http://www.thehavananote.com/2011/06/will_rubios_cuba_grievances_keep_farrar_out_managua--- Does Managua trust this guy after Honduras?
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Anya Landau French — Jun 14, 2011
With a thirty year career in the Foreign Service, including having served as the Acting Assistant Photo courtesy of:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/108143.htmSecretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and having just completed a 'hardship' post as Chief of Mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (which doesn't carry the title of Ambassador), Jonathan Farrar might reasonably have expected to now take an ambassador posting, even if the one he got was to another politically-charged post, in Managua,Nicargua.
Unfortunately for Farrar, Newly-minted Cuban American Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Western Hemisphere Subcommittee seems pretty likely to hold up his nomination, despite having never met with Farrar to discuss his grievances before last week's nomination hearing. (You can view Rubio's criticism of Farrar and Farrar's response here.)
What has Farrar done to possibly tank his nomination? Apparently he wasn't "abrasive" enough. Farrar got on the wrong side of Rubio by taking down the polemical electronic billboard ticker he inherited, telling the truth as he saw it about a fractured and weak Cuban dissident community in now-Wikileaked State Department cables, and apparently inviting the wrong people to his events and not inviting the right ones. Oh, and rather than staying at Farrar's residence, U.S. diplomatic delegations overnighted in - gasp - the Hotel Nacional, the same hotel in which visiting members of Congress usually stay.
In reality, Rubio is punishing Farrar for the instructions he received from Washington and carried out both dutifully and effectively. I met Farrar several times while he was posted in Havana, and while we didn't always agree, he earned my respect. I found him well-informed and fair; He refused to tell you whatever you wanted to hear. He struck me as a realist who nonetheless expected Havana to live up to far better. Whereas his immediate predecessors were toxic among private Cuban citizens due to the more confrontational policy they served under the Bush administration and the flamboyant, non-diplomatic way in which they carried it out, Farrar and his wife regularly visited a different church in the greater Havana area every Sunday and held auctions for independent Cuban artists, without stirring up an international crisis.
Recall, it was during the tenure of Jim Cason when 75 Cuban dissidents were rounded up and hastily sentenced to long prison sentences for collaborating with a hostile enemy (the United States), and it was during Farrar's time in Havana that nearly all of the 75 were finally freed (though I give credit to the United States mainly for staying out of the way of the talks that made that possible). And when Farrar took down the ticker and other provocative props Senator Rubio preferred, the Cuban government responded by taking down dozens of giant black flags from in front of the Interests Section, and by finally removing the noxious billboards suggesting that the United States under George Bush was behaving like Hitler's Nazi Germany. During Farrar's tenure, Havana became less confrontational and less 'anti-American'. Isn't that the sort of record we want our diplomats to leave behind?