News on Youtube Feb 10 2018

- Good evening.

I think you're going to find yourself disappointed

after that generous introduction.

(audience laughs)

Thank you, Wesley, very much.

This is a Cuban hummingbird.

It's called the Zunzun.

And the United States has a policy called a ZunZuneo

that we'll talk about a little bit later.

It's the world's smallest bird.

It's sometimes called the bee hummingbird

because it's about the size of a honey bee.

It weighs about as much as a dime.

We'll get back to this in due course.

But let me begin at the beginning

when Pria, whom I cannot see because the lighting is poor

on my face in the audience,

when Pria asked me to send her a few words about

what I'd like to discuss with you this evening,

I replied that I wanted to talk about

the most dysfunctional relationship

in the history of United States foreign policy.

Dysfunctional in the sense that it, not working.

Here we are extremely close neighbors,

but until 2016 the United States and Cuba

had not had formal diplomatic relations for 56 years.

January 3rd, 1961.

That shatters every record.

And this is with one of our closest neighbors.

You want more dysfunction?

Well, still today in 2018,

we have an economic embargo with Cuba.

That began in 1960, 12 presidents ago.

By law, this embargo cannot be lifted until Cuba performs

17 different acts.

One of them is, quote,

"having a free and fair election for a new government

"that does not include Fidel Castro or Raul Castro."

Now, I think that is the only instance

in our 242-year history as a nation

where U.S. law has stipulated

the names of specific individuals

that other countries' voters

should not select as their leaders.

More dysfunction?

During the years since 1960

right up to today,

the United States has been openly attempting

to change the Cuban government.

We have used almost every tactic,

short of an armed invasion.

We have sabotaged power plants,

we have dropped incendiary bombs on sugar fields,

we have armed assassins.

Probably the most imaginative was

a fountain pen with a hypodermic needle so fine

that Fidel Castro would not recognize

that he was being injected with poison.

Wesley, how small would that needle have to be

before you would say ouch?

(audience laughs)

Look, today we call this state-sponsored terrorism.

Now, none of this has achieved its goal,

which is to remove the Cuban leaders

who have held power since 1959.

So, okay, it's a dysfunctional relationship.

The obvious question is,

why do we want to replace them?

What is our grievance?

Well, since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s,

the answer has been that the Cuban government

is not democratic,

and, therefore, it does not represent

the will of the Cuban people.

And I want to be clear before I go on.

Cuba is not democratic.

Regardless of how you assess

the successes and the shortcomings of the Cuban Revolution,

surely we can all in this room agree on one thing,

any government

led by the same two brothers for over half a century

without a competitive election is not a democracy.

But neither is Saudi Arabia

with whose government we are the best of friends.

What's the difference?

Well, the undemocratic Saudis help to protect our interests

and the undemocratic Cubans threatened our interests.

And that's what, of course, any foreign policy

is supposed to do.

It's supposed to protect and promote

the interests of the country with the policy.

Specifically for Cuba, our policy has reflected

the economic concerns of U.S. investors

who lost a lot of money in the early 1960s.

Then the securities concerns of U.S. defense managers

when Cuba became related with the Soviet Union,

and since the end of the Cold War,

the interest of domestic politics.

Look, and any policy does that.

It focuses on protecting economic,

security, and domestic political interests.

What makes Cuba an interesting case

is because it is so extreme

it throws into really sharp relief

the way that we in this country

look at those tiny, little countries

that are in Latin America,

down there beneath the United States.

In our relationship with Cuba,

you see a set of tightly integrated beliefs

that control the way we think when someone says Cuba.

Now, think of an app,

a piece of software in your brain called Cuba.

And someone from the Department of State

sitting in his or her office,

someone knocks on the door,

said, "Do you have a minute to talk about Cuba?"

In less than a nanosecond, what happens is,

is the person who has been asked that question

moves, reaches over, grabs this mental mouse,

moves it across the desktop in the mental computer,

and clicks on the Cuba app.

We all do this, we do it 1,000 times a day.

And all you have to do is say a word, say a word like Cuba,

and you boot up your Cuba software.

So what is this software?

I'd like to talk about three beliefs

that comprise the way we think about Cuba,

and then turn to how those beliefs

affect the policy that we have today.

The first is that

we have a natural right to hegemony,

to dominant influence over all those little countries

that lie down there beneath the United States.

