Opinions Bush nominee tightens screws on Cuba By Alec Dubro On March 22, the Bush administration nominated Otto Reich, an inside player in the 1980s Iran-Contra conspiracy, to the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. This is the highest ranking U.S. administration position for North and South America. Presently, Reich is a well-connected corporate lobbyist representing liquor, tobacco and arms industries. He's also a vice president of an apparel industry "sweatshop monitoring" group, widely viewed as a dodge. But Reich is being considered, not because he's another unsavory lobbyist, but because he's a friend of the Bush family and, more importantly, because he's a high-profile Cuban American. The nomination of Reich is regarded as a political payoff to the right-wing Cuban faction that has held U.S. Cuban policy hostage for decades, and which was an important factor in George Bush's Florida strategy last fall. At the same time, too, it makes clear the Bush administration's concern with business profits above all other considerations. Reich is politically obsessed with one issue: Cuba. He has lobbied consistently to tighten the economic embargo on the island, hoping one day to provoke an uprising against Fidel Castro. The policy of isolating Cuba and punishing its people has bred widespread contempt for U.S. diplomacy in Latin America. As strategy for removing the Castro regime, it has not worked for 40 years and there is no reason to believe it will work now. At the same time, Reich invokes the ghosts of a particularly divisive scandal. During the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration met a rising tide of domestic opposition to its Central America wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Reich headed a propaganda department in the State Department called the Office of Public Diplomacy. This unit was staffed with CIA and Pentagon "psychological warfare" specialists and reported to Oliver North. The function of the operation was to mislead the American public by feeding false information, discrediting reporters whose work the Reagan administration did not like, and exploiting other propaganda tactics normally used to confuse and manipulate the populations of enemy countries. Congressional probes of the Iran-Contra scandal later identified numerous illegalities and led to the closure of the Office of Public Diplomacy. More recently, as a corporate lobbyist, Reich has been involved with the Bacardi rum company and the U.S.-Cuba Business Council, which is a nonprofit organization backed by Bacardi and partially funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Bacardi has paid Reich more than $600,000, according to public records recently cited in The New York Times. In addition to lobbying for Bacardi, Reich has represented the British-American Tobacco Company. He also assisted the Lockheed Corporation in its attempt to sell F-16 fighter planes to Chile, breaking a 20-year policy of U.S. restraint in keeping high-tech military equipment out of Latin America. Lastly, he's vice-chairman of Worldwide Responsible Apparel Program, or WRAP, an apparel industry front group characterized as a way for clothing importers to avoid serious scrutiny of their factories in developing countries. If confirmed, Reich will help oversee the notorious Helms-Burton Act, a law he helped draft. While working for Bacardi, he successfully lobbied to slip Section 211 into the 1998 Omnibus Appropriations Bill which stripped Cuba of trademark protection. Helms-Burton has fueled serious trade friction with the European Union and Section 211 prompted the European Union to bring a legal action against the U.S. to the World Trade Organization. This shadow dance of corporate and non-profit interests and activities may be lucrative for Reich and his corporate clients, but it hasn't benefited either the U.S. business community or the American people. Even as the nomination is being considered, U.S.-Cuban relations are taking another nosedive. For the past 40 years - despite the most extreme U.S. provocations - the Cuban government has respected U.S. trademark protection. But now, the Cuban government has announced that they will begin making a Bacardi rum of their own. Moreover, the Cubans, in retaliation for the Reich-inspired trademark attack, will produce AIDS pharmaceuticals without regard to American patent. As a result of Reich and his backers, American companies find themselves in a trade war they didn't ask for and may not win. With U.S.-Latin American relations poised at a fork in the road between an improving region-wide, trade-based relationship, and an escalating American military engagement in Colombia, Reich is the wrong man, with the wrong instincts, pursuing the wrong interests, at the wrong time. Alec Dubro is media director of the Foreign Policy In Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. The Institute for Policy Studies is a multi-issue progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. (http://www.ips-dc.org).
