Democracy in Peril

By Steve Sebelius

IS CUBA NEXT?: A Republican president denouncing Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is the ultimate dog-bites-man-and-then-falls-asleep story: boring, redundant and about as unusual as the coming of spring after winter.

But this time, there was something eerie about the way President Bush spoke about the tiny communist nation just 90 miles from the Florida Keys.

It was a speech denouncing pervo-tourism, the practice of visiting foreign countries to have sex, often with underage prostitutes forced to trade their bodies for money. Castro has said there are no destitute prostitutes in his country; anybody who sells their body does so by choice. And since Cuba has such great health care, the hookers are clean.

Bush, speaking to ultra-Republican Cuban expatriates who are still itching for a chance to grab a rifle and liberate their homeland, used all the usual rhetoric. But some of his phrases seemed a little familiar.

"The regime in Havana, already one of the worst human rights violators in the world, is adding to its crimes," Bush said. "The dictator welcomes sex tourism."

The regime? The dictator? We've heard this somewhere before.

The White House has "put a strategy in place to hasten the day when no Cuban child is exploited to finance a failed revolution and every Cuban will live in freedom," Bush added.

Every Cuban, living in freedom? Oh, here we go.

Bush is getting ready to invade.

Think about it: In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush often used "the dictator" instead of Saddam Hussein's proper name, and "the regime" to talk about Hussein's government. And he promised that every Iraqi would live in freedom, which they sort of do, if you don't count the interim government's martial law powers.

And now it's Cuba's turn.

It makes sense. An invading Bush would be an instant hit in Florida, a must-win state in this election year. He'd be canonized in the Cuban ex-pat community, and those folks vote. And he'd erase one of the last outposts of communism, something the Democrat John F. Kennedy failed to do in the infamous Bay of Pigs debacle.

Instead of Halliburton and Bechtel, we'd see Archer Daniels Midland, Hilton and MGM Mirage rush to "rebuild" Cuba, restoring the former jewel of the Caribbean to its pre-revolution glory. Big donors would no longer pay sky-high prices for their Cuban cigars in an embargo that's mostly ignored anyway. Sugar, of course, wouldn't be grown in great amounts until the Fanjul family figured out a way to make money, some of which would be funneled to the party in plenty of time for Election Day.

Of course, we'd need to draft a few thousand troops to garrison the island and put down insurgents. Nothing too radical, since those military salaries tend to get out of control after awhile.

All that's left is to insist that the CIA has discovered Cuba has vast stocks of weapons of mass destruction. After all, Castro had them in the past, didn't he? And inspections just won't work. Where in the hell are Adlai Stevenson's picture files anyway?