Is This the Model We Want for Cuba?

capitol hill cubans

Here's the Vietnam model that The Economist and some Cuba "experts" want for Cuba.

Seems to be working great -- for the ruling regime, that is -- repression, riches and impunity.

By John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, in Politico:

Since 2008, the last time the White House hosted a Vietnamese leader, the government has jailed a growing number of dissidents, bloggers, and religious leaders, whom the party-controlled courts have sentenced to increasingly lengthy sentences. Convictions in political cases in the first half of 2013 have already overtaken the total in 2012, which in turn exceeded the numbers in 2011 and 2010.

Worse, the crackdown on dissidents is but one facet of Vietnam’s rights problems. Abuses include torture and killings by police, confiscation of land without due process and compensation, and persecution of underground religious groups and ethnic minorities. Motorists who argue with police are beaten. Farmers’ land is stolen from them. People of faith are forced to renounce it. Ethnic minorities are persecuted for organizing to fight discrimination. Many Vietnamese struggle under this spell of unchecked brutality, either bloodied when trying to challenge it, or forced into quiet submission [...]

The Administration’s hope, several years ago, was that opening up trade negotiations and a military strategic dialogue with Vietnam would serve as an incentive for the government to make changes, and perhaps soften its authoritarian edge. It now appears that hope was misplaced.

It is clear that U.S. policy needs to change — the question is how. The United States needs to start linking its economic and other relations with Vietnam to specific human rights reforms. And the message on this should be clear and public. As a first step, Obama should order the U.S. Trade Representative to make its basic demands in the TPP process public, so that workers and citizens in Vietnam – and the United States – can determine that basic labor rights are being upheld.

But the Obama administration should also be asking itself a more fundamental question: Should the United States continue to engage in business as usual with a government that criminalizes the act of calling for democracy, and shows no inclination toward reform?