Carter Cuba visit
Former President Carter's Cuba report draws fire
In a report about his trip to Cuba, former President Jimmy Carter writes
that Fidel Castro's main health issues are his knee and shoulder.
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com
Former President Jimmy Carter's visit to Cuba last week is generating
more controversy, with one critic calling him a "shill" for Havana and
another pointing out mistakes in his report on the visit.
Carter's 1,500 word report, issued Sunday, essentially recorded the
meetings he held and some of the comments he heard during his three-day
stay in Havana, which he described as a "private" visit to explore ways
of improving U.S.-Cuban relations.
The trip drew praise as an attempt by the former president, who made
human rights a keystone of his time in the White House, to dissipate
some of the acrimony that traditionally dominated bilateral relations.
"His gentle manner, unbending smile and projection of modesty could not
possibly contrast more with the thermal rhetoric and testosterone-driven
style that typically dominates here and in Miami," wrote Nick Miroff in
the Web site Global Post.
Anti-Castro activists blasted him as naïve and worse, however.
"It's hard to see him as anything but a shill for Cuba's military
dictatorship," conservative columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady wrote in
The Wall Street Journal.
Mauricio Claver-Carone, head of the anti-Castro U.S.-Cuba Democracy
political action committee, noted that Carter's report devoted just one
oddly-worded paragraph to his meeting with independent bloggers and
dissidents recently freed after nearly eight years in prison.
The dissidents, Carter wrote, "complained about their difficulty in
getting renewed ID cards and drivers' licenses" and insisted that other
dissidents who accepted exile in Spain as a condition of their release
be permitted to return to Cuba.
Dissidents Oswaldo Payá and Angel Moya told reporters last week that
they had told Carter they wanted free elections and human and civil rights.
Claver-Carone also noted that Carter's version of the 1996 shoot-down of
two Brothers to the Rescue airplanes by Cuban warplanes, killing four
South Florida residents, was factually wrong. He mentions one plane and
insinuates that it was flying over Havana. The two planes shot down
never violated Cuban airspace, according to a U.N. investigation.
"It's Cuba's version of the events,'' he added.
Carter also met with Cuban rulers Raúl and Fidel Castro; Ricardo
Alarcon, head of Cuba's legislative National Assembly of People's Power;
Cuban and U.S. diplomats; and Alan Gross, a U.S. government
subcontractor serving a 15-year sentence in Havana.
He described Fidel Castro as "vigorous, alert'' and said the former
leader's main health issues were his left knee and right shoulder,
injured in a 2004 fall. Carter made no mention of the intestinal
infections that nearly killed Castro in 2006.
The report noted that Gross was being held in a hospital and had
complained that he was receiving better treatment than other prisoners,
although after his arrest in late 2009 he was treated worse than the others.
Gross was accused of delivering satellite communications equipment to
Jewish and other "marginalized" group in Cuba as part of a program
financed by the U.S. government to expand Cubans' access to the Internet.
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez acknowledged "some positive steps" by
the Obama administration but complained that the overall impact of
recent U.S. policies were "very damaging," especially the tightening of
controls on Cuba's use of U.S. dollars in financial transactions, Carter
wrote.
His report added that Rodriguez also noted that a U.S. government
program to promote democracy in Cuba, "which is a regime change strategy
funded at $20 million, remains a serious source of concern" for Havana.
Carter's report added that he also met with two mothers and three wives
of the five Cuban spies convicted in Miami and serving long sentences in
U.S. prison.
"Their trial in the highly charged Miami political climate was
considered to be biased by a U.S. appellate court, but subsequent
appeals have been denied," he wrote, again using imprecise language.
One of the five's appeals, based on their argument that their trial
should have been moved out of Miami, was upheld by a three-judge panel
of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. That ruling was
later overturned by the full Appeals Court. The same Appeals court also
upheld the five convictions, but ordered a reduction in the sentences
for two of the Cubans.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/04/2150412/former-president-carters-cuba.html
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