‘The Totalitarian Regime Is Intact’: One Cuban’s Message to Obama
Dion Publishing Company presents Rosa Maria Paya on Obama’s Opening to Cuba – The Atlantic
Ofelia Acevedo, wife of Oswaldo Paya, one of Cuba’s best-known dissidents, is comforted by a priest near the tomb of her husband after his burial in Havana July 24, 2012. Paya, leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, died on Sunday in a car crash, government and opposition sources said. Another dissident died in the crash, and a Spaniard and Swede were injured, after the car left the road and hit a tree, government officials told Reuters. REUTERS/Stringer (CUBA – Tags: POLITICS OBITUARY) – RTR359TA
The U.S. is pressing ahead with its opening to Cuba. What does that mean for democracy on the island?
The Totalitarian Regime Is Intact’: One Cuban’s Message to Obama
Global News
Earlier this month, Ben Rhodes, the architect of Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening to Cuba, characterized the full restoration of U.S.-Cuban relations—in other words, Congress lifting the U.S. travel ban and trade embargo against the island—as inevitable and imminent. It would be the next domino to fall after the first U.S. presidential visit to Cuba in 88 years, the first authorization of commercial flights from America to Cuba in five decades, the first sales of Cuban coffee to the U.S. market, and so on.
“The fact of the matter is that the American people and the Cuban people overwhelmingly want this to happen,” Rhodes said. “Frankly, whatever the political realities in either country, for somebody to try to turn this off, they would have to be working against the overwhelming desires of their own people.”
As the Obama administration seeks to cement one of its principal foreign-policy achievements, it’s worth pausing to unpack that complex word: “desire.” Rhodes is right that the majority of Americans and Cubans support re-establishing ties between the two nations. Yet most Americans and Cubans don’t think re-established ties will bring more democracy to Cuba’s one-party state. In one 2015 poll, just over 50 percent of Cubans said they were dissatisfied with the country’s political system and wanted more political parties than the Castros’ Communist Party. But roughly the same percentage didn’t think their country’s new relationship with the United States would change the Cuban political system (Cubans were more likely to anticipate change in their widely despised economic system). They desire normal relations with America. But many also desire democracy. And they don’t expect the former to lead to the latter.
For Rosa Maria Paya, such an outcome is patently unacceptable. Paya is the daughter of Oswaldo Paya, a Cuban democracy activist who in 2012 was killed in a mysterious car crash that official accounts labeled an accident, but that Paya’s family, and the driver of the car, have condemned as a brazen assassination by the Castro regime. Paya is 27 years old, a recent college graduate who studied physics like her father and relocated from Havana to Miami after his death; she’s part of a generation of Cubans that is especially supportive of democracy, the United States, and emigration from Cuba. And Paya is an activist in her own right, continuing her father’s campaign for a national plebiscite on whether to overhaul Cuba’s political system.
Paya cannot be counted among the “overwhelming” number of Cubans who, according to Rhodes, are enthusiastic about Obama’s Cuba policy. She is not as quick as Rhodes to downplay the “political realities” in her country. At the Human Rights Foundation’s Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway, she offered sobering and, at times, searing commentary on what the Obama administration’s outreach to Cuba has produced—and, critically, what it hasn’t.
