Cuban American National Foundation

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The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF, Cuban American National Foundation ) is an organization of Cubans in exile in the USA with the aim of building a free democracy in Cuba in place of the dictatorship established by Fidel Castro . It was especially in the 1980s and 1990s, during the tenure of its chairman Jorge Mas Canosa , as an influential interest group in US politics.

history

The Cuban American National Foundation, based in Miami, was founded in 1981 by 15 exiled Cuban business people. It was founded in coordination with senior government officials including President Ronald Reagan , who shared the group's political positions. A model for the organization was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) , which was extremely influential in Washington . The CANF is financed from tax-exempt membership fees, which are graded according to income. The membership reached 250,000 in the 1990s. The CANF was also supported by government funds to carry out certain projects. Jose Sorzano - 1985–1987 President of the Foundation - and Otto Reich , who is also closely associated with the Foundation, played a key role in the government's Latin American policy during the Reagan presidencies and under both George HW Bush and George W. Bush.

Although the foundation's influence on US Cuban politics in the 1980s and 1990s was emphasized by commentators in the US as well as by the Cuban government - for which the tightening of the embargo in 1992 and 1996 is pointed out - there were also agreements between the USA and Cuba, which even bitter resistance from the CANF could not prevent - such as the peace agreement in Africa, the bilateral migration agreements (1984 and 1995) and the repatriation of the refugee child Elián González .

In 2001, important leadership members split off and founded the “Cuban Liberty Council” (Cuban Liberty Council, CLC) as an alternative to the CANF, which, in contrast to the CANF, advocates a more confrontational policy towards the Cuban government and a tightening of the embargo. While the CLC was the preferred organization of the George W. Bush administration to address the Cuban-American community, under Barack Obama the CANF is again closer to the government. The split was often seen as an expression of the different political positions of the original Cubans in exile and the second generation born in the USA. The changes also included a shift in the foundation's primary interest to promoting civil society in Cuba and its activists on the island rather than the priorities and opinions of Cuban exile.

Today's President of the CANF is Francisco José "Pepe" Hernández, while Jorge Mas Santos acts as Chairman of the Board of Trustees ("Chairman").

activities

Between 1983 and 1988, the foundation received government funding through the National Endowment for Democracy in the amount of US $ 390,000 for the purpose of publicly informing about human rights violations by the Cuban regime .

One element of political lobbyism was campaign donations that flowed into candidates from both major parties at the wedding of the CANF, both within the state of Florida and at the federal level. The "Free Cuba PAC" used for this donated a total of 221,000 US dollars in the 1994 election campaign. When the fundraising organization was last active in 2004, it only spent a tenth of the amount.

Through special authorization from the Reagan administration, the foundation was given extensive powers to handle family reunions as part of the "Exodus" project, which began in 1989. By the end of the project in the mid-1990s, these affected around 10,000 relatives of Cubans living abroad who had come to the USA in 1980 as part of the Mariel boat crisis .

In 1991, the foundation started its “Misión Martí” project, based on the model of the Peace Corps , which consisted of six-month courses in which young Cuban Americans looked at a potential contribution to building a new community in Cuba after the expected end of communist one-party rule should be prepared. In addition, the CANF appointed a special commission for the economic reconstruction of Cuba, which should also stand by in the event of the fall of the Castro government.

The CANF is the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba affiliated ( "Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba") projecting the CANF board member Tony Costa and the donations and USAID funding in direct support of dissidents and representatives of civil society used in Cuba. For the period from September 2011 to September 2014, the USAID foundation, which was established in 1992, received grants of 3.4 million US dollars. The CANF is represented at ten universities in the USA by the student organization University Council of the Cuban American National Foundation (UC-CANF), which organizes information events at universities and support measures for opposition members in Cuba.

Positions

One of the foundation's first political projects was the call for a publicly funded radio station to be set up to provide the Cuban population with information not filtered by their own government. This was realized in 1985 with the start of Radio Martí , which was also followed by TV Martí in 1991. Mas Canosa was appointed by Reagan in 1984 as chairman of the Advisory Board for Cuba Broadcasting, the advisory board to the control authority of the broadcaster, and held this position under successive Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton until his death in 1997.

After the end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the communist sphere of influence it dominated, the CANF played a key role in the reformulation of US policy on the Cuba. The most important elements were the laws to tighten the embargo , the Cuban Democracy Act (Torricelli Act) of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (Helms-Burton Act) of 1996.

Jorge Mas Santos, eldest son of the foundation's founder, took over the management of the CANF after the death of his father. Under his leadership, the organization made a gradual change of direction towards more moderate positions in politics towards the Cuban regime. A prominent contributor to this change of course is the US-born Cuban American Joe Garcia , who served as CANF's managing director from 2000 to 2004, after the organization under Mas Canosa had always been close to the Republican Party. Garcia initially left the CANF to join the campaign team for US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry , and was elected a member of the House of Representatives in November 2012 at the second attempt.

The CANF is currently working in Washington to maintain the conditions for travel and money transfers to Cuba for Cubans living in the United States that were relaxed by President Obama. At the same time, the foundation supports actors from opposition civil society and their relatives in Cuba materially and politically. For example, in October 2013 Mas Santos accompanied the spokeswoman for the human rights organization Damas de Blanco , Berta Soler , during her visit to the White House for a conversation with Vice President Joe Biden .

