Evidence of meeting #19 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cuban.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Kevin Sorenson Conservative Crowfoot, AB
Let me ask you this question. There are maybe things we could be doing right now, but is there any one thing we should do right at the time Fidel passes on?
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Kevin Sorenson Conservative Crowfoot, AB
Dies.
Others have said that the window right now is fairly foggy, but there will be a definite window of opportunity at the death of Fidel Castro. Even Raoul...maybe we should be influencing him. Only last week we had someone say he's five years younger. He may not be that far behind Fidel. Maybe we have to wait until the end of Raoul. But is there any one thing at that time...?
There are things we should be doing now, yes--supporting civil society, supporting certain NGOs--but is there any one thing, when we know this transition will take place, that the west, the United Nations, and Canada should do?
12:35 p.m.
As an Individual
Oh, when the transition takes place. Yes, help us in any way financially. When the transition takes place, we will need a lot of money. Cuba will need it to develop everything. We don't have development in Cuba, not at all, nothing--no highways, no roads, nothing. So we will have to rebuild the country again.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Kevin Sorenson Conservative Crowfoot, AB
Is there someone there who could...? As far as governance is concerned, is there a group there that could step in if that opportunity ever...?
In Haiti, to be quite honest, there are a lot of people elected as parliamentarians who have no idea what the role of a parliamentarian is.
Are there people with good governance practices?
12:35 p.m.
As an Individual
Yes. You are asking for something that is impossible right now. What we are doing right now is fighting the dictatorship. Right now we don't have an opposition party in waiting for what you say.
Do you understand that?
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
May 15th, 2007 / 12:35 p.m.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
This is kind of a wide-ranging discussion, and all of my questions actually got eaten up along the way in I think a very constructive fashion.
When I was listening, and especially in the beginning, the Mark Twain saying occurred to me, that people have a face they show their family, a face they show their friends, and a face they don't show anybody. To some degree, we're getting some enlightenment on the latter in this conversation.
Again, when we talk about communism...I was recently in China, and without going into too much detail, I raised the issue of Falun Gong at a meeting. I had a person suddenly say, “Well, it's not in the media”. Since it's not in the media, it can't exist in a state-controlled media. So it made for an interesting discussion--a very brief one.
We have the The National Corporate Social Responsibility Report that has recently been completed. We've just received that report. To my mind, that's one of the ways of influencing Canadian companies and how they function relative to Cuba, and this group will be looking at that. Another one...I have an embarrassment here because we talk about the system of UN rights and obligations, and Canada hasn't even signed onto the optional protocol against torture. So before we point fingers, we'd better wrap that one up and carry on.
The civil society in Cuba.... I've been there a number of times. I've walked freely in Havana without someone around me. But you can sense, even when you talk to people, they're looking over their shoulder. So I'm really encouraged to hear the discussion around how we can support civil society.
Again, I was going to speak about CIDA, which you raised a few minutes ago, but it strikes my mind that the dollars Canada offers via CIDA are too small to have a tremendous impact. But Mr. Broadbent's suggestion of this dialogue or conference I think is a significant step Canada could take.
Beyond that, I really don't have questions to ask, because you've communicated it so well, the passion we heard across the way from the individuals who were detained. As I say, I'll leave it at this point to go to the second round.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
12:40 p.m.
NDP
12:40 p.m.
As an Individual
To pick up on one point, about the problematic aspect of such a conference giving advantage to the Cubans, I think the advantage of such a conference, if they agreed to do it, is that it enables Canada not only to talk about our own rights problems internally—we need some improvement, and so on—but obviously it enables us to talk about the Cuban rights problems, as we understand them, as we've heard from witnesses, as we've seen from Amnesty reports or the Committee to Protect Journalists.
It provides a forum for public discussion. The advantage would be the agreement that was almost reached. Of course, this would be in Havana as well as in Ottawa, and you would be able to say all these things in Havana. Now, of course, how much you would see in the Cuban press or media is another question, but the very fact that it is taking place and there's open discussion both there and here is an extension I think, in tough-minded terms, of the principle of having dialogue with the regimes and putting on pressure in terms of rights.
So yes, they may get a certain propagandistic advantage out of having such a conference, and I would say that's great, let them get that bit of advantage, and then you use that to put on more pressure for the implementation of more rights. If they say no to it, then that should be a public part of our diplomacy too, in the sense that if we're calling for this and there's a proposal—the foreign minister is involved in this or our ambassadors—then it becomes knowledge that they said no to it. Anyway, I think from the point of view of people who are concerned about rights and freedom of association, as well as other freedoms in Cuba...I don't want to exaggerate its importance, but it's a real plus to further certain developments.
