More Potential Backlash From Bush Cuba Policy

The Times also has this article about the possibility of backlash against President Bush for his new Cuba policy:

But the strategy has pumped life into a voter registration drive among newer Cuban immigrants, who generally favor greater contact with the island and their relatives there.

Sergio Bendixen, a longtime pollster based in Miami, said the new measures were drawing supporters and opponents in equal numbers among Cuban-Americans. For a bloc that has been characterized by remarkable electoral cohesion for decades, the split is telling, Mr. Bendixen said.

"They've been very controversial," he said of the new restrictions. "The Bush side feels it's going to energize their base. The Democrats feel it has created a very important opening to gain significant support."

Jorge Mursuli of Mi Familia Vota, a voter registration drive among Hispanics in Florida, said his nonpartisan operation was signing up as many Democrats as Republicans.

"It shows you the potential this issue has to blow up in their faces," Mr. Mursuli said of the president and his advisers on Cuba.

Knowing the president and his inability to acknowledge his mistakes, I predict that there will be a Reaganesque moment. Just as President Reagan ignored the poignant pleadings of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and went to Bitburg, Germany to lay a wreath on a memorial for the Waffen SS after making the hideous statement that they were also "victims" of the Nazi's, I predict that President Bush rather than acknowledge he made a mistake will ignore the pleadings of Felix Ramirez as recounted in this post:

Felix Ramirez, 51, who arrived in the United States in 1969 and says he visits the island three times a year and sends cash to relatives regularly, said he has a terminally ill sister in Matanzas. He fears he won't see her again.

''She's dying,'' he said. "In three years, she'll be dead and buried and I can visit her bones in some cemetery.''

But please don't take my word for it. After all, I'm just a foe of Bush looking for any port in a storm. Consider this:

Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, based in Miami, said the restrictions adopted by the administration amounted to "bad policy and bad politics." Although his longtime anti-Castro organization, the largest exile lobby, supports most provisions in the new strategy, the restrictions on travel and relief packages have changed the focus of debate, he said, away from Mr. Castro's human rights record and the persecution of dissidents.

"We succeeded in turning Castro versus the U.S. government into David versus Goliath,'' Mr. Garcia said. "The giant is perceived as being abusive."

That's what I've been saying all along.

Comments

[Nell Lancaster]

President Reagan ignored the poignant pleadings of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and went to Bitburg, Germany to lay a wreath on a memorial for the Waffen SS after making the hideous statement that they were also "victims" of the Nazis

Which created such a storm of condemnation that he felt compelled to do something to limit the political damage. What he did was get Congress to ratify the convention against genocide, which had languished there for years exactly because of opposition from his wing of things.

I imagine you're right about Bush being unlikely to admit his mistake on the Cuba travel restrictions. It's almost too late in the campaign season even if he were to reverse the action (and it would open him to charges of --gasp-- flip-flopping). Wouldn't it be supreme, wonderful revenge if this ends up carrying Florida for Kerry?