefine the Florida-Cuba relationship, which until now has generally been controlled by Castro-hating exiles who live in Miami.
Castor is in as good a position as anyone to change the conversation. Her district and surrounding areas include over 100,000 Cuban-Americans, and when she made her trip to Cuba last month, she became only the third Tampa lawmaker ever to do so.
Her visit and proclamation came just weeks before another milestone: At the end of this month, the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce will make its first fact-finding trip to the island, accompanied by three Tampa City Council members.
Simultaneously, efforts continue around the U.S. not only to end the travel ban but also to remove Cuba from the list of terrorist-supporting nations.
Cuba has been on that list since 1982, and remains so according to the State Department, because it has “publicly opposed” the U.S.-led war on terror and maintains friendly relationships with other state sponsors of terrorism. But in 1998, a comprehensive review by the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Cuba does not pose a threat to U.S. national security.
But Miami-based blogger Alberto De La Cruz, who blasted Congresswoman Castor for her statements since returning from Cuba, says the 1998 report was largely authored by U.S. intelligence expert Ana Belen Montes, who three years later was arrested and convicted of being a spy for the Cuban government over a 17-year span.
Hogwash, replies Peter Kornbluh. He says that while Montes was a leading analyst, the report was by no means a one-person operation. “She was not the primary and solo individual who did this massive report on the fact that the [Cuban] military had significantly deteriorated and the U.S. military did not see them as a threat.”
Last week the World Trade Center of Tampa Bay, a local business group that hopes to cash in if and when the trade embargo is lifted, hosted a panel discussion in downtown Tampa debating the terrorist designation.
“Debating” is debatable, perhaps, since five of the six panel members were in agreement that the designation should go. Tampa Attorney John Grandoff pointed out that certain nations have been added and then subtracted from the list, such as North Korea in 2008.
“Where is North Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan?” he asked. “Where are other countries that could be deserving? Does Cuba have a totalitarian repressive regime? Yes, it does,” he said, citing a Human Rights Report with numerous incidents of violations. But then he rhetorically asked if Cuba was a hotbed of terrorism. “On par with Syria, Iran and Sudan [the other nations on the list]? No, it is not.”
Former Miami State GOP Representative Annie Betancourt, another of the panelists, said such a debate was still not possible in Miami.
The only panelist who spoke against removing Cuba from the terrorist list was Tampa attorney Ralph Fernandez, the hardest of Cuban hardliners. Yet even he seemed to have mellowed somewhat, saying at the meeting that he too now favors eliminating the ban on Americans traveling to Cuba.
Castor’s predecessor in Congress, Jim Davis, traveled to Cuba with Fernandez’ blessing. He met in advance with U.S. intelligence officials in a meeting Fernandez set up. But Fernandez says Castor did not avail herself of those same briefings, an omission he told CL last month was “unforgivable.”
But Castor obviously wasn’t intimidated by Fernandez and his ilk, whose criticisms are beginning to sound almost impotent in the wave of support for an end to the sanctions, or at least for a plan in the event that U.S. policies change.
The Chamber’s first trip to the island after years of being asked to do so is a step in that direction.
The conditions of the trip have raised some questions, however. The group is traveling under a “Person to Person” license (the same kind that Jay-Z and Beyoncé had) and not a higher listing that could get them in the door with Cuban government officials.
“They have no official meetings! Isn’t that the purpose of going?” thunders Al Fox, head of the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation in Tampa, and a man who has made over 80 trips to the island over the past few decades.
Fox coordinated a meeting two years ago between Chamber CEO Bob Rohrlack and Cuba’s top U.S. diplomat at the time, Jorge Bolanos. He is disappointed that the Chamber didn’t work through him in setting up this trip.
Rohrlack says he appreciates Fox’s work on the issue, but says that Fox is “looking at this as a one-chapter book, where we’re seeing this trip as potentially the first page of a very long book.” The Chamber head calls the Cuba journey “an experiential learning trip” and says Fox’s strategy is different from the Chamber’s.
The Chamber has not released the names of those attending the trip, which takes place May 29-June 2. Rohrlack says he will leave it up to the individual members whether or not to make their names public when they meet shortly before the trip.
The trip is not being organized out of Tampa but through the Southern California-based tour operator Premier World Discovery/Chamber Explorations, and includes visits to rum and cigar factories and several museums. The schedule does include a meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Investment to “discuss the business environment inside Cuba.” Rohrlack says he’s comfortable working with the California company because of its experience helping chambers of commerce tour Cuba, adding that he wanted to “stay above the fray” of working with a local group with a political agenda. (The Chamber did arrange its travel to and from Cuba with a local agency, Tampa-based Island Travel & Tours.)
Tampa City Councilmembers Mary Mulhern, Yolie Capin and Harry Cohen will be accompanying the Chamber on the visit. Though initially disappointed that the people-to-people license precludes meeting with Cuban officials, Mulhern says it’s a “very big step” for the Chamber to make this trip. She emphasizes that both the Chamber and Castor’s trip owe a debt of gratitude to Fox, who she says “has navigated the minefield of Tampa-Cuba relations in the last decade.”
Harry Cohen says he supports Congresswoman Castor’s call to reexamine current U.S. policies towards Cuba, but he’s trying to avoid any preconceived notions. “I’m making the trip primarily to learn, and I’m interested to see what opportunities exist for Tampa, once relations with Cuba and the U.S. are normalized.”
With this surge of positive energy, the question remains: What are the chances that Obama will heed Castor’s call and make significant changes to the 51-year-old embargo?
Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson remains skeptical. The former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in the first George W. Bush administration, Wilkerson has been working for the past several years with a group of U.S. and Cuban officials in so-called Track II efforts on a report that the two countries could have better relations. He hopes the report can be presented to White House officials sometime this month, but in a conversation with CL last week he admitted that he was “very, very cynical” that Obama would ever flip. He’s been critical of the president’s “moral courage,” and he also believes that while Cuba might be of huge interest to himself and the people of Florida, it simply doesn’t rank that high when talking foreign policy, not with Syria, Iran, China and other entities taking precedence.
“I do hope that people beneath the president will gain a little courage from some of the recommendations we’re going to make and be a little more forceful in pushing these recommendations with the White House,” he says, “and maybe break something loose in the way of better procedures for agricultural sales, better procedures for other Americans than Cuban Americans to visit Cuba.”
The NSA’s Peter Kornbluh agrees with Wilkerson to a degree, but says that the hardline Cuba lobby in Congress is a shadow of its former self, with one notable exception — New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he “can do a tremendous amount of damage,” warns Wilkerson, such as holding up ambassador appointments if he’s angry about an administrative change of position on Cuba.
There’s also the Helms-Burton law, which demands that before relations can be normalized Cuba must legalize all political activity; release all political prisoners and international inspections of Cuban prisons; abolish the Ministry of Interior, its State Security branch and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution; and hold free, fair and internationally supervised elections within 18 months after the transition government assumes power, with the participation of multiple political parties and free access to the mass media.
At the conclusion of a letter she wrote last week to the president and Secretary of State Kerry, Castor suggested that the Tampa Bay area would welcome the opportunity to host a dialogue between the U.S. and Cuba.
“Please heed the words of many of the Cuban dissidents I have spoken to who urge America to give greater attention to its island neighbor, lift the embargo and promote greater modernization of civil society in Cuba to benefit the Cuban people,” she wrote. “You can lay the groundwork for improvement.”
The next step is President Obama’s. Will he, as Lawrence Wilkerson wonders, show moral courage before the 2016 election cycle cranks up? Or will the voices of the status quo remain the order of the day?
This article appears in May 2-8, 2013.