WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

BOOKS: Volume XXI,  No 1, Spring 2004	Print
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Rumba Diplomacy in the Age of Bushismo
Ned Sublette *

One Havana morning in June 2001, members of the rumba group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas were filling out U.S. Optional Form 156 BNS, version in Spanish, to get visas for a forthcoming tour of the United States. I saw the old familiar question, “¿Es Ud. Miembro del Partido Comunista de Cuba? [Are you a member of the Communist Party of Cuba?] Sí ___ No ___.”

Below that, a new question had been rubber-stamped onto the printed form: “Es Ud. Miembro o Representante de Una Organización Terrorista? [Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?] Sí ___ No ___.” I took out a notebook and copied it down, because I didn’t believe my eyes. Was this perhaps a test of the applicant’s basic intelligence?¹

Shaking their heads in disbelief, the Muñequitos checked the “No” box.

That rubber-stamped question encapsulates the absurdity of U.S. policy toward Cuba. President Bush had been in office less than six months, and the “war on terrorism” was not yet a household catchphrase, but his new administration was eager to portray Cuba as a terrorist threat to the United States. This administration was, and is, permeated with the hardest of Cuba hardliners, who occupy positions of power as never before. That in turn has translated into a distortion of U.S. foreign policy, skewing our approaches both to Latin American policy and to national security.

The stated goal of the administration— regime change in Cuba—cannot be achieved without igniting a conflagration. Mean-while, 31 states have trade agreements with Havana under a 2000 law that permits the sale of foodstuffs to Cuba for cash, though the administration has lately been refusing to process visas for Cuban buyers and travel licenses for U.S. farmers. In statehouses around the country people are complaining that foreign policy has been hijacked by South Florida politics. To placate a small constituency demanding action against Fidel Castro, the administration is also undermining one of the most positive developments in U.S.-Cuban relations in the last 45 years—a cultural rapprochement between people in the United States and people in Cuba that took place in the 1990s, even as the politicians were busy talking tough.

The First Crack in the Wall

For the three decades prior to the 1990s, Cuba’s image to Americans was reduced to one easily demonizable figure: Fidel Castro, the Bearded One. A significant opening in 1978 under President Jimmy Carter brought important changes (family visits, direct U.S.-Cuba passenger flights). However, the early days of the Reagan administration saw a new militancy following the promotion into governmental circles of extremist figures from what a friend of mine in Florida calls the anti-Castro industry. Its influence in Washington thrived during the first Bush presidency and was somewhat held back—but hardly disappeared—during the Clinton years.

But during the 1990s, a popular movement in the United States, inspired by music, found its way through cracks in the regulations and brought the two countries closer together. This is not a mere platitude about the power of art; I saw it happening.

Los Muñequitos were an important part of that opening. Founded in 1952 in their home town of Matanzas, they are a music and dance troupe whose specialty is the variety of rumba called guaguancó, which apparently emerged in the 1880s in the same neighborhoods where the group’s members live today. Their art is complex and erudite, an Afro-Iberian synthesis with elements of Cuba’s Congo, Yoruba, Carabalí, and Dahomeyan heritage. They can identify each tradition for you rhythm by rhythm and step by step, because in Cuba black people still sing in their ancestral African languages, play drums from the motherland, and practice traditional African religions— a knowledge of inestimable cultural value that has been conserved in Cuba for the whole world to treasure.

I helped bring about the Muñequitos’ first U.S. tour, in October 1992. Produced by the Suitcase Fund of Dance Theater Workshop in New York City, it was carefully planned for two years in order to comply with U.S. laws and administrative regulations, which as they relate to Cuba have for decades resembled the law of a totalitarian country. Each performer had to be individually exempted from President Reagan’s Presidential Proclamation 5377, which prohibits employees of the Cuban government (construed to mean all Cubans) from entering the United States. The itinerary had to be approved by Washington. Performances had to be purely cultural or academic, not commercial, in nature—thus requiring bureaucrats to differentiate between culture and commerce, a distinction nowhere else clear in American society. The performers could not be paid for their work; they could only receive per diems.