This was going on in the early 1990s too, the opening up of civil society, and then there was a repression again. This would I think be a plus in helping to encourage that.
12:40 p.m.
Pavel Vosalik
I certainly support you, Mr. Broadbent, in terms of this conference. Definitely, it's quite interesting too. It depends on the content of this conference and the fact that the offer is coming from Canada to Havana to organize something like that. It could be quite interesting to see the reaction coming from the Cuban government, how far they are open to talk to Canada, not just about friendship and economic cooperation, but about sensitive things as well. My personal opinion would be that your government will not receive any positive response.
The other comment about the money going through CIDA to Cuba...at this time, what I see as very important, and maybe not such expensive help, is the fact that the advantage to the Cuban government is that the government controls information. So what my embassy is trying to do is open public access to the Internet for Cuban citizens. Unfortunately, because of the repression coming from the Cuban government, we are still not very successful at this.
Maybe Canada has the advantage to open some cultural information centres, or whatever we want to call them, not just in Havana but maybe outside Havana, as a source of information coming from the free world to the Cuban population. This is maybe the easiest and quickest way for your government to open places where the people from Cuba could come and receive information other than information coming to them via the propaganda television, newspapers, etc. To make free access to information is the easiest way to support a civil society right now that's still in the process of creating the structures, but maybe this could help.
To support and talk to the newly born or stillborn political parties, I think definitely this is what we have to do to talk to these structures. Political parties represent the backbone of civil society. I don't say that we have to talk just to the political parties, but it would definitely be the biggest mistake to exclude these structures from our dialogue with the Cuban population.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Jason Kenney
Thank you very much.
We'll now move to Mr. Khan. But before doing so, Mr. Broadbent had earlier asked whether or not Cuba was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Our research analyst has been able to ascertain that they are not a signatory, nor have they made any efforts to sign the covenant.
12:45 p.m.
As an Individual
What about the other one, on economic and social development?
12:45 p.m.
Committee Researcher
They have not done so, according to the information I received.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Jason Kenney
Apparently not. Christine Chanet addresses their failure to be a signatory in her report to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights.
Mr. Khan.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Wajid Khan Conservative Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Broadbent, I wholeheartedly agree with your suggestion. I'll come back to it in a second.
What is the possibility of a government-to-government dialogue between Canada and Cuba, and at the same time between the United States and Cuba?
I think the United States is becoming a little more pragmatic in many areas. They tried to support the dissidents in Iran and failed miserably. They also had some other failures in that kind of effort. But now they're talking openly of the Iraq situation to Iran. They're not poking fingers in their eyes anymore. Also, some of these latest successes, as far as Mullah Dadullah and others are concerned, have been because of a certain time for dialogue. Embargos and restrictions and sanctions have not helped against Iran in the past either.
I'd like to receive your comments, sir. Even against Korea they're talking through multilateral channels. Do you think that kind of approach or rapprochement with Cuba would be beneficial?
Second, how do you see both Castro and Cuba evolving?
Coming back to the democracies, democracy has a price in some of the developing countries. I'm sure most people here are not strangers to that. The international community cannot be successful or helpful until and unless you see people on the street—mass demonstrations, those kinds of things. That sends a signal that change needs to happen. If you have 75 people or 200 people in jail for speaking up, I don't think a lot of the world is going to be interested, really. We can talk all we want about human rights; they will probably take another century.
I would like to receive your comment, Mr. Broadbent.
12:45 p.m.
As an Individual
Concerning a multilateral approach, I think politically it would not be wise for us to do this in conjunction with the U.S. The quickest way to get a no from Castro and the Cubans I think would be to involve the Americans. It's entirely a tactical question here, because they have always used U.S. policy towards Cuba—including an invasion of Cuba in the past, of course—as something that's just anathema.
So I think it could be counterproductive. Any efforts we make should be on a bilateral basis, or with our democratic friends in the European Union. I would just avoid the linkage, for this kind of conference that we're talking about particularly, with the U.S.
On the other question, to understate it considerably, if I heard you correctly—“What about a post-Castro Cuba?”—part of the very long discussion that, as I mentioned, I had with him in 1990 or 1991, a three-and-a-half hour discussion, focused exactly on that, in a way: on what had been going on in Europe in the previous two years after Mr. Gorbachev took his really significant leadership on the then-Soviet side.
