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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios
Administrator, USAID
Cuba Transition: Humanitarian Aid for Cuba in Transition
Cuban Transition Conference
January 16, 2004
Thank you very much, Jaime. It's good to see you again. And thank you, Adolfo and Roger, who has just left. I am a New Englander, and I have to tell you this is not that cold by our standards. This is balmy weather. Today it's 50 to 100 degrees below zero in Maine, where we have a summer house. That is cold weather. This is balmy. But if you're from Miami, I can understand your discomfort, yes.
Castro has held the Cuban people in political bondage for now more than four decades. The Cuban transition to democracy may not be smooth. It is important, therefore, that we should prepare carefully for Cuba's transition to democracy because we know from experience that the pent-up expectations and frustrations of a long-repressed people could boil over and be chaotic. No one is more aware of this than President Bush. As the President said when he established the Commission for the Assistance to a Free Cuba in October, "It's time to plan for the happy day when Castro's regime is no more and democracy comes to the island. The transition to freedom will present many challenges to the Cuban people and to America, and we will be prepared."
So it is my pleasure today to welcome you all here, as we prepare for a successful and peaceful transition.
I would like to talk about three things today: First, the factors that will shape U.S. humanitarian relief efforts early in the transition; the strategies that should guide our efforts; and, third, the importance of basing our relief efforts on accurate assessments of local conditions.
As the leading and largest bilateral humanitarian aid organization in the world, USAID's first concern in any transition is to ensure people's basic needs are met, to minimize human suffering, and to protect human life. Our resources are not unlimited, however, and the robustness of our humanitarian response will depend on the severity of the crisis, access by aid organizations to the people in need -- access is a typical problem in a complex emergency -- and adequate resources.
In the case of Cuba, the transition is not likely to be as severe as, say, North Korea, where 2.5 million people are likely to have starved to death during the mid to late 1990s during a terrible famine. Still, we cannot be certain of the conditions of the Cuban people during such a transition.
I must say, when I was researching, doing the research for the article that Jaime, and Adolfo, and Roger have referred to ("Humanitarian Assistance During a Democratic Transition in Cuba" in Comparative International Development, winter, 2000) -- by the way, I had no idea at the time I was going to be Administrator; I would have been much more careful what I said in the article had I known that people would have actually carried the instructions out. I don't even remember everything I wrote in the article, but I do recall reading some World Food Program assessments that there was a severe drought in the Highlands area, up in the mountainous areas, and we really were not sure of the level of malnutrition because, in any totalitarian regime, numbers are manipulated. I know from my own research, for instance, that the North Koreans manipulated data, so we did not even know until two years into the famine, that large numbers of people had already died.
So we have to be very careful about any information coming out of Cuba, even from respected international organizations or respected NGOs because totalitarian regimes are totalitarian. They control their society so completely that they can, in fact, manipulate all of the information coming out of their society to the outside world.
Jasper Becker, my good friend, who is a scholar of China, wrote a book, which I commend to you, on the Great Leap Forward famine, the worst in the history of the world. Thirty million people died between 1958 and 1962. It's a book called, "Hungry Ghosts." But he argues in that book, as I do in my book on the North Korean famine, that totalitarian regimes are particularly good at hiding widespread suffering from the outside world. As I said before, the North Koreans were very skilled at this, and they manipulated, and they still manipulate, the nutritional surveys that are done by outside organizations, however competent these organizations may be.
As for two other factors, Cuba ranks very high in terms of the national interests of the United States and public support in the United States for the people of Cuba. So we have a moral imperative driving a potential response and a national interest imperative.
Those two imperatives, in my view, will succeed in ensuring we have enough resources available. We do have proximity, at least. It's not like going to Afghanistan, which is on the other side of the world. There is, though, because of the proximity of the United States, a high risk of rapid and chaotic out-migration from Cuba in the aftermath of Fidel's departure.