The tour lasted nine weeks—an impressive itinerary for a 15-piece folkloric group that had never played in the United States.

It sold out halls everywhere. Muñequitos mania ensued; longtime fans of the group’s 1950s recordings came out of the woodwork. Their hotel in Manhattan became a site of pilgrimage, where New York’s most respected Latin musicians came by to hang. Some people suspended their daily lives to follow the tour around the country. The group’s members were astonished and overwhelmed by the outpouring.

The Muñequitos tour was by no means the first time artists living in Cuba had performed in the United States since the Cuban Revolution, but through their visibility and energy they established a useful precedent, even though admission policy remained capricious. In 1993, the Havana group Yoruba Andabo, whose repertoire is similar to that of the Muñequitos, came to New York, but the distinguished Afro-Cuban singer Merceditas Valdés, who was to have appeared with them, was denied entry, apparently because in the 1950s she had appeared in theatrical shows in New York and was thus deemed a commercial, and not a folkloric, performer. (Merceditas took the visa rejection very hard, and died in 1996 without having returned to the United States.) Another tour the same year by the Afro-Cuban pop group Mezcla was similarly vetted, resulting in the denial of visas to some band members.

Concerning Cuba, unfortunately, Democratic presidential candidates have a tradition dating back to John F. Kennedy of trying to outflank Republicans on the right. Thus in April 1992, at a lucrative fundraising luncheon in Miami’s Little Havana, Bill Clinton endorsed the embargo-tightening Cuban Democracy Act (also known as the Torricelli Bill, for its sponsor, the fundraising pitbull Rep. Robert Torricelli (D/NJ), who was subsequently elected to the Senate and left office under an ethics cloud). Candidate Clinton thereby goaded the first President Bush, who had opposed the bill, into signing it into law. In 1996, President Clinton signed the draconian Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (also referred to as Helms-Burton, or the Bacardi Bill, for the company whose lobbyist, Otto Reich, drafted much of it). Still, the entry criteria relaxed, and in March 1999, Cuban artists were exempted from Proclamation 5377, spectacularly increasing their visibility in the United States.

In 1996, Los Van Van (the number one contemporary dance band in Cuba since its founding in 1969) was granted a visa. After that, Cuban dance bands entered frequently, bringing with them the powerful new wave of percussion-rich big-band music called timba. Though boycotted by commercial U.S. Latin radio stations and subject to numerous legal restrictions, these formidable bands, rehearsed to the nines and ready to do musical battle, generated mini-cults in various U.S. cities. Also entering the United States were Cuban jazzistas, whose reputations preceded them and who were received like family by their stateside colleagues.

A few musicians sought the easily granted (to Cubans) “political asylum” to try their fortune in America, though none actually feared political persecution at home. Others found legal ways to remain in the United States. But most returned home, having made international connections and taking all kinds of musical, tech-nological, and social ideas back to Havana, gratified by the affection they received from their colleagues and the attention they received from the public, and in general feeling “oxygenated” by the experience, as one musician told me.

By 2001, you could feel the difference in Havana. A significant number of Cuban musicians had by then been to the United States and jammed with their American counterparts, and American musicians visiting Cuba were honored guests. Meanwhile, in New York, the influence of the Cubans was audible in the city’s music. Collaborations thrived despite arcane legal prohibitions. Friendships grew. People fell in love and got married, finding themselves with family in both countries. Artists were pioneering the work of tying the two societies together under conditions of mutual respect. It gave them a vision of what it might be like if the world were normal.

For the Muñequitos, a U.S. tour every year or two had become an important part of their lives. They played in Europe, but their natural turf was the United States, where in every city a core audience of black Cubans—a somewhat different group than what Americans often think of when they speak of the “Cuban-American communi-ty”—showed up in addition to the throngs of English-speaking Americans. On April 9, 2002, they even played a sold-out show at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater. They didn’t cause trouble; they represented their country, their city, and their barrio with good humor and dignity. They didn’t ask for political asylum; they went back home, where their neighbors envied them their accomplishments.

