have you been pouring moon shine in you tea?

By JORGE G. CASTANEDA

Normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba was widely seen as exactly the kind of high-value, low-hanging fruit that would be ideal for a president elected under the banner of "change." But a scathing new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, "New Castro, Same Cuba," will make lifting sanctions against the Castro regime—on travel, remittances, trade—more difficult for President Obama.

Sadly, the human-rights situation on the island remains dismal, despite new leadership. According to HRW, the Raúl Castro government has harassed and imprisoned dissidents using an Orwellian provision of the Cuban Criminal Code that punishes "dangerousness." Authorities can lock up individuals on the suspicion that they may commit a crime in the future, or for engaging in behavior that is "antisocial" or contrary to "socialist morality."

Among the activities the government has deemed "dangerous" are: handing out copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, failing to attend pro-government rallies, or simply being unemployed. In its report, based on more than 60 interviews carried out in Cuba without official permission or by phone from abroad, HRW documented more than 40 cases of dissidents who have been sentenced for "dangerousness."

Cuban law is replete with laws like the "dangerousness" provision that may be used to punish anyone seen as critical of the government. Human-rights defenders, journalists, political activists and others charged with breaking such laws find themselves at the mercy of a system that violates virtually every due process right.

Political detainees are denied access to legal counsel and family visits. They are subjected to abusive interrogations, and they may be detained for months or even years without being charged. Trials are pure theater, mostly conducted behind closed doors and finished in minutes.

Once in prison, abuse is commonplace. On Dec. 10, 2008—Human Rights Day—a political prisoner tried to read aloud to fellow prisoners from a book his wife had brought him called "Your Rights." In response, a guard came into his cell and told him to eat the book. When the prisoner refused, he was beaten and later sentenced to six more years in prison for "disrespecting authority."

Dissidents are subjected to public "acts of repudiation," in which crowds gather outside of their homes, throwing stones, shouting threats, and sometimes physically assaulting them. Those labeled "counterrevolutionaries" are fired from their jobs, monitored, threatened and prevented from traveling. The beating of dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez by two men she says were Cuban agents in civilian clothes in Havana just two weeks ago is further proof of this regrettable state of affairs.

Without outside pressure, the human-rights situation in Cuba will not improve. But outside pressure—sadly absent today, in the case of Europe or Latin America—has proved insufficient. At the same time, the U.S. embargo policy has been a unmitigated failure.

The logical route to follow is the one HRW and others have suggested: The U.S. should shift from a policy of regime change to a policy of human-rights promotion. The Obama administration should approach the European Union and the Latin American democracies and offer to lift the embargo on the condition that these countries join the U.S. in pressuring Cuba on a single demand: the release of all political prisoners, including those incarcerated for "dangerousness."

Once the U.S. government has secured this commitment and a multilateral coalition is in place, the U.S. should end its failed embargo policy. Cuba should be given a brief and specified period—the report recommends six months—to release all of its political prisoners.

If the government of Raúl Castro complies, it will set in motion a process whose ultimate goal is the full normalization of relations with the U.S. and the EU, as well as compliance with the democratic standards of the Organization of American States. If it does not, this multilateral coalition should enact targeted sanctions directed at the leadership of the Castro government.

The Castro brothers know that nothing would be more threatening to their half-century monopoly on power than the end of the U.S. embargo, which they use as a justification for their ongoing abuses. Indeed, they appear to be deliberately sabotaging normalization by making the human-rights situation worse.

This is why a multilateral approach is crucial. According to the Spanish daily El País, President Obama asked Spanish Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero three weeks ago to "Tell the Cubans we are taking steps, but if they don't take them too, it will be very difficult for us to continue." The Obama administration gets it. Now, if only we could get more Latin American countries to stop countenancing Cuba's human-rights violations and play a constructive role.

Mr. Castaneda, a professor at New York University and fellow at the New America Foundation, was Mexico's foreign minister from 2000 to 2003.

You think ABC and the other commies care about Human Rights??

