Sen. Marco Rubio charged this week that the State Department has made another big concession to Raul Castro’s regime, by cutting funding for democracy programs in Cuba.
“The Cuban government rails consistently against the democracy programs as interference with their sovereign affairs, and then in order to show that they’re trying to be friendly, the Obama administration comes back and says, look we reduced funding for these programs,” Rubio told the Washington Examiner late Tuesday. “In private conversations, I’m sure they’re pointing it out.”
“It’s the program the Cuban government hates the most and so I imagine that one of the reasons why they reduced funding is because of a concession to the Cuban government as part of this ongoing one-sided outreach to the Cuban government,” he told the Examiner. “It’s demoralizing to democracy activists in Cuba to see all this outreach to their efforts, meanwhile the funds to support all their efforts are being reduced.”
Rubio provided that assessment after pressing a pair of State Department officials about why they requested that Congress provide less that the $20 million usually allocated to democracy programs, only to receive contradictory answers.
“It’s very unusual for a government agency to ask for less,” Rubio noted during the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing Tuesday morning.
One witness suggest the budget cut was necessary because there weren’t enough democracy programs to support in Cuba. “The level of funding is one that we believe we can execute on the ground there,” Francisco Palmieri, a principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere, told Rubio. “It’s a combination of the amount of money that we believe can be absorbed inside Cuba at this time.”
Palmieri was at a loss when Rubio asked him to clarify, given that explanation, whether they were cutting funding for some programs on the island. At that point, Palmieri’s colleague interjected with an different answer.
“I always welcome as much spending as we can do in any country in the world that needs it,” replied Tomasz Malinowski, a senior official in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. “I’ve got, as I mentioned, about $85 million globally for every single country, every single continent, in the world to spend on democracy and human rights programs and I could probably spend more in every single country where we’re doing this kind of work.”
Rubio wasn’t persuaded by either answer, although he allowed that Malinowski’s was closer to the truth, saying that the State Department could spend $50 million in democracy promotion in Cuba.