During all this time, if an American musician hired one of the Muñequitos to play a session—put a hundred bucks in a drummer’s hand and said, play me a track, and the musician took the money home to feed his family—that American would have been guilty of violating the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, a wartime emergency law created to stop American companies from trading with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, and applied to Cuba by a directive from President Kennedy in 1963.

A Window Opens

In 1988, there was a rare attack of sanity in U.S. Cuba policy when California representative Howard Berman tacked onto the otherwise unrelated Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act an amendment that explicitly legalized the unlimited importation from and exportation to Cuba (and other sanctioned countries) of “informational materials”—books, newspapers, pamphlets, posters, photographs, films, sound recordings, etc. This established a legal means of doing business with Cuba that did not exist for most industries, and gave legal cover to the release of recordings from Cuba in the United States.

At the time of my first visit to Cuba in January 1990,² there were perhaps five recordings on CDs of music from contemporary Cuba easily available in the United States, all on European labels. Meanwhile, New York salseros were trading fifth-generation cassettes of the hot new Cuban stuff. That year, with a partner, Ben Socolov, I started a record company, Qbadisc, to make modern Cuban music available to Americans. I also collaborated with the label Luaka Bop to produce a compilation of postrevolutionary Cuban music to which the company gave the perfect name: Dancing with the Enemy.

Qbadisc didn’t make much money, but it set a precedent, and by the mid-1990s hundreds of titles licensed from Cuba were available in American record stores from a slew of labels in America and Europe. However, this did not mean that the door was wide open for U.S. labels to do business with Cuban musicians. It was legal to license existing product, but not to finance the creation of new recordings, or to sign a Cuban artist to a recording contract, or to cause someone else to do so (e.g., to set up a dummy foreign corporation). Ironically, it would have been perfectly okay under Cuban law for a Cuban artist to sign a deal with us. On this score, Cuban law fostered free trade while U.S. law not only blocked it but handed international exploitation of the Cuban music industry over to the Europeans. It was difficult, if not impossible, for a U.S. company to promote Cuban artists by bringing them into the country for press conferences, to schedule tours, or to produce music videos.

The embargo of Cuba was not only a commercial boycott that isolated Cuba; it was a cultural boycott that isolated the United States, because in music, Cuba is, and has always been, a world power. Delving deeper into Cuban tradition, I slowly began to realize that our popular music histories had given scant credit to Cuban musical ideas that were central to the formation of American popular music, from ragtime to rock and roll. This ultimately became a major subtheme of my book Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. As early as the sixteenth century, creolized African music was traveling back from the New World via Havana to Seville and upward through Europe (becoming the sarabande and the chaconne). By the 1830s, the habanera, played by orchestras that included rhythmic percussion, had become a hemi-sphere-wide vogue, whose traces you can hear in Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”

The word habanera was used interchangeably with tango, whose characteristic rhythm came to Argentina from Cuba, and which appeared in the “St. Louis Blues” of W. C. Handy (who visited American-occupied Cuba in 1900). The 1931 success of “The Peanut Vendor” launched a rumba boom in the United States, and by the 1940s, Cuban music was transforming American popular music from the bass line up, as Dizzy Gillespie describes in his auto-biography.³ Rhythmic ideas from the mambo and the cha-cha-chá were basic to rock and roll, as in the case of the American garage-rock classic “Louie, Louie,” whose famous three-chord lick was appropriated by the song’s composer, Richard Berry, from a tune in the repertoire of the famous Cuban bandleader René Touzet, who lived in Los Angeles in the 1950s. But I digress.

Cuban Music Goes Multiplatinum

The most unlikely international hit ever was recorded in 1996 at Havana’s EGREM studio. Buena Vista Social Club featured a crew of mostly elderly Cuban musicians playing with American guitarist-producer Ry Cooder and his son under the British auspices of Nick Gold’s independent World Circuit label. A runaway phenomenon in Europe, it was released in the United States on Nonesuch (part of Time Warner) in September 1997. Had Nonesuch financed the creation of the master tape instead of merely distributing the finished product, it would have been committing a felony.

