Analysis: Obama changes could test Castros’ grip

Cuba’s communist leadership has long cast itself as David standing up to the U.S. Goliath and the crippling force of America’s punitive trade and travel embargo.

Now they have a problem: If Barack Obama follows through on campaign promises to ease restrictions on the island, he could chip away at the Castro brothers’ best case for staying in power.

And if a new Democrat-dominated Congress takes Obama’s moves even further, Cuban leaders may have a hard time maintaining their tight control over Cuban society.

“They’d have to throw out the whole script about American imperialism,” said Phil Peters of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank.

Top Cuban ideologues are already worried.

“We have before us the immense challenge of how to face a new chapter in the cultural struggle against the enemy,” Armando Hart, 78-year-old patriarch of Cuban communists, warned last week in Granma, the party newspaper.

If Cuban-Americans are allowed to visit more frequently and send more money to the island, it could spark “a new chapter in the ideological war between the Cuban revolution and imperialism,” Hart wrote.

The U.S. government’s Cuba policy has been frozen in time since 1962, when it imposed the embargo with the aim of bringing down Fidel Castro’s government at a time when U.S.-backed exiles mounted the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Soviet missiles in Cuba pushed the world close to nuclear war.

Sporadic congressional efforts to end the embargo since then have failed, largely due to the political influence of powerful Cuban exiles who insisted on isolating Cuba and trying to strangle its economy to force Castro out.

But Castro, now 82, remained in power until he ceded the presidency to his brother in February due to illness. And Raul Castro, 77, shows no sign of making any fundamental changes.

The embargo is “a policy that hasn’t worked in nearly 50 years,” said Wayne Smith, a former top U.S. diplomat to Havana and a Cuba fellow at John Hopkins’ Center for International Policy. “It’s stupid, it’s counterproductive and there is no international support for it.”

Obama has promised to lift limits that President George W. Bush tightened on Cuban-Americans wanting to visit and send money to relatives. He also says he’s open to a dialogue with Raul Castro—something the Cuban president has indicated he would welcome.

If Obama really wants to force the Castros to open up, he should push Congress to eliminate the embargo altogether, and allow Americans to freely travel to Cuba, said Smith. “Lifting travel and remittance restrictions on Cuban-Americans just doesn’t get to the heart of the problem.”

So far, Obama has said he supports the embargo. But many hope his initially modest moves will encourage the Democrat-controlled Congress to do something bold.

“Today for the first time there is real political space for an incoming administration to try something new on Cuba policy,” said Jake Colvin, vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which opposes all unilateral sanctions.

When Obama visited Florida during his campaign he was hosted by the Cuban American National Foundation, a longtime bastion of Republicans who shot down any attempt to ease the embargo. Obama ended up carrying Florida, winning even in counties that re-elected Republican representatives who have been the most stalwart proponents of isolating Cuba.

Even these Cuban-Americans, while they still support the embargo, may sense a shift in voters’ attitudes. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and brothers Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart de-emphasized Cuba in their campaigns, focusing on the economy, health care and Iraq.

Obama is unlikely to ignore their views, but if he wants to force a change in Cuba policy, he might not need their votes.

In Havana, dissident journalist Miriam Leiva says toppling the embargo could be agonizing for communist leaders who have long used it to “justify their errors and efficiencies, to repress and jail anyone of differing opinions.”

But Cuban officials insist they want all U.S. restrictions toward the island to end.

“We expect that the new president will change the policy toward Cuba after nearly 50 years,” Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told The Associated Press after the U.N. General Assembly last month voted 185 to 3 (the U.S., Israel and Palau) with 2 abstentions (Micronesia and the Marshall Islands) to repeal the embargo.

Many Cubans are hoping a new U.S. administration will encourage openings that improve their lives.

In a congratulatory letter to Obama, government opponent Hector Palacio Ruiz expressed hope the new administration would allow direct financial aid to dissidents and “eliminate the obstacles that impede us from putting an end to the tyranny that our people suffer.”

Leiva argued in an essay that a freer flow of visitors to the island “could favor the sharing of democratic ideas indispensable at this time, when urgent change is required.”

Anita Snow, AP

Fifty killed, scores hurt as Haitian school collapses

A ramshackle church school collapsed in a shanty town on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital on Friday, burying dozens in rubble and killing at least 50, many of them children, rescue workers said.

The three-story La Promesse school caved in while class was in session, and some of the walls and debris crushed neighboring residences in the Nerettes community near Port-au-Prince, injuring still more, civil protection service official Nadia Blachard told Haitian radio.

“There are 50 killed and 124 wounded, including 20 in serious condition,” Blachard said.

Crowds of screaming and crying parents swarmed the ruins in the aftermath searching for their children. The work continued after nightfall with the help of U.N. peacekeepers, relatives and rescue services.

President Rene Preval said the poorly constructed building did not meet building standards, but the priority of authorities was to continue to hunt for those trapped under debris but still alive.

At the scene, crying and screaming parents searched desperately for their children while bodies of students lay crushed under blocks of concrete.

“It’s like an earthquake,” said Brazilian Maj. Gen. Carlos dos Santos Cruz, the commander for U.N. troops in Haiti.

One boy was trapped by debris that pinned his legs. He begged the rescuers to “please cut my feet off,” a firefighter told Reuters.

The roads around the school were so jammed with people looking for loved ones that some of the rescuers had to be brought in by helicopter.

“My son who is 15 years old, he’s dead. He’s my only son,” sobbed 40-year-old Josiane Dandin. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Another woman screamed for her missing 12-year-old daughter. “I don’t know if she is dead or alive,” she said.

