Political Report # 1319 How to Stop the U.S.-Cuba Backslide

By William M. LeoGrande America Quarterly

Relations between the United States and Cuba are on a downward spiral due to the mysterious injuries suffered by staff at the U.S. embassy in Havana last year, and there is no clear escape path from the vicious circle of recriminations that have damaged the interests of both countries. The most recent blow to relations came on March 2, when the Department of State announced that the embassy in Havana would become an unaccompanied post with reduced staffing similar to what it has been since last October, when most U.S. diplomats and family were recalled. Moreover, U.S. embassy staff who have been working in Washington will now be reassigned, further degrading U.S.-Cuban diplomatic ties. Going forward, the U.S. diplomatic presence in Cuba will be weaker than at any time since former President Jimmy Carter opened the U.S. Interests Section in 1977. The absence of diplomatic boots-on-the-ground means fewer cultural and educational exchanges; slower progress on issues of mutual interest; less help for U.S. visitors who need consular services; and new hardships for Cubans seeking to emigrate to the United States, who will have to travel abroad to get a visa. The travel warning issued by the State Department in October has already reduced the number of U.S. visitors, hurting the owners of private rental homes (casas particulares) and restaurants (paladares). U.S. study abroad programs have been hit hardest because many universities prohibit sending students to a country under a warning. How did we get into this mess and how can we get out? Washington's initial response to the reported injuries a little over a year ago was to work quietly behind the scenes with Cuban authorities. In February 2017, Cuba's President Raúl Castro met personally with the U.S. chargé d'affaires, Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis, and promised a full investigation, even inviting the FBI to Cuba.

Book Review, The Diplomacy of Revolution and Counterrevolution: Some of the Secrets Revealed

:::::: Book Review ::::::

The Diplomacy of Revolution and Counterrevolution: Some of the Secrets Revealed
by Nelson P. Valdés

Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana

LeoGrande William M. & Kornbluh Peter Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

The authors and publishers of Back Channel to Cuba have an extraordinary—in fact impressive—sense of timing. The book became available to the general public just a few weeks before the Cuban and American presidents announced, on the same day (December 17, 2014), that full diplomatic relations would be restored by the governments of the United States and Cuba. LeoGrande and Kornbluh describe their book as presenting “a comprehensive chronicle of the history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba since 1959” (3). They call this unknown history “secret back-channel diplomacy”and note that the process of negotiation has been arduous, difficult, and complex. Indeed, and long overdue.

Political Report # 1257 To "Afflict the Comfortable"

By Jonah Walters, NACLA/Jacobin

During his decades as a public figure, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann- Nicaraguan politician, priest, and former president of the United Nations General Assembly- managed to escape much of the international notoriety visited upon his Sandinista comrades. But from the beginning of his political life to his death earlier this month, he was never far from the struggle. D'Escoto, who died on June 8 from apparent stroke complications, was a lifelong proponent of a radical politics that once seemed to promise restoration for a battered and disoriented international left. He led a tripartite life-as a revolutionary, a priest, and a public servant-during a period of profound change in his home country, when an insurgent egalitarianism swept through popular consciousness to saturate both secular and Catholic worldviews. Throughout the 1980s, grassroots movements pushed the struggle over the Catholic Church's social mission out of the Vatican and into the glare of the Central American sun.Throughout the 1980s, grassroots movements pushed the struggle over the Catholic Church's social mission out of the Vatican and into the glare of the Central American sun. As poor people's movements in the Global South, particularly Latin America, repeatedly challenged elite power and wealth, some factions of Catholics broke with the Church hierarchy to advance a radically transformed vision of Catholic social doctrine. This reinterpretation of the Church's obligation to the poor went beyond the historic Catholic commitment to charity to advocate involvement in political struggles-including revolutionary ones. Known in Latin America as "liberation theology," this tendency also found some adherents in the North American Maryknoll missionary order, which had long included political activism as part of its ministry. In the 1960s, after much internal debate, the Vatican seemed to legitimate liberation theology, but by 1985 this emergent radicalism had grown militant enough to rattle Church elites. Pope John Paul II retaliated by stripping four Nicaraguan priests of their holy orders. D'Escoto, a Maryknoll priest and Nicaragua's foreign minister at the time, was one of them.