Category: International

* Here’s an incongruous postscript to the week of national mourning in Cuba over the death of Fidel Castro. President Raúl Castro has announced that the Cuban government would prohibit the naming of streets and monuments after his brother. The government would also bar the building of statues in Castro’s image. This would, underscored Raúl Castro, be in keeping with his brother’s desire to avoid a cult of personality.

Say what? What the hell do they think “Fidelismo” was?

* U.S.: Stop hypocritically lecturing Cuba. Cuba: Stop getting in your own counterproductive way.

The U.S. delivery of $400 million  in cash to Iran–in the same time frame as a hostage release–raises legitimate questions about quid pro quos and ransom paying.

In short, it was a quid pro quo. The timing was not preposterously coincidental.

But in truth, it was not ransom. Not when you’re sending Iran back its own money. In the 1970s, pre-revolutionary Iran paid $400 million for military equipment that was never delivered–for obvious reasons. The matter has long been the purview of an international tribunal, and the Iranian nuclear deal obviously ramped up the timing. It’s not the Shah’s money; it’s the Islamic Republic of Iran’s. Like it or not.

Last fall, Eusebio Leal, Havana’s celebrated historian and architectural preservationist, made a well-received presentation to the Ybor City Chamber of Commerce. It underscored the new normal evolving between Cuba and the U.S. It also highlighted Leal’s increasing prominence in speaking for Havana’s ambitious restoration plans–including repurposing and multi-use–and the role of profits from tourism, notably from America, that will help facilitate Old Havana restoration.

Ten months later, Leal no longer has autonomy. His Office of the Historian of Havana has been absorbed by Division General Leonardo Ramón Andollo Valdés of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR). According to FAR, the move against Leal’s market-friendly “empire” will result in “greater efficiencies.”

Indeed, change is never easy.

Call it cachet meets marketing meets geopolitical change. Also call it Nespresso Cuban coffee–or “Cafecito de Cuba.”

Starting this fall, Nestle-owned Nespresso will be selling Cuban coffee in the U.S. Recent regulatory changes now permit independent Cuban entrepreneurs–in this case “Granma” and “Santiago de Cuba,” to export their coffee to this country.

The imported Cuban coffee will only be available to make in the company’s specialized Nespresso OriginalLine machines.

* Rule of thumb: If you’re planning a coup, be really, really sure of success. Everyone knows the consequences for failure. Turkey should be a teachable moment for coup plotters.

* Speaking of, Turkey’s NATO allies, including the U.S., condemned the coup attempt and urged all sides to support Turkey’s democratically elected government. Of course they did. They need Turkey–and its military heft and logistics–in the war against ISIS.

It doesn’t alter the reality, however, that nobody in the West had been particularly impressed with Turkey’s trending authoritarianism, its take on a sovereign “Kurdistan” and its less-than-enthusiastic embrace of secular society.

* Is there a more insidiously evil oxymoron than “honor killing“?

It’s hardly consoling enough to the emotionally traumatized and grief stricken, but the absolute, worst thing that could have happened in Orlando last month didn’t. That would have been that nothing good came from abject evil.

Twisted jihadism, perverted Islam and yet-to-be-determined subplots wreaked unconscionably horrific depravity on our society. While it was the Pulse nightclub–and its LGBT clientele–that were lethally victimized, it was humanity at large that was targeted.

And responded.

The outpouring of sympathy and empathy–and donated blood–was pronounced and powerful. Too bad a tipping point had to come with horror and tragedy.

Orlando was not something awful that happened to “them.” It was something awful inflicted upon “us.”

The lens of humanity has been focused like never before on what we all have in common–not in contrast because of our sexual-orientation differences. This was about that which makes us part of the family of mankind, not about that which makes us different family members.

It’s not surprising that some GOP analysts and Trump apologists thought it fortunate timing that Trump was in Scotland when the Brexit vote came down. You see what you want to see. “The Brexit vote will be a boon to Donald Trump and his candidacy, which has tapped into the same set of fears felt by everyday Americans,” assessed Republican George Lemieux, the former Florida senator.

He’s wrong. Again.

It’s already increasingly apparent that acting on gut anger, selective scapegoating and immigration paranoia is not nationalism at its best. Tossing off the shackles of EU bureaucracy makes a good rallying cry, but Brexit is still a recipe for much more than populist perspectives. It triggers scenarios from economic volatility to geopolitical uncertainty. It invokes the law of unintended consequences. Ask Scotland. Ask U.S. exporters. Ask 401-k managers.

Put it this way: When Russia is pleased, it’s more hangover than euphoria.

