OBAMA CUBA

[Oscar]

Jimmy Carter Calls U.S.-Cuba Diplomacy 'Courageous'

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Posted: 12/18/2014 8:12 am EST Updated: 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter says he is "proud and grateful" for the president's efforts to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba. Carter calls the shift in policy "courageous."

Carter rejects accusations that President Barack Obama is appeasing Cuba's communist leaders.

He said Thursday on MSNBC that the best way to bring democracy to Cubans is to let Americans "go there and trade and invest." Carter says that will show Cubans that Americans are "not the enemy."

Carter tried to normalize relations with Cuba shortly after taking office in 1977 by re-establishing diplomatic missions and negotiating the release of thousands of prisoners. But conflicts over Cuban military action in Africa and a flood of Cuban refugees in 1980 stymied those efforts, which ended when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981.

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'Cuban Five' at Heart of US-Cuba Deal

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Marjorie Cohn, Professor, Thomas Jefferson School of Law Posted: 12/17/2014 7:13 pm EST Updated: 12/17/2014 7:59 pm EST

In the course of delivering his historic speech dramatically altering US Cuba policy, President Barack Obama briefly mentioned that the United States released three Cuban agents. These men are members of the "Cuban Five," who were imprisoned for gathering information on US-based Cuban exile groups planning terrorist actions against Cuba. Without their release, Cuba would never have freed Alan Gross, and Obama could not have undertaken what 10 presidents before him refused to do: normalize relations between the United States and Cuba.

Fighting Terrorism Against Cuba

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The Door Is Now Open

In his speech, Obama mentioned the hypocrisy of the US refusal to recognize Cuba while we enjoy normalized relations with Communist China. He announced several other new measures designed to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba.

But Obama did not lift the US blockade of Cuba, which consists of economic sanctions against Cuba and restrictions on Cuban travel and commerce.

Every year for 23 consecutive years, the United Nations General Assembly has called on the United States to lift the blockade, which has cost Cuba in excess of $1 trillion.

The US trade embargo of Cuba was initiated during the Cold War by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to a 1960 memo written by a senior State Department official. The memo proposed "a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the [Castro] government." As Obama stated, that strategy has been a failure.

During the Clinton administration, Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, which tightened the blockade. Obama promised to try to work with Congress to repeal this legislation.

Because of the significance of the Cuban exile community in Miami, and the strategic importance of Florida in US elections, no US president has dared to normalize relations with Cuba. As Alice Walker wrote in The Sweet Abyss, "Many of our leaders seem to view Florida's Cuban conservatives, including the assassins and terrorists among them, as People Who Vote." Obama has taken a courageous step in shifting US policy toward Cuba.

In their simultaneous speeches today, both Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro thanked Pope Francis for his efforts in helping to engineer the historic deal. CNN reported that bells were ringing in churches all over Havana. This is a wonderful day indeed.
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Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). In 2000, she joined 250 members of the NLG in a million-person march in Havana against the US blockade of Cuba.

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