White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Mandela Doctrine and McCain’s Heresy

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What does one do about John McCain? Why can he not play the senior statesman? He is a veteran who has endured more than anyone should endure during his imprisonment in North Vietnam. He is a Churchill scholar. He has been a distinguished senator, a worthy presidential aspirant and a powerful voice for many causes.
 
But he cannot help himself: the ill-considered statement is his trademark. Without knowing anything about the situation on the ground in Syria, McCain was foursquare for American intervention. Now he said President Obama shaking hands with Cuban President Raul Castro was akin to Neville Chamberlain's shaking hands with Adolf Hitler.
 
McCain knows much more about the events of 1938 than this cheap shot suggests – I have heard him hold forth in front of the Churchill Society on the unfolding of the Third Reich's European strategy. So he knows better than to compare Obama's handshake with Castro to Chamberlain's grasp of Hitler's contaminated paw.
 
It is little understood these days in the United States how few were Chamberlain options, and how he owed it to the British people to forestall war until they were somewhat more ready to fight it. That is why Churchill joined the cabinet — and why, at the time, he accepted Chamberlain's action.
 
But that is not the point. In his way, McCain's remark trashes the Mandela doctrine, laid out in “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela's 1995 autobiography: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
 
Mandela's stature grew as his personal serenity and sense of high moral purpose began to be known not only outside Robben Island, but also inside the prison as he began to affect his jailers.
 
Mandela was schooled by the Methodist missionaries, who educated him to persevere and to seek peace; to turn the other cheek. This was one part of his inner strength. The other came from his birth as a nobleman of his tribe; someone in line to be its king if the wider struggle had not been paramount.
 
From Mahatma Gandhi, who had led a civil rights campaign for Indians in South Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, from the missionaries and from his birth, Mandela knew who he was. He also had a selflessness. He could have been released from prison a decade earlier, if he had been prepared to renounce violence. He was not.
 
Unlike Gandhi, Mandela thought violence was a necessary tool in the struggle. Many otherwise good white South Africans thought he should have been put to death – much in the same way we feel about terrorists today.
 
Yet when apartheid fell, not least thanks to Mandela's great partner in the making of the new South Africa, former President F.W. de Klerk, Mandela insisted on peace and reconciliation, saving a troubled, beautiful land from more bloodshed.
 
Mandela shook the hands of his enemies; those who had imprisoned him for 27 long years. He shook their hands just as McCain had gone back to Vietnam and shook hands there.
 
In that atmosphere of celebrating the life a man who had the genius to shake the hands of those who wanted him dead, and then to have reconciled with them, it would have been a travesty of Mandela's legacy for Obama not to have shaken the bloodstained hand of Castro. That is what Mandela would have wanted and would have done himself.
 
It is probably what McCain would have done, too, had he won the presidency. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

If We Get Our Way in Cuba, It Becomes Our Problem

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As President Barack Obama heads to Trinidad and Tobago to meet with leaders from the hemisphere, Cuba must be on his mind. He has slightly, very slightly, eased some of the conditions of the 47-year-old embargo on the island nation–less than many Americans wanted, and more than the hardest of the hardliners wanted.

His temerity is a testament to what a problem Cuba has now become for the United States. Once it was a political problem, involving the vote of Cuban-Americans in Miami. But as the generation that fled Fidel Castro’s revolution all those years ago has declined in numbers and influence, the epicenter of the Cuban problem has moved north from Miami to Washington.

Successive administrations have wrestled with what to do about Cuba; how to satisfy the angry refugees in Miami and to begin to normalize relations with our closest neighbor after Canada and Mexico. At one time, it was necessary to punish the communist regime for its willingness to be an outpost of the Soviet Union and a base for its missiles, and a fomenter of revolution in Africa and South America.

But things change, even in long-running dictatorships. No longer can Castro or his brother Raul, who has succeeded him in the day-to-day running of Cuba, look to Russia for succor, nor thrill to the applause of the unaligned nations.

The Brothers Castro–old, old men–have long since drawn in their international horns and have tacitly admitted the failure of their glorious revolution by tentatively loosening some of the economic reins (small private restaurants, foreign-currency accounts and cell phone ownership) that so enslaved Cubans. Last time I was in Cuba some party officials, over rum, told me that much of the old apparatus of the state–like the block informers—had become rusty.

Nowadays, Cubans seem a lot more concerned with the limits of their failed economy than the oppressive nature of the state. When I visited Cuba in the mid-1980s, the sense of the state was everywhere and was oppressive. You got the feeling that that if a group of people were walking down the street, they would all strive to be in the middle–not in front and not behind. In those days, the Russian presence was palpable and depressive.

As in the Soviet Union itself, government officials kept to the party line. Twenty years later, these same officials made jokes about the communist party and the governing apparatus. Particularly, I found them happy to ridicule the myth of Che Guevara, the mythological Argentine doctor who fought alongside Fidel Castro.

In short American attitudes to Cuba are changing as Cuban attitudes toward themselves are also changing. Theirs is not a yearning for political freedom as for personal mobility. Imagine growing up 90 miles from Miami, listening to commercial radio from Florida and knowing that if things do not change, your future will be one of poverty and confinement? Your face forever pressed against the American windowpane.

A government official, a member of the Communist Party, told me: “We are tired of rice and beans. We can smell the pork. We want some of it on our plates now.” A colleague of this man said that in the time of the Soviet Union, he would not have dared to speak up the way he did, but now it did not matter.

Obama has shown caution–as he does in many things–in edging towards a greater liberalism with Cuba. His challenge is geographic as well as political. If an open society emerges in Cuba, untold numbers of Cuba’s population of 11 million will try to emigrate to the United States. On Florida’s East Coast, thousands of boats are ready to illegally bring Cubans to the United States; likewise aircraft.

Cuba has no great wealth beyond its people; its biggest export is still sugar. Its people long for American goods, but they are penniless. U.S. agricultural exporters yearn to increase sales to Cuba, but the market is small.

There are already about 200,000 Americans who visit Cuba every year, according to the U.S. Interest Section in Havana (an embassy in all but name).

As the end of days for the Castro regime looms in Havana, a crisis grows in Washington: How will we keep the Cubans in Cuba if a new government meets all the well-published conditions for ending the embargo? A few Americans will head to Cuba. But mucho Cubans will be Miami-bound–like hundreds of thousands almost immediately. You cannot build a fence down the coast of Florida.