This right is based upon the fact

that we are rich and powerful,

and countries like Cuba are not rich and powerful.

Our economy is 250 times larger than Cuba's.

Think of me as Cuba.

I'm six feet tall.

And think of me standing beside a giant

that's 250 times bigger.

(mumbles) 1500-foot high giant.

Now, for comparison, the Empire State Building is about

1200, 1300 feet high.

And this economic giant has used

a substantial portion of its fabulous wealth

to build the most powerful military

in the history of the human race.

And this raw strength has given U.S. officials,

such as Secretary of State Alexander Haig,

the ability to ask President Ronald Reagan

for a simple green light.

According to Nancy Reagan,

First Lady,

what Secretary Haig said to President Reagan is this,

"You just give me the word and I'll

"turn that effing island into a parking lot."

Now, you may think that I've thrown up a slide

that's atypical.

But the archives are packed to overflowing

with sentences like that about Latin America,

and especially about Cuba,

all of which seem to suggest a belief in hegemony,

in our predominant influence.

What I think would seem strange

to a visitor from another planet

is why when the Cubans refuse

to behave as Washington insisted,

that their country was not turned into a parking lot.

You know, why didn't we squish them?

Well, the early answer, of course,

is that Cuba did what weak countries have done

since time immemorial.

They allied themselves with the rival power,

the Soviet Union.

But that meant that now

Cuba didn't simply threatened our economic interest,

it also threatened our security interest.

But an invasion, an invasion,

might lead the Soviet Union to react.

At the time, back in the early 1960s,

the principal concern was that the Soviet Union

would do something in Berlin.

And that could easily lead to war.

So for three decades,

we used almost every other weapon we had

short of an invasion,

right down to that fountain pen with the hypodermic needle.

And then the Cold War ended.

Cuba was no longer a threat to our interests

in the sense of our security interest.

And our economic interest, really,

had in large measure melted away

and maybe their economic interest was more in (mumbles).

The people who lost most of heir money in Cuba

had written off their losses with taxes years earlier.

So what were the interests that kept us hostile?

Well, what had happened, of course,

is that during the Cold War years,

the Unites States had developed

a new domestic politic interest,

specifically, the electro interests of U.S. policy

in attempting to secure the votes

of Cuban Americans living in Florida.

There are 850,000 Cuban Americans in Florida,

a large proportion of whom still vote today

on the basis of how hostile

a individual candidate or a political party

is to the Cuban Revolution.

So if you want to explain today's embargo,

you don't have to look any further.

Okay, that's our first belief.

The second belief

that underlies this Cuba app,

and I have to be a little careful here,

it's the belief that the region's inhabitants

are an inferior branch of the human species.

Well, let me just show you what a U.S. ambassador

wrote from Cuba back in 1946.

He wrote, basically, "If you mix Hispanic and Black,

"which is what Cuba is,

"you get a people that are lazy,

"that are cruel, that are unreliable,

"they're irresponsible, and dishonest."

Now, some of you, I hope almost all of you,

will at least wince a little bit

when you see sentences like that.

So we look for euphemisms.

My generation's word for inferior has been underdeveloped.

Washington today prefers the word developing.

These are developing people.

Now, I need to point out

that this sentence by Ambassador Norweb

is no abnormality.

I could go back from 1946

to the beginning of the 20th century

and find President Theodore Roosevelt

talking about these strange,

turbulent, little half-caste civilizations,

or I could go forward to as little as two weeks ago

when President Donald Trump said,

you know what he said

or what he is said to have said.

And you know for sure what he said about Mexicans

as he announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2016.

President Trump is unusual today because he is uncensored.

He says what he appears to believe.

But as you know, he says what many think

or say only privately.

In any event, it's probably a sign of progress that

U.S. diplomats no longer write sentences like that.

But today's political correctness

makes research much more difficult.

Today, you have to observe behavior

and then infer this belief in Latin Americans' inferiority.

Now, we'll get back to that research problem

in just a couple of minutes,

but before that we need to talk about the third belief.

The first is about hegemony,

the second is about Latin Americans' inferiority,

and the third belief in our Cuba app

is the firm conviction that

developed countries like the United States

have a responsibility to improve

underdeveloped peoples like the Cubans.

In the case of Cuba, we can trace this belief

back to the early 20th century.

If you all know,

the Spanish-American War of 1898 yielded the United States

its first colonies in Latin America,

Puerto Rico, the Philippines,

Guam, and Cuba.