Controversy

After Mas' death in 1997, there was a critical discussion about the financial structures of the foundation and the transparency of the use of membership fees and other income that were triggered by investigations by the federal tax authorities . As a result, there was an organizational restructuring of the foundation and disputes influenced by political positions among leading members, 22 of whom resigned in 2001.

In 2008, the CANF published a study that pointed to undesirable developments in the use of public funds earmarked for promoting democracy in Cuba and allocated to non-governmental organizations by the US development aid agency USAID . A very large proportion of this money remains in Florida, while very little money is actually used for measures in Cuba, which means that the programs are largely ineffective.

The militant Castro opponent Luis Posada Carriles , who was temporarily paid as an informant for the CIA , claimed to have received around US $ 200,000 from Mas Canosa (interview with the New York Times ), which he later revoked. Jose Antonio Llama, a former board member, told the Miami Herald that between 1994 and 1997 he was instrumental in funding the preparation of (failed) terrorist attacks on Cuban targets.

literature

  • Jessica Gibbs: US Policy Towards Cuba: Since the Cold War. Routledge, Abingdon, et al. a. 2009, ISBN 978-0-415-43747-9 (English)
  • dies .: The Cuban lobby and US policy toward Cuba. In: Andrew Johnstone and Helen Laville (eds.): The US Public and American Foreign Policy. Pp. 138-152, Routledge, Abingdon et al. a. 2010, ISBN 978-0-415-55315-5 (English)
  • Patrick Jude Haney and Walt Vanderbush: The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh 2005, ISBN 978-0-822-97271-6 (English)
  • Silvia Pedraza: Political Disaffection in Cuba's Revolution and Exodus. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge u. a. 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68729-4 (English)
  • Henriette M. Rytz: Ethnic Interest Groups in US Foreign Policy: A Cuban-American Story of Success and Failure. Palgrave Macmillan, New York and Basingstoke 2013, ISBN 978-1-137-34979-8 (English)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Gibbs (2010), p. 141
  2. ↑ a b Jochen Oberstein: Cubans in exile: "Fidel Castro is a murderer". In: Focus from March 1, 1993, accessed on November 3, 2013
  3. ↑ CANF praises Bush appointment of Reich. Press release from PR Newswire dated January 11, 2002, accessed from The Free Library on November 3, 2013
  4. ↑ a b Gibbs (2010), p. 142
  5. ↑ Haney, p. 39
  6. ^ Rafael Hernández: Intimate Enemies: Paradoxes in the Conflict between the United Sates and Cuba. P. 11f. In: Jorge I. Domínguez u. a. (Ed.): Debating US-Cuban Relations: Shall We Play Ball? Routledge, New York and London 2012 (English)
  7. ↑ Rytz, p. 196ff.
  8. ↑ Silvia Pedraza: Political Disaffection in Cuba's Revolution and Exodus. P. 304 f.
  9. ↑ Interview with Jorge Mas Santos (video), from August 2011, as part of the Botifoll Oral History Project at the University of Miami, accessed on November 11, 2012 (Spanish)
  10. ^ National Coalition for a Free Cuba Summary. In: Open Secrets , accessed November 3, 2013.
  11. ↑ Haney / Vanderbush, pp. 44f.
  12. ^ Murió Jorge Mas Canosa. In: ABC of November 24, 1997, accessed November 3, 2013 (Spanish)
  13. ↑ Tracey Eaton: Cuba money trail: Tale of two Miami non-profits in the Cuba Money Project blog from October 29, 2011, accessed on November 7, 2011 (English)
  14. ↑ Tracey Eaton: Rags and riches on Cuba money trail. In the blog Cuba Money Project of April 8, 2013, accessed on November 3, 2013 (English)
  15. ^ Official website of the UC-CANF (last update July 2011), accessed on February 13, 2013 (English)
  16. ↑ Lesley Clark: CANF director Joe Garcia quits to help John Kerry win election , in: Miami Herald of September 2, 2004, accessed via Havana Journal on November 11, 2012
  17. ^ Juan O. Tamayo: Biden receives Ladies in White leader in White House. ( Memento of the original from December 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Miami Herald, October 25, 2013, accessed November 3, 2013.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.miamiherald.com
  18. ^ Alfonso Chardy: IRS audit led to CANF shifts. In: Miami Herald, August 26, 2001, accessed from LatinAmericanStudies.org on November 3, 2013
  19. ↑ Philip Peters: CANF: Overhaul the USAID program in The Cuban Triangle blog from April 28, 2008, accessed November 7, 2011 (English)
  20. ^ The Cuban American National Foundation: Findings and Recommendations on the Most Effective Use of USAID-CUBA Funds Authorized by Section 109 (a) of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Helms-Burton) Act of 1996 (PDF; 232 kB) from March 2008, accessed November 7, 2011 (English)
  21. ↑ http://articles.latimes.com/2007/apr/20/world/fg-posada20
  22. ↑ Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rohter: A Bomber's Tale: Taking Aim at Castro; Key Cuba Foe Claims Exiles' Backing. In: New York Times, July 12, 1998, accessed April 29, 2014
  23. ↑ Cuban Exile Says He Lied to Times About Financial Support in: New York Times, August 4, 1998, accessed January 3, 2012
  24. ↑ Wilfredo Cancio Isla: Former CANF Board member admits to planning terrorist attack against Cuba , in: Miami Herald of June 25, 2006, accessed via Havana Journal on November 11, 2012 (English)