Thumbs Up to Obama's Revised Cuba Policy

PHUTATORIUS
Today the Obama Administration announced that it will relax longstanding sanctions on Cuba just a little.

These gestures — allowing emigres to travel and send remittances to their family members in Castroland, opening up communications channels for U.S. based cellular and satellite television carriers to broadcast into Cuba — could not but elicit criticism from the right, simply because we're talking about the lifting of restrictions on Cuba. And in due course, two Republican Cuban-American representatives posted this sharp critique of the policy change:
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Unilateral concessions to the dictatorship embolden it to further isolate, imprison and brutalize pro-democracy activists, to continue to dictate which Cubans and Cuban-Americans are able to enter the island, and this unilateral concession provides the dictatorship with critical financial support.

But this sort of talk doesn't really enrich the discourse: the statement says nothing about the nature of the "concessions"; it chooses instead to blather about how awful the Castro regime is, presumably in support of the thesis that any treatment that doesn't consist of a stiffarm constitutes an indulgence to dictatorship. This is too bad, because I should think that the Diaz-Balart brothers are peculiarly positioned to make some nuanced contribution to the discourse on Cuba.

I'm not wholly averse to the notion that we have to "get tough" with dictators, but in the case of Cuba, it ought to be clear by now that a wholesale reevaluation of the United States' policy of "disengagement" is in order. It's been fifty years now, and I think it's fair to say that our isolation strategy has not been effective. Castro is still hanging on. There's no better indicator of Castro's growing sense of comfort than the evolution of his wardrobe — from his signature Revolution-evoking fatigues into a politician's suit, and then from there into pajamas and Adidas. Clearly, Fidel is letting it all hang out in his isolation and old age, and all signs point to an orderly transfer of power to Raul down the road. Maybe it's time to say that our policy just hasn't worked.  Why don't we put pride and spite aside for just a moment and consider the possibility that softening up the line just a little doesn't translate to "letting Fidel win?"  I think by most measures — at least those important to him — he's already won.  If you'd asked Castro in a candid moment back in 1960 to set the odds that he would be (1) alive, (2) still in Cuba, and (3) its head of state in 2009, even he would have laughed you out of the room.

And it's worth examining a bit more closely exactly the specific moves the Obama Administration has made. They haven't abandoned The Embargo outright. They're not sending champagne and Omaha Steaks to Fidel (or even DVDs). The relaxed restrictions are directed not at the Castro regime, but at the people suffering under it.  It seems not just benevolent to allow Cuban-Americans to reestablish ties with and lend material support to their families on the island — it's actually pretty clever. These families can see how their relations have prospered under the American system. The President gets that the isolation actually supports Castro's grip on power, because it makes it easier for him to suppress the evidence of working alternatives to the regime's ideology.  It's no coincidence that Obama relaxed the travel and remittance restrictions at the same time he opened up cellular and satellite concessions: these, too, will get word out to Cubans of the grand, beautiful world that subsists beyond the socialist writ of El Presidente Fidel.

Whether or not you might think this sort of opening-up is advisable with, say, Iran or North Korea, here it seems to be a no-brainer, given 50 years of failure and it's the only thing we haven't tried. So maybe Castro's government absorbs some of the proceeds of the check you write to Grandma in Havana. I'd be quite surprised if that revenue makes the difference between a surviving and a failing regime. The Cuban people deserve better — they deserve to know that there's better out there — and that's what will ultimately drive out the Communists. And I think we should place just a little bit of faith in Obama's strategy: here's a guy who knows a thing or two about bottom-up political movements.

Vercingetorix, tell me why I'm wrong.

A Baseball Fan's Thoughts on the WBC

PHUTATORIUS
I was mousing around the World Baseball Classic website last night, looking for reasons to be interested. Here's the best I could do:

*Yulieski, Yunesky, Yadier, Yolexis, Yosbany, Yuliesky, Yoennis. Y-names were hip in Cuba in the 1980s.
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*Cuba has a 6'-0", 260-pound catcher (named Yosbany). I'd pay money to watch a guy that size work behind the plate. God bless him — there are multiple knee surgeries in his future.

*On paper, it looks like Venezuela has blown by Puerto Rico in terms of baseball talent.

That's really about it. The reasons not to care about this tournament are abundant. It starts with the composition of the teams. Another "Ys Guy," Yuniesky Betancourt, is the Mariners' starting shortstop and should be on the Cuban team. But he and any other major league defectors weren't invited. Politics, politics, politics. Contrast the Italian roster, which, per the tournament's quirky eligibility rules, features guys like Lenny DiNardo (Place of Birth: Miami, Florida), Mark DiFelice (POB: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), Frank Catalanotto (POB: Smithtown, New York) and Chris Cooper (really? Chris Cooper? POB: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Under WBC rules, if you're eligible to be issued a passport from that country (a factor that is keyed entirely to the laxity of that nation's laws), you're eligible to play on that country's baseball team. I know that a fair amount of "carpetbagging" persists in FIFA's international tournaments, too, but this seems especially out of order, and I don't doubt the purpose of it is to populate rosters to fill out the tournament's sixteen-team field.

Still more problematic is the watered-down nature of the competition. The best of the best don't necessarily play in the tournament; major league teams will do what they can to keep their players out of it; the games are played early on in spring training, when the players are hardly at the peak of their conditioning. The tournament has a rule that imposes pitch counts on national team managers: 70 pitches max in the first round, 85 in the second, 100 in the semifinals and finals — with mandated days of rest between appearances. Some kinks in the format have been worked out: advancement from the first round won't be decided by bizarre tiebreakers, as in the last tournament. The bracket is altogether decipherable, though, so I call it a wash.