We held Cuba for four years.

Then when we were preparing to grant Cuba its independence,

we created a law,

an amendment to the Army Appropriations Bill for 1902

that gave the United States the right to reenter Cuba

whenever we wished for the protection of life, property,

and individual liberty.

This is called the Platt Amendment

named after Senator Orville Platt,

the chair at the time of the

committee on relations with Cuba.

This is our first protectorate.

We, essentially, created five different protectorates

in Caribbean region during the Progressive Era,

the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

And so in 1906,

four years after we gave Cuba its independence,

the United States exercised the right to take over Cuba

for another three years.

President Theodore Roosevelt had to explain

why he was doing this,

and what he said was,

"We have this obligation.

"I'm seeking the very minimum of interference

"to make them good."

Okay, that was back more than a century ago,

but fast forward if you will for a second with me to 1991.

That was when a reporter asked the first president Bush

if he was planning on engaging with Fidel Castro

now that the Soviet Union was imploding

and our security interest was no longer an issue.

And President Bush's response was,

"What's the point?

"All I'd tell him was to the give people

"the freedom that they want,

"and then we would do what we should do:

"go down and lift those people up."

Now, President Bush's seven immediate predecessors

always answered that Cuba first had to sever

its relationship with Moscow.

But, here, in 1991, 1992,

came the first law that now governs our policy toward Cuba,

and it's called in 1992,

this law is called the Cuban Democracy Act.

And then in 1996, we passed another one

called the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act,

also known as the Helms-Burton Act.

This belief that the United States

should take responsibility for improving Cuba's governance

has been evident for more than a century.

Our first governor general of Cuba,

he put his finger exactly on the problem that we have today.

He said, "Look, we really don't care,

"but we really have to make sure

"that the right people are in office."

Class and are, I understand,

he made a grammatical error there.

"We must see that the right class are in office

"before we can turn the government over."

Now, what that meant in these circumstances

is that we selected Cuba's first president.

His name is Tomas Estrada Palma.

He was Cuba born,

but he was also a naturalized U.S. citizen

who had been living in upstate New York for 25 years

before he returned to Cuba.

And he didn't return to Cuba

until the ballots have been counted.

That's getting the right class into office.

We felt that we had this responsibility

from the very beginning.

The Cuba Democracy Act of 1992,

the Helms-Burton Act of 1996

are just an indication of how little has changed.

We believe that if you leave Cubans to their own devices,

if you leave them to their own devices,

backwards people like the Cubans

are going to make poor choices.

And those poor choices can affect our interests.

In the case of Cuba,

this effort to help them make good choices

has always been episodic.

We haven't had a continuous.

We pop in and pop out, pop in and pop out.

It began back in 1906.

When we took over Cuba again,

the person responsible for the takeover

was the secretary of war, William Howard Taft,

soon-to-be president.

He went down to see what the trouble was in Cuba in 1906.

He said it's just such a mess, we have to take it over.

And he named himself provisional governor of Cuba.

It happened that shortly, shortly thereafter

the University of Havana was starting its school year.

There is an opening day ceremony,

and he decided to give a speech.

And look what he said.

He's trying to encourage Cubans

to confront their shortcomings.

He said, "Look, you're an inferior people."

Belief two.

"But I'm here, I've taken over your country

"and one of the things I want you to get to work on

"is the fact that

"you young Cubans just aren't interested enough

"in making money."

Now jump ahead 110 years to 2016

when President Obama visited Cuba

and he spoke to the Cuban people.

He gave a speech in the most elaborate auditorium

that was broadcast on television to the entire country.

And he felt, too, that he was compelled to point out

to the Cubans some of their shortcomings.

And here's what they were.

Now, again, this is a visitor to Cuba

coming, as we'll see in just a moment,

essentially, to end a long period of hostility,

who decides to take it upon himself to tell the Cubans

exactly what William Howard Taft had said,

different problem, of course,

but (mumbles) what William Howard Taft had said

back in 1906.

Now, imagine a foreign leader visiting the United States

giving us a lecture about

what we need to improve in this country.

But for Cuba, that's what we've always done.

It's normal.

It's just a normal thing.

Cuba,

we just believe we need to do things like this.

Okay, those are the principal beliefs

that govern our thinking about Cuba

and about many, many, many other countries.

I could go on, but I only have 45 minutes.

