Clinton Confirmation Hearing - CUBA

[magbana]

What a bunch of crap.

This excerpt is from the NY Times transcript which can be found in its entirety via the URL listed at the end.

BARRASSO: Thank you.

Could I shift a little bit to Cuba? As you know, right now we have strict laws and regulations limiting economic transactions with -- with Cuba, with relatives of folks who are here. Any thought on lifting restrictions on families to visit and send -- and send things to Cuba?

CLINTON: Senator, the president-elect is committed to lifting the family travel restrictions and the remittance restrictions. He believes, and I think it's a very wise insight, that Cuban-Americans are the best ambassadors for democracy, freedom and a free market economy.

And as they are able to travel back to see their families, that further makes the case as to the failures of the Castro regime -- the repression, the political denial of freedom, the political prisoners -- all of the very unfortunate actions that have been taken to hold the Cuban people back.

You know, our policy is, first and foremost, about the freedom of the Cuban people and the bringing of democracy to the island of Cuba. We hope that the regime in Cuba, both Fidel and Raul Castro, will see this new administration as an opportunity to change some of their typical approaches.

Let those political prisoners out. Be willing to, you know, open up the economy and lift some of the oppressive strictures on the people of Cuba. And I think they would see that there would be an opportunity that could be perhaps exploited.

But that's in the future, whether or not they decide to make those changes.

========================================

THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 13, 2009
Transcript
Senate Confirmation Hearing: Hillary Clinton

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/politics/13text-clinton.html

[flamingdem]

1. The hipocrisy comes in when one considers human rights in China

I don't see the US doing much leveraging with embargos over there....

[EFerrari]

2. How about first you close down those secret prisons, Hillary,

and then get back to us?

[Judi Lynn]

3. I just read today that Bill Clinton was given $325,000.00 for his campaign by Jorge Mas Canosa,

the little Miami dictator who ran Miami with an iron fist, and who fully expected to be Cuba's next President, as he believed he could persuade some American President, in time, to overthrow the Cuban government. Getting terminal cancer several years ago cooled that anticipated bit of ambition for him.

$325,000.00. Big chunka change, isn't it? The information I read, by Ann Louise Bardach, former New York Times journalist, said that most Americans believe Clinton actually eased Cuban/US relations, but what actually happened was that Clinton took relations in a retrograde direction, putting conditions, after he signed the Torricelli and Helms-Burton travesties, back around where they were under EISENHOWER, for chrissakes. She said that he helped push legislation which even George H. W. Bush himself shunned for its extraterritorial reach as being unacceptable. Imagine that. Jesus Christ.

Don't count on anything civilized regarding Cuba to get Hillary Clinton's stamp of approval. Oh, by the way, her brother, Hugh Rodman married a very political hard-right-exile in Florida. Here's her image:



Maria Victoria Arias, some of her Arias family members appear in other photos:
http://mensual.prensa.com/mensual/contenido/2005/12/01/hoy/sociales.shtml
From October, 1996:

History Lesson: Brothers Plane Shootdown, Hillary Clinton's Sister in Law
TIME Magazine
October 28, 1996 Volume 148, No. 20

CLINTON'S CUBAN ROAD TO FLORIDA HOW POLICY WAS TURNED BY A FEW CUBAN AMERICANS, INCLUDING HIS SISTER-IN-LAW

DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

Not too long ago, all a Republican presidential candidate had to do was point out that his opponent was soft on Fidel Castro to maintain the G.O.P.'s lock on Florida's powerful Cuban-American community. But Bob Dole has nothing on Bill Clinton. The President has been courting that community, and to them he is now a hard-liner after their own hearts. A Miami poll has found that 41% of Florida's Cuban Americans plan to vote for Clinton, almost double what he won in 1992, finally giving him a chance to take the state he lost by a squeaker in 1992. It is one of the biggest triumphs of his campaign.

But the Clinton turnaround has come with costs. The tale of how he brought it off involves excessive influence over foreign policy by a special-interest group, gloves-off bureaucratic infighting and a willingness to bash U.S. allies for electoral gain. It also involves peril. Wooing Dade County's 678,000 Cuban Americans has resulted in the most volatile period of confrontation with Havana since the 1962 missile crisis. The Pentagon fears it is only a matter of time before another event like February's shoot-down of two U.S. civilian planes by Cuban MiGs sparks a military confrontation between the two countries.

Four years ago, senior State Department diplomats hoped Clinton would breathe fresh air into U.S.-Cuban relations. Miami's fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American community had long blocked any thaw, though the Pentagon had concluded that Havana posed no threat to the region, and Washington had made peace with almost all its cold war enemies. But half a dozen Cuban-American Democrats who raised huge sums for Clinton in 1992 convinced the new President he could win Florida in '96 if he became even more anti-Castro than Ronald Reagan or George Bush had been.

