Peter Kornbluh | The Nation

Five Cuban counterterrorism experts are being held indefinitely in
American prisons while the "bin Laden of Latin America" is let free.

A panel of experts explores the view from Havana.

The godfather of vicious anti-Castro violence, Luis Posada Carriles
will soon be released from US custody. Is that any way to treat a
terrorist?

Chile's Supreme Court handed Augusto Pinochet both a victory and a blow
with its recent rulings on Operation Columbo and Operation Condor.

Will the Bush Administration recognize that anti-Castro radical Luis Posada Carriles is a terrorist?

Pinochet's indictment marks a new era.

In years past, the cronies of Gen.

Declassified documents reveal the US government's role in the Pinochet
coup.

"I am here in the hope that we can do business," Minnesota Governor
Jesse Ventura told a Cuban audience after cutting the ceremonial ribbon
with Fidel Castro to open the recent US Food and Agri

"I have concluded that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our
relations with Cuba," Jimmy Carter proclaimed in a secret Presidential
Directive shortly after taking office in 1977. With that signed order
Carter became the first and only US President to make a rapprochement
with Fidel Castro's revolutionary government an explicit goal of US
foreign policy. Although his Administration succeeded in negotiating the
creation of "interest sections" in Havana and Washington, Carter's
objective "to set in motion a process which will lead to the
reestablishment of [full] diplomatic relations" eventually fell victim
to the cold warriorism of his national security advisers.

Twenty-five years later, when Carter became the first US President to
travel to Cuba, meet Castro and address the Cuban people, he again
called for normalization of relations. His historic five-day visit, May
12-17, has dramatically renewed the national debate on US policy toward
Cuba.

What the former President described as "an opportunity to explore issues
of mutual interest" has mobilized almost every conceivable interest
group--commercial, political, humanitarian--across the ideological span
on a gamut of contentious issues relating to Washington's approach to
Havana. As the Pope did during his visit to Cuba in 1998, Carter has
astutely managed to simultaneously draw attention to the archaic nature
of the forty-year US embargo on trade and travel, to the merits of civil
dialogue, and to human rights and democracy.

Carter's trip was carefully scripted to balance competing political
interests as well as his own multifaceted personal agenda. Before he
announced his travel plans, Carter dispatched emissaries to Washington
to discuss with numerous NGO and lobbyist organizations the merits of
such a visit; he then received a comprehensive intelligence briefing
from the Bush Administration and a steady flow of delegations and
specialists at the Carter Center in Atlanta, who shared their expertise
on Cuban issues. Pro-dialogue coalitions like the Cuban American
Alliance Education Fund issued statements signed by numerous grassroots
organizations in "full support [of Carter's] initiative for dialogue."
The rabidly anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation criticized
him for entering into "discussions with the Cuban regime, thereby giving
[it] a measure of legitimacy."

In Cuba, Carter's schedule included three meetings with Castro, two
state dinners, a baseball game and visits to Havana's most prestigious
schools, laboratories and hospitals, as well as meetings with Cuba's
leading dissident, Elizardo Sánchez, and Oswaldo Paya, the
organizer of the Varela Project--a petition drive to reform political
and economic structures. Most significant, in a live nationally
televised address to Cuban citizens from the University of Havana,
Carter carefully underscored the themes of changing both US policy and
Cuba's socialist political system. US-Cuban relations, he said, had been
"trapped in a destructive state of belligerence for forty-two years,"
and he called on Washington to "take the first step" by lifting the
embargo on trade and travel. At the same time, he called for the
"fundamental right" of free speech and association in Cuba, and for
Cubans to be allowed to "exercise this freedom to change laws peacefully
by a direct vote."

For the Cuban government, what Carter said was far less important than
the spirit of recognition and mutual respect in which he said it. As the
only one of the ten US Presidents Castro has faced over the past
forty-three years who has come to the island, Carter got the red carpet
treatment--symbolic and real. A Cuban band played "The Star-Spangled
Banner" when he arrived, and Castro made it clear that there were no
conditions on his visit. "You can express yourself freely whether or not
we agree with part of what you say or with everything you say," Castro
stated in the reception ceremony at the airport.

When Castro first issued his invitation to Carter to visit Cuba, in
October 2000, George Bush had not yet been elected. Now, with a White
House that, as the Wall Street Journal recently described it,
"sees a President whose bacon was saved in Florida in 2000 by the
Cuban-American vote," Carter's trip has taken on a whole new political
cast. Since the Administration could not find any grounds to block his
visit, it tried to undercut Carter by sending Under Secretary of State
John Bolton to the Heritage Foundation to proclaim, "Cuba's threat to
our security has been underplayed" and to allege that Castro had "a
limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort"
that Cuba was sharing with "rogue states." Carter exposed this canard,
and infuriated the Administration, by using his visit to Cuba's leading
biotech facility, on May 13, to share the results of his pre-travel US
intelligence briefing with Cuban scientists and the US press corps: He
had asked the CIA if there was any evidence that Cuba was sharing any
information that could be used for terrorism, "and the answer from our
experts on intelligence was no."

The Bush Administration clearly fears the impact of Carter's trip. In an
effort at damage control, the White House promptly scheduled a speech in
Miami on May 20, at a fundraiser for brother Jeb's re-election campaign,
in which President Bush will express his presidency's hostile policy
toward the Cuban government and, lest US citizens get ideas from the
Carter visit, outline plans to further restrict travel to Cuba.

In tact and in substance, the Carter trip stands in stark contrast to
Bush's political diatribe. His visit cannot help but contribute to the
momentum on Capitol Hill, and throughout the country, to rethink
Washington's retrograde approach to Havana. This past fall Cuba made its
first cash purchase of US foodstuffs in forty years. As trade barriers
are slipping, a bipartisan coalition in Congress--the Cuba Working
Group, led by Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake--has organized a task force
to begin breaking up the embargo piece by piece. Its first focus is on
an amendment to the Treasury appropriations bill to free travel to the
island--legislation that is likely to get a significant boost from
front-page New York Times photos of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter
walking through charming Old Havana.

"The point is that engagement is more likely to encourage Cuba in the
direction of reforms than unrelenting confrontation," says Wayne Smith,
who served as the Carter Administration's first chief of the new US
interest section in Havana from 1977 to 1981. That point is obviously
lost on Bush. But it isn't lost on his predecessor in the Oval
Office--or on the majority of Americans, who believe that diplomatic
dialogue is far more likely to advance US interests than pandering to a
constituency in Florida to get the President's brother re-elected as
governor.