Half a Brain Regarding Cuba

By Myriam Marquez The Salt lake Tribune-The Orlando Sentinel

    With the war in Iraq over and the road map to peace in the Middle East delivered, there's plenty of opportunity for America to gloat. It shouldn't. Not when our own hemisphere is in such turmoil. Where's the road map for the Americas?     As Secretary of State Colin Powell noted this past week at the Council of the Americas conference, Latin America's poverty, coupled with political setbacks, challenges the most ardent defender of democracy and capitalism in the region. "We told them that democracy would work," Powell told business leaders. "If we collectively do not deliver, then democracy has no meaning, the free-market system has no meaning."    With oil-rich Venezuela in the midst of a political and economic meltdown; Colombia's people terrorized by leftist narco-traffickers and right-wing paramilitaries; Central America still struggling with democracy; and Cuba suffering through its 44th year of a communist dictatorship, the region's challenges are immense.     Latin America was supposed to be George W. Bush's job numero uno. Bush was working with Mexico's Vicente Fox to create a massive Americas trade zone that would rival the European Union's and lift all boats, as the Republicans like to say. But the terrorist attacks on America forced a reshuffling of U.S. priorities.     Cuba remains at the epicenter of the political chaos, having recently killed by firing squad three hijackers of a ferry and imprisoned 78 dissidents, including dozens of independent journalists. In the face of such repression, even European communists and Latin American intellectuals have woken up to Cuba's reality, some calling for a trade embargo against the island unless the dissidents are set free. No one with half a brain is buying the Cuban regime's line that the dissidents are a made-in-USA plot to destroy the revolution.    Powell says the United States is retooling its policies toward Cuba. There's talk the U.S. embargo will once again be tightened. Great -- just what Castro intended, another hard-line U.S. policy he will manipulate.     Here's what Castro wouldn't expect: a tough, principled stand by Latin America and the European Union to put their money behind their human-rights rhetoric. They have argued for years that trading with Cuba would help open that society. Now that Castro has called their bluff and tightened the noose on his people, the only thing left that hasn't been tried is the big stick of economic sanctions.     Not because Tio Sam says so. But simply because it's the moral thing to do, the right thing to do, and, when all is said and done, the only road map that can lead Cuba's desperate people to freedom.