The FIFA World Cup works because even though it's club play that finances the sport — and the club owners have millions invested in the fragile knees and ankles of the players on their payrolls — every one of the players would sacrifice life and limb to play for his national team and win the Cup Final. The players are all-in, and the club owners aren't politically in a position to keep their players out of the tournament. Simply put, the World Cup is more important than the club leagues, whereas the WBC is a creature of Major League Baseball, and its subordination to MLB is written into its charter, all the way down to the last, detail-heavy regulation about how often and how long the national teams can play their pitchers.

It's possible that someday the WBC will grow into a World Cup-quality competition. It would need to step out from under MLB's thumb, and the players — not some of them, all of them — will have to care enough to put their bodies, and their million-dollar paydays, on the line, to vie for the honor of lifting the championship trophy for their country. I won't hold my breath. In the meantime, I'll tune in not for the drama of the competition, but for the novelty: say, of watching an all "Ys-Guys" battery — Yulieski pitching to Yosbany, and the massive Yosbany using his gravitational field to block a splitter in the dirt.

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Lost It to the Revolution

PHUTATORIUS
Assassins turn their guns on Albert Anastasio, the notorious capo of a national contract-murder syndicate, in his New York City barber shop. Mobbed-up casino owners arrange a sex party for then-Senator John F. Kennedy in Havana (and later kick themselves for failing to film it). A young Fidel Castro abandons ship nine miles off the Cuban coast to escape a rival with homicidal intentions. I gotta say, Havana Nocturne is a fun read.

T.J. English's plot is straightforward: he lays it all out in the book's subtitle. American gangsters see opportunity in Havana's licentious nightlife — gambling! glitz! girls! — Mob cultivates a partnership with ex-President Fulgencio Batista, Batista retakes power, and Havana really starts to hop. Batista has a strong hand politically but manages to overplay it. The revelry in Havana ends — poetically — in the wee hours of New Year's Day, 1959, as Castro's revolutionaries put Batista to flight and swarm over the city. A six-year party, followed by a fifty-year (and counting) hangover.

By now we're all familiar with the broad contours of this history, and English doesn't add much from a big-picture standpoint. There's no innovative historical argument here, no challenge to the conventional wisdom. It's the richness of detail that makes this book such a good read. It's the synthesis of sources, the cobbling together of a hundred gripping, tabloid-quality anecdotes of sleaze, corruption, excess, debauchery, murder, repression, insurgency, and riot. Oh — and Sinatra, too. How could anyone not want to read this book?
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Two dynamic personalities drive the narrative here, and neither of them is Batista. The first is Meyer Lansky. Lansky, an unheralded Mob organizer and financier — and onetime protegé of Arnold Rothstein, scourge of baseball fans the world over — was the visionary who, along with Lucky Luciano, founded "the Commission," a sort of national governing board for the Mafia and later led the Commission's bid to colonize Havana's tourism and entertainment industry. Hyman Roth's character in The Godfather, Part II is modeled after Lansky. The other mover and shaker is Fidel Castro, and of course we know all about him.

It should not be surprising that Lansky and Castro's stars were in opposition. As English tells it, these two were polar opposites in every way — they were matter and anti-matter (you can decide which was which). Castro, the son of a prosperous landowner family, grew up in the country; Lansky was raised in poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Lansky was disciplined, deliberate, and pragmatic, as much of a "peacemaker" as any gangster can be (the Anastasio hit notwithstanding); Castro is aggressive and confrontational, the consummate risk-taker. Lansky survived and thrived by flying under the radar — of law enforcement, of his Mob colleagues, of American journalists obsessed with the Mafia. Castro promoted a cult of personality that put himself forward as the very embodiment of the People's Revolution.

English works hard to place Lansky's Havana Mob and Castro's 26th of July movement in tension, but the truth is that his book tells two parallel narratives. The only point of connection between Lansky and Castro is Batista's regime, the fixed point around which these two characters pivot. Lansky's Havana "scene" parties on, at first blissfully, then willfully ignorant of the threat posed by Castro; meanwhile, Castro soldiers on in the mountains, plotting his revolution. He is aware of the influence of American gangsters in Cuba, but his obsession is with Batista — always Batista. If anything, it is surprising that these two elements could coexist in Cuba for as long as they did. It's clear that this island wasn't big enough for the both of them, and one man's ascendance necessarily excluded the other. For all that, though, Lansky and Castro's respective crews never came into active conflict, English's book is a bit anticlimactic as a result, and you can almost feel the author chafing at that fact.

If English advances a thesis at all, it is a subconscious one. He doesn't argue the point, but you can't help but get the feeling that this ending was foreordained. Lansky's plans could never have worked, in the long term. The active ingredient in the Mob's Cuba formula was a government partner that would sell the country's guts and soul to foreign investors for a cut of the take. Without Batista — and exactly Batista — Lansky and his partners in the Syndicate would never have gained their foothold in Havana. And yet Batista's was exactly the sort of regime that can never sustain itself. In retrospect, it's hard to see the Mob's Havana holiday as anything but a time-limited proposition. What was not predictable, necessarily, is that Fidel would not allow the Mob to co-opt him into its Cuba project. Turns out you can refuse an offer from the Mafia. This might explain why, after managing somehow to survive that first refusal, Castro is still around.


UPDATE: For all you doubters about the long-term prospects of This Thing of Ours, it's worth pausing to consider Lansky and Luciano's fruitful partnership — proof positive that a Jew and an Italian can work together and succeed in this world. FO is the Internet's "Commission," and don't you forget it.