A very real possibility exists, therefore, that a failed Cuban transition could lead, as Jaime said, to a complex humanitarian emergency. I do note several national experts in complex emergency are here today: my good friend Dr. Skip Burkle has written widely written on this subject; Dick McCall, who served in AID under me and then of course under Brian Atwood, is an expert in conflict mitigation and management, and I notice a group of other people here. So you have assembled the right people who have the expertise to do the planning and the thought needed for this effort.
How the transition in Cuba proceeds will profoundly affect the nature of the response. Of course, there's always the possibility that a new Cuban leader, with no interest whatsoever in democracy, will emerge from within the current system. I am sure that's what Castro is hoping will happen, but all of us pray it will not.
If that can be prevented, there are several scenarios that could take place, although some people don't like scenario development. I think they are needed to consider the different responses that we would take, depending on which one takes place.
The first is a stable democratic transition, where a government takes over with broad public support. There is no disruptive opposition from the old order and no violence or unrest. I'd like to think that would happen, but old orders don't go away quickly or easily. There are people who have been feeding off the system for 40 years who by now probably have no ideological principles left. They are simply benefiting from being in power. And those people, as we see in Iraq, do not go quietly, usually. But it's possible; it's possible.
There's a second possibility, and that is an unstable democratic transition takes over and is shaken by internal division, sporadic violence, disruption from renegade military units or disaffected party cadres, but it weathers the storm, while maintaining the ability to schedule elections and transfer power to a democratically-elected government.
The third, the worst option, is an unstable democratic government takes over, which dissolves into a failed state or a collapse. There would be widespread violence from a national military, divided into factions supporting various elements of the old regime. Under this scenario, we could expect widespread atrocities and human rights abuses and the political system and economy to collapse, which would be a catastrophe.
This third scenario is what we refer to as a complex humanitarian emergency. This is where democratic transitions unravel into chaos. During the 1990s, we had about two dozen of these complex emergencies around the world. There are patterns that take place when these emergencies unfold, and they repeat themselves over and over again. So it's not a mystery as to what might happen if the third, and worst, scenario takes place.
If Cuba's transition turns into a complex emergency, some humanitarian organizations may not be willing to work there because of the chaos and violence that might ensue. It depends how severe that violence is and how arbitrary it is. Few are there now with any grassroots infrastructure. In many of the complex emergencies we've dealt with in the last 15 years, because the countries were already very poor and had a history of instability or fragility, there was already an infrastructure of U.N. agencies and NGOs that were there that could provide assistance on an immediate basis.
What we found in Iraq was that there were only four or five NGOs in the country before the war started. And so the humanitarian infrastructure in Iraq was very thin, and I have to say this caused some real concerns as to what might happen should a war take place. Fortunately, almost all of the worst scenarios, in terms of a humanitarian crisis in Iraq, did not take place, and so we didn't have to have the infrastructure to do an immediate response, but you never can predict. You can never predict.
At the heart of all humanitarian relief strategies are two essential imperatives--as I said earlier, saving lives and reducing suffering. This should not be done primarily through the importing of humanitarian relief commodities, such as food and medicine, but through the strengthening of traditional coping mechanisms in the population. While donated commodities can supplement this effort, it is immediate rehabilitation programs that yield the most productive results and encourage self-sufficiency.
There will be a tendency, because Cuba is so close, and there are so many Cuban Americans and people who care about what happens in Cuba, for people to empty their medicine chests and send a lot of expired drugs, and blankets, and that sort of thing. That is really not what we need, I have to tell you. What we've learned is the faster we can move from the humanitarian relief phase, the emergency response phase, into immediate rehabilitation, the better off Cuba will be in terms of its longer term development.
Secondary objectives may also be added to the mission, yet it is essential that we do not compromise the primary mission of saving lives and reducing suffering. It is important to remember that the more chaotic conditions become, the more you can expect the law of unintended consequences to take hold. Plans that are poorly designed can sometimes exacerbate a crisis, rather than improve a situation for the people's suffering.
That said, there are several secondary objectives that should be considered in Cuba's case, provided, of course, they do not compromise the essential task of saving people's lives.
