OUR PLACE IN THE SUN by Robert Wright/Lana Wylie reviewed by Roger Noriega

Roger Noriega

Because I am arguably one of the “right-wing” Americans whom many of the co-authors of “Our Place in the Sun” deride, it might disappoint them to know that I enjoyed their incisive, candid descriptions of Canada’s engagement of Cuba during the last 50-plus years.

Although I disagree with the premises behind several of the essays, I consider this book an enlightening review of how Canada has wrestled with the Cuba issue in the context of its high-stakes relationship with the United States and its own diplomatic identity. I have had a front-row seat to some of these developments for the last 25 years from posts in the U.S. Congress and State Department, and now I have a greater appreciation of what was going on backstage in Ottawa and Havana.

I come away from this reading noting one essential similarity and several fundamental differences that continue to shape Canadian and U.S. treatment of the Castro regime.

First, never, ever, has U.S. policy-making toward Cuba been led by any one who admired Fidel Castro. The intellectual free-spirit Pierre Trudeau was clearly charmed by Castro during his January 1976 visit to Havana, moving him to play to what the authors describe as “carefully stage-managed” crowds by shouting, “Viva el Primer Ministro Castro!” A dozen years later, the pragmatist Jean Chretien would confess publicly to having a youthful man-crush on the audacious revolutionary. Robert Wright quotes Chretien as saying that Castro “was like a star for a lot of us.”

These two Canadian leaders have plenty of company in the world in this respect, to be sure.

However, in contrast, their American counterparts were never taken in by the Cuban revolutionary myth. This certainly applies to Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes; and if Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton ever harbored any admiration of Castro, they were never moved to admit it. U.S. leaders can be forgiven for having their guard up where Castro is concerned, considering the mortal nuclear threat staged from Cuba with Castro’s enthusiastic backing in 1962. Moreover, Carter learned his own humiliating lesson about the perils of courting Castro long before Chretien attempted to leverage reforms out of Havana.

These two very different U.S. and Canadian policies have something in common, though: Both strategies have failed to bring about meaningful change in Cuba precisely because that’s the way Fidel Castro wants it. Castro himself explained his intractable nature in a post mortem of Chretien’s conscientious lecture on civil liberties in his 1998 visit to Havana as “giving advice to someone who had not asked for it….” Canadian diplomat James Bartleman, who was skeptical of the regime’s good faith even as he dutifully planned Chretien’s ill-fated visit, offered his own summary of his chief’s initiative, saying, “a policy of constructive engagement had gone as far as it could, at least as long as Castro was alive.” Precisely. The problem has never been that Eisenhower was too harsh, Kennedy too arrogant, Diefenbaker too indulgent, Carter too solicitous, Reagan too ideological, or Chretien too naïve, etc. The trouble is that Fidel Castro is a dictator.

Cubans are trapped in a failing communist economy because that is the way Castro wants it. And his will is imposed by a police state that answers to the Castro brothers and no one else. The fact that the contributing authors never acknowledged these essential facts with any serious discussion hobbles their collective analysis of Canadian policy and their facile critique of the U.S. approach.

From the American point of view, there also is the unanswered question of legitimacy when it comes to whether or not it is wise to negotiate with the Castro regime. Dennis Molinaro’s essay cites a memorandum to Prime Minister Diefenbaker recommending Canada’s immediate formal recognition of the Cuban revolutionary government in 1959 as a function of two facts: Castro’s government is “in full control of all national territory” and “seems … to enjoy popular support to a reasonable degree.” That latter point is now patently untrue of the Castro dictatorship for decades, which is characterized by a one-party state, sham elections, and brutal, systematic repression.

Very simply, Canada’s policy does not question Castro’s right to govern Cuba. U.S. policy is shaped by the conclusion that he does not. It is unfair to suggest that Canada’s policy aims to coddle a dictatorship; Robert Wright’s rich description of the efforts of Chretien and his foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy leaves no doubt that these men were motivated by a fervent desire to open economic and political space for the Cuban people. That they insisted that engagement of the de facto regime is the only sensible way of achieving that goal is where most American stakeholders beg to differ. They tried to convince Chretien that Castro would never compromise his hold on power or bend to foreign pressure.

