Coral Gables, Florida
FIDEL CASTRO is not known for his subtlety. So when Cuba’s state-run TV dove headfirst into the comic-satire pool last winter, the results were predictably ham-fisted. A brief cartoon introduced Cubans to “Transition Man,” a quirky-looking bloke in a pink gown and carrying a magic wand. On the show, which still airs, Transition Man seeks to reverse the Castro revolution’s accomplishments in such areas as medicine, education, and race. Once this pesky avatar of Yanqui imperialism loses his wizard garb, he’s revealed to be a rat.
The real-life Transition Man–and the cartoon’s inspiration–is James Cason, the career Foreign Service officer who recently capped a three-year term as chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (our de facto embassy). Speaking to an audience at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies on September 12, Cason holds up a picture of his animated alter ego.
“Dictatorships are not good at humor,” he says wryly. “We’ve heard stories of [Cuban] children on buses pretending they were me, incanting ‘Cachan, Cachan’ as they waved imaginary wands to magically obtain some scarce object. I don’t think this was the regime’s intent.”
Cason leaves Cuba a minor celebrity–“an icon of dissent,” as he puts it. The Cuban government brands him a “provocateur” and much worse. The exiles here in South Florida, of course, see things differently. His plucky support for Cuba’s democracy movement has made Cason a hero to the likes of Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, two Miami-area Republicans. Ros-Lehtinen calls Cason “a true freedom fighter,” while Diaz-Balart hails his “imagination and courage.”
Cason’s work with Cuban democrats built on the efforts of his predecessor, Vicki Huddleston. He traveled widely around the island (until Castro confined him to Havana), meeting with Cubans of all stripes, and made the U.S. mission a haven for dissidents and independent journalists, a place where they could watch CNN en Español, TV Martí, and other foreign media. The mission dispensed thousands of books and shortwave radios, and even some laptops and printers, in accordance with the Bush policy of aiding Cuba’s opposition and promoting civil society.
But Cason went a step further. He’s best known for the creative stunts he used to throw the floodlights on Cuban tyranny: the replica of a famous political prisoner’s isolation cell he placed in the backyard of his residence; the time capsule he and some dissidents buried, filled with literature and messages to be read on the eve of Cuba’s first democratic election; the massive neon “75” he displayed last Christmas to signify the 75 activists locked up by Havana in a 2003 clampdown.
In response to that last escapade, Cuban authorities threw up a gigantic billboard across the street depicting the hooded detainees at Abu Ghraib. It bore a huge swastika, while a nearby mural portrayed a swastika-sporting “Corporal” Cason dropping bombs on Cuban children.
“For weeks” afterward, Cason says, the regime “literally blasted us with revolutionary music.” But he feels he won the Christmas spat, since media coverage reminded the world–and ordinary Cubans–of Castro’s prisoners. Nor was Cason deterred by Havana’s retaliation. His Fourth of July reception this year, attended by hundreds of Cubans, featured a three-story Statue of Liberty holding a “75” in place of a torch.
“I discovered that symbols were the most compelling means of conveying the repressive nature of the Castro regime,” Cason explains. “Symbols also catch the attention of the international media, and they get filtered back into Cuba through photos, illegal Internet access, contraband satellite dishes, and TV Martí.”
Perhaps Cason’s chief innovation has been the use of video conferences to connect Cubans with foreigners. Last March, three well-known oppositionists–Félix Bonne, Marta Beatriz Roque, and René Gómez Manzano–testified via videolink before Congress and answered members’ questions in real time. Cason is “particularly proud” of this new tool.
He’s also bullish on the prospects for a transition. “Castro’s rickety system cannot last much longer,” he says. “Change is inevitable.” Nevertheless, he expects Cuba’s first post-Fidel government to be some sort of military junta.
That seems the consensus among Cuba watchers. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Falcoff points out, “The regime is already morphing into a kind of military dictatorship. The army is much more important than the Communist party.” The armed forces even run Cuba’s prized tourism industry. Falcoff, author of the magisterial Cuba: The Morning After, sees post-Fidel Cuba evolving into a “military-entrepreneurial” structure not unlike Somoza’s Nicaragua or Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, in which the ruling autocracy maintains close ties with foreign businesses.
“I think we have to be realistic,” says Falcoff. The hope is that post-Fidel Cuba will take a liberal democratic page from, say, post-Soviet Poland. But the operative model may well be post-Mao China. Rumors persist that Raúl Castro, Cuba’s military boss and heir apparent, favors the Chinese template of embracing capitalism within an authoritarian political system. Fidel disavows any such plan; he has even curbed the timid free-market reforms of the 1990s. But some future strongman could survey the island’s basketcase economy and decide to become Cuba’s Deng Xiaoping.
As for the U.S. embargo, Cason still supports it, believing it will afford leverage during Cuba’s eventual transition. But an influential chunk of Cuban dissidents, led by Oswaldo Payá, don’t.
This gets to another harsh reality of Cuba’s plight: Despite Cason’s gutsy efforts, the opposition remains divided and querulous. Last May, for example, Payá boycotted the historic meeting of Marta Beatriz Roque’s pro-democracy assembly, then slammed Roque for her warm relations with the Miami exiles. Such squabbles ensure that Castro has little to fear, at least for now, from Cuba’s civil society types.
Nor, really, did he ever have much to fear from Cason in the short run. As Cason puts it, the U.S. mission plays David to Castro’s Goliath security forces. Still, Cason, who’s been nominated as ambassador to Paraguay, bequeaths a considerable legacy to his successor, veteran diplomat Michael Parmly. “Promoting democracy in Cuba is not a sprint,” says the outgoing U.S. envoy, “but an ongoing relay race.” Indeed it is–and Cason carried the baton with flair.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