So what I'd like to do is I'd like to shift gears

and focus on how these beliefs affect our policy today.

And this is where, if you're interested, you can

watch the behavior of U.S. policymakers

and then come to your own conclusion,

make your own inferences about how these beliefs fit in

or whether they fit in at all.

Now, as any competent policy analyst will tell you,

and I don't know if you all are aware that

Claremont McKenna has one of the nation's most distinguished

policy analysts on its faculty, Bill Ascher.

And he's sitting at a table with a visitor

from Yale who is also one of the nation's most distinguished

policy analysts, Gary Brewer,

who'll be here for a couple of months?

As I hope the two of them will not contradict me in saying,

(audience laughs)

if you wanna analyze a policy,

in our case, U.S. policy today toward Cuba,

first of all you have to identify the goal

of any policy you are about to create.

You know, what do you want to accomplish?

Well, our goal since the beginning, as I mentioned,

(mumbles) that is the 19th century,

when there were pirates of the 1820s,

we're having a resale shop in Havana's harbor,

our goal since the 19th century

is to have a Cuba that does not threaten our interests.

That's our goal.

Then having identified your goal,

you have to select a strategy for reaching that goal.

Since 1960, our strategy has been to replace

the current Cuba government.

Having selected your strategy,

then your job is to select the specific steps, the tactics,

that you're going to use to implement the strategy

that, hopefully, will allow you to reach the goal.

Okay, I wanna talk about those tactics.

So far, we've used three.

And see if these beliefs that I've mentioned

have anything at all to do with any of these three.

The first tactic was covert force.

As I said, we didn't want to invade Cuba.

That would be a very risky operation indeed

in the dark days of the Cold War.

And, again, we don't have an awful lot of time here,

so let me just ask you if you're interested in seeing

the use of covert force,

just Google Bay of Pigs.

Better yet, Google Operation Mongoose.

Part of that was the hypodermic needle.

There was also a exploding seashell

and several other items in that.

I mean, really, it was a use of force

designed to overthrow the Cuban government.

That was the tactic.

In response, the Soviet Union put missiles in Cuba.

And that led to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

that scared the bejabbers out of everybody.

So a year later,

after President Kennedy had been assassinated,

a new president, Lyndon Johnson,

inexperienced in foreign affairs,

got on the telephone 10 days after Kennedy was assassinated.

He called up J. William Fulbright,

the well-respected chair

of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,

and he asked him what to do about Cuba.

And, fortunately, they recorded the conversation.

Lyndon, I mean, it's a little crude, I understand.

But the basic idea is, don't do anything like this force,

using force anymore,

just find a way to squeeze them.

And a year later,

as Lyndon Johnson's national security advisor,

McGeorge Bundy sent the president a memo that said,

"Look, we're gonna have to live with this guy.

"But we probably should just keep up

"our present nasty course."

Now, what was that present nasty course?

It was the embargo.

That's tactic two.

After the missile crisis, covert force disappeared.

Not overnight, it took a long time to get those

Cuban American saboteurs to stop their rage in Cuba.

But very slowly, over the course of about four years,

using force disappeared

and the embargo became the nut pinching, the squeezy.

This tactic two is, basically,

the idea is do what you can do to harm the Cuban economy.

Hurt the common citizen.

Make their lives difficult.

Deny them anything they might want from us,

like tourists or market for their sugar.

The embargo continues to this day.

Sometimes it's relaxed a bit, sometimes it's tightened.

Just a couple of months ago on November 8th,

that was tightened by the administration,

generally believed to have been influenced heavily by

Cuban American Senator Marco Rubio.

It's a lot harder now to

do people to people exchanges with Cuba

than it was before November 8th.

So far, tactic two has not worked.

So without abandoning the embargo,

we have set out on a new tactic

of facilitating dissent within Cuba.

And that's where we're focused today.

Campaigning in Florida in 2008,

candidate Barack Obama told a Cuban American audience

that it's time for a new strategy.

Now, he meant tactic, but forgive him that.

"It's time for a new strategy.

"I will maintain the embargo,"

tactic two,

"but immediately allow unlimited travel and remittances

"by Cuban Americans.

"It's time to let Cuban American money

"make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime."

Now, tactic three is based upon

the belief that everyday Cubans are disaffected.

But they cannot do anything about it.

The Cuban state security is a very strong state security.

It knows what people are doing.

So they're isolated.

