2014
January
Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2370-74 | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:32 AM
In the wake of the Cold War, Cuba became not only one of the last remaining Communist regimes on earth but also one of the few to resist broader economic liberalization. As a result, during a decade where globalization was a buzzword and the spread of global mass commercial culture was celebrated by some intellectuals and denigrated by others, Cuba became a kind of historical artifact, seeming to echo or reinforce idyllic visions of a decommercialized past. Such conceptions fueled not only a significant portion of Cuba’s draw as a tourist destination but also a renewed attraction to Cuban artists and music.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2374-79 | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:33 AM
Moreover, beginning in 1987, a crack in the U.S. information embargo opened up when Congress passed what came to be known as the Berman amendment, for Congressman Howard Berman of California. Crafted to protect the First Amendment rights violated by the ban on American travel to Cuba, the new law allowed Americans to import “informational material,” interpreted as not only printed material but also any form of creative expression, including music, visual art, sculpture, etc. These liberalized cultural exchange policies under the Clinton administration, coupled with the growing power of digital technology, increased access to a veritable treasure trove of past and present Cuban art that had by and large not received significant Western attention.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2452-53 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:56 AM
Today, Cuba spends 43% of its national budget on health, education, and social security.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2468-71 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:58 AM
The UN has recognized the extremely low infection rate in Cuba and in 2006 hailed the island’s program as “among the most effective in the world.” Notably, in Cuba only 29 children have become infected with HIV in the past 20 years as Cuba has effectively prevented mother-to-child transmission of HIV, mainly due to the government’s universal provision of antiretroviral therapy, which became broadly available in 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2477-80 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:59 AM
Those looking for the end of the Cold War to transform Cuba into a western liberal democracy were sorely disappointed. Organized opposition parties and groups remained proscribed, free speech and assembly continued to be repressed, and, although their numbers had vastly diminished, political prisoners still languished in Cuban jails. (By the end of the 1990s, the number of political prisoners hovered in the range of 200 to 300.)
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2491-93 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:02 AM
Yet in light of decades of American attempts to unseat the regime, receiving funds from external sources (or simply the perception of being willing to do so) cast a pall of suspicion over their activities, leading to accusations that they were mere lackeys of foreign interests.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2518-20 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM
In 2002, Payá presented 11,000 signatures backing the Varela Project to the National Assembly of People’s Power in Cuba, coinciding with former president (and human rights champion) Jimmy Carter’s historic trip to the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2500-2503 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM
In March of 2003, for example, human rights activists were dealt one of their most significant blows since the end of the Cold War when authorities arrested some 75 independent journalists, prodemocracy organizers, and other dissidents. In what became known as the “black spring,” Cuban officials targeted those individuals allegedly collaborating with or receiving funds from the U.S. government, Cuban American groups, and/or international organizations agitating for more democracy and human rights.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2618-21 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:19 AM
Cuban authorities viewed the controversy over Elián not only as an indicator of all that was sour in U.S. policy toward Cuba but also as an opportunity to goad the Cuban American community into potentially damaging missteps in its quest to keep the embargo in place. Yet Fidel wasn’t the only one who saw Elián’s story and his ultimate fate as a potent symbol.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2640-44 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:21 AM
With Attorney General Janet Reno’s authorization, federal agents stormed the Little Havana house in a surprise, predawn raid, seized the boy, and quickly ferreted him away to his father. After two months in Washington waiting out a courts appeal process and under 24-hour protection by the ATF, Elián and his father returned to Cuba as national heroes. The entire episode inflicted great damage, first and foremost to the boy and his family, while dealing a withering blow to those in the exile community who attempted to exploit his odyssey.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 2692-94 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:27 AM
Yet by and large, in foreign policy, the White House was preoccupied with the consequences of German reunification, the first Gulf War in Iraq, the breakup of the Soviet Union into over a dozen separate countries, and bailing out Moscow. Moreover, the first Bush administration did not put a premium on schadenfreude, at least in public.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 2701-4 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:35 AM
Proclaiming that the time had come to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro,” Clinton endorsed the Cuban Democracy Act, a piece of legislation conceived initially by Mas and sponsored by New Jersey Congressmen Robert Toricelli. Against his better judgment and to no political or electoral benefit of his soon to be one-term presidency, George H.W. Bush endorsed the bill and then signed it into law in October 1992, just before his defeat in the November elections.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2725-26 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:38 AM
