Brazil in Focus

by Marcos Azambuja
President Dilma Rousseff has just completed her first state visit to Cuba. It would have been better if she hadn't gone there, at least not now. By going to Havana, she has put herself in a bind that even the most skilful diplomacy would be hard pressed to escape. As head of one of the world's great democracies, Rousseff speaks and acts with the legitimacy of a leader who has come to power by the will of the people and for a constitutionally defined term, her victory determined unequivocally through the ballot box and in free and fair election. On more than one occasion, she has clearly stated her commitment to human rights.

On the other hand, the initial stages of her political trajectory and the complex web of allegiances that her coalition partners and the governing Workers Party rank and file have spun around her have put her in a position where a measure of loyalty - or at least indulgence - toward the Cuban regime is unavoidable.

Rousseff, therefore, could not have been expected to touch down at José Martí Airport in Havana and start issuing declarations of public censure of Cuba's human rights record, much less of the regime's maneuvers to perpetuate its hold on power, as it has managed to do for the last 52 years.

There is nothing inappropriate about Brazil deploying high-level diplomatic missions to Cuba. We have important economic and commercial interests in Cuba, and major Brazilian companies are justified in working to consolidate and expand their presence on the island. Helping them do so is a natural and appropriate diplomatic goal that falls squarely within the accepted bounds of the international game.

And yet the timing of the Cuba trip was unfortunate. Engaging Cuba is something our three most recent governments have done with propriety and success. Brazil is fortunate to have a versatile corps of senior ministers and bureaucrats who may be quickly deployed and tasked with promoting and defending our various interests abroad.

Thanks to shifts in the global balance of power, Brazil today enjoys unprecedented international visibility and prestige. Our priority should be to preserve our national leaders from encounters with certain players in the international arena looking to take advantage of Brazil's credibility to burnish their own credentials or advance their own agenda.

On his recent swing through Latin America, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad omitted Brazil from his itinerary, and that exclusion was interpreted internationally as a sign that the Brazilian president wished to keep a prudent distance from the Iranian leader.

There was a time not long ago when our leaders travelled abroad in order to seek loans. Today, often enough, we are the ones financing international borrowers. That is to say, Brazil is lending its prestige to discredited governments and leaders.

Brazil could have sent a government mission to Cuba without the presence of President Rousseff, whose political constraints prevented her from speaking out on her beliefs and publicly embrace the universal values of liberty and individual freedoms to which Brazil unquestionably subscribes but are routinely disrespected by the Cuban regime.

What she did do, on the contrary, was to unhesitatingly and vehemently condemn the notorius conditions of the prison at Guantanamo Bay where alleged terrorists are confined. Some of these men have been caged there for years, and many have yet to be tried, constituting a flagrant violation of their rights and a stain on the reputation of the United States.

And yet Rousseff's critique of Guantanamo Bay would have carried greater weight and been more balanced had it been accompanied by an equally vehement condemnation of authoritarian, single-party governments - such as the one in Cuba - that curb their citizens' freedom to come and go, to name just one restriction.

The romantic and, at the same time, heroic origins of the Cuban Revolution endowed Brazilians with a sentimental bond and a vision of liberation that a half-century of abusive suppression of civil liberties have yet to completely erode.

Without the legitimacy that only democracy can confer upon a government and after a long history of economic mismanagement, the Cuban government nonetheless has managed to cultivate the notion that its legitimacy rests on a tenacious resistance to the external political threat and the ravages of the economic blockade imposed by the U.S. In this sense, we tend to see Cuba not so much for what it is but for what it represents, an imagined bulwark against the Yanqui menace. Strictly speaking, there is not so much a pro-Cuba position, merely an apoplectically anti-American one.

Perhaps this becomes clearer when we consider that we do not share a similarly reverential cult for the old Soviet Union or of Maoist China (both of which shaped the Cuban model), and that support for the sclerotic Cuban regime flourishes essentially because it is a symbol of hostility toward Washington.

The lesson here is that, in diplomacy, an ill chosen itinerary can skew the journey, even before it begins. A head of state does not go to Tehran with impunity. Honoring Chavez in Caracas has its risks. A visit to Cuba exacts a price. In these countries, as in many others, we are dealing with regimes avid to parlay a visit by a credible world leader into a tribute, direct or indirect, to the failed policies they represent.

Marcos Azambuja, a former Brazilian ambassador, currently serves as vice-president of the Brazilian Center of International Relations. This is a version of an article published in O Estado de São Paulo. Translation by Roman Gautam.