04/15/09 – Stephen Weber – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our guest today is Steve Weber from worldpublicopinion.org.
They've done some new research on American attitudes toward Cuba.
Very interesting stuff.
Welcome to the show, Steve.
How are you?
Good, Scott.
How are you today?
Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
So, let's see here.
April 14, 2009.
Americans favor new approach to Cuba.
Lift the travel ban.
Establish diplomatic relations.
A majority of Americans feel it is time to try a new approach to Cuba, according to a national poll by worldpublicopinion.org.
Okay, so before I ask you about Cuba, straighten me out because I think I might be a bit confused.
Did PIPA change their name to worldpublicopinion.org, or has it always been the same thing, or what?
Our organization officially is a program on international policy attitudes, or PIPA, but we have a major global project of polling on international issues, and it's called worldpublicopinion.org, and we often poll in 20 to 25 countries around the world, and we also do polls in the U.S., and this poll was on an international policy question, but it was just among the American public.
I see.
And so these things, it's not that one's changed to the other.
That's right.
Two parts of the same organization.
It's a new project that we've developed over the last two years of global polling.
Well, I'm always glad to be on y'all's mailing list because you do great work here.
So what do we have going on here?
A major change in American opinion toward the line that maybe we need to start softening our approach to this little island 90 miles off our Florida coast there?
Yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
We just released a poll.
It was a poll of 760 Americans, and the interesting issue is that if you look across a whole series of facets of American policy towards Cuba, the public generally doesn't support them.
Practically none of them does the public support.
For example, what about having diplomatic relations?
We haven't had diplomatic relations since the 60s.
The public, by a large majority, thinks we ought to have diplomatic relations, and the interesting thing is this isn't just limited to Democrats or liberals.
Republicans, a majority of Republicans, think we ought to have diplomatic relations as well as a majority of Democrats and independents.
Everybody thinks we ought to have diplomatic relations, or a large majority of all political groups feel we ought to have diplomatic relations.
Well, share with us some of those numbers in specific, could you?
Sure.
The different Republican, Democrat, independent.
Among Americans as a whole, 69% say they favor reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba.
28% are opposed.
Among Republicans, the number is 57% who favor diplomatic relations, and 40% who are opposed.
Wow, that's impressive.
It jumps up to 82% among Democrats and 58% among independents.
And so one of the interesting things here is when we look at the diplomatic relations, or Obama's new policy towards allowing Cuban Americans to visit families in Cuba, that's widely favored.
And that's basically going back to the rules as they were during the Clinton years, I guess, right?
Yes.
In fact, this actually occurred in two stages.
First, in early March, they revised some rules that President Bush, the second President Bush had put into place that made it tougher for Cuban Americans.
So first they relaxed it somewhat, then they relaxed it completely.
But Americans generally approve of allowing Cuban Americans to visit their families in Cuba.
And this is true of Republicans as well as Democrats as well as independents.
And so I think one of the potent sets of findings here is that Americans are not so divided on this issue.
And even, for example, when we label a policy as an Obama policy, Republicans still saw this Obama policy as something that they could support.
That is very interesting.
And now how much has this changed over, say, I don't know, 10 years or something like that?
Well, there are a couple issues where we do have some trend data.
For example, on the diplomatic relations question.
Back in 1998, PIPA asked a question like this, and we found that 56% of the public favored diplomatic relations in Cuba.
So going back some time, the public has favored reestablishing diplomatic relations.
Gallup asked the question in 2002 through 2004, 2006, 2008, the identical question.
And what you see is a gradual upward trend.
So now we're at a point where 69% of the public favors diplomatic relations.
So I think if we if we would want to draw some conclusions about trends, is that the public favors a more open relationship with Cuba.
And this has been an increasing trend over the last at least 10 or 15 years.
Well, that really is impressive to hear that such a good majority was at 58% of Republicans.
In terms of reestablishing diplomatic relations, 57%.
That's pretty impressive to hear that apparently it's not the case any longer that the idea of having fair play for Cuba would be associated with a position that you have to be a commie to think so.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's hardly kind of a liberal, marginal view.
And I remember going back to the days of my childhood in the 60s and where this was clearly a leftist position.
But it's a very centrist position now.
Well, the Cold War has been over for a generation or so.
Well, let me ask you this.
Do you ever ask specifically or do you in this poll, you talk about relations and travel restrictions and that kind of thing.
What about dropping the embargoes, dropping all the sanctions and trade restrictions?
Do you ever ask that?
Yes.
We have a couple of handfuls of questions here all about Cuba policy.
And the embargo is an interesting and somewhat puzzling issue.
When we asked that just a couple of weeks ago, we found that Americans are divided on ending the embargo or continuing the embargo.
Overall, 48% of Americans say we should continue the embargo and 49% say we should end the embargo.
So it's almost exactly evenly divided.
On this issue, Republicans are more likely to favor continuing the embargo and Democrats are more likely to favor ending the embargo.
But this issue is the most divided issue of all the ones we spoke about.
We did ask, I think, kind of a fundamental question about Cuba policy.
Kind of one of the core questions is whether increasing contact between the U.S. and Cuba in the form of travel and trade, what effect does that have?
Does that strengthen the Cuban government because it enriches them somehow or is it going to have a liberalizing effect on the Cuban system?
When we asked, here's the exact question.
If there is increasing travel and trade between Cuba and the U.S., do you think it will lead Cuba to be a more open and democratic direction or will strengthen the communist regime in Cuba?