As a result of these complex and politicized regulations, actual sales seldom transpired. Indeed, Cuba would claim that the embargo was directly responsible for the death or illness of patients for whom Cuba was unable to purchase key equipment and medicines.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2739-41 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:39 AM
Equally significant, the bill retained nearly full executive privilege over the embargo; if he saw fit, the president could still do away with most sanctions with the stroke of a pen.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2774-77 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:45 AM
Yet even more to the point, because the agreements involved government-to-government cooperation, they compromised many exile leaders’ beliefs in a strategy of complete isolation from the Castro government. In their view, the migration agreements conferred sovereign status on a regime considered illegitimate by the exile leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Note on Page 167 | Loc. 2777 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:46 AM
and because the exile community is based in FL... they have disproportionate influence over national politics
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2786-89 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:48 AM
Upon coming to office, the Clinton administration moved to signal its embrace of democratic movements, parties, and institutions in Latin America, distancing itself from the Cold War preference for stable authoritarian regimes. Yet when the Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections (only months after the balsero crisis came to an end), none other than Jesse Helms, a hard-core anti-Communist crusader, became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signaling that the Cold War was far from over.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2864-67 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:23 AM
the president conceded a degree of executive authority that not even Jesse Helms had expected possible. Helms-Burton codified all existing provisions of the embargo. While the president would retain some authority to tinker with some restrictions on the margins, by and large the executive branch gave up its authority to lift or impose sanctions, turning over to Congress a substantial portion of its power to shape policy toward the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2876-77 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:26 AM
If ever Castro needed justification for the government’s siege mentality, or proof that he and the revolution were all that protected Cuban citizens from a return to the injustices of the Batista past, Helms-Burton was it.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2908-9 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:35 AM
With an eye on the 2000 election, however, the White House ruled out any bolder ventures, lest they damage Al Gore’s chances at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2943-47 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM
The pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 provided the opportunity for reform-minded CANF members, including Mas Santos, to steer the organization away from his father’s rigid isolationist approach by supporting family ties and dissidents on the island. After Mas Canosa, new Cuban American voices and organizations gained some political space in Miami and in Washington. By slowly adapting to a new reality of family ties and more forcefully promoting the potential of a viable opposition on the ground within Cuba, the CANF was able to retain a shot at relevance under a new generation’s leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2951-52 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM
The Elián González episode, followed by the contested 2000 election, dashed any expectation that the end of Clinton’s presidency would bring dramatic moves by the White House toward Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2956-58 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM
Gore knew he would be hard pressed to sustain Clinton’s impressive gains in Cuban American votes in 1996. And he didn’t: Gore lost Florida to Bush by 537 votes, but he lost Cuban American votes by a much wider margin, winning just under 20% to Bush’s 80%, a more than 15% decline relative to the Democrats’ win in 1996.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2958-60 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM
Nothing dramatized the political backlash of the Elián affair as much as the spectacle of Cuban Americans participating among the crowd of demonstrators in December 2000 who succeeded in forcing, literally, an end to the Miami-Dade recount, and ultimately to Al Gore’s shot at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2981-85 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:36 AM
they were intent on plugging a leaky embargo even though public opinion (whether nationally, in the business community, or among Cuban Americans) was clearly supportive of the Clinton-era openings. Moreover, the president himself (whose brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, had developed deep political and business ties with Cuban exile leaders) had campaigned on a promise to bring down Fidel. Nonetheless, prior to September 11, 2001, the new government paid scarce attention to Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 3061-64 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:08 PM
In 1990, following intensive lobbying from the Florida congressional delegation, the first President Bush pardoned long-time anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch, one of the two principal intellectual architects of the 1976 explosion of the Cubana Airline passenger flight that killed all 73 people on board. In 2005, his co-conspirator, Luis Posada Carriles, crossed into Texas from Mexico, and after a period of one month in detention, was released. Both now live in the Miami area.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Bookmark on Page 187 | Loc. 3079 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3078-83 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM
