Cuban Refugee

Stinging critique of U.S. policy

Another volley was fired last week in the ongoing war of words between Washington and Havana, but this time the barrage came from an unexpected source. In an article published in the fall issue of the quarterly Foreign Policy magazine, Wayne Smith, a former State Department official, delivers a stinging critique of the Reagan Administration's policies toward Cuba. Charges Smith: "Its approach is as hackneyed as it has been unsuccessful."

From 1977 to 1979 Smith served as director of the State Department's Office of Cuban Affairs; he then went to Havana to head the U.S. interests section before resigning last month. While acknowledging that no U.S. Administration has ever devised an effective policy for dealing with Fidel Castro, Smith especially blasts the rigid, confrontational approach of the Reagan White House. From the start, Smith contends, the Reaganauts were obsessed with forcing Cuba to stop meddling in Central America and, in particular, to quit supplying arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador. But U.S. attempts to pressure Castro backfired; he responded by seeking more arms from the Soviet Union.

Smith argues that over the past 18 months Washington spurned at least three separate diplomatic initiatives by Havana. Last November, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig met secretly with a Cuban official in Mexico City; U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Vernon Walters conferred with Castro in Havana four months later. Both meetings were unproductive. As a good-will gesture, Smith contends, the Cubans also informed the U.S. in December that they had stopped shipping arms to Nicaragua, implying that they had turned off the weapons flow to the Salvadoran guerrillas. Washington responded by further lambasting the Havana regime in public. Smith insists that Washington's evidence for those ship ments was dubious. Says the former envoy: "If the guerrillas had received all the arms reported by U.S. intelligence, the Salvadoran army would be outgunned 20 to 1."

The Administration, however, vehemently rejects Smith's advice that it can best change Cuban policies by "demonstrating over time that compromise is in Havana's interests." The State Department denies that the U.S. ever "closed the door to a dialogue," and Secretary of State George Shultz indicated last week that chances for opening talks now were nil. "If Cuba changes its behavior, fine," he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "But Cuba is not likely to do that in response to some general plea from the U.S."

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