A prisoner swap and a resumption of relations between the United States and Cuba will enrich the communist nation's dictatorial rulers without altering their anti-American behavior, former CIA operative and station chief Gary Berntsen told
Newsmax TV on Thursday.
The sudden reversal in U.S. Cuban policy announced on Wednesday by President Barack Obama also fails to acknowledge the real victories against Cuba internationally that were enabled by a half century of sustained economic and diplomatic isolation, Berntsen told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner.
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"The pressure that we put on them has worked," said Berntsen, a 23-year agency veteran. "Where they were doing military campaigns against us in Central American and terrorism, and all these other things in other places, it's reduced.
"If you go back to the late 1970s, the Cubans were on the ground with military forces in Angola, in Mozambique, in Ethiopia," he said. "They were out there side by side with the Russians attempting to overthrow our system.
"They have now been reduced to a banana republic and I don't think that we needed to do much more to help them," said Berntsen. "We should have just waited."
Berntsen said
the reported swap of spies — three in U.S. prisons for one held in Cuba — along with the return of a jailed American contractor, Alan Gross, is a "significant" development in intelligence terms.
"We've released a number of individuals that were involved in active planning in the United States and … their intelligence collection activities resulted in the death of some Americans," he said.
Berntsen said that he does not object in principle to countries trading imprisoned spies, but he argued that Cuba got the better of this deal.
"We've given them normalization," he said. "We've given them a lot — a whole lot — and it doesn't look like a very good, negotiated deal for the U.S., because Cuba has consistently worked against the U.S. and our efforts to build free democratic governments across Latin America that were free-market based."
Berntsen described contemporary Latin American leaders Evo Morales in Cuba and José Mujica in Uruguay as Cuban proxies, and exemplars of Cuba's longstanding support for violent left-wing movements in the Americas — Mujica was part of the Tupamaro Marxist insurgency in the 1960s.
He also said that Cuba, out of necessity, has shifted its tactics in the region from overtly military to clandestine and political.
"When the Cubans went into Central America years ago in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States went in with the CIA and Special Forces and beat them back," said Berntsen.
"So what the Cubans did was they changed their tactics: They switched over to the political process, and they overcame the political process by seizing control of left-wing political parties in Latin America with murder, mayhem, money — the whole thing."
He said that those conflicts are "a continuation of what happened in the Cold War" and that there's no reason to hope for anything else just because the U.S. has extended a hand.
"They won't get any better because this is an absolute police state," he said. "I expect no changes from the Cubans. They stated, 'Yes, we'll let the Internet in. We'll do this or that.' They're not going to do any of it. This is an authoritarian government. The only way they can stay in power is with complete control and it's a police state."
He said the preliminary easing of travel and commercial restrictions announced on Wednesday — although an economic embargo remains in place — "will enrich the Cuban leadership" by injecting cash into hotels and other businesses controlled by the government.
"I don't see this as helping the [Cuban] people very much, and we're not in a position to sort of leverage this for great effect," said Berntsen. "This has been a very bad deal."
He also said Obama "looks weak in this," adding, "The president had an ideological reason for doing this, but we got nothing in return."
Berntsen also discussed Russia's plunging currency and sanctions-starved economy, and said that a Russian collapse is in nobody's interest because it "becomes dangerous for everybody" and could prompt President Vladimir Putin to attempt other military land grabs in the region beyond the Crimea.
"I think we need to get him to the table" for a "negotiated settlement" on the Ukrainian civil war, said Berntsen.
Discussing the Sony data breach attributed to North Korea-sponsored hackers, Berntsen said the episode — culminating in Sony pulling a movie that lampoons North Korea — sends a message to the world that "we are easy to blackmail."
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