Senior Clinton aides call the cabal the "core group." It includes Maria Victoria Arias, a Miami lawyer married to Hugh Rodham, the First Lady's brother; and wealthy businessman Paul Cejas, who occasionally stays overnight at the White House. Arias telephones Hillary frequently and often sends Clinton clippings from Florida newspapers. In regular meetings at the Colonnade Hotel in Coral Gables or at Little Havana's Versailles Restaurant, the core group plans strategy and prepares appeals, which are sent by way of private notes to Clinton's top political aides. "When an issue comes up, we try to get a consensus and present a united front," says core-group member Simon Ferro, a Miami Democratic activist.

Clinton came to the Oval Office with his own Castro obsession. In 1980 he lost re-election as Governor partly because Cuban refugees rioted at an Arkansas Army post. As President he ordered the CIA to estimate the chances of an upheaval in Cuba during his first term: the agency said better than fifty-fifty. Clinton aides later pressed the cia to fund Cuban dissidents secretly. Burned by a dirty-tricks campaign against Castro in the '60s, the agency sidetracked the idea.

Clinton's foreign policy toward Cuba soon became snarled in bureaucratic battles between Administration hard-liners and moderates. In 1994 Castro allowed 33,000 Cubans to flee to South Florida, and the Administration began discouraging more escapees by detaining the rafters indefinitely at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The core group urged Clinton to punish Havana by halting airline flights to Cuba, but State Department moderates lobbied to maintain informal exchanges, including charter flights. Morton Halperin, the National Security Council's point man on Cuba, circulated a draft presidential speech offering carrots to Castro if he adopted reforms. Hard-liners, led by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Michael Skol, allied themselves with the core group and launched a guerrilla war against the conciliatory moves. Clinton shelved the carrots and embarked on the hard line.

By January 1995 the U.S. Atlantic Command chief, General John Sheehan, who had pressed to ease tensions with Havana, began badgering the White House to clear out the 20,000 Cubans at Guantanamo. Riots were possible, he warned, and by his staff's estimate, a permanent refugee camp would cost some $2 billion. Three months later, partly with that figure as ammunition, Administration moderates staged a policy coup. Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff began secretly talking to Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's legislature. The Guantanamo refugees would be sent to Florida. To stanch any new exodus, U.S. Coast Guard boats would intercept future rafters at sea and return them to Cuba on condition that the regime not punish them.

So that no one would catch on, Tarnoff had his wife book his airline ticket to Toronto, where he met with Alarcon in a hotel room to sign the deal. Tarnoff and Halperin were afraid the Cuban Americans might try to scuttle the talks. Indeed, a decision memo had to be sent to Clinton three times before he finally agreed to keep the negotiations secret from the core group. When the agreement was announced, however, angry Cuban Americans poured into the streets of Miami, and the core group retaliated by having Clinton oust Halperin as Cuba point man. The core group then hovered over every inch of policy. A Clinton speech in October 1995 announcing minor cultural exchanges took three months of vetting.

Meanwhile, hard-liners in Havana and Miami were edging both countries toward a crisis. Planes from Brothers to the Rescue, based in Miami, began buzzing Havana, dropping propaganda leaflets. Castro fired off angry notes to Washington warning "deadly force" would be used unless the flights stopped. In January, U.S. intelligence agencies spotted Cuban MiGs test-firing air-to-air missiles and practicing maneuvers to attack slow-moving aircraft similar to the Brothers' planes. The State Department, however, did not believe Castro would attack.

Then on Feb. 24, two Brothers' Cessnas were shot down near Cuban airspace. The core group pressed Clinton to respond militarily. Two days later, the President gathered his top national security advisers in the White House Cabinet Room and grilled the Joint Chiefs Chairman, General John Shalikashvili, on whether the U.S. should punish Cuba with a cruise-missile attack or air strikes. The general argued against any military action, and Clinton eventually abandoned the idea. But five days after that, the White House sent a secret note warning Havana that the U.S. would react militarily if more planes were shot down. The following week a belligerent U.S. Congress passed the conservative Helms-Burton bill, imposing even more draconian sanctions than the 34-year-old U.S. embargo. Foreign-policy aides opposed the bill, which punishes foreign companies that trade with Cuba. But the President could taste victory in Florida and signed the bill on March 12.

The Helms-Burton law is creating diplomatic havoc. Europe, Asia and Latin America are ignoring Washington's demand to halt trade with Cuba and threatening economic retaliation against the U.S. if Clinton carries out the law's most severe penalties. Ironically, Castro has benefited politically from the crisis. A CIA estimate this summer concluded that the new sanctions have actually strengthened his regime, handing it a convenient excuse to crack down on dissidents. "We're left now with a relationship that's more dysfunctional than during the cold war," says Robert Pastor, an NSC expert on Latin America during the Carter Administration. But in Florida, Clinton leads Dole in the latest polls by as much as five percentage points.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami

http://uscubanormalization.blogspot.com/2007/12/history-lesson-brothers-plane-shootdown.html

[amyrose2712]

4. Yeah ...

this new admin isn't looking too good in regards to Latin American/Cuban relations.