Obama and BP at Risk Over Oil Spill

Obama examines some of the effects of a spreading crisis Larry Downing/Reuters

As the Gulf spill threatens to sink BP and damage a Presidency, it's time for Obama to rally the U.S. around tough, fair regulation—for the good of capitalism

By Paul M. Barrett

With failure heaped upon failure in the Gulf of Mexico, the environmental disaster now threatens the viability of not only a vast corporation but also a U.S. Presidency. The buck stops with both—one financially, the other politically. Can either recover?

The markets sent ominous signals about BP's (BP) future once it became clear over the Memorial Day Weekend that the top-kill plugging maneuver had not worked. In the Gulf, hurricane season has arrived, bringing with it the prospect of fierce storms chasing rescue ships to shore and spreading the sickening oil slick farther along the southern coast. A long, grim summer seems all but certain.

Its shares sharply depleted, BP, the largest oil and gas producer in the U.S., suddenly seems vulnerable to a breakup or takeover. In Washington, the Obama team appears to be flailing. Trying to assert some form of authority, the President vowed to bring wrongdoers to justice. The promise seemed mostly like a distraction from frustrating reality: In the short term, President Obama can do little, if anything, to stanch the gushing well.

As much as any other challenge—Wall Street, health care, Afghanistan—the oil spill may define Obama as a leader. He either will find a way to rise to this occasion and make some broader use of the crisis in the Gulf, or it will permanently taint him.

Deficient Oversight

This is a moment to think big and creatively. As distant as risky drilling rigs off Louisiana may seem from the New York financial laboratories where wizard bankers synthesized subprime credit derivatives, Obama could explain the important connections: how, after decades of antiregulatory fundamentalism in Washington, the feckless Minerals Management Service became the Securities & Exchange Commission of the oil business.

It is no coincidence that staff members at both agencies watched pornography on government computers when they should have been monitoring their respective beats. Although corruption and incompetence seem to have run deeper at the soon-to-be-dismantled MMS, the zeitgeist of the two places was similar, according to investigations and congressional hearings: Industry was to be trusted, even when government overseers had no more idea what transpired on the trading floor at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns than they did on the ocean floor beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

The question is: What will Obama do about it?

One route to political rehabilitation would be to redefine how government interacts with business. The goal he should articulate is protecting capitalism—and the society it's intended to serve—from the tendency of the profit-minded to go to extremes.

Takeover Prospects

Profit-minded investors, meanwhile, have soured on BP. "We are very negative on the prospects for BP, and this situation has a real possibility of breaking the company," London-based investment bank Arbuthnot Securities said in a June 1 research note. That day the British energy giant's shares dropped as much as 17 percent in London, their biggest one-day decline in 18 years. The company's stock flattened on June 2, closing down 34 percent since the Deepwater Horizon exploded Apr. 20. That erased more than $58 billion (40 billion pounds) from BP's value.

Ivor Pether, who helps manage $9.2 billion at Royal London Asset Management, including BP stock, told Bloomberg News: "We're getting into share price territory where analysts speculate about takeover possibilities, because the loss of market value is much greater than the estimated 'worst case' costs." Buyers haven't surfaced yet, he added, "because the near-term uncertainty is so high." BP spokeswoman Sheila Williams declined to comment.

The company's woes grew worse when the Obama Administration announced June 1 that it will investigate potential criminal and civil violations related to the spill. "We will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said. While Holder didn't get into particulars, troubling facts have already surfaced. The House Energy & Commerce Committee released internal BP e-mail showing that company employees had worried six weeks before the rig explosion that workers were struggling to control the well below. A criminal indictment of BP and other companies involved in the accident—perhaps for infractions of the Clean Water Act or other environmental laws—"is very likely," David M. Uhlmann, a former chief of the Justice Dept.'s environmental crimes section, told Bloomberg. Uhlmann, who now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School, pointed out that after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, ExxonMobil (XOM) pleaded guilty to charges of that variety.

Another potential line of prosecutorial inquiry, and one that could have more severe effects on BP, would focus on whether executives lied in formal statements to the government. Depending on how high up the chain of command the probe went, a cover-up investigation could seal the fate of Chief Executive Tony Hayward and underscore questions about BP remaining independent. The company has said it will cooperate with investigators.

White House in Control?

