“… de las 6.6 millones de hectáreas cultivables del país, sólo están en uso unas 3.1 millones de hectáreas. Se podría añadir que de esta cifra sólo unas 500 mil hectáreas están en manos de campesinos o cooperativas privadas y sin embargo son responsables del 60 por ciento de la producción agrícola de la isla.”

Por Pablo Alfonso

Publicado el 09-12-2009

Diario Las Americas - enlace al original

Los políticos y los especialistas en mercadeo tienen mucho de común. Son

gente creativa que ofertan su producto, a veces, más allá de sus propias

posibilidades. Algo semejante sucede con ciertos empresarios que se

lanzan a la conquista de objetivos comerciales.

Políticos, empresarios y cabilderos han hecho gala de una inagotable

imaginación a lo largo de la última década en el tema de las relaciones

Cuba-Estados Unidos. Algunos con lógica inexcusable, otros con sus

intereses a flor de piel y la mayoría con ingenuos argumentos que rozan

el infantilismo.

En materia de comercio no he sido nunca de los que se oponen a que el

diferendo político entre Cuba y Estados Unidos sea un obstáculo para el

negocio. Otra cosa, por supuesto, es el ángulo político del asunto. No

siempre comercio y política van de la mano, aunque sería tonto pensar

que cada uno camina por una senda diferente.

Hecha la anterior aclaración en beneficio de los ríspidos, los impolutos

y los apasionados conversos de cada lado, es tiempo de pasar al tema de

esta columna.

Se trata de una entrevista publicada la pasada semana en el semanario

cubano Opciones, una especie de periódico que pretende ser un órgano de

temas económicos y financieros; tarea difícil en un país donde la

economía y las finanzas, se acuestan en la misma cama de la ideología y

la política.

Opciones entrevistó al empresario Jay Brickman, vicepresidente de la

naviera estadounidense Crowly y algunas de sus afirmaciones fueron

sorprendentes. Confieso que no sabría clasificarlas de infantiles,

interesadas o ingenuas. Dejo esa tarea a los lectores.

“Cuba podría suministrar aguacates, cítricos, café, azúcar y otros

productos a Estados Unidos cuando cese el embargo económico”, afirmó

Brickman, quien añadió que “en un futuro, Cuba puede ofrecer ciertos

productos (…) por ejemplo a la Florida, donde muchas de las tierras

cultivables se están usando para construcciones y ha bajado la producción”.

La cita es textual.

La naviera Crowly transporta productos agropecuarios estadounidenses a

Cuba desde su venta a la isla fue autorizadaa en el 2001. Bueno, uno

puede entender el interés de Brickman de que el comercio no sea en una

sola dirección para que sus barcos no tengan que regresar vacíos a

Estados Unidos.

Pero el argumento utilizado carece de realismo. ¿Qué tan informado está

Brickman de lo que sucede en Cuba?

Si las sanciones económicas a Cuba fueran suspendidas ahora mismo sería

casi menos que imposible que el régimen cubano estuviera en capacidad de

exportar productos agrícolas a Estados Unidos.

¿Dónde están los aguacates, señor Brickman? ¿Y el azúcar, el café y los

cítricos?

Brickman parece ignorar que la agricultura cubana, al igual que la

producción general de bienes en la isla, está en bancarrota.

Habría que recordarle que, según cifras oficiales, de las 6.6 millones

de hectáreas cultivables del país, sólo están en uso unas 3.1 millones

de hectáreas. Se podría añadir que de esta cifra sólo unas 500 mil

hectáreas están en manos de campesinos o cooperativas privadas y sin

embargo son responsables del 60 por ciento de la producción agrícola de

la isla.

Con la ineficiente producción del mayoritario sector estatal es

imposible alimentar a los 12 millones de habitantes del país.

El resultado de esta ecuación es sencillo. Debería estar claro para

todos los Brickman de este mundo que para revertir esa situación, la

dictadura castrista tiene que dejar a un lado el estatismo y liberar a

las fuerzas productivas del país, poniéndolas en manos de los cubanos.

Casi nada. Todo un cambio de sistema. Cuando eso suceda, entonces Cuba

sí estaría en condiciones de vender sus excedentes agrícolas a Estados

Unidos.

Ahora mismo, si no existiera el embargo, el régimen cubano tiene muy

poco que ofrecer al mercado estadounidense. El níquel está comprometido,

al igual que el tabaco y el puñado de azúcar que produce.

