American Lawyers’ Trip to Cuba: Can’t Be Tourism

Politic365/ Alejandro Miyar

Right now, American lawyers, representing the American Bar Association, are in Cuba. Their mission in Cuba is poorly defined and raises serious questions of the ABA’s priorities there.

The ABA trips have also raised the ire of Cuban Americans. Since late last year, the Cuban American Bar Association (CABA) has urged the ABA to reconsider. CABA’s concerns have not fallen entirely on deaf ears—the health law and criminal justice groups have cancelled their trips. Yet, the ABA remains largely committed to continuing the inexplicable visits.

CABA attorneys have sought a middle ground in the face of the ABA’s resistance, offering to educate ABA lawyers before they travel to Cuba on the issues, social and political, that they will face on the island.

“Our concern is that the ABA—as a champion of the rule of law and a defender of liberty—will be used by the Cuban government to legitimize a totalitarian police state that routinely flouts basic human rights,” CABA President Vivian de las Cuevas-Díaz told Politic365

The ABA’s delegations have been organized at the invitation of the National Union of Cuban Jurists.  The organization touts itself as a non-governmental organization but its website and corporate governance statutes makes clear that it is little more than a fief of the Castro brothers’ regime.  The Cuban Jurists, unsurprisingly, pledge to promote the ideals of Cuba’s Marxist-Leninist Revolution abroad.

“The ABA should not allow itself to be exploited as a party to a carefully-orchestrated and state-sponsored propaganda campaign.  Instead, the ABA should insist on the participation of truly independent Cubans at these meetings,” CABA Past President Victoria Mendez wrote to ABA President Bill Robinson in December 2011.

The ultimate question is whether these trips are aimed at productive dialogue with Cubans or are simply the ABA’s half-hearted attempt to place a veneer of respectability on what essentially is a leisure trip for American lawyers.  Obviously, American lawyers are uniquely suited to promote the rule of law and civil society.  But they cannot do so if they work within a Cuban system that skews the balance of justice to the interest of its dictatorship.

Cubans in exile have struggled for the past six decades to effectively communicate the island’s reality to the international community.  Too often, thrill-seeking foreigners overlook the poverty and corruption of the Castro regime, and view the island as a romantic oddity. This is unfortunate.

Cuban Americans, therefore, have been forced to find innovative strategies to raise international awareness of the injustices of Cuba’s iron curtain.

As long as the ABA and other American organizations insist on travelling to Cuba, organizations like CABA and the youth-oriented Roots of Hope can and should help their American counterparts to meaningfully engage Cubans. American legal organizations traveling to Cuba should support civil society, bloggers and other independents.

Cuban-Americans are well suited to this task. In 2003, I traveled to Cuba as part of a group of students from Haverford College.  I struggled with the decision to join that educational excursion because my own parents found their lives forever altered after fleeing Cuba in the 1960s.  The years I spent as an adolescent speaking with my family and the larger exile community in Miami prepared me to educate my student peers to see past the island’s lush appeal to the depressing reality of a state rotting from the inside out.

That trip encouraged me to become active in politics.  In 2008, I worked for then-Senator Obama’s campaign as he pledged to ease restrictions on travel by Cuban Americans to visit family on the island. It is common sense that we should allow Cuban Americans to connect with their families on the island to seed democratic ideals.  As President, Obama has made steady progress in this policy area.

But there remains a heady distinction between Cuban Americans traveling to a country with which they are well-versed as opposed to American lawyers engaging without a thorough understanding of the terrain.  Especially when the visit can fuel the Castros’ propaganda machine.  The ABA can do better than working with an arm of the Cuban government.

Strategic engagement through conversation and diplomacy is a good idea.  Facilitating ignoble ends is not productive. The ABA’s heart is in the right place.  It’s true that strategic engagement through “soft” diplomacy can bring results.  However, the mere facilitation of the Castro kleptocracy is unproductive.