Regime Change

Once again President Bush is urging another nation to throw out its current leaders and to install new leaders more acceptable to Washington. This time the target is located in our own hemisphere: Cuba. There's nothing new about this foreign policy. American presidents have been doing it for decades. What is new is that the rest of the world has made it clear that other nations are growing weary of the American meddling. In an op-ed piece published Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times, Paolo Spadoni, visiting assistant professor in the department of political science at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, demonstrates just how weary the rest of the world has become.

Stressing that an eventual transfer of power from Fidel to Raul would simply amount to "exchanging one dictator for another," Bush announced the creation of a multibillion-dollar international "freedom fund" that would help pay for infrastructure improvements and other programs in Cuba after the island's citizens rid themselves of their "tropical gulag." Furthermore, Bush declared that the United States is willing to offer scholarships to students in Cuba and to license religious groups and nongovernmental organizations to provide computers and Internet access to the Cuban people, "but only if the Cuban regime, the ruling class, gets out of the way."

Leaving aside Bush's archaic rhetoric and his dangerous message for the Cuban people to "rise up to demand their liberty," one cannot avoid wondering how he can realistically seek financial contributions from other countries to support U.S. pro-democracy efforts in Cuba. These are the same countries that have repeatedly condemned Washington's hostile policy toward Havana and told the U.S. to change its unilateral approach. ...

The U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday held its annual vote on U.S. economic sanctions with respect to Cuba, and it overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for an end to the 45-year-old embargo and objecting to U.S. laws and regulations compelling other countries to adhere to it.

Before Congress' passage of the Cuban Democracy Act in 1992, Cuba had not been able to obtain a General Assembly resolution against the U.S. embargo. That law, among other things, prevents cargo vessels from third countries from docking in U.S. ports if they visited Cuba in the previous six months. In November 1992, because of international concern regarding the extraterritorial character of the U.S. legislation, the United Nations condemned the embargo by a vote of 59 to 3 (with 71 countries abstaining). Since then, the vote has become more lopsided. In 1998, 157 governments expressed disapproval of U.S. sanctions (with 12 abstentions).

Bush's tougher stance on Havana and his pressure on other countries to curtail their business relationships with the Castro regime have just galvanized the international community even more and isolated the U.S. further. The number of countries opposing the embargo in the U.N. peaked at 184 this year, with only Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau siding with the United States. [Emphasis added]

Mr. Bush's speech was carefully crafted to appeal to the older generation of Cuban exiles in Florida and the wing of the Republican Party still hunting Communists under every bed in America, but it once again shows the bankrupt nature of the administration's foreign policy. This White House assumes other nations will automatically fall into line once a pronouncement from Mr. Bush issues. The fact that the rest of the world, and I am speaking of the real world, not the imagined world of this administration, has no intention of punishing Cuba further doesn't matter, because Mr. Bush and his administration will proceed to do whatever it wants, cobbling together a "Coalition of the Willing" from such as the Marshall Islands and Palau as justification.

If it weren't so expensive in terms and human lives and American dollars, this twisted policy would be laughable. That's how far we've sunk under the current regime.

Heckuva job, George.