While the FBI explores the nuances of pollution law, the White House promises daily to stem damage to the Gulf coastline and economy. "I'm confident people are going to look back and say this Administration was on top of what was an unprecedented crisis," Obama has told reporters. That seems increasingly doubtful. However the destructive gusher is stopped, Obama will have been the man in charge when we all realized that the White House isn't "on top of" much of anything when it comes to deep-sea oil.

The federal government that Obama inherited in 2009 had been more or less uninterested in keeping up with business over the course of three decades. "Industry has developed technology the government doesn't understand," says Richard B. Stewart, a professor of environmental law at New York University Law School.

As happened in the wake of the collapse of some of Wall Street's most storied investment banks, we are already beginning to learn that BP's internal communications show a reluctance to address what should have been dire warning signs. BP e-mail obtained by the House Energy Committee reveal that anxiety about the safety and soundness of the BP well was intensifying more than a month before the Apr. 20 blowout. This evidence, while fragmentary and inconclusive, may cast doubt on BP's contention after the explosion that the company was caught entirely by surprise.

A Mar. 10 e-mail from BP executive Scherie Douglas to Frank Patton, an MMS drilling engineer, said the company planned to sever the pipe connecting the well to the rig and then plug the hole. "We are in the midst of a well control situation on MC 252 #001 and we have stuck pipe," Douglas wrote, referring to the subsea area Mississippi Canyon 252. "We are bringing out equipment to begin operations to sever the drillpipe, plugback the well and bypass." BP received verbal approval from an unnamed MMS official at 11 p.m. on Mar. 11 to insert a cement plug at a shallower depth than normally would have been required after the hole caved in on the drilling equipment, the e-mail showed. Asked about these exchanges, a company spokesman said: "We have always said it was a complex accident. We await a full report."

The Myth of Industry Infallibility

As investigators reconstruct events leading up to Apr. 20, Sarah S. Elkind, an historian of politics and the environment at San Diego State University, warns against focusing on minutiae to the exclusion of the big picture. Within the MMS, she says, "The employees followed cues from political appointees during the Bush Administration and earlier Administrations, going back to 1980, and including Democrats as well as Republicans. The message was that government doesn't work, and industry always knows what it's doing. What did we expect the employees to do?"

Industry, of course, doesn't always know what it's doing, NYU's Stewart notes. He headed the Justice Dept.'s environmental division in March 1989, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 250,000 barrels of crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound. For 21 years, until BP, that was the record U.S. oil spill. After the Valdez ran aground, it became clear that the industry lacked the plans or equipment to contain a spill of that magnitude, Stewart says. "Government had delegated most cleanup responsibility to the oil companies, and their response capability was in mothballs."

Congress responded belatedly with legislation in 1990 that required safer supertankers and a mechanism for the U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies to coordinate a cleanup—on the water's surface. That didn't help prepare for a blowout a mile below. Once again, government had deferred to the oil industry, and the giant company in question wasn't ready for a monumental snafu.

Obama has spoken expansively about restoring respect for government service. His occasionally populist rhetoric aside, he has been solicitous of corporate interests, too. Recall the astonishing bailout of General Motors. Just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the President had proposed expanding offshore oil exploration, in part as a bid for Republican votes for stalled energy and climate legislation. At the time, Obama praised advances in drilling technology.

"Where I was wrong," he said on May 27, "was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios." By his own admission, this product of Harvard Law School and liberal South Side Chicago politics was mesmerized, along with everyone else, by the myth of industry omnipotence.

Interior Dept. Lapses

The President also acknowledged that his Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, who oversees the MMS, hadn't moved quickly enough to root out favoritism and laxity. In 2009, BP was granted a "categorical exclusion" that allowed the Deepwater Horizon to operate without analysis required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Obama said changes had been planned at Interior. "If they were happening fast enough, [BP's safety glitches] might have been caught."

In congressional testimony, Salazar has blamed the environmental lapse on a statutory 30-day deadline on the permitting process. The Administration says it will seek to extend that time limit to 90 days. Salazar exacerbated his department's bumbling image by repeatedly boasting about having a "boot on the neck" of BP. He even suggested that the company would be pushed "out of the way" if it didn't move faster. The tough-guy talk wasn't convincing. The government lacks the necessary engineers, undersea robots, and scientific expertise. This remains BP's show.