Nos queda el sol, el mar y las arenas blancas de nuestras playas. Eso es

algo que no ha podido opacar la revolución castrista.

Diario Las Americas - ¿Dónde están los aguacates? (12 September 2009)

Heil Woodrow!

By DAVID OSHINSKY

Published: December 30, 200

The New York Times Book Review - link to original

Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word “fascist” all the time. College presidents were fascists, Vietnam War supporters were fascists, policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists, on and on. To some, the word smacked of Hitler and genocide. To others, it meant the oppression of the masses by the privileged few. But one point was crystal clear: the word belonged to those on the political left. It was their verbal weapon, and they used it every chance they got.

LIBERAL FASCISM

The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

By Jonah Goldberg.

487 pp. Doubleday. $27.95.

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Forty years have passed and not much has changed, complains Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist and contributing editor for National Review. Leftists still drop the “f word” to taint their opponents, be they global warming skeptics or members of the Moral Majority. The sad result, Goldberg says, is that Americans have come to equate fascism with right-wing political movements in the United States when, in fact, the reverse is true. To his mind, it is liberalism, not conservatism, that embraces what he claims is the fascist ideal of perfecting society through a powerful state run by omniscient leaders. And it is liberals, not conservatives, who see government coercion as the key to getting things done.

“Liberal Fascism” is less an exposé of left-wing hypocrisy than a chance to exact political revenge. Yet the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults — no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars.

According to Goldberg, fascism in America predated the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. He believes that Woodrow Wilson turned the United States into a “fascist country, albeit temporarily” during World War I. Americans in 1917 were reluctant to join the slaughter in Europe. Their nation hadn’t been attacked; there was no defining event — a Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor — to rally public support. So Wilson formed the country’s first propaganda ministry, the Committee on Public Information, to teach people what they were up against. The devil became German militarism — the merciless Hun — and Americans were encouraged to lash out at those of German ancestry inside the United States. Vigilante groups arose to mete out justice and spy on fellow citizens. Congress passed draconian laws banning “abusive” and “disloyal” language against the government and its officials. The Post Office revoked the mailing privileges of hundreds of antiwar publications, effectively shutting them down. Rarely if ever in American history has dissent been so effectively stifled.

At the same time, Wilson formed numerous boards to regulate everything from the production of artillery pieces to the price of a lamb chop. The result, Goldberg argues, was the birth of a socialist dictatorship that “whipped, cajoled and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state.” Though partly dismantled after the war, this model, we are told, became the blueprint for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Goldberg is less convincing here because he can’t get a handle on Roosevelt’s admittedly elusive personality. He treats Wilson as a serious thinker, rigidly focused on his goals, but portrays Roosevelt as a classic dilettante, shallow and detached. For Goldberg, even the president’s greatest skill — his ability to communicate with the masses — was negated by his failure to chart a steady course and stick to it. One is left to ponder how the outlines of America’s modern welfare state emerged from such a lazy, superficial mind.

In attempting to link Roosevelt to the fascism that enveloped Europe in these years, Goldberg highlights examples like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which offered a paycheck and military discipline to unemployed young men from the cities, and the National Recovery Administration, which was intended to spur industrial production through centralized planning. But it’s absurd to view the C.C.C. as the American version of Hitler Youth, and the N.R.A. — heavy on slogans, light on coercion — was so ineffective that Roosevelt heaved a sigh of relief when it was declared unconstitutional in 1935. Oddly, Goldberg has less to say about issues more likely to bolster his case, like the enormous growth of executive power under Roosevelt and his ill-fated attempt to “pack” the United States Supreme Court.

Goldberg acknowledges that Wilson and Roosevelt faced legitimate national emergencies — a world war and an economic collapse. But subsequent presidents have invented false crises to roil the masses, he claims, and John F. Kennedy did it best. “It is not a joyful thing to impugn an American hero and icon with the label fascist,” Goldberg writes, but how else does one explain his popularity? The answer lies not in Kennedy’s record, which Goldberg assures us was slim, but rather in his cold-war brinkmanship, his “adrenaline-soaked” appeals to national service and martial values, and, of course, the Nazi-like cult of personality that he buffed to gleaming perfection.