Tactic three, as it has evolved since 2008,

has come to mean giving Cubans the ability

to end their isolation.

Washington calls this building civil society.

And this, it's from the Obama administration's

request to Congress for $20 million

in its annual appropriations and foreign affairs,

an earmark of $20 million to promote civil society in Cuba.

Now, please, please don't judge this on the basis

of whether these are good ideas.

These are probably all good ideas,

is that we are paying $20 million

to encourage the Cubans to be able to have

a stronger civil society.

Belief number three.

Civil society is the aggregate

of all the non-governmental organizations

that voice the interest and the concerns

of everyday citizens apart from

and independent of the government.

Social media has become the principal mechanism

for building civil society in U.S. policy.

And for some governments, social media has become

the tool for implementing a foreign policy.

The Russians, apparently, used social media

to try to influence our election in 2016.

In the case of Cuba, social media is a mechanism

being used by the U.S. government to encourage dissent.

The model for tactic three is the U.S. Tea Party.

The idea was to get people together for tea,

in quotation marks.

Once they were in touch with one another...

well, look, let's just let them tell you themselves.

This is from the Tea Party website

for a couple of months ago.

And this is how it evolved.

The gathering crowds that are being mentioned here

never met face to face in a single place.

But they got together via the media,

via the (mumbles), the Glenn Becks, and so forth.

Disgruntled citizens started calling in,

they started listening to other people

who had their concerns.

They had now a vehicle for expressing themselves

and for really forming a virtual community

of like-minded individuals.

This is exactly, folks,

what we are trying to do today in Cuba with tactic three.

Meanwhile, in late 2014, for reasons really related to

our relations with the rest of Latin America

about which we can talk if you'd like later,

in 2014, after quietly negotiating

an agreement with the Cuban government,

President Obama made an announcement.

He said that it does not serve America's interests,

note that word,

to try to push Cuba toward collapse.

That's the embargo.

And then in the State of the Union message a month later,

he said, "We're ending a policy

"that was long past its expiration date.

"When what you're doing," the embargo,

"doesn't work for 50 years,

"it's time to try a new tactic."

Now, to the extent permitted by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act,

President Obama was saying that the embargo is over.

He loosened it dramatically.

That's one of the things that President Trump

tightened last November.

The something new was tactic three,

an effort to build Cuba's civil society.

A few months after this announcement,

Barack Obama and Raul Castro met in Panama

and agreed to embark upon a new beginning.

The two countries reopened their embassies in mid 2015.

In March of 2016, President Obama visited Cuba

and he said, "I've come here

"to bury the last remnant of the Cold War."

A month later,

President Castro

complained that the United States

was using what he said other means

to change Cuba's government.

He was referring to Washington's effort

to improve Cuba's civil society.

And there's no debate here.

All you have to do is look at the (mumbles) website

of the United States Agency for International Development,

our primary foreign aid agency,

and you'll see that we spent, during the Obama years,

155 million to improve civil society in Cuba.

And you add to that the $20 million

provided by the government-funded

National Endowment for Democracy.

170, $175 million will buy you

an awful lot of civil society building in Cuba today.

How was that spent?

Well, President Obama promised.

He said, "We will pursue democracy programming

"that is transparent."

But then his administration expanded dramatically

his predecessors' secret programs,

the full range of which are are still not known.

These programs focused on technology to build

a virtual civil society

to assist Cuban citizens to communicate with one another

without being observed by the Cuban government.

And that brings us the to bird.

It's an AID Program.

This is a Zunzun.

Zunzun is this tiny, little hummingbird.

Z-U-N-Z-U-N.

The U.S. Agency for International Development

had until recently a program called ZunZuneo.

ZunZuneo would be a gathering of these birds.

Think of (mumbles) very tiny,

so you'd have a hard time identifying it.

Many people will say I've heard them a lot.

Cubans will tell you, "I've heard these a lot,

"but all I hear is the noise of their wings."

They're beating something like 80 times a second,

the wings, so you hear zun, zun, zun, zun.

And he said they dart around as hummingbirds all do,

and our ZunZuneo was a gathering of these.

Look, it's like Woodstock was a gathering of hippies,

(audience laughs)

or Burning Man is a, what is it,

a gathering of strange people like my daughter.

(audience laughs)

Okay, so think of that kind of a situation.