The director of the MMS is gone, and the agency has been divided in three, so that its collection of oil royalties won't undermine its policing function. Obama has imposed a six-month moratorium on new permits for deepwater wells. The sale of exploration leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off Virginia has been suspended. A big Arctic energy project will be delayed. The government will require tougher certification of the sort of equipment—the notorious "blowout preventer"—that failed on the Deepwater Horizon.

That's not stopping some Republicans from equating Obama's response to the crisis to President George W. Bush's lack of urgency in reacting to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is running a Web video juxtaposing candidate Obama's words about Katrina—"Never again"—with those of liberal commentators castigating him for acting "lackadaisical" about the Gulf crisis and seeming as ineffective as "a Vatican observer."

More measured critics recognize that neither party has covered itself with glory. "The truth of the matter is nobody knows how to fix this damned thing," Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, told reporters, "and if they know how, they need to step up."

The Case for Better Regulation

Until someone figures out how to fix BP's leak, the idea the President should stress is how to reframe the debate about oil, investment banking, and other technologically sophisticated industries. Obama should argue that we need better government oversight of business, not to harm it, but to nurture it. He could invoke the memory of the New Deal regulatory revolution, which shielded industry and finance from calls for socialism after the Great Depression.

He won't win over Tea Partiers who see the New Deal (and the income tax and civil rights laws) as constitutional infringements. But a majority in America may well be receptive to an appeal that Democratic pollster Douglas E. Schoen described this way in a roundtable on the politics of the spill on washingtonpost.com: "We are all in this together—not as corporations or populists, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans working to solve the problem collectively." In a speech in Pittsburgh on the afternoon of June 2, Obama started in this direction, then swerved toward partisanship. The Republican agenda, he said, "basically offers two answers to every problem we face: more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations."

For the foreseeable future, we need an oil industry. It should be one that worries about tough inspections so it avoids another Deepwater Horizon. For the longer term, as Obama argued in Pittsburgh, we need a comprehensive climate and energy bill that will create incentives to find alternatives to oil retrieved at great expense from the ocean depths or purchased from pernicious foreign sources.

In the same spirit, pending financial reform legislation aims to insulate Wall Street from its worst instincts and make it less of a threat to the rest of us. Bills waiting to be reconciled by the House and Senate would give regulators more authority to monitor complex securities, simple mortgages, and all manner of transactions in between. Financial firms would come under pressure to reduce debt and hold more capital in reserve. If a financial outfit began to fail, regulators would have more tools to disassemble it before a traumatic collapse.

Obama ran for President emphasizing results. Businesspeople like to talk about results, too. After a generation of operating according to a simplistic notion that defined government oversight as essentially poisonous to corporate success, now would be an opportune time to rally the country around an ideal of tough, fair regulation for the good of business and the customers it serves.

Barrett is an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. With reporting by Stanley Reed, Brian Swint, Joe Carroll, Jim Efstathiou Jr., and Justin Blum.

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Cuba—A Way Forward

José Goitia/The New York Times/Redux

The Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, Havana, May 2008

by Nik Steinberg, Daniel Wilkinson

In a 1980 interview, Gabriel García Márquez told The New York Times that he had spent three years writing a book about life in Cuba under Fidel Castro. But, he said, “now I realize that the book is so critical that it could be used against Cuba, so I refuse to publish it.”

In view of the Colombian author’s past concern for the victims of Latin America’s authoritarian regimes, it seems likely that what he called a “very harsh, very frank book” addressed Castro’s systematic repression of dissent: the rigged trials behind closed doors, the abysmal “reeducation” camps, the long prison sentences. Castro’s methods may have seemed relatively tame when compared with the mass slaughter of civilians by US-backed regimes throughout the region, for example in Guatemala. Yet as the cold war ended, these dictatorships gradually gave way to civilian rule, and the Castro government was left standing as the only one in the hemisphere that continued to repress virtually all political dissent. García Márquez’s book remained unpublished.

The fact that Latin America’s most renowned writer would censor himself in this way may actually say more about the plight of Cubans under Castro than anything in his manuscript. For the notion that to criticize Cuba is to abet its more powerful enemies was, for Fidel Castro, the key to achieving what his prisons alone could not—ensuring that his critics on the island remained isolated and largely ignored.

