Human Rights Watch does not see the US blockade of Cuba as a human rights abuse.
In late 2009 the New York-based group Human Rights Watch published a report titled New Castro Same Cuba. Based on the testimony of former prisoners, the report systematically condemns the Cuban government as an “abusive” regime that uses its “repressive machinery … draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who have dared to exercise their fundamental freedoms”.
The group says it interviewed 40 political prisoners and claims to have identified extraordinary laws by which Cubans can be imprisoned simply for expressing views critical of their socialist system.
At first glance one might be forgiven for thinking that Cuba must be among the worst of human rights abusers in the Americas. A little reflection, however, might lead one to question such statements coming from the USA, a country with thousands held in an international network of secret prisons, many subject to torture regimes.
So how credible is this scathing report on Cuba? And who does Human Rights Watch represent?
Answering the latter question is a little more difficult than it is for other organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established by the US government, or even the France-based Reporters without Borders (RSF), funded directly by the US State Department for some of its anti-Cuba campaigns. In the manner of “embedded journalists” who travel with US troops around the world, the NED and RSF can be considered “embedded watchdogs”, helping to legitimise or delegitimise regimes, consistent with US policy.
`Privatised, US-based selection of issues’
Human Rights Watch, however, is not funded by the US government. Yet it gets most of its funds from a variety of US foundations, in turn funded by many of the biggest US corporations. These wealthy, private foundations often tie their contributions to particular projects. So for example HRW’s Middle East reports often rely on and acknowledge grants from pro-Israel foundations. Other groups ask for a focus on women’s rights or HIV/AIDS issues. More than 90% of HRW’s US$100 million budget in 2009 was “restricted” in this way. In other words, HRW offers a privatised, wealthy, US-based selection of rights issues.
The coordination of all these interests is best illustrated through HRW’s new chairperson, James F. Hoge Jr. A publisher and journalist, Hoge was editor of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 2009, and a prominent member of that magazine’s sponsor, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR, regarded as the most influential of US foreign policy think tank, includes much of the US corporate elite (including banks and media) as well as past and present leaders of the two major parties. Past US secretaries of state, such as Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, and the current US secretary of deence Robert Gates are CFR members. It is really a “Who’s Who” of the US elite.
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