Travel to Cuba won’t foster democracy

I’m not opposed to the growing push in Washington to liberalize U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba, but the stated reason behind the move — that a flood of U.S. tourists will bring democracy to the island — is wishful thinking.

Last week, more than 20 key senators — including the Senate Democratic Policy Committee chairman, Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. — introduced a bill that would allow Americans to visit the island freely. The bill was backed by a diverse coalition, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Human Rights Watch.

Meantime, there is growing speculation in Washington that President Barack Obama will announce new initiatives to relax the travel ban to Cuba before the April 17 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.

Family travel

Obama, meeting a campaign promise, last month scrapped some restrictions on family travel and remittances imposed by the Bush administration.

But claims that a broader easing of U.S. travel to Cuba would accelerate a political opening on the island are highly misleading.

“Tourism has not brought down a totalitarian regime anywhere in history,” says James Cason, a former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, who heads the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba advocacy group. “No study of Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union alleges that tourism had anything to do with the end of communism. Radio Free Europe did.”

Cason and other skeptics cite the following reasons to doubt that a massive influx of U.S. visitors would have a major political impact on the island:

Cuba’s dictatorship penalizes interactions of ordinary Cubans with foreigners. Under Cuban law 80, of 1999, it is a crime for Cubans to accept foreign publications from visitors.

And a 2004 Ministry of Tourism memo to hotel workers prohibits them from interacting with foreigners outside their workplaces.

Virtually all foreign tourists in Cuba stay at hotels in isolated places where they have little contact with nontourism workers. Of the 103 four- or five-star hotels in Cuba, 67 percent of them are located in Varadero, Cayo Coco and other places in the countryside, and only 19 percent are in Havana.

Few Americans speak Spanish well enough or care to have political conversations with ordinary Cubans. Most tourists go to Cuba for three things that start with “s”: sun, songs and sex.

My opinion: Obama should go ahead with his campaign promises to relax family travel and remittances restrictions for Cuban Americans, and he should lift restrictions on academic exchanges with the island, which is within his authority. Congress should eliminate all restrictions on family visits, and perhaps even lift the travel ban on tourists altogether.

But this should be done based on Americans’ rights to freely travel anywhere, and in conjunction with a U.S. diplomatic offensive to press Cuba to allow fundamental freedoms.

False assumptions

It should not be based on false assumptions that a flood of U.S. visitors will spark an outcry for democracy on the island. It is more likely that interaction with American tourists carrying expensive video cameras would drive even more Cubans to flee to Miami.

Post script: Talking about the upcoming Summit of the Americas, Obama should tell Latin American and Caribbean leaders who will ask him to lift all U.S. sanctions on Cuba: “OK, I’m willing to enter into that discussion, but only if you do your part, and abide by hemispheric agreements calling for the collective defense of democracy anywhere in the region, including in Cuba.”

Many major Latin American countries, including Brazil, are turning a blind eye to the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter and other deals that commit them to demand respect for basic political rights wherever they may be violated in the Western hemisphere.

X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.