More than 9,000 multinational troops and police make up a U.N. peacekeeping force sent to stabilize Haiti after its former president was driven out in a bloody rebellion in 2004.

The impoverished Caribbean nation lacks sophisticated rescue equipment. Haiti is also still struggling with the destruction wrought by four tropical storms and hurricanes that hit in quick succession this year, killing more than 800 people and destroying 60 percent of the crop harvest.

Joseph Guyler Delva, Reuters

Austrian Journalist Slammed For Racist Obama Rant

Spiegel Online International

- Klaus Emmerich has long been a figure in Austrian television news. His journalism career spans 61 years and includes a stint as a correspondent in Washington D.C. for ORF, Austria’s public television station. He is something like the Wolf Blitzer of Austria.

Or, at least, he was. Now, the respected US expert has stained his own report card with a string of blatantly racist remarks regarding the election of Barack Obama in the US. Speaking on a talk show on the Austrian public channel ORF on Wednesday, he said: “I wouldn’t want the Western world to be directed by a black man. When you say that is a racist remark: right, without a doubt.”

Americans are “racists, now as before, and it must be going very badly for them that they so convincingly … send a black man, and a black, very good-looking woman, into the White House,” he said.

Click here for more….

Obama inspires Afro-Brazilians

Gabriel Elizondo, Al Jazeera

- It is likely that no group of people anywhere in South America are watching the rise of Barack Obama as the first black US president as passionately as in Salvador, Brazil.

Salvador, on the northeast coast of the country, is Brazil’s third largest city with about 2.8 million inhabitants, over 80 per cent of whom are defining themselves as black of mixed race.

Most people from the city are direct ancestors of the first four million slaves who were taken to the city in the 16th century from what is modern-day Nigeria.

Click here for more…

Nairobi summit bids to rekindle Congo dialogue

Heads of state and mediators gathered Friday in Nairobi to energise peace efforts in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as a ceasefire collapsed and renewed fighting displaced thousands.

The emergency summit in the Kenyan capital comes a day after Congolese rebel forces captured another town in Nord-Kivu and the UN peacekeeping force’s inability to stop the violence became ever more salient.

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that rebels and pro-government militia had killed at least 20 civilians in recent fighting.

“We will be discussing the way forward in the resolution of the Congo problem,” Kenyan Foreign Minister Moses Wetangula said, adding he believed the summit would yield “a clear direction how to resolve this crisis.”

Attending the summit will be UN chief Ban Ki-moon, the presidents of the DRC, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and the UN’s newly-appointed envoy to the DRC, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo.

One of the main goals of the meeting is to rekindle dialogue between Congolese President Joseph Kabila and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame.

At a meeting in Nairobi a year ago almost to the day, their two countries committed to a plan aimed at stabilising the eastern DRC but both sides have failed to deliver.

The agreement says Kinshasa will disarm Rwandan Hutu rebels wanted over the 1994 genocide and operating in eastern Congo while Kigali stops supporting armed groups, including Congolese rebels using Rwanda as a staging ground.

Congolese Foreign Minister Lambert Mende said Thursday he hoped the summit would “prepare the ground for much healthier and balanced relations between our two countries.”

Kagame has vehemently denied any involvement in the latest round of fighting and lambasted what he says is a misguided approach by an international community shirking responsibility.

Kinshasa has never exercised any real authority in eastern DRC and its regular troops fled in the face of Laurent Nkunda’s offensive, allowing the rebels to seize key towns and threaten the regional capital Goma.

On Thursday, rebels appeared to have successfully fought off a two-day offensive carried out by pro-government Mai Mai militia on the town of Kiwanja and captured another town in the region, Nyanzale.

Residents of Kiwanja accused rebel forces Thursday of murdering civilians as they drove back the Mai-Mai. An AFP photographer counted eight bodies in civilian clothes.

Human Rights Watch said at least 20 people had been killed and 33 others wounded in the battle for the control of Kiwanja and during ensuing mop-up operations by Nkunda’s troops.

The mission in Congo (MONUC) is the UN’s largest peacekeeping force with 17,000 troops but it has only a few hundred in the areas affected by the latest violence and has been unable to curb the fighting and displacement.

MONUC spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich said Thursday that armoured personnel carriers were dispatched to Nyanzale to halt the fighting “with orders to fire if necessary.”

Infighting between the peacekeeping force’s various national contingents, reluctance to use its fire power and growing hostility from the population have hampered MONUC’s action in the region.

Remedies to MONUC’s impotence will also be discussed in Nairobi as tens of thousands of civilians remained without shelter and little to eat.

The DRC is a country five times the size of France, host to a myriad of armed groups, Congolese and foreign. An estimated 1,200 people die every day of conflict-related causes.

In an apparent olive branch to Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), Congolese Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito said Thursay he was ready to talk directly with the rebels.

Nkunda was not invited to the summit in Nairobi and his spokesman said Thursday he expected no diplomatic breakthrough.

“Nothing is going to come out of it, there have already been so many conferences of the same kind,” Bertrand Bisimwa told AFP.

With peace still stuck in the starting blocks a year after all required agreements were signed, analyst Francois Grignon said however that Obasanjo’s appointment should boost hopes.

“Obasanjo is a former head of state and has the authority to check Kagame and Kabila… to pick up his phone and call the UN Security Council,” said Grignon, head of the International Crisis Group’s Africa Programme.

“Obasanjo will have to produce a realistic roadmap, with a clear timetable, leading to the stationing of troops,” he said, adding that military options to disarm the Hutu rebels in Congo would also have to be explored.

AFP

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