For years, many believed that the last thing keeping the region’s democratic tide from sweeping across Cuba was the unique force of Fidel Castro’s character—the extraordinary combination of charisma and cunning with which he inspired and corralled his supporters, provoked and outmaneuvered his enemies, and projected himself onto the big screen of world politics. Under his leadership, Cuba had made impressive gains in health care, education, and the eradication of extreme poverty. But the promise of the Cuban Revolution had been undercut by years of chronic deprivation, exacerbated by the US embargo, and brought to the brink of collapse by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had propped up the island’s economy for decades. Democracy would come to Cuba—the thinking went—as soon as Fidel Castro was no longer standing in its way.

Then in June 2006, his health failing, Castro was forced to step down formally after nearly five decades in power. And nothing happened. No popular uprising in the streets, no Party shake-up, no coup. Instead, his younger brother, Raúl, took up power and, though lacking Fidel’s charisma, was able to keep the country running smoothly. Within months, it seemed clear that Cuba’s single-party system could continue without Fidel at the helm.

Some still held out hope that Raúl Castro would begin a process of political reform, a Cuban perestroika. Those looking for signs of an opening pointed to several of Raúl’s early actions, including state-sponsored public forums ostensibly aimed at encouraging criticism of government policies and the signing of the two major international human rights treaties.

But was Raúl Castro allowing genuine criticism of his government? Was the repressive machinery being eased or even dismantled? A year ago Human Rights Watch set out to answer these questions. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. The Cuban government welcomes tourists to the island, but has for years denied access to international rights monitors. Foreign journalists are followed around by undercover agents: their e-mails are monitored and their phones tapped. Those who publish in-depth stories on controversial issues face expulsion.

Our first step was to write to the Cuban government requesting authorization to visit the island. Human Rights Watch does not normally request permission to do its work, but it seemed like a good way to test whether the government’s attitude had changed. The government never responded.

We then got in touch with several local dissidents. Outside of Cuba, people often refer to “the dissidents” as though they are a single, unified political group. They are not. They do not share a single ideology or objective. Rather, the dissident community is made up of a variety of Cubans scattered across the island, some of whom belong to small groups, and others who work alone. A dissident may be someone who writes articles critical of the government, attempts to form an independent labor union, or simply refuses to attend meetings of a local revolutionary committee. What ties these people together is that they engage in activities that the Cuban government considers contrary to its policies, and therefore “counterrevolutionary.”

We obtained reports of alleged government abuses from several unauthorized human rights groups in Cuba, whose leaders have persevered over the years despite tapped phone lines, restricted mobility, frequent police raids, and periods in jail, relying on a few committed volunteers to compile lists of political prisoners and testimony about violations. But tracking down the alleged victims to corroborate these reports often took weeks. E-mail access on the island is virtually nonexistent, and many families outside of Havana do not have phone lines. When we were able to get through by phone, some people were too frightened to speak. Others spoke cryptically to avoid arousing the suspicion of listening ears. Still others spoke freely until their lines went dead, mid-sentence. While we did manage to conduct some full-length interviews, it became increasingly clear that the only way to get the full story would be to visit the island.

It would prove to be the most difficult research mission Human Rights Watch had undertaken in the region in years. Our team entered on tourist visas and traveled the length of the island by car, telling no one in advance that we were coming and never staying in any town for more than one night.¹ The fear we had sensed over the phone was even more palpable on the ground. Some people became so uneasy talking about government abuses that we cut short the interviews and moved on. Several alerted us to watching neighbors who monitored suspicious activity for the local Revolutionary Defense Committees. A Baptist minister, when asked about human rights, told us quietly that what we were doing was illegal and asked us to produce identification.

Yet many people welcomed us into their homes, where they spoke frankly of their experiences. Small boxes and folders were brought out from beneath beds and inside kitchen cabinets, with official documents that corroborated their stories. Among much else, we were shown a court ruling from a dissident’s trial, which his wife and children were not allowed to attend; a parole order warning a journalist that he could be returned to prison at any time; a letter denying a critic of the government permission to travel.

Piece by piece, the evidence stacked up. The human rights treaties had not been ratified or carried out. The “open” forums to discuss government policies were governed by strict rules that prohibited any talk of reforming the single-party system. More than one hundred political prisoners locked up under Fidel remained behind bars, and Raúl’s government had used sham trials to lock away scores more. These new prisoners included more than forty dissidents whom Raúl had imprisoned for “dangerousness.” The most Orwellian provision of Cuba’s criminal code, this charge allows authorities to imprison individuals before they have committed a crime, on the suspicion that they might commit one in the future. Their “dangerous” activities included failing to attend pro-government rallies, not belonging to official party organizations, and simply being unemployed.