The first is: We should try to discourage internal population movements within the country during a transition through media broadcasts and the rapid establishment of humanitarian aid efforts in rural areas, in small towns, in order to reduce the incentive to move to the cities. The reason is this: People on the move during an emergency, according to research we've done over a period of years, are at much greater risk from violence, communicable disease and acute malnutrition than they would be if they stayed in their homes.
Second is supporting a democratic transition through the relief effort itself, as we have done in Afghanistan, by having relief organizations work closely with local governments and with transition governments so that the public credits the new government with an improvement in conditions.
Third is encouraging the building of civil society and democratic pluralism by having relief organizations work with emerging local institutions or churches to administer the relief. This joint work should be designed to build local capacity in running programs.
Finally comes designing relief programs so that they help prepare society for long-term development is very important. We call this the relief to development continuum. For example, in Afghanistan we did food for work programs in the middle of a famine relief response that were very helpful in beginning to rehabilitate the agricultural sector. In other words, we used food aid to do food-for-work to restore the irrigation systems in much of the country, and that helped restore the agricultural system, while also preventing a famine.
Of course, we cannot know for certain what Cuba's needs will be until a thorough humanitarian assessment is completed. Given the highly politicized nature of Castro's government, I would, as I said earlier and I want to repeat, I would not rely on the statistics they produce.
The best people to do these humanitarian assessments -- have a bias in this because I used to run the office-- is USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, OFDA. While the United Nations or Red Cross could do them, too, political pressures sometimes distort, particularly in Cuba's case, what some of those assessments might say. That does not mean they shouldn't do the assessments, but we need to do them together.
A good assessment will calculate Cuba's food supplies, the nutritional status of children, shelter requirements, agricultural production, water, sanitation, medical and the micro-economic situation. From that would come a series of specific programs and recommendations that the United Nations agencies, the NGOs, and donor aid agencies would carry out.
Accepting media accounts or reports from non-technical people is simply a shortcut to disaster. I can tell you many, many stories from emergency responses where this happened. For example, on the front page of the Washington Post -- this happened during the Kurdish emergency in 1991-- they reported a meningitis epidemic. In fact, there was no meningitis. There was a cholera epidemic, which does not require immunizations. It requires soap and clean water to prevent the epidemic from spreading. And we were about to send, because of pressure from Congress, because of this article on the front page of the newspaper -- it's one of my favorite stories -- the wrong response because the disease was improperly reported by a newspaper, and people believed what was in the newspaper.
Reporters are not scientists. They're not medical doctors. They're not public health experts. I don't expect them to understand what they see and understand the response to it. And so we need to make sure we do proper assessments by technical people.
A good assessment will help doing the longer-term response in a responsible way. Given Cuba's long nightmare with Marxist economics, a micro-economic study will be of particular importance. Micro-economics, frequently in unstable situations, can stimulate or retard violence, depending on how those forces move. That is where we can look for the causes of malnutrition and starvation, the relationship of family income to food prices, the vitality of local markets and the impediments to the development of more efficient markets. There is a direct relationship by the micro-economic situation, the cost of food, and the economic forces at work at the local level and people's ability to survive.
The Cuban people have used four traditional coping mechanisms to survive the double disasters of Marxist economics and the loss of Soviet subsidies. I'm sure you all know this. The one that's most important is remittances from abroad, particularly from the United States. The others are: a return to the countryside to grow food, which has been happening at an elevated rate in the last few years; direct humanitarian aid; and the tourist industry. The problem is that many people in the country do not have access to any of these coping mechanisms.
I would like to conclude now with some recommendations that we are actually implementing.
- Efforts should continue to encourage Cuban American charities to develop stronger operational relationships with U.S. NGOs that are skilled in emergency response and to register with AID. A domestic charity that does not register with AID is going to have trouble getting money from AID later on. This way they can learn NGO governance and programming standards in the way in which AID does its grant-making processes. I know that the Cuban Democracy Support Group, the Miami Medical Team, and the Cuban Council and other Cuban-American NGOs have registered with us, but it is important that others do as well.
- Second, we should begin developing four tracking systems, which will be critically important: Nutritional surveys of children under five -- the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), by the way, is the preeminent authority in the world on these tracking systems; morbidity and mortality tracking; food market survey prices -- there are a number of NGOs that do a very good job of tracking these prices -- and household surveys of family food stocks.
