The politics of U.S. vs. Cuba run shallow

Did we really once have a politics in this country in which elected representatives of the people engaged in free and eloquent debate about the issues of the day, disdaining the notion of merely playing to the crowd, the ones who would get them re-elected?

Perhaps. Or perhaps that's a fake nostalgia-fueled pipe dream. Even if no actual Mr. or Ms. Smith ever went to Washington, and politics ain't bean bag, it's still a crying shame to see a principled politician simply trying to make a point be muzzled, literally kicked out of a congressional hearing in the Capitol, simply because her opponents are craven for votes.

But that's what happened last week to Rep. Barbara Lee, Doakland — that seasoned East Bay pol who most Southern Californians had likely never heard of until she entered the Democratic race for the United States Senate after the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

What happened to Lee doesn't seem to have much to do with California politics. She was not on the campaign trail, but, rather, expressing her support in a House subcommittee hearing for the effort to open up diplomacy with Cuba and move toward normal diplomatic relations with the island nation 90 miles off our shores. Literally every other nation in the world has those normal diplomatic relations with Cuba. Why not us? Lee has often asked.

The answer does not have to do with political or economic logic but with politicians pandering for votes from the millions of Americans who as Cuban refugees and their descendants are either quite rightly still angry about the theft of their businesses and properties after the Cuban revolution or quite rightly angry about the repression of the Cuban regime toward its people more than six ruinous decades since that revolution.

But the U.S. has diplomatic relations, huge trade deals and no travel restrictions with other heinous governments around the world. After 60 years of embargo, might it not be time to try another approach to the Cuban problem? Open diplomacy, perhaps?

When Lee tried to make that point a hearing by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, she was ordered removed from the room by the subcommittee chair, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican from Florida.

Salazar accused Lee of “unequivocal support of Fidel Castro” and spreading “communist propaganda.” Salazar cut Lee's microphone after the congresswoman tried to object to her forced removal from the room with these words: “I am an African American woman who has a point of view, where, in a democracy, those points of views are allowed. And you are doing exactly what you say the Cuban government is ... denying me the opportunity to present my point of view. What is wrong with this picture?” Lee said.

Isn't that what all of us who view free speech as a right would have said in her shoes, given the absurdity of such censorship within the very halls of Congress? You don't have to be party to Lee's left-wing views to be outraged at one member of Congress silencing another and removing her from a hearing room to which she was invited in order to make a tawdry political point with your constituents back home.

“Lee is a former member of the subcommittee and was invited to the hearing to speak on Cuba and diplomacy with the country, an issue that she has long championed,” the website Truthout reports.

“This goes against the fundamental principles of Congress,” later wrote Rep. Ro Khanna, Dfremont, the subcommittee's top Democrat, who invited Lee to speak, “We should be engaging with those we disagree with, not removing them from hearings.”

Here's what Lee would have said if she hadn't been booted: U.S. Cuba policy is based on the theory that “if we punish them just a little more, we will make them succeed. We see the failure of this upside down policy everywhere — more Cubans are fleeing the island than ever before, adding to the humanitarian crisis. Do we really want to exacerbate a situation where life in Cuba is so unbearable that people are forced to leave?”

Hard to disagree — unless you're shilling for votes.