El Obama’s Scroogie
December 26, 2014
The great Cuban-born pitcher, Luis Tiant, had a live arm as
a young man. Scouted in his teens while
playing for Cuban
Juvenile League All-Star team in 1957, he was signed for the enormous sum of
$150.00 per month, and then purchased by the Cleveland Indians in 1961, just in
time to have hostilities between the United States and Cuba escalate. He didn’t see his parents for fourteen
years.
In
the late 1960’s, Tiant hurt his shoulder, and after some difficult years,
realized that to continue pitching effectively he had to change. Out emerged El
Tiante —different arm-angles, different release points, a curve, a scroogie, a
little of this and a little of that, and, most famously, one of the most
bizarre wind-ups seen since the Dead-ball era.
He literally turned his back on the hitter, regaining the time from his
lost zip with the extra split second that the batter took to determine when the
ball would actually be thrown. He broke
all the rules—no one was like him. And
he got results.
Barack
Obama just pulled a little El Tiante. He
looked at all the rules about our relationship with Cuba, decided they weren’t
putting wins up on the board, and came up with a new pitch from an entirely new
delivery. Obama decided to bring Cuba just
a little bit in from the cold.
Was he right? You
have to pick through the issues very carefully.
Let’s start with the Castros. Good guys, lovers of liberty? Not exactly.
If there has been any mellowing, we can stipulate they hide it very well.
And, we can also stipulate that the Cuban émigrés who lost
both political freedom and personal assets in Fidel’s La Revolución justifiably bear a long grudge. They ended up on the
wrong side of a struggle between one form of dictatorship and another. One
can’t blame them for resisting anything short of Castro’s complete capitulation
and a triumphant return to the homeland.
It is a peculiarity of our history that we don't really
understand revolution, even though we lived it.
We don’t get the concept that radical changes in leadership can lead to
a complete reversal of fortune, both in the political and economic
spheres. It didn’t happen here. We had some bloodshed, a bit of tar and
feathering, many Tories left and were compensated by the Crown, but if someone
had slept through 1776 and awoken 15 years later, they probably wouldn’t have
been shocked at who had money and power.
Nor would they have been that shocked at the way we went about things—we
emulated the Brits, except for keeping the King.
But Fidel really was “The World Turned Upside Down”. So, any re-evaluation of Cuban policy begins with
the unhappiness of the older generation of Cuban émigrés who lost it all and
want to see no normalization. You have to accept that their feelings are
genuine, and legitimate, and must be taken into account. But you then have consider that, with the
passing of years, we have begun a changing of the guard—and a majority of
younger Cuban-Americans support normalization.
Finally, we have to ask the most important, and frankly, the most
uncomfortable question—what is in our national interest, and how does the
present policy advance those goals?
We might as well start on the third by admitting something
to ourselves. American foreign policy is
generally driven by self-interest.
George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” was a lovely concept, very
high-minded, and we can even agree for the purposes of argument that he
advanced it for noble reasons. But it is
totally impractical as a central rationale.
We don’t do it that way. We pick
our friends and our enemies to advance our interests. In our hemisphere, we have, at various times,
stood behind the Argentinian Junta, the dictatorships in Honduras, Guatemala,
Nicaragua, and Duvalier’s Haiti. There was
cold calculation in this: first, support American business (Banana Republic wasn't always so stylish)
and later as a Cold-War strategy.
What about Cuba?
Well, there is the very stirring Teddy Roosevelt charge up San Juan Hill, an
epic in the Spanish American War of 1898.
And then, the far more prosaic Cuban “Constitution” we imposed, which
allowed Uncle Sam to drop by on occasion to make sure that they maintained “a government adequate for
the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” As Thomas Donlan pointed out in a recent
editorial in Barrons, we did these little ‘interventions’ in force and on a
regular basis in the early part of the 20th Century. Donlan went on to quote a Marine Major
General who operated in Cuba and other Latin American countries “I was a racketeer
for capitalism.”
“Racketeer for capitalism” isn’t exactly the type of
sentiment that stirs the soul, but we are all past that, of course. That leaves us basically with one remaining
“national interest”; Cuba is infested with Commies. Certainly true. As is our largest foreign holder of US
Treasuries, “Red” China, and as is a place like North Viet Nam, where we lost
over 50,000 of our men not all that long ago.
How about a strategic issue?
There was that nasty incident in 1962 where the Russians placed
nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. So, the embargo, which was imposed in 1960,
and strengthened by a series of laws enacted afterwards, would seem to have
some “existential” underpinnings. Except
that was more than 50 years ago, and we did about $30 Billion worth of trade
with Putin’s kleptocracy in 2014, despite the rather limited embargo we’ve
imposed on them recently for Ukraine. Somehow,
the logic seems to dim….
A rational person would acknowledge that more than 50 years
of this have not produced the regime change we wanted, have not restored the
now fairly ancient warriors of the expat community to their homes and assets,
and frankly does us very little good in the world of diplomacy. We look silly—everyone else quite happily
smokes Cuban cigars—and the small-mindedness of this, coupled with an obvious
double standard, diminishes the moral force of our arguments in the
international forum on a host of other issues.
All that being said, we have to acknowledge that there are
still domestic political considerations. Those expat Cubans not only have a
moral claim, but also still hold major sway, particularly in Electoral
Voter-rich Florida. And, while President
Obama has considerable Executive Branch authority to conduct foreign relations,
there is a web of at least half a dozen laws that would have to be amended by
Congress.
What happens next? The President has already opened the
door, and it remains to be seen whether Congress, soon to be completely
controlled by the GOP, will either move things along, or try to slam it as hard
as possible on his foot. They have a few
approaches they can take. The most
passive would be to refuse to alter existing legislation, but let the rest of
Obama’s policy proceed. Or, they could
do as they threatened and defund any spending on enacting it. Or, they could escalate even further by defunding and adding a condemnatory resolution.
This isn’t going to be easy. GOP has a real conundrum,
because they are going to have reconcile what position they ultimately want to take it in plain view. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush have roundly
denounced Obama, but Rand Paul approves.
Donlan, by no stretch of the imagination a liberal, supports the new
policy. So, of all people, does George
Will. As does the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, which spent nearly 100% of its campaign contributions on Republicans
in the last election cycle. And any
number of other Republican/Conservatives who deplore the fact that “Emperor”
Obama did it, but quietly admit there really isn’t anything wrong with the
concept, it’s just “the way” he did it, or that he wasn’t gracious enough to
not do it and wait for one of theirs to get the credit.
But, I like it. I
don’t care much about the political ramifications. And I don’t know whether Obama is right on
this, but he’s done something really fascinating. He has taken a policy that has long
demonstrated its ineffectual nature, and challenged it. In sclerotic
Washington, that is worth something.
Old El-Obama threw a scroogie. I'd like to see that pitch more. From both parties.
Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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