Let me tell you why these are important. The first two tell us whether or not the nutritional situation is deteriorating. The second, on morbidity and mortality tracking, will tell us if there are disease epidemics that are spreading across the country, as the systems collapse. The market surveys for food will tell us whether a food emergency is beginning. We can tell by market prices. If there is a dramatic rise in market prices of food, which is where people get their food, particularly in urban areas, over a very short period of time, there will be famine conditions developed. That is what causes, in many emergency situations, mass starvation.
In Somalia, for example, in 1992, in the spring, in a three-month period, food prices went up by 700 to 1,200 percent in urban markets and a quarter of a million people died as a result, in addition to the chaos, which is, in fact, one of the reasons the prices went up, but there's a direct relationship between people's ability to cope with an emergency situation and the prices of food in the market.
If the food security systems deteriorate, children will be most at risk earliest in the emergency. They are always the most vulnerable, and we should plan a mass immunization program for children under five. I understand that Cuba has a reportedly high rate of childhood immunizations. However, the quality of those immunizations may be weak, as has been the case of other nations that were formerly in the Soviet bloc. The quality control and the manufacture of the serum for immunizations in Eastern Bloc countries were remarkably bad. And so just because kids were immunized, we should not assume that they are, in fact, getting the protection they would if it were administered from a better source.
I don't know how they produce these medications in Cuba. If they are importing them from abroad, they are probably in better shape. If they are producing them locally, there may be a problem.
- Once a transition has begun, the interim government should commission NGOs to manage large-scale public works projects using day labor or food-for- work to get money into people's pockets. The success of these programs can be a very important deterrent to young men who might otherwise turn to crime or join paramilitary militias. One of our major focuses in AID and the CPA in Iraq is, in fact, production of these sorts of jobs to get people off the streets, particularly young men.
- Similarly, every effort should be made to keep all of the public schools open. Now, this is not just for education purposes. It is in order to keep order in the society. The worst thing that can happen in society is to take kids, aged from 6 to 18, and put them out in the street by shutting the schools down. It will create a public safety problem and create a severe problem of order and structure in their lives, and so they will be at risk, and the society will be more chaotic. So, to the extent that we can keep the schools open and not close them or, if they are closed, open them quickly, it will be very important to public order and to protection of children. It's also a much easier way of making sure they're all fed properly and that we can do nutritional surveys properly.
- We know, in a lot of emergency situations in urban areas, that urban gardens can be a very important way of people feeding themselves. And given that Cuba has the right climate for this - it is harder in North Korea or in a cold climate, but Cuba has very good soils, and it has a good climate, and so some effort to use this as a coping mechanism until the economy would be stabilized and jobs produced is one way of protecting food security.
- And, finally, if food prices exceed the ability of ordinary families to pay for food in the markets, particularly in urban areas, a careful food monetization program should be introduced. Now, I said this with respect to Afghanistan, and some people in the agriculture industry in the United States thought I was trying to get AID to regulate international markets, and that is not what we're talking about. We're talking about local markets in a discrete area. If prices rise too rapidly, as I mentioned before, as they did in Somalia, there needs to be interventions by auctioning food off to get the prices down to a normal level, a more international level of price supports, not permanently, simply to get us through the crisis period.
We have a number of excellent speakers today, and I'm sure you will have many useful suggestions from them during the conference. Many of these ideas will be published and help shape the recommendations that Secretary Powell will make to the President on May 1st on behalf of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.
The Secretary has no illusions about Fidel Castro. He asked me this morning about this meeting, and he's monitoring what we do. He reads. He's a voracious reader, and so don't be surprised if he reads the proceedings.
As he has written himself: "There are courageous individuals in Cuba who are working daily and heroically against great repression to bring about the institutions and practices of a civil society. The United States will do all it can to encourage them and promote a peaceful transition to democracy."
And I just can tell you that we will be there to provide leadership and assistance, operationally, in our effort to carry out the Secretary's and the President's instructions.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
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