Brookings Needs Five Minutes With Senator Rubio

capitolhillcubans

Last week, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) famously said regarding travelers to Cuba:

"Cuba is not a zoo where you pay an admission ticket and you go in and you get to watch people living in cages to see how they are suffering... You just went to Cuba and to fulfill your curiosity — which I could’ve told you about if you’d come seen me for five minutes — you’ve left thousands of dollars in the hands of a government that uses that money to control these people that you feel sorry for."

One traveler who could have used five minutes with Senator Rubio is Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott.

Talbott traveled to Cuba earlier this month, wined and dined with Castro regime officials, and left them thousands of dollars, while probably shunning courageous democracy activists (as his Brookings colleagues have done in the past in order not to "offend" their regime hosts).

Then, he made this amazing "discovery":

From Havana: much of Cuba's expanding tourist sector is controlled by military officers, active & retired.
— Strobe Talbott (@strobetalbott) March 2, 2013

Despite this, Talbott's subordinate at Brookings, Ted Piccone, who led some of the previous trips that shunned Cuba's courageous pro-democracy activists, argues this week that the U.S. should proceed to bail out the Castro regime -- by enhancing business ties with its monopolies (for Cubans are prohibited from engaging in foreign trade) -- in order to soften the blow from the prospective loss of billionaire subsidies from Venezuela.

(This was not a surprise, as in the past, Brooking's Cuba reports have completely glossed over human rights).

Piccone's column is entitled "Time to Bet on Cuba." However, unilaterally engaging the Castro regime and its business monopolies sounds more like "Time to Bet on Castro."

Ironically, this week, we have witnessed the extraordinarily talent and courage of Yoani Sanchez and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo in New York and Washington D.C.; Berta Soler in Madrid and Rosa Maria Paya in Geneva. Not to mention the leadership of Antonio Rodiles, Jose Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez," Jose Daniel Ferrer, Guillermo Farinas and so many others back in Cuba.  

These outstanding individuals have shown the world that there is indeed a Cuban alternative to the Castro regime -- that there is a bright future ahead.

Brookings is clearly making the wrong bet.