We published our findings on November 18, 2009.² It was only then that we received a response from the Cuban government: a public statement, published that day, declaring our report “illegitimate and illegal.”

If the crime of the political prisoners is essentially voicing their opinions, a main function of imprisoning them is to isolate them from their potential audiences. Ramón Velásquez Toranzo taught theater until his political activities cost him his job. In December 2006, he set out on a silent march across the island to call for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners. On the road he was repeatedly threatened and beaten by civilian Rapid Response Brigades, according to his wife and daughter, who accompanied him. He was twice detained and forcibly returned to his home by police. On his third attempt, he was taken to prison and given a three-year sentence for “dangerousness.” Raymundo Perdigón Brito, who had worked as a security guard before he too was fired for “counterrevolutionary” activities, wrote articles critical of the government for foreign websites until, in 2006, he was sentenced to four years in prison for “dangerousness.” Digzan Saavedra Prat, a shoemaker, documented abuse cases for a local human rights group, an activity that cost him his job and caused him to be convicted of “dangerousness” in 2008. His indictment accused him of “being tied to persons of bad moral and social conduct,” “setting a bad example for the new generation,” and “thinking he is handsome.”

Those who continue to speak out while in prison are isolated even further. One man was arrested and sentenced to four years for “dangerousness” after he tried to hand out copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in public in 2006. In 2008, he attempted to commemorate International Human Rights Day (December 10) by reading the Universal Declaration aloud to fellow inmates. But according to his wife, a guard cut him short, ordering him to eat the text—literally. When he refused, he was beaten, thrown into solitary confinement for weeks, and sentenced in a closed-door hearing to six more years in prison for disrespecting authority.

We heard many similar accounts from former prisoners and the relatives of current ones. Those who refused “reeducation” or questioned prison conditions were thrown into solitary confinement cells measuring three by six feet for weeks, even months, on end. Their visits were cut off, phone calls denied, and letters confiscated. Since Cuba has for years refused to grant human rights monitors access to its prisons, it is difficult to get firsthand general accounts of the conditions inside. The most comprehensive—by the sixty-seven-year-old journalist Héctor Maseda Gutierrez, currently serving a twenty-year sentence for his writing—had to be smuggled out of prison virtually page by page. It is titled “Buried Alive.”

While not all dissidents are locked up, nearly all are effectively imprisoned on the island itself. In clear violation of international law, the Cuban government requires its citizens to obtain permission to leave the country, and those marked as “counterrevolutionaries” are generally denied it. The prominent blogger Yoani Sánchez—whose posts comment on the daily indignities of life in Cuba—has three times been refused permission to leave the country, twice to accept international prizes and once, in March 2010, to attend a conference on the Spanish language.

The emergence of a nascent blogosphere has been heralded as a sign that Cuba is opening up, yet the government systematically blocks critical websites and strictly controls access, forcing bloggers to upload their posts using thumb drives and illegal back channels. Because an hour’s use costs roughly one third of Cubans’ monthly wages, and since there are few connections outside of cities, the average Cuban has no access to the Internet. Although Yoani Sánchez was named one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people, most Cubans on the island have never even heard of her, let alone read her blog.³

Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images

A street peddler, right, watching dissidents Ofelia Acevedo and Oswaldo Paya of the Varela Project, whose grassroots campaign for a democratic referendum in Cuba was squashed by the government, Havana, October 3, 2003

The Cuban government also seeks to isolate dissidents from their communities. They are fired from their jobs and blacklisted from employment. They are subjected to public “acts of repudiation,” in which mobs surround their homes, chant insults, throw stones, and sometimes assault them in plain view of their neighbors. Friends and family members are warned to keep their distance, lest they too be branded counterrevolutionaries and punished. Under the “dangerousness” provision, even spending time with someone who is considered “dangerous” is punishable, a kind of “dangerousness” by association.

“People who come to my house are immediately called by state security and reprimanded,” Eduardo Pacheco Ortíz, a human rights defender and former political prisoner, told us. “Then these people—for fear of losing their jobs, for fear that [the authorities] will take it out on someone in their family—simply stop talking to me.”