The idea was to build a site for near,

look, we got $175 million to spend,

why not spend some of it to build a program that,

basically, it was to use

money from the tax payers of the United States

to create a Cuban Twitter, but with more.

It was a program of text messaging,

email newsletters, a Facebook page, a Twitter account,

a website all designed to look like

it was from Cubans themselves.

Cubans have plenty of cell phones.

They have a lot of very, very poor internet connections,

but there are plenty of cell phones in Cuba.

And the idea was for us to kind of invade that

with our ideas about building civil society

but make it look like there's just Cubans

talking to one another.

The email newsletter, for example, that was in this Twitter

and the Facebook,

the email newsletter

was produced by a USAID contractor in Nicaragua.

This program was entirely secret

until the Associated Press got a hold of it in 2014.

AID fessed up and said, "Look, we shut it down."

And they didn't say why they shut it down,

but Associated Press reporting team that broke the story

said that, "If exposed, it would be embarrassing."

Well, why would it be embarrassing?

Well, first of all, it would open the administration

to charges of hypocrisy.

After saying you're going to build civil society

transparently,

now all of a sudden you're doing things like this.

No one wants to be embarrassed in that way.

But then also, and I think much more important,

it would remind everyone of an even more embarrassing

and still unsettled case of Alan Gross

that some of you may have heard of.

Alan Gross had his own version of a ZunZuneo

that didn't have a name,

but it was, basically, the same idea.

He and his wife Judy were a two-person company

that specialized in providing internet access

where there is none.

And also how to avoid prying eyes,

like the eyes of Cuban security.

They had an AID contract in Cuba as well.

Part of $175 million.

Alan Gross took his first of five trips to Cuba

in early 2009,

shortly after President Obama was inaugurated.

He did each of these trips with Jewish groups

participating in what are called people to people exchanges.

And this one was with a small Jewish community in Cuba.

Without their knowledge of his purpose,

Gross spread the electronic equipment he needed

among the luggage of the participants in this exchange.

In his fourth trip,

he carried 12 iPads, 11 smartphones, three computers,

six external drive, three satellite modem,

three routers, three controllers, 18 wireless access points,

13 memory sticks, and a bundle of networking switches.

That's what the Cuban court found.

When he got back home, he reported wireless networks

established in three communities.

On his fifth trip, he was arrested while carrying a chip

that would keep the Cuban authorities from locating

satellite phone transmissions

anywhere closer than 250 miles.

This particular chip was said to be available

only through U.S. intelligence agencies

in the Department of Defense.

I haven't been able to confirm that.

He was charged with a law that prohibits, quote,

acts against Cuba's independence and territorial integrity.

He poorly defended himself.

He had lawyers, but they weren't gonna do him any good.

So he threw himself on the mercy of the court.

He said, "I am deeply sorry for being a trusting fool.

"I was duped, I was used."

Now, the Cuban court found that unconvincing.

(mumbles) what any of you here, if you,

he wrote four post-trip reports,

and all of them indicated he knew exactly what he was doing

with AID's money.

The Cuban court sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Meanwhile, Judy Gross sued AID.

When her husband was finally released in late 2014

after five years in Cuban jails

where he lost almost all his teeth,

AID settled with Gross for $3.2 million.

For five years of your life, would you do it?

Okay, that's tactic three.

No one outside the government

knows how many of these we have.

(mumbles) don't have any idea.

Okay, my time is up.

So let me close by emphasizing,

as I've tried to by juxtaposing these timeframe quotations,

let me quote in by emphasizing

how little seems to have changed.

In the beginning, at the turn into the 20th century,

the U.S. Army general in charge of Cuba

repeatedly reported to Washington that

it's next to impossible to make them believe

that we have their own interests at heart.

This is General Leonard Wood.

I've gone through all of his papers

and the papers of the people with whom he corresponded,

particularly President Theodore Roosevelt.

I'm absolutely convinced that General Wood

never wondered why it was so difficult.

He just found it difficult and he never, he never,

there's no hint that he was (mumbles)

"I wonder why it's so difficult to make them understand

"that we're just trying to help them."

I'm also convinced that

it's just because he believed about Cubans

the way many of us today believe

about those shithole countries beneath the United States.

We're hegemonic.

They're inferior.

And for their development,

they need the assistance of the United States.

What General Wood failed to see in 1901

and what we are obviously still failing to see today

is that Cubans deeply, deeply resent

that they are believed to be inferior

and that the United States believes

that Cubans need our help in order to develop.

