Huffington Post: John Kerry Should Support “Regime Choice” for Cuba

The argument du jour for opponents of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) programs to promote democracy in Cuba is that they violate the island’s “sovereignty” by advocating “regime change.”

The latest congressional manifestation of this opposition comes from U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who announced last week that he would unilaterally delay the Obama Administration’s disbursement of $20 million appropriated by the U.S. Congress for FY 2010.

Never mind that these programs support the families of Cubans jailed for their support of democracy, their loved ones fired from their jobs and their children expelled from school. The programs also provide cell phones, laptops and other basic items that Cuba’s bloggers need to break through the regime’s censorship and information monopoly in their efforts to build a civil society; and that they provide books to independent libraries, paper and pencils to labor unions and journalists to allow them to exercise their fundamental human right of free expression.

For opponents of these democracy programs, that’s all irrelevant. They want the programs scrapped altogether and replaced with ones pre-approved by Cuba’s dictatorship.

According to Kerry, “there is no evidence… that the ‘democracy promotion’ (quotations are his) programs… are helping the Cuban people. Nor have they achieved much more than provoking the Cuban government to arrest a U.S. government contractor who was distributing satellite communication sets to Cuban contacts.”….Read More

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Posted by Jose Reyes on May 15 2011. Filed under Cuba Related, Current News, Post To Slider. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.