After Ramón Velásquez Toranzo was sentenced to four years for his silent march across the island, his son René, who had not marched with his father or considered himself “political,” was fired from his longtime job without explanation, then repeatedly denied work on the grounds that he was not “trustworthy.” Members of the local Revolutionary Defense Committee regularly harassed and threatened him in public. Police warned his friends that they would get in trouble if they kept hanging around him, until he had few friends left. His girlfriend was forbidden by her parents from seeing him. “Some days I wake up and I think: I have nothing. I am nobody. I have no dreams left for my future,” René told us.

Some outside observers contend that the existence of around two hundred political prisoners has little impact on the lives of the 11 million other Cubans. But as the blogger Reinaldo Escobar recently wrote, “Why then does an index finger cross the lips, eyes widen, or a look of horror appear on the faces of my friends when at their houses I commit the indiscretion of making a political comment within earshot of the neighbors?”⁴ The political prisoners may be small in number, but they are a chilling reminder to all Cubans of what has been a basic fact of life for half a century: to criticize the Castros is to condemn oneself to years of enforced solitude.

In addition to declaring our report illegal, the Cuban government also claimed it was part of a broader effort to “trample” Cuba’s “right to free self-determination and sovereign equality.” This charge, while no more credible than the first, warrants serious attention, for it is reflected in the concerns of García Márquez and many others outside of Cuba who have for years been reluctant to criticize the Castros.

Invoking national sovereignty may be the most common tactic used by governments around the globe—and across the political spectrum—to counter criticism of their abusive practices. It is the international equivalent of the “states’ rights” claim that segregationists in the US South used for years to defend their racist laws and policies. The aim is to shift the focus of public concern from the rights of abuse victims to the rights (real and imagined) of the states that abuse them.

What sets the Castro government apart from most others that employ this tactic is the fact that Cuba has indeed, for five decades, faced an explicit threat to its national sovereignty—coming from the United States, a superpower ninety miles off its shores. In the 1960s, the threat took the form of covert military action, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and multiple botched assassination attempts. It continues in the form of the economic embargo established by President Eisenhower in 1960, later expanded by President Kennedy, and eventually locked in place by the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act. Also known as “Helms-Burton,” the law prohibits the president from lifting trade restrictions until Cuba has legalized political activity and made a commitment to free and fair elections. It also prohibits lifting the embargo as long as Fidel and Raúl Castro remain in office. In other words, it requires that Cubans be free to choose their leaders, but bars them from choosing the Castros. It is thus a program to promote not only democracy but also regime change.

It is hard to think of a US policy with a longer track record of failure. The embargo has caused much hardship to the Cuban people but done nothing to loosen the Castros’ hold on power. Instead it has provided the Cuban government an excuse for the country’s problems. Billboards line the roads outside Havana with slogans like “Eight hours of the blockade is equivalent to the materials required to repair 40 infant care centers.” The excuse is effective because it is at least partly true.

The US policy has also served the Castros as a pretext for repressing legitimate efforts to reform Cuba from within. The most notorious example of the past decade came in response to the Varela Project, a grassroots campaign designed to take advantage of a constitutional provision that allows a national referendum on any reform proposal that receives 10,000 signatures. The organizers spent years holding meetings and gathering signatures, enduring repeated harassment by authorities, attacks, and arrests. In May 2002, they delivered more than 11,000 signatures to the National Assembly.

The response was crushing. Rather than put the referendum to a vote (as required by law), the Castro government countered with its own referendum, which proposed amending the constitution to declare the socialist system “irrevocable.” This referendum passed, according to the government, with 99 percent of the public’s support. Not long afterward, the government began its most aggressive crackdown in years, arresting seventy-five “counterrevolutionaries,” including many Varela Project leaders, and sentencing them to an average of nineteen years in prison.

In a news conference immediately following the crackdown, Cuba’s foreign minister claimed that the Varela Project had been “part of a strategy of subversion against Cuba that has been conceived, financed, and directed from abroad with the active participation of the US Interests Section in Havana.” The United States had indeed been supporting civil society groups in Cuba for decades. In 2002, the year prior to the crackdown, the State Department devoted $5 million to “democracy promotion” in Cuba, channeling it through the US Interests Section in Havana and nongovernmental groups based mostly in Miami. For instance, several Cuban journalists received salaries from US-funded Internet publications critical of the Castro government.

Nonetheless, many of the seventy-five were convicted without any evidence of support—direct or indirect—from the US government. And in those cases where the Cuban government did show they received US support, it provided no credible evidence that the recipients were engaged in activities that would be considered illegal in a democratic country.

