By Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat in America's Quarterly:
We shouldn't make unilateral concessions to the Castro regime because it will cost lives. Fundamentally fragile, totalitarian dictatorships interpret all policy actions through the narrow lens of regime survival. That means they unfailingly construe unilateral concessions as weakness. That is a very dangerous message to send to Raúl and Fidel Castro in the zero-sum game they play with their own people.
Simply put: to retain power, the Castros must deny Cubans the very freedoms they overwhelmingly want. Therefore, if a morally and economically bankrupt, violence-prone, half-century old dictatorship is led to believe that it can kill without any significant response, it will unhesitatingly do so.
Take a recent example: the July 2010 deal between Cuba and the Roman Catholic Church, brokered by the government of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to free 52 dissidents. Such unilateral coddling along with the support received from a coterie of left-wing Latin American leaders and the decision by the Organization of American States to rescind Cuba's expulsion made the Castros think that they could once again get away with murder. (And any careful review of how the regime proceeded to methodically break the health of imprisoned civil rights activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo leaves no doubt that it was murder with the mistaken belief that killing a defiant black laborer would stymie the resistance of his fellow activists while passing unnoticed by the international community.)
Why did the regime then sit down with Cardinal Jaime Ortega and then deport some political prisoners? Because as the Cardinal himself has recognized, the spike in internal civic defiance and the international condemnation caused by Zapata's murder threatened the fragile status quo in which the regime survives.
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