Buena Vista spurred a further boom in tourism to Cuba, especially after the success of the 1998 feature-length film of the same name. The picture’s stars became concert draws worldwide, and though the album was never released in Cuba, its signature tune, “Chan Chan,” crowded out “Guantanamera” as the song most frequently played by Cuban hotel bands.

The Clinton administration had not been bothering music companies. But the visibility of Buena Vista was too much: would-be travelers to Cuba were calling the Treasury Department and asking for the same permission that had been given to Ry Cooder. Unfortunately, Cooder had traveled without a license, and in 1999, he paid a $25,000 fine for his trespass. That’s a bar-

Rumba Diplomacy in the Age of Bushismo

gain only if you sell 6 million records worldwide, as Buena Vista did. Had Cooder financed the production of the record instead of merely directing the recording process in the studio, he could have been in even more trouble.

The 9/11 Aftershock

One night, I stopped by the Manhattan nightclub SOB’s, where the Havana dance band Dan Den was playing. I hadn’t even realized the group was on the bill, but it had come to seem normal for Cuban musicians to be playing here. I stayed and listened to the band, hung out with my friend, the group’s pianist/director Juan Carlos Alfonso, then walked the six blocks home. Down the street, a mile south, the twin towers of the World Trade Center—my nightlight—looked down at me. I noted the time as I came in: 1:38 A.M., September 11, 2001.

Just hours later, I watched and smelled the plume of smoke rise from where the towers had been. At that moment, Cuba was on the official U.S. list of seven state sponsors of terrorism, along with Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea. (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia were not on the list.) The Latin Grammy Awards, scheduled to take place that night in Los Angeles, were of course canceled.⁴ A number of nominated Cuban artists—a few of the foremost talents of one of the world’s richest musical territories—had jumped through all the hoops to come to L.A. to attend. Horrified, they watched the events unfold on television, and, like many others during those days, donated blood.

Six months later, on March 11, 2002, a Florida flight school received a notice from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that two of the September 11 hijackers had been approved for student visas. The ensuing embarrassing publicity caused new criteria for entry into the United States to be hastily put into place. Now, besides getting a visa, artists who wished to perform in the United States would have to undergo an additional security check, even if they had been in the county many times before. There was no indication of how long this check might take, but one thing was clear: it was going to become much more difficult to bring Cuban artists into the United States. Unfortunately, by then summer touring plans were already in place.

Meanwhile, the administration was ratcheting up its verbal attacks on Cuba. On May 6, 2002, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton gave a much-quoted speech at the Heritage Foundation (“Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction”) in which he announced that “the United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.”⁵ Cuba is quite proud of its biotechnology industry, but no credible evidence has been offered that it is producing biological weapons. In effect, Bolton was suggesting that any country that can produce its own pharmaceuticals poses a potential threat to the United States.

In the same speech, Bolton quoted Fidel Castro as having said, “at Tehran University,” that “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up.” This was complete hooey. The quote was fabricated.⁶ Nonetheless, it continues to be recycled in speeches, and it can still be found on the U.S. State Department web-site. Bolton’s apparent motive, aside from saber rattling, was to cast aspersions on Jimmy Carter’s forthcoming, precedent-shatter-ing, goodwill trip to Cuba. Fidel Castro vehemently denied the charge, and Carter himself took the unusual step of countering it while in Havana. Carter, who was visiting Cuba’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, noted that he had been briefed before his trip by the State Department, U.S. intelligence agencies, and the White House, and said, “I asked them specifically on more than one occasion is there any evidence that Cuba has been involved in sharing any information to any other country on Earth that could be used for terrorist purposes, and the answer from our experts on intelligence was ‘no.’... These allegations were made, maybe not coincidentally, just before our visit to Cuba.”