Is something missing here? Goldberg races from Wilson to Roosevelt to Kennedy and on to Bill Clinton with barely a glance at what happened in between. The reason is simple: for Goldberg, fascism is strictly a Democratic disease. This allows him to dispose of the politics of the 1920s in a single sentence. “After the Great War,” he writes, “the country slowly regained its sanity.” What Goldberg may not know — or is afraid to tell us — is that the 1920s were anything but sane. This was the decade, after all, that contained the largest state-sponsored social experiment in the nation’s history — Prohibition — and it lasted through three Republican administrations before Franklin Roosevelt ended it in 1933. The 1920s also saw the explosive spread of the Ku Klux Klan in the Republican Midwest, a virtual halt to legal immigration under the repressive National Origins Act and an angry grass-roots backlash against the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Goldberg briefly enters the Eisenhower 1950s to tease liberals for whining about the supposedly trivial impact of McCarthyism. “A few Hollywood writers who’d supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs,” he says. What’s the big deal? For the Reagan 1980s there is near-silence — hardly a word. I had entertained the slim hope that Goldberg might consider the “fascist” cult of personality surrounding Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” hokum (“Prouder, Stronger, Better”). But, alas, such scrutiny is reserved only for the Clinton presidential campaign of 1992, with its “Riefenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy.” Indeed, even George W. Bush’s spectacularly staged landing on an aircraft carrier in full battle regalia to declare “mission accomplished” in Iraq escapes notice here. It doesn’t take a village for Goldberg to play the fascist card; a single Democrat will do.

The final chapters of “Liberal Fascism” are a rant, often deliciously amusing, against America’s numerous liberal-fascist elites. In unexciting times, when there are no calamities to be addressed, liberals push a more robust social agenda, Goldberg claims, using the state and the friendly news media to tar opponents of, say, affirmative action or same-sex marriage as bigots, fanatics and fools. The task facing conservatives, he adds, is to hold liberals accountable for these jackboot tactics. “For at some point,” Goldberg writes, “it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, ‘Enough is enough.’”

These are familiar words, eerily reminiscent of the “adrelaline-soaked” clichés of John F. Kennedy as he railed against Soviet expansion around the globe. But I dare not call them fascist. That would be unfair.

David Oshinsky, who holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas, is the author of “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.”

By ALI H. SOUFAN

The New York Times - link to original

September 6, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

PUBLIC bravado aside, the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind. The three that were released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.

The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the report, the latter “is a more subjective process and not without concern.” And the information in the two memos reinforces this differentiation.

They show that substantial intelligence was gained from pocket litter (materials found on detainees when they were captured), from playing detainees against one another and from detainees freely giving up information that they assumed their questioners already knew. A computer seized in March 2003 from a Qaeda operative for example, listed names of Qaeda members and money they were to receive.

Soon after Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in 2003, according to the 2005 memo, he “elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow Airport.” The memo speculates that he may have assumed that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow member of Al Qaeda who had been captured in 2002, had already divulged the plan. The same motivation — the assumption that another detainee had already talked — is offered to explain why Mr. Mohammed provided details about the Hambali-Southeast Asia Qaeda network.

Mr. Mohammed must have likewise assumed that his interrogators already had the details about Al Qaeda’s organizational structure that he gave them. When I testified in the trial of Salim Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s personal driver, I provided many unclassified details about Al Qaeda’s structure and operations, none of which came from Mr. Mohammed.

Some of the information that is cited in the memos — the revelation that Mr. Mohammed had been the mastermind of 9/11, for example, and the uncovering of Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber — was gained from another terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, by “informed interrogation,” conducted by an F.B.I. colleague and me. The arrest of Walid bin Attash, one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted messengers, which was also cited in the 2005 C.I.A. memo, was thanks to a quick-witted foreign law enforcement officer, and had nothing to do with harsh interrogation of anyone. The examples go on and on.

A third top suspected terrorist who was subjected to enhanced interrogation, in 2002, was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the man charged with plotting the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole. I was the lead agent on a team that worked with the Yemenis to thwart a series of plots by Mr. Nashiri’s operatives in the Arabian Peninsula — including planned attacks on Western embassies. In 2004, we helped prosecute 15 of these operatives in a Yemeni court. Not a single piece of evidence that helped us apprehend or convict them came from Mr. Nashiri.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

A lack of knowledge perhaps explains why so many false claims have been made about the program’s alleged successes. Many officials in Washington reading the reports didn’t know enough about Al Qaeda to know what information was already known and whether the detainees were telling all they knew. The inspector general’s report states that many operatives thought their superiors were inaccurately judging that detainees were withholding information. Such assessments, the operatives said, were “not always supported by an objective evaluation” but were “too heavily based, instead, on presumptions.” I can personally testify to this.

