Posted on: Monday, May 20, 2002

EDITORIAL
Carter speech offers middle way for Cuba

You can't appreciate how absurd the decades-long American isolation of Cuba is until you compare it with the progress of American relations with communist countries in Asia — China and Vietnam.

There are some thugs still in charge in China and Vietnam, and human rights still take a beating there. But conditions in those countries — with every contract signed — are changing rapidly for the better, while Cuba is going noplace. That's partly because of the brutality of Fidel Castro's regime, but also because of the lack of outside exposure.

Former President Jimmy Carter's nationally televised speech in Cuba offers a beginning point for moving U.S. relations with that Caribbean nation in the more constructive directions of those with China and Vietnam.

President Bush and Cuban leader Fidel Castro may both have miscalculated in their expectations for Carter's visit. Bush hoped for a highlighting of his government's claim that Cuba is exporting biological weapons, and Castro hoped that Carter would call for an end to the American sanctions against Cuba.

Carter did call for an end to the U.S. trade embargo, as has this newspaper for years now. But he crossed up Castro badly when he revealed to a national audience that 11,000 Cubans had signed a petition calling for greater human rights. And Bush's week took a bad turn when Carter told the Cubans that Bush's intelligence establishment had no evidence supporting the bioterrorism charge.

What Carter has created is the opportunity for change by both sides. Unfortunately, Bush seems to believe that getting even tougher with Cuba will help get his brother, Jeb, re-elected as governor of Florida. Yet surveys show that the Cuban emigre community is softening in its opposition to reconciliation, and American farm states are getting used to new income from selling agricultural commodities to Cuba.

U.S. hostility toward Cuba is out of step with reality.