On May 13, Secretary of State Colin Powell backed off from the charge, saying, “We didn’t say that [Cuba] actually had some weapons, but it has the capacity and the capability to conduct such research,” and refused to make Bolton available to testify before Congress about the charge, infuriating Sen. Christopher Dodd (D/CT). The charge did not resurface in President Bush’s May 20 speech on Cuba, and has essentially been dropped, presumably because there is no substance to it. (Unfortunately, the experience did not deter the administration from subsequently making its famous weapons-of-mass-destruction charge to justify invading Iraq.)

During Carter’s visit to Cuba, he gave a live and uncensored television address in which he said: “There are some in Cuba who think the simple answer is to lift the embargo and there are some in my country who believe the answer is for your president to step down from power and allow free elections.... Because the United States is the most powerful nation, we should take the first step. My hope is that Congress will soon act to permit unrestricted travel between the United States and Cuba, establish open trading relationships and repeal the embargo.”

In summer 2002, musical presenters, managers, and artists incurred painful losses as tours were canceled left and right. Bebo Valdés, still a great pianist at the age of 84, left Cuba in 1960, disgusted with communism. He has lived in Stockholm for almost 40 years and had previously entered the United States. But he lost prestigious concert dates in fall 2002 before ultimately being admitted. Of the various Cuban musicians nominated for the 2003 Grammy Awards, the only one given a visa to attend the ceremony was 85-year-old Generoso Jiménez.

Cuba was by no means the only country affected, but was part of what amounts to an ongoing U.S. cultural boycott against much of the world. Malian singer Salif Keita, one of Africa’s most famous voices, had to cancel his appearances last summer. A few of the many others who had to cancel appearances at American cultural institutions were Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Pakistani singer Faiz Ali Faiz, Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden, the Peking Opera Company of Jilin, and India’s Mamata Shankar Ballet Troupe. The net effect was to discourage American presenters from working with artists from abroad; in the words of Laura Connelly-Schneider of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “the current climate makes me think twice [about] who I program.”⁷ This year, Spanish flamenco master Paco de Lucía’s sold-out January 24 concert at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley— one of the major world-music events of the year in that city—had to be rescheduled and his entire tour was disrupted because Homeland Security had not cleared his bassist, Alaín Pérez, a brilliant young Cuban player who has lived in Spain for five years.

In 2003, in what Representative Berman called a “very bizarre interpretation” of the amendment that bears his name, the Treasury Department ruled that American journals publishing work from sanctioned countries may not “enhance” the work—explicitly including copy editing and the adding of illustrations—without receiving a license to do so.⁸ Apparently, writers from sanctioned countries must now provide camera-ready, perfectly translated copy. Meanwhile, scholars from countries considered security risks (including Cuba, China, Russia, and countries in the Middle East)

Rumba Diplomacy in the Age of Bushismo

are being denied entry, scientific collaborations are falling apart, and international academic and scientific conferences are being scheduled outside the United States so participants from everywhere can attend.⁹

This is a dangerous time to be deepening the isolation of the United States. It appears that our long experience of quarantining Cuba’s culture has served as a precedent for becoming deaf to the world.

When the Muñequitos were nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2003, Diosdado Ramos, the group’s director, applied for a visa to attend the nationally televised ceremony, as did Juan Formell, director of the also nominated Los Van Van. Unfortunately, this time the show was going to be in Miami, where protest against the presence of Cuban artists has in the past been organized, massive, and violent. Though there was no chance Cubans would get to perform on the broadcast, there was the specter of civic disturbances by local hotheads if they were even permitted to attend. Ramos and Formell were denied visas, though they had both been in the United States numerous times (including, in Formell’s case, in June 2003 to headline at Carnegie Hall). Reagan’s Proclamation 5377 had been reapplied to artists, which is to say, the visas were denied on grounds of national security.¹⁰ When asked what threat to U.S. national security he represented, Ramos was quoted in the Cuban press as saying: “Our tumbadoras [conga drums] are nuclear weapons!” I imagine he laughed when he said it. For the 2004 Grammy Awards, all five nominees in the Traditional Tropical Latin category were Cuban. Two artists touched by Buena Vista stardust, Ibrahim Ferrer and Manuel Galbán, won Grammys in their respective categories, but, like the other ten nominated Cuban artists, they were not permitted to enter the United States for the ceremony.