According to Cuban court documents, the support took the form of supplying, through the US Interests Section in Havana, equipment like fax machines (“used systematically in sending information to counterrevolutionary cells located in Miami”), books (“all with a pronounced subversive content”), and medicine (“with the explicit purpose of winning over addicts to their cause”). In other cases, the prisoners had been paid by the US for filing articles or radio reports for foreign outlets, or visiting the US Interests Section, where they had “access via the Internet to the websites of enemy publications…[and] counterrevolutionary dailies like the Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald, Agence France-Press, Reuters, and the American television channel CNN.”

Many governments require civil society groups to register funding they receive from foreign states. But for Cubans there is a catch: to register funding from the US government is to admit to a crime punishable with a prison sentence of up to twenty years—even when the funding merely supports activities like human rights monitoring, labor organizing, and establishing independent libraries. In fact, these activities are illegal in Cuba even when pursued without US support. The criminal code explicitly outlaws “actions designed to support, facilitate, or collaborate with the objectives of the ‘Helms-Burton Law.’”

Since promoting democratic rule is a central objective of Helms-Burton, any action taken toward that end can therefore be considered a crime. In this way, just as criticism of the Castros is equated with abetting their enemies, promoting democracy is equated with US-sponsored regime change.

But if the pretext for the crackdown was bogus, it nonetheless served a crucial function: to recast the government’s repression of its citizens as the story of a small nation defending itself against a powerful aggressor. It was the same tactic that Fidel Castro had been employing to brilliant effect for decades. By casting himself as a Latin American David besieged by a US Goliath, he usurped the role of victim from his prisoners. The sleight of hand worked because, for many outside of Cuba, the indignation provoked by the US embargo left little room for the revulsion they would otherwise feel for Fidel Castro’s abuses.

Raúl Castro has adopted this same tactic, so that when outsiders hear of Cuba’s political prisoners, many think first of what the US has done to Cuba, not what Cuba has done to its own people. While the prisons, travel restrictions, and information controls make it difficult for Cuban dissidents to get their stories out to the world, the Castros’ portrayal of Cuba as a victim makes audiences abroad less willing to hear these stories. The effect is to seal Cuba’s prisoners off from international sympathy and reinforce their prolonged solitude.

Once a year, for nearly two decades, the UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US embargo. In 2009, the resolution passed 187–3, with only Israel and Palau siding with the United States. While this condemnation is deserved, there is no such UN vote to condemn Cuba’s repressive policies, or comparable outrage about its victims.

This discrepancy is particularly pronounced in Latin America, where the long history of heavy-handed interventions and outright coups has left an abiding aversion to US bullying. Even leaders whom one might expect to be sensitive to the prisoners’ plight choose to remain silent. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was himself imprisoned by a military dictatorship, and former President Michelle Bachelet of Chile is the daughter of a political prisoner (and herself a torture victim). Yet in recent years, both have made state visits to Cuba in which they embraced the Castros and refused to meet with relatives of political prisoners.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of leaders have praised the Castro government as a standard-bearer for the region. President Evo Morales of Bolivia says that Cuba “teaches the entire world how to live with dignity and sovereignty, in its permanent fight against the North American empire.” President Rafael Correa of Ecuador speaks of the “Latin American pride” he feels when witnessing Cuba’s ongoing revolution, which “secured the reestablishment of human rights for all Cuban men and women.” Perhaps the most fervent supporter is President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose government has taken over the role, once filled by the Soviet Union, of keeping the Cuban economy afloat by providing millions of barrels of subsidized petroleum. Chávez calls Cuba’s revolution “the mother” of all Latin American liberation movements, and Fidel Castro “the father of the motherland.”

Over the past decade, a growing number of voices in the United States—including editorial boards, research organizations, and advocacy groups—have called for an end to the embargo. But they are far from winning the policy debate in Washington. Anti-Castro hard-liners within the Cuban-American community continue to wield disproportionate influence, even if their dominance has waned in recent years.

The opponents of the embargo have failed to be persuasive. Many have sought to play down the scope of repression in Cuba out of a concern—similar to García Márquez’s—that criticism of the Cuban government will only strengthen the hand of the anti-Castro hard-liners. But by making this strategic choice, they have undermined their credibility among the very people they need to persuade: those who are justifiably concerned about Cuba’s political prisoners. Moreover, they are unable to offer a politically workable solution to members of Congress, who will never vote to end the embargo if this will have no effect on the regime’s abuses.

