November 2008

           
      The actor Sean Penn is hardly a knowledgeable or unbiased source on the state of Cuban-American relations. His sympathies for the Cuban and Venezuelan governments are as well known as his criticisms of American policies toward them. He maintains a warm relationship with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and admires Fidel Castro, telling of meeting with him in Havana. Yet Penn’s account in the forthcoming issue of The Nation of a private meeting in October with Raul Castro is of interest.

      Penn exploited his rapport with Chavez during his most recent visit to Venezuela, pressing him to persuade the Castro brothers to meet with him. Chavez soon obliged. With two traveling companions –Douglas Brinkley, an American professor, and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens— Penn was flown to Havana on a Venezuelan government plane. The three hoped to conduct joint interviews with the Castros.

      Unfortunately, Hitchens and Brinkley were excluded from the meeting with General Castro, who wore his four-star army uniform. Cuba’s new leader has scant experience bantering with foreign interviewers, and none at all in on-the-record meetings with anyone who might ask probing or unfriendly questions. In a few meetings with sympathetic interviewers he has said things that he must have later regretted. He knew he would be safe with Penn, however, but not with his companions, and especially not with the often outspoken Hitchens.

      In Penn’s account it was Hitchens, prior to their departure for Havana, who challenged Chavez with a penetrating question that if put to Raul might have caused him to blanche. “What’s the difference between you and Fidel?” Chavez’s response is revealing, if in fact it can be believed. “I am a social democrat. Fidel is a Marxist-Leninist. Fidel is an atheist. I am not.” Perhaps Raul had been warned by Venezuelan contacts that Hitchens might pose the same question to him.

      Penn claims that Raul had never before “given a foreign interview.” That is not true. He talked at length to two friendly Spanish-speaking reporters in the 1990s and to at least two Americans during the early years of the revolution. But Penn might be forgiven the error, because the meeting with Raul was a genuine scoop. During the twenty-seven months since the July 2006 transfer of power between the Castro brothers, Raul had not granted an on-the-record interview to a foreign interlocutor of any kind. He has avoided meetings with visiting American dignitaries, including prominent members of Congress who were anxious to see him.

      By October, however, anticipating that Barack Obama would win the presidential election, Raul agreed to meet with Penn primarily for the purpose of reiterating his interest in bilateral negotiations with the United States. Raul had already gone on record briefly expressing that position, but with the American actor he went further by making clear for the first time his willingness to sit down with Obama sometime after his inauguration. Oddly, and perhaps in jest or with a bitingly sarcastic intent, he proposed that they meet at the Guantanamo naval base. “We could give the president a gift...we could send him home with the American flag that waves over Guantanamo Bay.”

      Penn says he took notes but gives no indication that the meeting was recorded, as almost certainly it was on the Cuban side. Only an interpreter joined them. There is no way to know, therefore, how accurately Penn transcribed Raul’s responses. Clearly, portions of the seven hour interview were excluded from the relatively brief account in The Nation but there is no way to tell what was dropped. And there is no indication of how much time the two spent discussing bilateral relations or the relative importance Raul placed on the subject. Hopefully, a full transcript will be released.

      Raul’s intent in meeting with Penn was to reach a potentially large American audience with the hope of increasing pressures on Washington decision makers to unilaterally lift the economic embargo. He said his highest priority in bilateral talks would be to “normalize trade,” including the lifting of the U.S. travel ban. He also appeared to encourage American investment in Cuba’s petroleum sector, although his language, as reported by Penn, is difficult to follow.

      There is no mention in the article of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, the Clinton era “Wet Foot-Dry Foot” immigration policy, Cuba’s inclusion on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of international terrorism, or other issues that have impacted the relationship. Similarly, Raul provided no hints about what concessions his government would consider making. He gave no indication that he would give anything in the areas of human rights and political freedoms. To the contrary, he seemed to reiterate the standard Cuban position that its political system is non-negotiable.

      He also endeavored to distinguish himself from his brother, and in ways that made light of Fidel’s loquacity and narcissism. He told a hysterical story of a meeting Fidel hosted with a visiting Chinese delegation when he spoke for such lengths of time that, one by one, the Chinese nodded off. Then, with only the young Chinese interpreter still awake, Fidel undeterred, continued to drone on, speaking until dawn to the one hapless man still awake. In Penn’s account Raul relished telling the story at his brother’s expense.

      At the age of seventy-seven and in uncertain health --although Penn described him as vigorous-- Raul seems to have no illusions that the relationship with the United States, fraught by fifty years of conflict and long lists of grievances on both sides, will be resolved during his tenure. He told Penn, “perhaps we cannot solve all of our problems, but we can solve a good many of them.”

      If the American experiences in improving relations with China and Vietnam provide relevant guides, it could be a long time before the USINT mission in Havana again becomes an embassy. Normalization with China took seven and a half years, beginning with Henry Kissinger’s secret journey to China in July 1971 until full diplomatic ties were established in January 1979. With communist Vietnam the process dragged out for more than seventeen years.

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