More Cuba fulminations

SOMETIME BEFORE President Bush leaves office, or during the term of the next president, events will likely force the United States to change its policy toward Cuba. The aging Fidel Castro's rule is bound to end. But judging by the speech the president delivered last week, the Bush administration is not prepared to begin the negotiations with the Cuban government that are needed to encourage a transition away from dictatorship.

Bush is right when he says, "Cuba's rulers promised individual liberty. Instead they denied their citizens basic rights that the free world takes for granted." But nearly half a century of US pressure on Castro hasn't caused him to open up his country. While Bush promised Cubans that they would receive aid from a new Freedom Fund, he attached many unrealistic conditions. This gave Cuba's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, the pretext to dismiss the plan as "equivalent to the reconquest of Cuba by force."

Drawing on the history of US intervention in Cuba, nationalism is one of the great props of the Castro government. And while Fidel Castro is ailing, his brother Raul seems to have taken up everyday management of the government. Raul, however, is 76 years old, and the Castros will soon pass into history, probably before the next US president leaves office. The United States needs to accept the brothers' current dominance, while cajoling the Cuban government into beginning a dialogue with pro-democratic forces about opening up the political process.

"Cuba's regime uses the US embargo as a scapegoat for Cuba's miseries," Bush said. So why not loosen the economic sanctions? This would provide a lift to the Cuban economy, while demonstrating to the world that Castro's economic policies are to blame for the struggles of everyday life on the island. That's what the United States is already doing, in a halting way, by allowing Cuban-Americans to remit $1 billion a year to their families. But the Bush administration has tightened the rules on transfers, and the United States doesn't get the credit for this informal foreign aid.

That $1 billion estimate comes from Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who is helping to set up the Freedom Fund. "Whenever the communists in Cuba have resources they have used them to keep their people in line," he said in an interview. "They have used them for military interventions in Africa or Central America. They have used them to build up the military, never to make Cuban lives better."

Fidel Castro, however, called his troops home once the Cold War ended and hasn't gone on foreign adventures since then. And there's enough money coming into Cuba to maintain the security services and the army whatever the United States does. The US government ought to replace isolation with engagement. Why not, for once, surprise the Castro brothers?