A trusted friend of mine, retired Canadian ambassador Paul Durand, gave me a stark appraisal of Cuba’s intransigence based on his personal involvement in the Chretien government’s attempts to develop closer ties with Cuba:

We tried several initiatives in a genuine desire to improve relations with the Cuban regime, and to help them develop more normal relations with the international community. At times there seemed to be progress, but inevitably things would slide back. We eventually came to the realization that this regime had no intention of changing, and they would sell their friends – including Canada – down the river to gain even a sliver of advantage over the Americans. This was their all-consuming obsession – to survive the existential struggle with the United States. After a number of setbacks and betrayals, we gave up.

Conventional wisdom in the United States is that Canada’s Cuba policy is a convenient way of showing its independence from Washington. Hal Klepak’s essay explains in detail how this defiance of the United States has helped Canada win favor as it courts Latin American relationships. Molinaro takes us back to the roots of Canada’s posture on Cuba, providing a very human account of how Prime Minister John Diefenbaker happened to seize upon Cuba to show that Ottawa was not tethered to Washington. The author asserts, in no uncertain terms, that Diefenbaker’s “personal distaste for President Kennedy played a major role in shaping Canada’s Cuba policy.”

In his memoir, Diefenbaker would describe the “youthful” Kennedy as “activated by the belief that Canada owed so great a debt to the United States that nothing but continuing subservience would repay it.” Molinaro makes a convincing case that Kennedy’s “strong-arm tactics,” disrespectful treatment of Diefenbaker and U.S. envoy Adlai Stevenson’s arrogant call for Ottawa to “harmonize” its Cuba policy with the new U.S. sanctions helped harden Canada’s mere disagreement into conscious defiance.

Even before Diefenbaker got his back up, Canada’s Cuba policy started from a different place: the authors explain that Canada had no essential interests at play in the country in 1959, and successor diplomats came to see its real value as an icebreaker in its dialogue with Latin capitals about trade and investment. When an open microphone caught Chretien boasting to NATO colleagues at a 1997 summit in Madrid about how he had “stood up to” Washington on Cuba, Americans concluded that his subsequent visit to Havana was meant to flaunt Canada’s independence.

However, professor Wright’s description of Chretien’s confrontational tête-à-tête with the dictator in Havana in 1998 leads one to conclude that the gruff Quebecker sincerely thought he could talk some sense into Castro and extract concessions that would benefit the Cuban people. (Wright refers to diplomat James Bartleman’s account of a testy exchange when his prime minister peppered Castro with questions and placed a card under his nose bearing the names of four prominent dissidents; Castro snarled, “I have never been so humiliated.”)

Notwithstanding their good intentions, it cannot be denied that – from Diefenbaker to Chretien – Canada’s position on Cuba has been a convenient one. My friend Paul Durand, who acknowledged the failure of engagement, defends Canada’s positioning, saying, “Overall, our policy of maintaining correct relations with Cuba has served Canada well and has stood us in good stead with the rest of Latin America.”

The most disappointing aspect of this interesting book is the way in which American motives and the exile community in the United States are caricatured by the authors. Indeed, the book’s contributors are so determined to discredit U.S. policy as cynical pandering to the powerful exile community that they seem to forget that these people are Cubans, too. One sentence describes the deliberate shoot-down of unarmed civilian aircraft over international water in 1992 as merely “unfortunate.” For the United States, it was a bit more than that. It was the pre-meditated murder of volunteers searching the Florida straits for rafters fleeing Castro’s repression. The four victims had dozens of family members and thousands of neighbors who live in exile in south Florida.

It is fair to say that the exile community has a great deal of influence over U.S. policy – but they exercise this influence the way all men and women do in a democratic society. (Surely, the fact that one of Canada’s largest aid programs is in Haiti has something to do with the Haitian diaspora, with one of its own, Michaëlle Jean, serving as Governor General from 2005-10.) It is asking too much for exiles to be objective about Cuba and Castro. That is why they represent the largest source of humanitarian aid for the Cuban people. And that is why they demand a more effective policy from their adopted country that seeks to hold the dictatorship accountable.