Supporters of the enhanced interrogation techniques have jumped from claim to claim about their usefulness. They have asserted, for example, that harsh treatment led Mr. Mohammed to reveal the plot to attack the Library Tower in Los Angeles. But that plot was thwarted in 2002, and Mr. Mohammed was not arrested until 2003. Recently, interviews with unnamed sources led The Washington Post to report that harsh techniques turned Mr. Mohammed into an intelligence “asset.”

This latest claim will come as news to Mr. Mohammed’s prosecutors, to his fellow detainees (whom he instructed, at his arraignment, not to cooperate with the United States) and indeed to Mr. Mohammed himself. He told the International Committee of the Red Cross that “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”

The inspector general’s report was written precisely because many of the C.I.A. operatives complained about what they were being ordered to do. The inspector general then conducted an internal audit of the entire program. In his report, he questions the effectiveness of the harsh techniques that were authorized. And he slams the use of “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented detention and interrogation techniques.” This is probably why the enhanced interrogation program was shelved in 2005.

Meanwhile, the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program — one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation — is finished.

Ali H. Soufan was an F.B.I. special agent from 1997 to 2005.

Despite a rigid embargo that has spanned half a century, the United States is playing a major role in feeding Cuba.

BY MARTHA BRANNIGAN

MBRANNIGAN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Miami Herald - link to original 

Sept 6, 2009.

When a Havana family sits down for pollo asado, passes pan de ajo across the kitchen table or splurges on some chocolate soy ice cream, chances are the ingredients came from U.S. farms.

Venezuela may boast of its revolutionary friendship with Cuba, and China may send its youth there to study Spanish, but the United States has emerged as the No. 1 exporter of agricultural products to Cuba.

And that’s not all that can be sent to Cuba legally. Try live primates, truffles, azalea bushes, fox furs — even cigars.

When President Obama announced plans in April to ease the embargo by lifting family-travel restrictions to the island and allowing U.S. telecommunications firms wide latitude to do business there, many analysts said the policy changes could significantly expand ties between the estranged neighbors — assuming Havana responds positively to the overture.

But fairly significant commerce has been going on since the Trade Sanctions Reform and Enhancement Act of 2000 opened the door to U.S. food and medicine exports to Cuba — despite the tense relationship between Havana and Washington and a trade embargo that has spanned nearly 50 years.

U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba hit a record $711.5 million in 2008, as prices for commodities soared. That makes the United States Cuba’s fifth-largest trading partner overall.

“We are the natural provider of food and agriculture products to Cuba,” says Kirby Jones, president of Alamar Associates, a consulting firm for U.S. companies aspiring to trade with Cuba. “We’re No. 1 and could be selling a lot more, were it not for the restrictions.”

Over the past nine years, Cuba, which imports 80 percent of its food, has come to rely heavily on its nemesis to the north for wheat, corn, soy goods and scores of other key agricultural products.

American companies provide two-thirds of Cuba’s imported chicken and more than 40 percent of its pork imports. Utility poles, organic fertilizer and chewing gum also make their way in.

Not much medicine has been shipped, however, since Cuba has other options.

CASH FLOWS FROM U.S.

Much has changed since President John F. Kennedy imposed a total economic embargo of Cuba in 1962, making it illegal for Americans to spend any money in Cuba or trade with Havana.

The chinks began when some travel restrictions were lifted in the late 1970s, and through the years there has been a tightening and loosening of the embargo as administrations change in Washington.

In recent years, Cuba has raked in U.S. dollars in a host of other ways, too:

• The Castro government charges a 10 percent fee to exchange greenbacks for convertible pesos, or CUCs, used by Cuban Americans and other visitors, and there’s another 10 percent hit due to the unfavorable exchange rate given by money changers.

• Cuba also gets millions of dollars — perhaps hundreds of millions — in fees from U.S. telecommunications companies that already provide long-distance service to the island through third countries.