We are not going to be hearing Matan-zas-style rumba any time soon. A February 23 report by NBC’s Mary Murray gave the number of Cuban artists refused admission since November as 151.

Resealing the Wall

In the case of Cuba, our isolationism cuts both ways, since the U.S. government won’t let its citizens travel to Cuba, except under certain conditions. At the height of the Cold War, Americans were permitted to travel to the Soviet Union; with the recent lifting of the travel ban to Libya, Cuba is the only country in the world that Americans are forbidden to go to. It isn’t actually travel to Cuba that’s banned, because that would be unconstitutional. Instead, currency controls prohibit spending money in Cuba. If you go to Cuba, it is presumed that you spend money there, and the burden of proof is on the traveler. Travelers must therefore obtain a license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to spend money there. OFAC, the office charged with freezing al-Qaeda funds, estimates that it uses about a sixth of its employee resources to enforce Cuba sanctions.

The travel-licensing procedure was loosened in the later years of the Clinton administration, but under the Bush administration the regulations and their implementation have gotten surreally more stringent. A musician who wishes to play at a Cuban jazz festival must show that the event is “open for attendance, and in relevant situations participation, by the Cuban public, and all profits from the event after costs must be donated to an independent nongovernmental organization in Cuba or a U.S.-based charity, with the objective, to the extent possible, of promoting people-to-people contacts or otherwise benefiting the Cuban people.”¹¹ I have led several group tours for Americans of Cuba, focusing on Afro-Cuban culture, under what is called “people-to-people” contact (a Clinton-era innovation). By the time the travelers came home, they knew more about the reality of Cuba than the people who make American policy. But these tours are no longer possible, because the Bush administration has refused to renew the blanket licenses that permitted them.

If I were invested in maintaining the embargo, I would want to prevent those tours too, because few people who actually visit Cuba—whatever their impression of the Cuban government—come home in favor of the embargo, whose intention is to starve the Cuban people, thus destabilizing Cuba and justifying U.S. intervention. It seems absurd even to have to point this out, but after more than 40 years of making Cubans suffer, the embargo has not dislodged Fidel Castro, but, apparently, has helped him maintain power.

Nor is the real point of the travel ban to keep dollars from entering Cuba, given that Cubans in the United States are remitting possibly more than $1 billion a year to their families on the island. Rather, it is to keep Americans from seeing Cuba with their own eyes. It is to give the anti-Castro industry control of the media image of Cuba. And perhaps also to keep Cuba frightened of us. A couple of years ago I was sitting with a Havana grandmother, who said to me with affection, “If someone had told me 25 years ago that we would have Americans in our living room, eating lunch with us...you were the enemy.”

Last August, in an infelicitous choice of words, presidential adviser Karl Rove, speaking of the 2004 presidential election, referred to Florida as “ground zero.” That meant: talk as tough as possible on Cuba to appeal to the anti-Castro voting bloc, a vocal minority of which is crying out for U.S. military action against the island. But in the weeks that followed, both houses of Congress voted to let Americans travel freely to Cuba, passing an amendment to the omnibus Transportation, Treasury, and Independent Appropriations Bill that would have stopped funding for the enforcement of the travel ban. It would have been difficult for the president to veto this bill over the issue of Cuba travel, but the Republican congressional leadership solved the problem for him by stripping the provision from it behind closed doors after passage. In a Senate floor speech, an outraged Senator Max Baucus (D/MT) said, “In stripping that provision, leadership broke the rules of conference— and defied the will of the majority of both Houses. That is simply undemocratic.”