Indeed, I believe that the Cuban exile community will play a decisive, constructive role in the democratic transition and economic reconstruction of Cuba. Today, the community is an important channel for communicating with the island and for understanding what is happening on every street corner. They understand better than most the reality of the island and the damage done by the Castro regime, which has systematically sown cynicism and self-loathing into the Cuban people as a means of stifling dissent or activism. It will take the faith and confidence of familial ties to leach out the toxins of repression and doubt and to change the hearts and minds of loved ones on the island.

The exile community also has the cultural affinity and capital that make it a natural reservoir of investment and entrepreneurial know-how. While the vast majority will choose to stay in the United States, some may become missionaries and travel to Cuba to help orient people on the opportunities and responsibilities in a free Cuba.

Another passage in the book describes pre-Castro Cuba as a string of brothels and casinos out of a gangster movie – as if Castro rescued the country from exploitive U.S. multi-national companies and extremists that he sent into exile in Miami. The fact is, as I detailed in a February 2007 publication for the American Enterprise Institute, entitled, “Let Cuba be Cuban, Again,” the island republic that Castro took over in 1959 was one of the most prosperous and egalitarian societies of the Americas, near the top according to most socio-demographic indicators, behind only Argentina and Uruguay.

That country's social and economic condition was comparable to Spain and Portugal of the day. While it is well-known that Cuba's infant mortality rate is the second lowest in Latin America today, many historians fail to mention that pre-Castro Cuba ranked thirteenth in the world, with the best rate in Latin America. It also had the third highest daily caloric intake, the fourth highest literacy rate, the second highest number of passenger cars per capita, and ranked fourth in the production of rice.

The country was also culturally advanced before Castro seized power, with the third highest newspaper circulation per capita and second highest cinema attendance per capita in Latin America. Although, to be sure, the country suffered from the inequalities of wealth that plagued all countries in Latin America at that time (and still do), Cuba had the largest middle class of its peers in the Western Hemisphere.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Cuba’s democratic government produced progressive laws regulating labor, land tenure, education, and health that rivaled those of its Latin neighbors. For example, the 1940 Cuban constitution established such labor laws as the right to work, a maximum forty-hour work week, one month of annual vacation, social security, and the right to form and join unions; indeed, by 1958, almost half of the Cuban labor force was unionized. A 1951 World Bank report actually criticized laws protecting Cuban workers because they were considered so generous that they discouraged foreign investment.

These facts hardly supports the popular image of a nation plundered by foreign exploitation until Castro rescued her dignity.

Surely, in the wake of the Arab Spring, any sensible observer has to recognize that a people’s fervent desire to be free is irrepressible – quite literally. Washington and the rest of the West have had to step aside as cooperative regimes in Egypt and nearby have been swept away by angry mobs. Here in the Americas, Canada and the United States have criticized, albeit quietly, authoritarian populists in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua that were elected democratically but failed to govern with respect the democratic “rules of the game.”

So Americans who care about Cuba are right to ask why Castro’s regime is given a pass – when it is as repressive of every political and economic freedom as any in the world. More to the point, shouldn’t we learn the lesson of the Arab Spring that engaging the people – not merely the regime that represses them – is a better way of defending our interests and promoting our values.

I have had the honor of working with Canadians on every worthy cause in the Americas for the past two decades. So I have no doubt that when it comes to helping Cubans rebuild their nation after the Castro nightmare is over, Canadians will be counted on to make a generous contribution.

“Our Place in the Sun” is a thought-provoking account of Canada’s legacy in Cuba, and of lessons learned. Canada’s very different approach to Cuba has yielded the same disappointing results and the same sad conclusion: that Cuba’s promising future will have to wait until the Castro brothers are history.

Roger F. Noriega (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), a senior State Department official from 2001 to 2005, is a visiting fellow at AEI and managing director of Vision Americas LLC, which represents foreign and domestic clients.