• When Cuban Americans make trips to Cuba, they generally travel heavy, lugging an estimated $3,000 to $5,000 in goods for family and friends. If just half of the 200,000 Cuban travelers expected this year carried even the low end, or $3,000 worth, that would amount to $300 million of clothing, electronics and household gadgets winding up in Cuba in 2009 alone. These travelers also are allowed to spend up to $179 per day while in Cuba, according to U.S. regulations.

• Cuba’s airport-related fees levied on U.S. air-charter companies average $120 per passenger, according to charter officials, which would bring in some $12 million for the 100,000 U.S. visitors last year and possibly double that amount this year.

• And money sent by individual Cuban Americans to help family members amounts to an estimated $400 to $800 million a year, according to a 2004 study by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which noted some estimates put U.S. remittances as high as $1 billion a year.

Even with all major portions of the embargo still in place, such commercial ties between the United States and Cuba could easily exceed $2 billion a year.

TOUGH BUSINESS

Meanwhile, a series of intentional hurdles reflects the U.S. government’s conflicted attitude toward dealing with the communist regime that has outlived nine U.S. presidents.

The cash-strapped island must pay in advance for U.S. goods, and with no banking ties between two nations, Cuba has to pay through a bank in a third country, typically France.

U.S. exporters need clearance from the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. Cargo ships carrying goods from the United States must go directly to Cuba before visiting any other nations, and they are forbidden from picking up anything to haul elsewhere. Cuban food inspectors often can’t get visas to visit U.S. facilities.

And the trade remains a one-way street. Virtually nothing can be imported to the United States from Cuba, with the exception of artwork, printed materials and recordings. Last year, that came to a grand total of $39,126.

That gives Cuba the curious distinction of helping the United States with its chronic balance of trade deficit, albeit in a token fashion.

The obstacles to Cuba trade have tipped the scales in favor of agribusiness Goliaths like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson Foods.

For American businesses, there is only one customer in Cuba: Alimport, the government agency that coordinates purchases from the United States.

Small and mid-sized exporters are often spooked by the maze of regulations and the opaque process of selling to Cuba. More than a few would-be exporters have ventured to Havana trade fairs only to come home empty-handed.

“People [looking to export to Cuba] get discouraged,” says Jay Brickman, vice president of government services at Crowley Maritime Corp. He travels frequently to Cuba for his company, which sends a cargo ship with chicken and other agricultural products to Havana from Port Everglades every week.

“They confuse being nicely received by the Cubans with the idea they’re going to get business. Cuba is limited [in its ability to buy imports], and they’re price-conscious. You almost have to have a certain passion to really want to be there,” he said.

Some U.S. business executives imagine big opportunities in an untapped market. Others are drawn to the forbidden fruit.

Naples businessman John Parke Wright IV shipped beef cattle to Cuba from Port Everglades three years ago and flew to Havana to shepherd his herd from the dock.

Last year, Wright, a member of the Lykes family that owned vast agricultural lands in Cuba before they were seized in the revolution, exported 2,500 straws of Brahman bull semen from the J.D. Hudgins ranch in Hungerford, Texas, to impregnate Cuban heifers.

Now he’s negotiating more cattle deals for Florida and Alabama Brangus cattle and semen. Wright, who has been making frequent visits to Cuba for nearly a decade, sees big potential for agricultural development on the island, in keeping with President Raúl Castro’s recent call to the Cuban people to work the land. “There was and there is another Florida there in the land mass and agricultural potential,” says Wright.

But many others have called it quits after a few sales. Independent Meats shipped some goods about a year and a half ago, but decided its Idaho location is too far west to compete with other U.S. suppliers.

“It just didn’t make a lot of sense for us,” said Independent Chief Executive Patrick Florence.

Cuba, meanwhile, has spread out its purchases among as many U.S. states as it practically can in hopes of drumming up support in Congress for an end to the embargo.

And yet, this year, U.S. exports will likely trail 2008 as Cuba struggles with severe financial problems that limit its ability to pay for foreign goods..

CUBA’S CREDIT WOES

Some experts believe Cuba is facing its biggest challenges since the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left Fidel Castro scrambling for support in a changed world.

Just as poor families do, the Cuban government often makes purchases based on access to credit. That leaves U.S. businesses at a disadvantage, since transactions must be in cash.

