Should We Boycott Cuba?

EXECUTIVE-DECISION MEMORANDUM

To: The President of the United States
From: D. N. Forser, Chief of Staff
Re: Cuba
Date: July 30, 1996

What is it about a man with a beard? There is always something dishonest-seeming -- something that someone seems a little too anxious to conceal -- about a man who won't give us a clear look at his face. Personally I've always suspected that it's a form of compensation. We all know what it means when we come across some leathery Baby Boomer with a baseball cap on his head, with scraggly hair coming out from under the hat down his neck, and with a growth of beard on his face. What we know is: if he took that hat off, there wouldn't be any hair underneath it. The beard is a ruse meant to suggest overall hairiness. The cap is a feint implying that he's so bursting with energy he's about to run out on the baseball field. Think of the director Rob Reiner, or Mike Love of the Beach Boys. I rest my case. Think by contrast of Yul Brynner, Michael Jordan, G. Gordon Liddy, Montel Williams: we might disagree with them on this or that point of detail, but how refreshingly honest they seem for putting their whole head and face on open display. Even Liddy proves the point. He is the one of this group with the diciest reputation -- and he is the one with the partial subterfuge of facial hair, his tough-guy mustache. (By the way, Mr./Ms. President, I swear that you get younger looking every day! I guess the burdens of office, which have worn down so many of your predecessors, are just a kind of fitness drill for you.)

And if the beard is a form of compensation, what are we supposed to make of . . . a cigar?! Yes, I know that Freud is supposed to have said that sometimes a cigar was only a cigar. But let's be serious. When we see a big-talking braggart waving around a 12-inch stogie, well, we know what he's worried about, don't we? Is this somebody we can deal with as an homme sérieux -- as someone confident enough in his strengths and limitations that we can talk to him without endless mind games?

But I digress. Beards and cigars naturally make us think of Cuba, and, Mr./Ms. President, I am afraid that it is to this diminutive island nation that you must now direct your thoughts.

I can't remember exactly how many people took the Oath of Office between Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 and you at the beginning of your first term, but there have been a lot of them, and the one thing they've had in common is a headache named Fidel. Reagan and Carter, Johnson and Ford, Nixon and Clinton, Kennedy and Bush -- you can search in vain for other themes that connect them, but "What can we do about Castro?" has run right through the years. Indeed if we renamed the headache "Cuba" we could say that it has afflicted your predecessors all the way back to the portly William McKinley. "Remember the Maine" was the battle cry under which the irresponsible press of his era whipped up a war with the Spanish empire, with its twin outposts in Cuba and the Philippines. (Hmmm, maybe a headache named "the media" is another great constant in presidential life.)

In the excitement of victory over Spain and as a kind of lunatic extension of the Manifest Destiny principle, the United States asserted full colonial control over the Philippines. In effect the U.S. President replaced the Spanish King as a distant sovereign over the islands. (Even at the time many prominent Americans argued that this step toward imperium was a mistake. The best written of these arguments came -- what a surprise! -- from Mark Twain; years later it was published in The Atlantic Monthly.) The United States resisted going quite so far with Cuba, but from McKinley's day until the reign of the tinhorn Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, Cuba was a typical largely corrupt client state where the elite lived high, the masses were supposed to be happy with their rum and their cane-cutting jobs, and the least savory elements of American society -- gamblers and gangsters -- were de facto bosses.

All this changed with the Castro regime, of course. Ever since Fidel, Che, and their band of guerrillas came out of the hills in 1958, one American President after another has learned what it is like to be mocked and played for a chump by the neighborhood dictator. The prime chump of them all, of course, was John Kennedy, who just after his inauguration learned of the CIA's plan to re-invade Cuba, with Cuban exiles. In theory the oppressed masses on the home islands would rise up, rejoicing, and join the invaders to oust Fidel. In reality it did not work that way, and the botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961, set a modern standard for ineptness in U.S. foreign policy. The number two chump may have been James Earl "The Orator" Carter, whose administration sat by fecklessly in 1980 as Castro let prisoners out of Cuba's jails if they wanted to go to America. Political prisoners might have been one thing, but a good number of these "Marielitos" were criminals in the normal sense. Years later, it turned out that many of these immigrants had adjusted surprisingly well to life in America. (It is better not to talk about the twenty-five percent of them who were arrested for committing felonies in their new land. If you'd like to read more about this issue, you might want to take a look at an article from The Atlantic, "Immigration: How It's Affecting Us") But at the time, the "Mariel Boatlift" seemed a perfect illustration of Castro's inexhaustible ability to annoy, outwit, and generally vex the United States.

Fidel Castro rules a country with a population of eight million -- that's barely three percent as large as the United States. Yet I have to say, Mr./Ms. President, that he often seems to be in the driver's seat in terms of dictating American policy. From the Eisenhower years right through the first half of Bill Clinton's administration, Castro more or less determined our refugee policy. If you were running away from Mexico or Haiti or Burkina Faso and tried to get into the United States, we would probably send you right back home (if we caught you). We would assume that you were an "economic refugee." But if you were running away from Cuba, you could stop worrying as soon as you waded ashore in Florida. The law assumed that those fleeing Cuba were by definition political refugees. Given the view of President Clinton by his contemporaries, it is amazing that he dared change this law, because it was wildly popular among members of the Cuban-American constituency centered in Florida. But even after that, little sly Cuba seemed to boss big dumb America around.

Since none of our major allies shares our troublesome history with Castro -- and, to be honest, since none of them has a significant Cuban-American voting bloc -- they all make fun of the embargo we impose on Cuba. Since all of our neighbors in this country worry more about United States "hegemony" (where do they get these words? From books by Noam Chomsky? Or from junior-year-abroad at the Sorbonne, where Pol Pot once trained?) than about provocations from Castro, they all basically side against us too. Therefore, each time Castro gets under our skin, he succeeds in driving a wedge between us and our allies around the world. Of course you are familiar with the most flagrant demonstration of this mischievous power. Early in 1996 after the Cuban air force shot down a "rescue" plane flown by anti-Castro groups based in the United States, Republicans in our Congress rammed through the "Helms-Burton Act." In effect, this required us to impose sanctions on other countries unless they (like us) forbid their firms to deal with Cuba. Almost every other country permitted this! So, under the law and in order to show its displeasure with Fidel Castro, the United States was picking fights with the Canadians, the Brits, the Australians, and others with whom its real disagreements were small.

I have to be honest with you, Mr./Ms. President: no one in the rest of the world agrees with our "freeze out Cuba" policy. That does not make our policy wrong. Whole chapters in a future Profiles in Courage will be devoted to those who told truths the rest of the world wanted to ignore. (Your place in this book is already secure.) But when everyone else is headed the other way, perhaps we should at least check the map.

And so we near the choice, Mr./Ms. President. Will no one rid us of this troublesome dictator? One way or another the United States needs to get over its Castro problem. It is undignified for the world's greatest power to spend so much of its time reacting to one of the world's puniest states. The choice you face is how to end this problem. And your loyal staff suggests that you have two main alternatives: HARD ROAD or SOFT ROAD. We await your guidance.

The selections are:

A: The Hard Road (Please read a memo containing a brief argument in favor of Option A.)

B: The Soft Road (Please read a memo containing a brief argument in favor of Option B.)