The embargo must go. But it is naive to think that a government that has systematically repressed virtually all forms of political dissent for decades will cease to do so simply because the embargo has been lifted. Nor is it realistic, given the effectiveness of the Castros’ repressive machinery, to believe that the pressure needed for progress on human rights can come solely from within Cuba. The embargo needs to be replaced with a policy that will bring genuinely effective pressure on the Castro government to improve human rights.

For this to happen, the United States must make the first move. President Obama should approach allies in Europe and Latin America with an offer to lift the US embargo if the other countries agree to join a coalition to press Cuba to meet a single, concrete demand: the release of all political prisoners.

Some governments are sure to rebuff the offer, especially in Latin America. But for many others, the prospect of ending the embargo will remove what has long been the main obstacle to openly condemning the Cuban government’s abuses. And concentrating this multilateral effort exclusively on the issue of political prisoners will make it far more difficult for leaders who say they respect human rights to remain silent.

The new coalition would give the Cuban government a choice: free its political prisoners or face sanctions. Unlike the current US embargo, these sanctions should directly target the Cuban leaders—by denying them travel visas or freezing their overseas assets, for example—without harming the Cuban population as a whole. Ideally this ultimatum alone would suffice to prompt the government to release its prisoners. But even if it did not, the new approach toward Cuba—multilateral, targeted, and focused on human rights rather than regime change—would fundamentally transform the international dynamic that has long helped the Castros stifle dissent. The Cuban government’s efforts to isolate its critics at home would lead to its own isolation from the international community.

In the absence of such a shift, Cubans seeking reform will continue to face daunting odds. Any hope of drawing attention to their cause will require desperate measures, such as the hunger strike recently carried out by Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a dissident who had been in prison since the 2003 crackdown. For eighty-five days, Zapata Tamayo’s protest went largely unnoticed. It was only when he finally starved to death in February—becoming the first Cuban hunger striker to perish in almost forty years—that the world reacted. The European Parliament passed a resolution condemning his death as “avoidable and cruel” and calling for the release of all political prisoners. The Mexican and Chilean legislatures approved similar declarations.

The Cuban government responded in familiar fashion: it blamed the US. The state news organ claimed that Zapata Tamayo had been “thrust into death” by the “powerful machinery of the empire.” When several other dissidents began hunger strikes in the following days—including Guillermo Fariñas, a journalist who at this writing is reportedly near death—Cuban authorities dismissed them as “mercenaries” of the US. Decrying what he called a “huge smear campaign against Cuba,” Raúl Castro told the Cuban Congress, “We will never yield to blackmail from any country.”

Raúl Castro seems confident that he can defuse this latest challenge with the same sleight of hand his brother used so effectively in the past. And indeed, the flurry of condemnation following Zapata Tamayo’s death appears to have already faded. But more than just a tactical move, Raúl’s response reflects a vision for Cuba’s future that does not bode well for those desiring change. It is the vision he set forth on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in 2009, addressing the nation from the same public square where Fidel had first proclaimed victory:

Today, the Revolution is stronger than ever…. Does it mean the danger has diminished? No, let’s not entertain any illusions. As we commemorate this half-century of victories, it is time to reflect on the future, on the next fifty years, when we shall continue to struggle incessantly.

A story of struggle always needs an adversary, just as a claim to victimhood needs an aggressor. After playing this role for fifty years, the United States is now in a unique position to bring about change in Cuba: when it stops acting like Goliath, the Castro government will stop looking like David. Only then will Cuba’s dissidents be able to rally the international support they need to end their long years of solitude.

—April 28, 2010

1. The research trip was carried out by Nik Steinberg and a Latin American human rights lawyer who preferred to remain anoymous. ↩

2. Human Rights Watch, "New Castro, Same Cuba: Political Prisoners in the Post-Fidel Era." ↩

3. Time magazine has also named Sánchez's blog, Generation Y, one of the twenty-five best in the world; it can be read at www.desdecuba.com/generationy.↩

4. Escobar's blog, Desde Aqui (From Here), can be read at www.desdecuba.com/reinaldoescobar.↩

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• 'Ladies in White' clash with pro-Castro crowd (msnbc.msn.com)
• You: Fidel Castro Is Back in Charge of Cuba (newsweek.com)
• Roy Greenslade: Cuban paper runs letters critical of government (guardian.co.uk)

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