Next Stop: Cuba

Okay, you know how every once in awhile, you read a news story that’s just so nuts, you honestly can’t believe it, even though you’ve sworn a thousand times that nothing the Bush administration could do would surprise you anymore? This is one of those stories:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced the creation of a new post to help "accelerate the demise" of the Castro regime in Cuba.

Caleb McCarry, a veteran Republican Party activist, was appointed as the Cuba transition co-ordinator.

(Hat tip A Brooklyn Bridge.)

First of all, there’s the issue of embarking on this operation while still mired in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and even if this isn’t going to be executed via a military intervention, there’s still perhaps something to be said for keeping our eye on one regime change ball at a time, you know what I mean? The Bush administration hasn’t exactly proven itself competent multi-taskers.

More importantly, however, is what I found when I started doing a little research on this McCarry character, inspired by my curiosity at how, exactly, “a veteran Republican Party activist” is qualified to lead this so-called “Cuba transition.” Well, McCarry is, in fact, not a party activist so much as a “veteran congressional staff expert on Latin America” and a Professional Staff Member on the House International Relations Committee. His name pops up in articles on the 2004 El Salvadoran elections, as project director for a US Agency for International Development (AID)-funded international observer mission for the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, on a list of speakers at an AID-hosted round table discussion on the 2001 Nicaraguan elections, and as the project director for a $2 million AID-funded project to support the institutional and logistical development of the National Congress of Guatemala, among others. Much of the US involvement in Central American affairs done under McCarry’s leadership was carried out under the Center for Democracy, a bi-partisan organization started in 1984 by Allen Weinstein (who is currently the National Archivist, nominated last year and sworn in early this year with the fervent support of Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales amid serious concerns of archival, historical, and other governmental watchdog organizations, who noted that it was “the first time since 1985 that the process of nominating an Archivist of the United States ha[d] not been open for public discussion and input”). During the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, the Center for Democracy office in Managua (funded in part by AID) was implicated in the provocation of a pre-election violent incident while under McCarry’s direction.

In addition to McCarry’s involvement with the Center for Democracy, his name is, perhaps even more troublingly, found in a whole heck of a lot of places associated with Haiti, specifically the resignation/removal of Aristide. See here (where McCarry asserts that a Haitian election was manipulated by Aristide and his partisans), here (where he is listed as a speaker at a meeting on Haiti's November 2000 Elections and Challenges for U.S. Policy), and especially here, which is a great article by Max Blumenthal examining whether the Bush administration allowed a network of right-wing Republicans to foment a violent coup in Haiti, in which McCarry is described as a staunchly anti-Aristide staffer on the House Foreign Relations Committee who, according to a former senior State Department official, "worked hand in glove with [Stanley Lucas, the federally funded International Republican Institute's (IRI) senior program officer for Haiti]..."

So McCarry was an integral figure in the US’s involvement with Haiti, whatever, exactly, it was (and we all know how well that’s going). Now he’s been put in charge of “accelerat[ing] the demise" of the Castro regime in Cuba. Fantastic. I can’t wait to see what turmoil we cause there, too.