Not only did the administration disregard Congress’s wishes; it actually stepped up enforcement of the travel ban, naming judges to hear backlogged cases. (The first case up was a Ry Cooder casualty, a former State Department contract worker whose girlfriend was a Buena Vista fan; they had hopped over to Cuba while visiting Mexico.) An October 10 presidential directive called for increased scrutiny of travel to Cuba. This has translated into the systematic harassment, at the airport, by OFAC and Homeland Security of all licensed, legal travelers on charter flights to Cuba, who are being questioned and searched in a manner that some have described as intimidating. Some outbound travelers, with baggage already loaded, have been banned at the last minute from boarding the aircraft on technicalities. Homeland Security, created to deal with the terrorist menace, has used its resources to confiscate bottles of rum and boxes of cigars from returning legal travelers. The approach at present seems to be to treat all travelers to Cuba, even legal ones, as collaborators with a “terrorist” regime.

When a nation feels threatened, repression increases. In our country since 9/11, we have seen the Patriot Act, stealth detentions of Arab-Americans, the designation of individuals as enemy combatants by presidential order, confessions obtained under psychological torture in the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo,¹² denunciations of individuals and entire political classes as traitors in the mass media, and a Transportation Security Administration “no-fly” blacklist of people not allowed to board domestic flights.

Cubans were appalled, but not surprised, when the U.S. war against Iraq began in March 2003. For 45 years they have lived with the fear the United States might invade their country. Officially classed as terrorists, and accused of developing bioweaponry, what is to keep the Bush administration from launching a “shock-and-awe” campaign against them? Only this past December, Undersecretary of State Bolton, in speaking of Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, and Cuba, warned: “We repeatedly caution that no option is off the table.”¹³ In March, the United States escorted Aristide out of neighboring Haiti and installed a new head of state there, and the unsurprising revelation surfaced that the National Endowment for Democracy funded groups participating in the attempted 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. And those were democratically elected leaders.

On February 20, in Havana, U.S. Interests Section chief James Cason (who traveled around Cuba in 2002 attempting to organize a domestic opposition network to the Cuban government) issued a statement accusing the Cuban government of fabricating the threat of a U.S. invasion to instill fear in the Cuban population. That same day, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (who, along with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, stripped the Cuba travel amendment from the omnibus bill) appeared before an audience in Miami, where he made a spectacularly belligerent speech, in which he referred to the “Bush Doctrine,” or what a Cuban friend of mine calls bushismo:

The war on terror is a war against evil, and it is therefore a war against Fidel Castro.... And if the war on terror is going to be won, it must be won in this hemisphere first, and if it is going to be won in this hemisphere, then Castro must go!... When Castro is gone—cold, dead and buried...either by the slow hand of nature or the quick steel of justice—Cuba will be free.... This com mander-in-chief understands that in the war on terror we have one mission: to replace terrorist regimes with free democracies....

American analysts generally regard this sort of talk to be hot air to placate Miami. The Cubans take it seriously.

Despite hysterical rhetoric from Miami and the labeling of Cuba as a terrorist country, Cuba has never launched a terrorist action against the United States. Cuba is not threatening us, though it doesn’t obey us. To put our nation on a war footing with Cuba is just plain nuts. One has only to recall the operatic image of President Nixon shaking hands with Mao Zedong to realize that it would be possible for the United States to have a productive dialogue with Cuba. I’m under no illusion that we’re about to get a sane policy, but the United States needs to stop threatening Cuba’s security, and there are two simple steps that we could, and ought to, take right now.

First, the administration should respect Congress’s wishes and allow Americans to travel freely to Cuba. It should stop using antiterrorism resources to prosecute music lovers and bicyclists. Let individual Americans continue to form their own relationships with Cubans and see what that produces.

Second, Washington should encourage cultural, scientific, educational, and sport exchanges between Cubans and Americans. Stop treating internationally respected artists, scholars, scientists, and athletes like criminals. Tell OFAC to quit tampering with the Berman Amendment, which was designed to protect First Amendment rights. Let musicians get paid.

Isolating Americans from Cubans does us no good. It denies us the richness of Cuban music and culture, while ignoring the value of artists as communicators, both here and there. It holds the American belief in freedom of commerce hostage to the interests of a handful of businessmen and militants while trampling on our right to travel freely.

Remember ping-pong diplomacy with China? We need a return to rumba diplomacy. It was working very well._•