Castro's Lobbyists

Capitol Hill Cubans

Ted Piccone

By Guillermo I. Martínez in Sun Sentinel:

Latest pro-Castro campaign gets assist from people in U.S.

Journalists generally do not believe in coincidences. We prefer to connect the dots and see the pattern that emerges.

In the case of Cuba's new found hemispheric diplomacy, the pattern is obvious even to those not used to dig behind the news. The Cuban Government has launched a multi-pronged campaign to seek improved relations with President Barack Obama's administration, with the goal that while rapprochement may not be possible in an election year, it aims to make it real if the president is re-elected.

The campaign is composed of high-level Cuban government officials traveling to the United States for international forums — backed by the Cuban Catholic hierarchy — and includes the support of some very powerful Cuban-American entrepreneurs.

In the last six to eight weeks:

Cardinal Jaime Ortega went to Harvard University, where he criticized the U.S. embargo, said Cubans who had occupied a church in Havana were delinquents or crazies and revealed that in a private conversation years earlier the late Miami Auxiliary Archbishop Agustín Román had urged him not to speak about reconciliation in Miami.

Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, attended a conference in San Francisco There, Castro said U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba was being held hostage by the "Cuban mafia" in Miami and said that, if she had a vote in the U.S. elections, she would vote for President Obama.

Eusebio Leal, who with millions of dollars provided by international organizations has tried to refurbish and rebuild parts of colonial Havana, traveled to Washington, D.C., where he spoke at three events — at the National Trust for Historic Preservation at the prestigious Brookings Institution and at the Council of Foreign Relations.

A Cuban scientist received the Pew Fellowship for Marine Conservation. The New York-based Environmental Defense Fund gave Fabian Pina Amargos $150,000 to study the goliath grouper, a species of fish in decline. This is the first award given by the EDF for research in Cuba.

Attending Leal's conference in Washington were, among others, Florida sugar magnate Alfonso Fanjul and Paul Cejas, former President Bill Clinton's Ambassador to Belgium and a prominent member of the Democratic Party.

Prior to his attendance at the conference in Washington, Alfi Fanjul was part of a Brookings Institution trip to Havana to verify if, indeed, Raúl Castro was going ahead with all of the economic reforms he has promised. Also on that rip was Ted Piccone, senior fellow and deputy director for foreign Policy at Brookings, and once a former adviser to the National Security Council, the U.S. State Department, and the Pentagon.

If Piccone had any suggestions on how Cuba could help improve relations with the United States, they were not made public. His only statement to the media was a recommendation that the United States "pay more attention to the national and international economic policies of the island" and "not to politicize or interpose itself in the process of Cuba's readmission (into the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank)."

Another of the wealthy exiles traveling to Cuba frequently is Carlos Saladrigas, who spoke at the Felix Varela center in Havana. Saladrigas said that while it was impossible to seek a political opening in an election year, all the efforts were aimed at seeking closer relations between the two countries if Obama is re-elected.

One thing ties all these people and organizations. All of them want the United States to change its policy towards Cuba unilaterally. None has asked anything of the Cuban government.

None of them — the priests and millionaires, Cuban government officials and former U.S. officials, Cubans who live of the island or those who do so in exile — talked about the surge in political detentions in Cuba. According to Amnesty International, detentions in Cuba doubled in 2011, more than at any other time in decades.

None of them asked that Cuba allow its citizens to travel abroad, much less allow them to dissent from government policies in Cuba.

In essence, all of them, in one way or another have become lobbyists for the Cuban government — albeit they do so gratuitously. So, don't see these events as separate dots. They are part of a clear pattern to influence U.S. policy so that it favors the island's communist regime.