My view was that in Cuba there could be some reasonable chance—could be, and may be, but I would think with all the intervening years it's less likely—of preserving.... I've heard what our other guests here have had to say, but compared with some of the progress that has been made in other Latin American countries, the sooner the Cuban authorities, the Communist Party of Cuba, opens itself to reform within, the greater the opportunity, it seems to me, they have of preserving some of the gains that in one sense they have made.
But the longer they delay this, the greater the likelihood, in my view—and I don't think it takes a political genius to see this—to have the most extreme, and I choose my words with care here, of the Cubans who have “gone to Miami”, to put it that way.... I'm not saying all the Cubans who have gone there are extreme; I want to be clear on that. But there is a strong—and I use my words with care—right-wing element there, and the longer Castro waits on reform, the greater the likelihood, it seems to me, that you will get if not anti-democratic, then extreme right people coming in from Florida, joining with those in Cuba itself, for understandable reasons, to overthrow all the good with the bad.
He wasn't open to this argumentation at all. He did not want to provide any internal freedom at all to set the stage for a peaceful transition of the kind you had in Czechoslovakia. It had a democratic tradition, though, in a way that Cuba never had.
So to say the least, it's very complex and very uncertain, but the longer there's a delay from the regime itself in making more space for political and civil rights, the greater the likelihood I think that we're going to get an extremist government of another kind there.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Irwin Cotler Liberal Mount Royal, QC
I have just a brief question. I think we've learned from our inquiry into China and the Canada-China bilateral dialogue on human rights that things are not always what they may seem to be. We have frameworks, but they may serve more to shield problems than to in fact unmask them.
This particularly is to you, Ed, because of your experience in this particular aspect of our work.
Much of our involvement in Cuba is through CIDA, and that involvement, as has been mentioned, in CIDA is through development assistance programs. I looked at some. We support Cuban NGOs in local development initiatives. We had a conference recently, a round table on the Cuban economy. We have a project to improve transparency, to train 6,000 Cuban auditors and trade experts in free trade negotiations. We're supporting initiatives regarding innovative government capacity issues. These are a lot of buzzwords that I've become familiar with over the years, “capacity building”, “transparency”, “governance”, and all that.
Are we really using that whole approach there to in fact do something about the protection of civil and political rights, or are we just indulging that part in Cuba that, as you mentioned, is not the place where rights are being deprived, the socio-economic area, but we're not really focusing on the nerve centres where we should be?
12:50 p.m.
As an Individual
My impression, and I want to stress “impression”, is that it's the latter, and we can play games with ourselves. It certainly was my experience from the centre in Montreal, looking at most of what we were then doing in China, too. We have these wonderful conferences, people go over, and it can be, on our part, a gross act of self-deception. It can be.
Similarly, all the kinds of projects, it seems to me, Irwin, you mentioned, in Cuba, could have just a nice focus on economic and social rights and we ignore the political and civil rights dimensions of them and think we're doing something useful. The only way I think of answering your question is, are these projects pushing the envelope more towards political and civil rights as actually an empirical study?
I don't know well enough in there, but if we could get in...and that's the other big problem. As you will know, having been on the board at the centre, when the centre did projects in Latin America, even with bad regimes we could get in as a human rights organization and see what was happening on the ground. There was enough space for that. Well, we don't have that space in Cuba. We don't. We can't send human rights activists in there to verify if some of these projects we're doing are really pushing the envelope or not.
So my answer is that I tend to be a bit skeptical about them, that they can provide us with an excuse, saying we're looking at economic and social rights, carrying on our trade at the same time, but avoiding pushing the envelope on political and civil rights.
If they do the latter, then they're worthwhile, but as I say, I find it kind of hard to answer the question as a generalization: would I favour doing these things or not? I would favour doing them, but only on the condition that they're a foundation for pushing for other rights. As I say, the only way we find that out is to keep an eye on CIDA and get the best kinds of reports from them, and so on.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Jason Kenney
I'd like to take some of our last minutes to ask a couple of questions.
Mr. Aguilera, you were in prison for seven years? What was the charge formally entered against you?
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Jason Kenney
You said that, effectively, all you did was share some opinions with friends. Did you hand out any information?
12:55 p.m.
As an Individual
No, we only talked among ourselves, that was all, but we were speaking out loud. I mean, anybody could hear us.