This year’s Summit of the Americas will be the first to which officials from Cuba have been invited. But not all those seeking to represent Cuba feel they’re getting an appropriate welcome. Cuban artists and activists claim their government has kept them from taking part in the Summit’s civil society conferences — a refusal that betrays an unbridged gap in relations between the United States and Cuba.
Cuban civil society representatives protested outside the hotel where Summit meetings were to take place on Wednesday, claiming their government had denied them the appropriate credentials to enter the building. Official members of the Cuban delegation accused them them of being “murderers” and “mercenaries” working for the U.S. government.
What to call the unofficial delegation is a major point of contention. The U.S. government sees them as activists. The Cuban government calls them dissidents.
Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson has been leading the normalization talks for the U.S. She explained the difference in descriptors for the Cuban civil society representatives to NPR’s Melissa Block:
My perception of these activists is that in the Cuban case, they may be opposed to the current government. But in general around the hemisphere, they’re people who are seeking freedoms. So I tend not to call them dissidents in the same way that, I suppose, refuseniks in the Soviet Union was a negative term — one of honor in many ways, but a negative term. I see all of them as part of important voices for civil society, as I call it, throughout the hemisphere.”
But Cuban officials have espoused a very different view about the role of civil society representatives at the Summit — and their intentions, too.
Abel Prieto, an advisor to Cuban President Raul Castro said the representatives had no standing and should never have been included in the Summit.
“We can’t legitimize that opposition which is absolutely fabricated; it doesn’t have any weight, it doesn’t have any real connection to our society,” he told El Nuevo Herald. “It’s not possible to ask Cuba to dialogue with puppets of these special services agencies in the U.S.”
And Prieto’s charge has some grounding.
A series of investigations by the Associated Press revealed that U.S. American development organization, USAID, secretly tried to infiltrate Cuban rap groups in order to call on Cubans to revolt against their government. That revelation followed similar evidence of an effort to create a “Cuban Twitter” and even use an HIV-awareness program to spark protest against Castro.
The tensions over the civil society representatives — and the covert operations by the U.S. to influence them — may mar hopes that increased economic openness with Cuba will lead to a more democratic and free state, as President Barack Obama stated as his goal when he announced an end to sanctions against Cuba in January.
“In Cuba, we are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date. When what you’re doing doesn’t work for fifty years, it’s time to try something new,” Obama said.
But the use of aid agencies to influence the politics of Cuba has made many feel that while the U.S. officials reconsidered policies for a new era of economic openness, they continued to deploy covert tactics reminiscent of the Cold War. The ill will spurred by those has already cast a shadow over the historic Summit.
The conflict between the official and unofficial representatives of Cuba became so disruptive that the delegations of other countries felt obligated to sneak away from them in order to continue with the meetings they had been sent to Panama to participate in.