The message from the Cuban Revolution

to the United States is this,

"We are a small country with a substantial number

"of very large problems,

"but we are the ones who are going to address it.

"If you in the United States refuse to recognize

"our right to self-determination,

"then there's no reason to talk any further."

Cubans understand, of course,

that they're living beside a 1500-foot giant,

and they know that they can't move.

And they know also that we've, you know,

and look at our government today,

and, you know, really they know that

we can turn their country into a parking lot.

But to capitulate would be such a blow to their self-respect

that a lot of the Cubans of my generation

would rather go down fighting

than to give in to this kind of thinking

about their country.

Now, maybe your generation will be a lot less dysfunctional,

but until then I'm afraid that's about

the way we're going to have to end this tonight.

I thank you very much for listening to me.

(audience applauds)

- [Woman] Thank you very much, professor.

We now have time for questions.

If you have a question, please raise your hand

and either Wesley or I will come and hand you the mic.

Priority goes to students.

- [Questioner] Hi, thank you for your talk.

So in criticizing the hegemonic power relationship

that you see between the United States and Cuba,

I was wondering if you can give some examples

of some policies that the United States could take

that would give a more egalitarian relationship

between the United States and Cuba

and that you think would potentially be more successful

in maintaining that balance of power.

And do you think with respect to programs you mentioned like

the civil society building,

do you think programs like that

that aim to spread U.S. value should be abandoned entirely,

or do you think there's a more effective way of doing so

on a more equal playing field that abandons those beliefs,

three beliefs that you talked about?

- Fair enough.

Let me answer the second part first, can I?

I really believe that the strength of the United States

is to lead by example.

I think when we get involved in the ZunZuneos of this world,

we're probably making a grave error

in protecting our own interests.

I asked Pria when she asked me

what do I wanna speak about, and I gave her two options.

I said I'd be happy to talk about U.S.-Cuban relations.

I was in high school when Fidel Castro marched into Havana.

And so I've lived my whole life as a student

of U.S.-Latin American relations

with Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution,

so I'm happy always to talk about that.

But I said also, I've been working on this book

that Wesley mentioned at the end of his kind introduction.

It's subtitle is History of the U.S. Effort

to Improve Latin Americans.

And the basic message is that we have,

since the very beginning,

and now I really mean, deep, deep back in the 19th century,

we've had in our mind the need to improve the people

who live there beneath the United States.

And I use beneath in more than just geographic term.

Latin Americans all know this, it's not a secret.

In the beginning, with, say, the peace corps,

which, you know, what could be a

more innocuous type of improvement?

Governments like Mexico said,

"We don't want any peace corps volunteers."

And it's not that they didn't want peace corps volunteers,

they didn't want the mental baggage

that came along with this.

The best thing that we could do

to improve our relations with Cuba,

and with all of Latin America,

would be to frankly say

that we want to protect our interests.

Our interests are this, that,

and the other thing, and whatever the,

and say, "We are going to try to work with you

"to address these interests

"because they're of extreme importance to us.

"If they're not of extreme importance,

"we're not going to bother."

But, you know, what we do is we dress up

this effort to improve Latin Americans

in a way that makes you think, "Well,

"are we any different at all from what the Russians

"were trying to do last year?"

Look, this soft hegemony, it's an alibi for power.

And every Latin American looks at it like (mumbles).

I mean, those of you who have been to Latin America

and who've talked with Latin American students

in particular,

they've grown up with this understanding

that the United States thinks of them as inferior

and that the United States for some reason,

the some reason is our interests,

but the United States is interested in improving them

and getting them to stop doing what they're doing now

because it's inferior

and begin doing something different because it's better.

I mean, what could be less productive

for U.S.-Latin American relation?

I'm sorry, I do not mean to filibuster your question,

but my answer is get out.

Get out.

Look, if it works all right with Norway,

like Mr. Trump suggests,

then it probably will work all right with Cuba, too.

But heaven knows what you were gonna do with Florida.

I don't know if you noticed but after the last census,

Florida passed New York

and is the third largest state in the electoral college.

And those of you with a little bit of gray hair

will remember the Al Gore fiasco in the year 2000

when he lost the White House

via the electoral college by 537 Florida votes.

I have no idea what you do about that.