They give all radical leftists the benefit of the doubt but love to hate the US!

Human rights for leftist terrorists, Muslim jihadists but screw those Cubans...

Human rights in Cuba are not less than in US or other Latin America Country.

"Human rights in Cuba are not less than in US or other Latin America Country."

Sorry Popon ,but if you were in Cuba you would not be able to write freely like you do here nor would you be able to choose leaders with different ideas ,you would not be able to move without government approval.

Kind of weird to attribute equal human rights to democracies and dictatorships while writing from a democracy..

By THE ECONOMIST

Published: Monday, November 23, 2009 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, November 20, 2009 at 12:38 p.m.

Those who hoped that the arrival in power of Barack Obama and Raul Castro would bring a thaw in the continuing 50-year cold war between the United States and Cuba so far have little to cheer.

The Obama administration has lifted restrictions imposed by George W. Bush on visits and remittances to the island by Cuban-Americans and has resumed discreet talks on cooperation in practical matters such as migration, drug trafficking and postal services. But administration officials have said that they will not lift the economic embargo imposed on Fidel Castro’s regime

in 1960 until Cuba takes steps toward political and economic freedom.

For his part, Raul Castro, who replaced his brother at the head of Cuba’s government in 2006, has offered to talk to the Americans but insists that the island’s communist political system is non-negotiable.

On both sides there are pressures for further change.

These are more visible in the United States. On Thursday, the foreign relations committee of the House of Representatives discussed a bill to lift the ban on Americans traveling to Cuba. Supporters of this measure claim to have close to the 218 House votes required to approve it. Its chances in the Senate look slimmer.

Public opinion favors ending the travel ban. More surprisingly, a recent poll found that a majority of Cuban-American respondents do, too. But most Republicans and some influential Democrats still support the embargo.

The administration has been guarded on the travel ban. But if it is lifted, the rest of the embargo might soon follow as different business lobbies press for a piece of the action in Cuba, says Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank. U.S. hotel companies would doubtless want to be allowed to invest there, for example.

In Cuba, meanwhile, the police state remains intact.

In a report released last week, Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization, says that Raul Castro’s government has made greater use of a provision of the criminal code that allows indefinite detention for “dangerousness,” defined as conduct “in manifest contradiction to the norms of socialist morality.”

The report, based on an undercover investigation, states that at least 40 Cubans have recently been jailed under this provision for trying to exercise basic rights, such as staging peaceful marches or writing critical news articles. (On Nov. 6, Cuba’s most prominent independent blogger, Yoani Sanchez, was forced into an unmarked car, beaten and threatened, before being dumped on the street.) There are at least 200 political prisoners, and probably many more: Cuba is one of only eight countries in the world that denies the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prisons.

While Cuba justifies all this as self-defense against repeated U.S. attempts to overthrow the Castro regime, in fact it is aimed at enforcing political conformity, argues Human Rights Watch. It wants the United States, before lifting the embargo, to secure a commitment from Europe and Latin America to press for the release of political prisoners.

That looks naive. Many left-wing governments in Latin America apply a double standard when it comes to human rights: While suspending the not very repressive de facto civilian government in Honduras from the Organization of American States, they want Cuba to rejoin. (After the coup in June that toppled Manuel Zelaya, Honduras’ president, Raul Castro, with no apparent irony, even joined calls for an economic embargo against the country.)

The European Union has normal economic ties with Cuba, but is critical of its trampling of human rights. Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Moratinos, has said that he wants to use his country’s six-month presidency of the EU from January to soften that policy.

Just as the U.S. embargo has been futile and counterproductive, there is no evidence that “engagement” by Europeans or Latin Americans has much impact in Havana.

In the end, if change comes to Cuba it will be from within. Raul Castro has launched a wide-ranging public debate on the economy and is taking modest steps toward more reliance on market mechanisms. The changes are aimed at preserving communist control, and their pace will be glacial as long as Fidel remains alive. But there can be little doubt that a lifting of the U.S. embargo would help those within the regime in Havana who want to move in a more liberal direction.