U.S.-grown rice, especially the long-grain style favored in many recipes, was a huge hit with Cubans until 2005, when the Bush administration changed the meaning of cash in advance to mean payment before a product leaves U.S. shores — instead of when it arrives in port in Cuba.

Since that tightening of policy — which is expected to be reversed under provisions in the 2009 omnibus appropriations bill — U.S. rice exports to the island have plunged. Cuba has relied more on Vietnam, which is thousands of miles away and sometimes delivers broken rice but provides generous credit.

Some argue, however, that the cash-in-advance rule is a blessing in disguise for American companies, because it ensures that they get paid.

“Cuba generally doesn’t pay on time,” says John Kavulich, senior policy advisor for the nonprofit U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. “And sometimes it doesn’t pay at all.

Video - LA HABANA EN 1930 - link to original post

martes 1 de septiembre de 2009

Enlace al original

MIAMI (Reuters) - Los cubano estadounidenses están divididos sobre si Estados Unidos debe mantener su embargo comercial de 47 años contra Cuba, según una reciente encuesta, pero el apoyo al mantenimiento de las sanciones parece haber disminuido.

La encuesta, realizada por la firma Bendixen & Associates y publicada el martes por el diario Miami Herald, mostró que un 41 por ciento de los cubano estadounidenses se oponen a mantener el embargo, mientras un 40 por ciento apoyan mantenerlo.

Fernand Amandi, el vicepresidente ejecutivo de Bendixen, una consultora que estudia desde hace tiempo a la comunidad cubano estadounidense de 1,5 millones de personas en Estados Unidos, dijo al Miami Herald que la encuesta reflejaba una “evolución de ideas” entre los exiliados.

“Después de 50 años, algunos cubanos han llegado a la dolorosa conclusión de que el embargo quizás no ha sido la herramienta más efectiva contra el regimen de Castro”, dijo.

La revolución de Fidel Castro en 1959 llevó a un rápido deterioro de las relaciones con Estados Unidos.

Washington rompió relaciones diplomáticas con La Habana en 1961 y al año siguiente impuso su embargo comercial, en respuesta a la nacionalización de empresas estadounidenses en Cuba y por temor a que Castro girara hacia el comunismo.

Amandi, de Bendixen, dijo que el alto respaldo a poner fin al embargo mostrado por la encuesta hubiera sido una “herejía” hace seis o siete años, cuando el apoyo a las sanciones comerciales era mayor entre los exiliados cubanos.

Bendixen realizó la encuesta el 24 de agosto, entrevistando a 400 cubano estadounidenses adultos en todo el país. El sondeo tiene un margen de error de cinco puntos porcentuales.

Desde que asumió el poder en enero, el presidente Barack Obama ha dicho que quiere forjar un “nuevo comienzo” en las relaciones de Estados Unidos con Cuba.

Pero pese a su apertura hacia Cuba, Obama dejó claro que pretende mantener el embargo hasta que el Gobierno cubano se comprometa a excarcelar a sus presos políticos y mejorar los derechos humanos.

El presidente cubano Raúl Castro descartó cualquier tipo de “concesión” o cambios hacia el capitalismo.

Obama suavizó levemente en abril el embargo, al eliminar restricciones para que los cubano estadounidenses viajen a la isla y envíen remesas a sus familiares.

Una encuesta de Bendixen realizada en abril mostró que un 64 por ciento de los cubano estadounidenses apoyaban las medidas de Obama para suavizar el embargo.

Obama también reanudó las conversaciones sobre inmigración con el Gobierno de Raúl Castro, que reemplazó el año pasado a su convaleciente hermano Fidel en la presidencia.

Según diplomáticos, ambos países se disponen a discutir este mes la reactivación del servicio de correo directo, interrumpido décadas atrás.

Los analistas dicen que un cambio generacional tuvo lugar en las últimas décadas en la comunidad de exiliados cubanos, donde los más jóvenes y recién llegados favorecen un incremento de los lazos con Cuba, mientras los “históricos”, más veteranos, siguen firmes en su oposición a Castro y su apoyo al embargo.

La encuesta del 24 de agosto mostró que mientras el 62 por ciento de los cubanos llegados a Estados Unidos en la década de 1960 o antes favorecen el mantenimiento del embargo, la mayoría de los que llegaron a partir de la década de 1980 está a favor del levantamiento.

(Reporte de Pascal Fletcher. Editado por Lucila Sigal)