If Brexit is a net plus for Trump, that means a majority of the electorate has no problem with his take that he’ll “do well in any case”–whatever happens to the British pound, whatever happens to American retirement accounts, whatever happens to European stability.

I refuse to believe that a majority of U.S. voters will sign on to such a self-aggrandizing, globally unconcerned agenda of a presidential poseur ribbon-cutting as Europe convulses.

Surely, the melodramatic politics of fear and ego are not a winning combination. Surely.

*Cuba’s pragmatic opening to the world is underscored by more than a historic visit by a U.S. president, formal Cuban-American diplomatic relations and U.S. visitors flying in under the People-to-People designation. It’s also about soliciting big-money pop culture that is showing signs of an incipient backlash.

It’s not all upside when the Prado boulevard is closed off for a Chanel model shoot or traffic jams result from the filming of yet another installment of Fast and Furious. And, yes, Transformers starts production in Cuba this week.

Then add those televised scenes of affluent-looking, culture-dabbling cruise passengers being welcomed with rum drinks and scantily-clad dancers sporting Cuban flag-designed bathing suits. Apparently it became an off-putting, Caribbean-stereotype for locals still focused on an “egalitarian” life and what remains of revolutionary ideals. An inevitable conclusion: Cuban hypocrisy is revolting. Backlashes happen.

* Meanwhile, President Barack Obama was in Vietnam this week. He’s the third American president (Bill Clinton, 2000 and George W. Bush, 2006) to go there since the end of the war–and the first not to be hounded by what he was doing during the draft.

He was there to reassert and reinforce trade relations: The U.S. is now the largest importer of Vietnamese goods. But, more to the point, he was there to counter an increasingly assertive China. To that end, he officially ended the Vietnamese arms embargo that had been partially lifted in 2014.

Imagine, this authoritarian, repressive, election-free, political prisoner-holding, communist country–that the U.S. went to war with and lost more than 50,000 G.I.’s over–no longer has an arms embargo with the U.S. And bilateral relations have been normalized since the Clinton Administration.

But the U.S. still has an economic embargo with Cuba. Beyond ironic, frustrating and counterproductive.

* In the last two years, no country–on a per capita basis–has contributed more jihadists to the ISIS cause than Kosovo. Not long ago, Kosovo, although war ravaged, was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world. That all changed when the government of Saudi Arabia began proselytizing efforts on behalf of Wahhabism, its notably ultra conservative form of Islam.

Seemingly, it’s no leap of faith for a number of Kosovar converts to find common cause with the Islamic State’s raison d’être.

Imagine, Saudi Arabia is an ally.

*The Russia of Vladimir (“Make Russia Great Again”) Putin is, as we well know, problematic for the U.S. and the West. Unbridled nationalism and duplicity–as evidenced in central Europe and the Middle East–are more than manifest.

But Napoleon complex and Soviet hangover notwithstanding, this neo-Cold War scenario could have been foreseen given the way the actual Cold War ended. That’s certainly the take of Michael Mandelbaum, foreign policy professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.” It’s a worthwhile read.

In short, notes Mandelbaum, the geopolitical gains the U.S. made began unraveling in the Clinton Administration with the eastward expansion of NATO–to include the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe as well as former parts of the Soviet Union itself. This was after the Administration of President George H.W. Bush had “explicitly promised the Soviet leadership, during the discussions about German reunification, that the Atlantic alliance would NOT be expanded.”

The Russians, as a result, felt deceived, disrespected and excluded. And that was under Boris Yeltsin, who was no Vlad Putin. Yeltsin presciently warned in 1994 that NATO expansion would lead to a “cold peace” in Europe.

“(NATO expansion) squandered … much of the windfall that had come to the United States as a result of the way the Cold War had ended and led, eventually, to an aggressive Russian foreign policy that brought the post-Cold War era to an end,” writes Mandelbaum. “It did this in return for no gain at all, making NATO expansion one of the greatest blunders in the history of American foreign policy.”

Saudi Arabia attracted a lot of international attention recently by replacing a number of its top ministers and restructuring government bodies. The rationale: reduce heavy dependence on oil, diversify the economy and improve the quality of life of its citizens. Not officially noted: buying time for a American ally-monarchy that is reigning on borrowed time.

Talk about a perfect storm: Consider Brazil. Impeachment procedures are proceeding against President Dilma Rousseff; a majority of Congress is facing corruption and related charges; the economy is contracting while inflation has hit double figures; the Zika virus is still on the loose; and doubts continue to ratchet about the country’s readiness for the Rio Olympics.