Now, what President Obama was doing,

when that slide where I had him going down to Florida

in 2008 when he was campaigning,

what he knew, what his pollsters told him,

is that the Republicans have got a firm grip

on what are called the Historicos,

the historic immigrants from the early part

of the Cuban Revolution.

They have never forgiven John Kennedy

for not following through with the Bay of Pigs,

by sending in the marines to get rid of the...

They are Republicans,

they're gonna be Republicans until the day they die.

But the day they die is sooner rather than later.

Okay, and look, Barack Obama,

say what you will about him one way or other,

he had really, really good pollsters during that campaign.

And what he was told is you've gotta peel off

some of the Cuban Americans.

And you can peel off those early ones

who still have family down in Cuba

by saying I'm going to let the Cuban Americans have

the right to travel and send remittances,

money to their relatives in Cuba.

And you would attract those people.

He can't just say, "I will allow that to happen,"

you have to say, "I'll keep the embargo."

But he had to word it in a way that made him sound tough.

Like it's time for the Cuban Americans

to help us destroy the Castro government

or overthrow the Castro government.

But enough of my filibustering.

- [Questioner] Thank you for your talk.

At the end of October, I think it was,

a number of documents

were released about the Kennedy administration,

and some of them detailed a CIA set of plans called

Operation Northwood,

which, essentially, described how

they proposed to plan terrorist attacks in Miami, Florida

and Washington,

and as well as on the boats between Cuba and Miami,

and blame it on Cuba.

So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that

and if you have any idea why,

because that wasn't very widely reported,

so I was curious.

- You're telling me something for the first time.

I'm sorry, I have no reaction because I hadn't heard of it.

It's called Operation Northwood?

- [Questioner] Yeah, I can check later,

but, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it was.

- My immediate reaction is, of course,

look, there was a time when there was a...

after the failure of the Bay of Pigs,

the Kennedy administration, basically, went ballistic

on the Castro government.

It took a general, General Edward Lansdale,

and made him the leader of an organization

that called itself Operation Mongoose.

This Operation Mongoose was involved in myriad activities.

Basically, as I said, it was state-sponsored terrorism.

And the idea was just to, you know,

what you would say, I just see the logic behind it.

What you do is you convince the American public

that the Cubans are trying to bomb and destroy our country

and make that attack a justification for a counterattack.

And it doesn't surprise me at all.

I wish I know something about it though

so I didn't have to just give you a hypothesis.

- [Questioner] Thank you so much for coming.

I was curious, sort of to go back to your initial analysis,

what threat Cuba actually poses to the U.S.

Now, of course, it's no longer militarily

but economically speaking.

It's so small and so clearly not functioning

on its current system,

but I don't see why the U.S. wouldn't just like let Cuba,

I mean, (mumbles) Norway.

But what threat might one perceive

Cuba to have towards the U.S.?

- Look, over the course of my lifetime,

when I was taking my first courses

in international relations in foreign policy,

there was always some place somewhere in the syllabus

where someone said something like,

"Our politics stopped at the water's edge."

If the leader of the other party says that we have trouble,

I will back that person

regardless of whether it might

cause me something politically or whatever.

Over the course of my lifetime,

globalization has wrung the foreign out of foreign policy.

There is nothing about U.S.-Latin American relations

that is not today dominated, dominated,

by domestic political concerns.

Just look at the whole idea of this wall.

Look at immigration policy generally.

Look at NAFTA, look at drug policy.

Every one of those policy concerns

is based on domestic political concerns

and they involve constituencies

that in many cases, we're discovering,

are extremely powerful.

I mean, we used to talk about the Hispanic vote

belonging to the Democrats.

And look what Mr. Trump has discovered.

He's discovered that

he can use issues of inter-American relations

to build support from entirely different groups

that can challenge the strength of

the Democrats' hold on Hispanics.

Look, the answer is domestic politics.

If you were starting today

to study inter-American relations for a career,

you would want to study American politics

first and foremost.

Look, in the good old days of political science,

what you did if you majored in comparative,

I you were Latin American (mumbles)

and you majored in comparative politics

and you did a minor,

your second major would be in international relations.

Now it's got to be U.S. domestic politics,

what we call American government.

If you're not proficient in understanding

American government,

then you just don't get U.S. policy toward Latin America.

And it's really transformed the education of our

current generations of graduate students.

Can I have my dessert now?

(audience laughs)

- [Moderator] I think so.

Please join me in one more time thanking Professor Schultz.

(audience applauds)