What we find there is Americans, overall, by a large margin, 71% say increasing travel and trade with Cuba will lead Cuba in a more open and democratic direction.
Even the Republicans agree with that?
Even the Republicans agree with that.
59% of Republicans agree with that.
And so, in a sense, most Americans think that more contact with Americans, more contact with American values, more contact with American political openness and maybe American consumer economy will end up having a democratizing effect in Cuba.
And that, in some ways, I think the implication is that they see our policy as having been counterproductive.
Well, I wonder about the order of the questions, the way they're asked.
Do you switch them around?
Because it seems like if the trade embargo question was first, then you might get numbers more favorable because the way, at least it's laid out on the page here at worldpublicopinion.org, if this is the order of the questions, it seems like people get kind of worse and worse on the questions as you go through.
And the trade embargo question, instead of being the central relationship and the central question of what we should do, where, after all, people say by huge majorities that they think it would have a good effect on the island, that having the question in fourth place here is sort of giving them an option to walk back their earlier answers toward more openness by a step.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, that's an interesting question, Scott.
And here you're turning the methodologist on me a little bit.
Actually, we try to pay fairly careful attention to the ordering of the questions.
And so if you go online, you can actually find the actual questionnaire with the actual ordering of the questions.
And where neither of these things came in the first position, we asked the question about what is the effect of increasing travel and trade late in the interview.
And the question about lifting the trade embargo was two questions earlier than that.
So first they were asked the question about the trade embargo, which they were divided on.
Then there was another intervening question.
And then there was a question about, well, what effects do you think increasing travel and increasing trade would have?
And that's where we find that the public says it's going to have a democratizing effect.
My own view of kind of the disparity between these two questions is, if you ask trade embargo straight up, for many of the public, they see the trade embargo as a symbol of our relationship with that unpopular regime in Cuba.
Fidel Castro is still a very unpopular figure among the American public.
Well, see, now if you ask me the question first about should we open diplomatic relations, and I thought that that might be more or less the last question on the list, I might go ahead and sort of assume that you're talking about the embargo.
And I might answer the diplomatic relations question with the embargo in mind.
Because it does seem to me the central issue.
Actually, you didn't, Scott.
Because we asked the diplomatic relations question, and it came just before the embargo question, diplomatic relations question.
Sixty-nine percent favored opening diplomatic relations.
Then we asked embargo, only 48 percent of the people favored that.
And so it's pretty clearly, at least when we ask them both questions, they do pick up the difference.
It's interesting that the Republicans, the same proportion of Republicans who believe, 59 percent who believe that ending or at least increasing travel and trade would help lead Cuba in a more open and democratic direction, the same proportion say we should continue the embargo.
They would prefer that the people there are all strangled to death under communism.
I don't think that's really what they're saying or thinking.
But you can read the pattern of questions like that.
What I think is when you ask the question just specifically about trade embargo, people say, yeah, I think we ought to keep it.
But then you ask them the question, well, what do you think our objectives are here?
And do you think a policy of opening trade and travel is going to have this effect?
Or do you think the policy of opening trade and travel is going to have that effect?
And when they say, will opening trade and travel make Cuba more open and democratic?
Or will it strengthen the Cuban regime?
People have to handle that somewhat more deliberatively and say, what are our objectives here?
And so that's why I think on that question we find that more people seem to say, hey, this would have desirable benefits if we open travel and trade with Cuba.
That's my reading of those two questions.
In fact, the embargo question, the straight-up embargo question is the only one that Americans are so divided on.
The Obama administration just opened up and made travel very easy for Cuban Americans.
Cuban Americans can visit their relatives as often as they want.
The definition of a relative is quite broad.
It can be your second cousin, as I understand it.
They can stay there as long as they want.
They can send as much to Cuba in terms of remittances as they wish.
So it's much more open for Cuban Americans.
But, you know, Scott, unless you're a Cuban American, you can't go to Cuba.
And I can't go to Cuba.
I'm not a Cuban American.
And this is kind of an odd situation in that Cuba is the only country that our government tells us we are not allowed to visit.
You and I can visit Iran.
You and I can visit North Korea.
If North Korea would give us a visa or Sudan or Burma, we can visit those countries.
But our government says we can't go to Cuba.
And now it's created this opening for Cuban Americans, but only for Cuban Americans.
And we can understand the humanitarian reasons for that.
But the rights as an American, it seems kind of strange that you and I and 99% of our fellow Americans can't visit Cuba.
So we ask the public, do you think in general Americans should be free to visit Cuba?
70% of the public says they think in general Americans ought to be free to visit Cuba.
62% of Republicans, 77% of Dems, 66% of Independents.
And so the American public sees free travel to Cuba as something that Americans ought to be able to do.
Do you have any information on the Cuban exile community in Florida and whether their attitudes are changing at all?
You know, we haven't done the research, but there's a university in Miami called Florida International University that's been polling the Cuban American community over the years.
And I think their latest poll has indicated that even the Cuban American community is becoming more open, more favorable towards reestablishing diplomatic relations, opening travel with Cuba.
And so I think there is fairly good evidence from Florida International's polling of Cuban Americans in South Florida that that community now, particularly the younger members of that community, particularly the more recent immigrants from Cuba, want to engage Cuba more.
They want to be able to travel to Cuba.
The idea that Americans can't travel to Cuba, they disagree with.
And so now I think that community leans a little bit towards a more open approach and away from the historic policies.
All right, everybody.
That's Stephen Weber from worldpublicopinion.org and pipa.org.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.