The Bush administration largely ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, arguing that Caracas failed to present enough evidence. More likely, given the amount of declassified documentation available on the case, Bush officials bowed to pressure from Posada supporters who claim he would be tortured if returned to Chávez’s Venezuela. Yet neither has the United States endeavored to hold Posada accountable for his crimes. Although the Patriot Act permits the United States to indefinitely detain “excludable aliens” who are authors of terrorist attacks, Posada now lives, and is occasionally and publicly celebrated, in Miami, though generally by an aging group of his peers rather than by the majority of Cuban Americans.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3086-88 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:11 PM
As the United States entered the new millennium, Elián fatigue, embargo fatigue, and widespread annoyance with the domestic politics of the Cuba issue had helped create a bipartisan consensus in favor of dramatic policy change.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 3107-10 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:14 PM
Havana reasoned that allowing the groups to continue to function could also give an in-road to an enemy whose designs may well turn belligerent. Thus, in the eyes of Cuban officials, the national security prerogatives of cracking down on domestic opposition activists were well worth the near-universal international backlash Cuba was likely to (and did) incur. It is no surprise that the “black spring” arrests of 75 dissidents occurred in March 2003, the day before Bush formally declared war on Iraq.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3133-35 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:16 PM
Yet as allegations of torture surfaced and the legality of the detentions came into question, Guantánamo became, as it did for many of America’s global critics, a symbol of American imperial hubris, one which in the Cuban case also allowed Havana to highlight the island’s own history of grievances over American violations of its sovereignty.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3205-6 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:35 PM
After the Cold War came to an end, Castro viewed the emerging liberal democratic capitalist order in Latin America as a threat to social justice and a potential recipe for the political marginalization of the left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3246-48 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:42 PM
Between November 2005 and the end of 2006, Latin Americans went to the national polls in 12 countries. Left and center-left leaders were elected or reelected in 8 of the 12—Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and Uruguay—and came within striking distance of victory in Peru and Mexico.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3249-51 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:43 PM
these impressive electoral outcomes (and close losses) signaled an increasingly empowered electorate’s demands for public policies to address vast inequality, poverty, social exclusion, and rampant crime.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3265-68 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM
through well-funded and fiscally competent institutions, a government’s primary role is to deliver the building blocks of opportunity, dignity, and social rights to populations long excluded from the region’s wealth and resources. By the end of his presidency, even George W. Bush indirectly conceded this point by attempting to frame U.S. policy toward the region as helping Latin Americans achieve social justice, appropriating language once the preserve of Cuba and the region’s Left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3270-71 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM
while Cuba’s international message continues to resonate, its domestic model is largely seen as an anachronistic holdover from a prior era.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3293-97 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:49 PM
When in April 2002 Chávez was briefly ousted in a coup, the White House and the U.S. embassy in Caracas issued statements indicating that they looked forward to working with the new government. The president of the congressionally funded International Republican Institute even praised the coup attempt. Leaders throughout Latin America were justifiably appalled at Washington’s seeming approval of a fundamentally undemocratic act. Indeed, just months earlier in September 2001, Colin Powell had stood with Latin Americans to sign the OAS’s Inter-American Democratic Charter, which explicitly banned coups from the region’s political playbook.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3319 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM
while interests remain permanent, alliances never are.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3321-24 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM
With a population of just over 11 million, Cuba’s GDP (roughly $45 billion in 2007) falls closest to neighbors like the Dominican Republic or Ecuador. GDP per capita is comparable to that of Guatemala or Honduras. But unlike any of these countries, Cuba has attempted to shield most of its population from the dynamism and pressures of globalization,
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3330-32 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:53 PM
Although agriculture has been somewhat decentralized and private farmers’ markets are now ubiquitous, Cuba still imports over 80% of the food consumed by Cubans and foreign tourists, with a sizeable percentage from the United States since 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 3364-65 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:57 PM
With the prisons at Guantánamo a daily reminder of the human consequences of one country rewriting the international rules of war, Cuba was able to deflect attention from its own prisons and political prisoners onto those jailed by a foreign power on its own territory.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3501-2 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 08:13 PM
Though some in the Bush administration dismissed these changes as simply “cosmetic,” other reforms are far less susceptible to this charge.
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