CANADIANS GIVE UP ON 'MAKING NICE' WITH FIDEL CASTRO

WASHINGTON -- For many years, since I have interviewed and written a lot about Fidel Castro, well-meaning Americans and others have asked me: "What can we do about Fidel?"

My answer has always been the same: "One of two things: Kill him or stay away from him!"

That answer may seem a bit flippant -- and it is meant to be -- but essentially the message is right. It is based upon the proposition that this is not a man you are going to change through goodwill; in fact, you are not going to change him at all. It is like expecting a personality like Bill Clinton suddenly to immerse himself in a Trappist monastery (good luck).

In the past week, we have had further dramatic proof that trying to reform Castro remains futile. This is the story, brewing for some months, of how even idealistic Canada is drawing back in its long hoped-for "constructive engagement" with Castro. It didn't turn out the way it was supposed to, but then virtually nothing having to do with Castro ever does!

There is a lot of cocktail hour snickering here in Washington these days about the "nice Canadians" pulling back from their long engagement with Cuba. Ottawa has canceled ministerial trips to Havana, put many projects on hold and stated, significantly, that it would no longer champion the cause of getting President Fidel Castro invited to the prestigious Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001. Prime Minister Jean Chretien said, frostily, that he was putting some "northern ice" on the relationship, while Cuban specialists, such as John Kirk of Dalhousie University in Halifax, sniffed of Chretien: "He was foolishly optimistic and naïve. The Cubans don't make concessions unless they have to."

Many of the Canadian programs were admirable, at least in their intention. The Canadians sought to develop relations with the younger generation of Cuban officials under Castro for dealings in the future; they sought to push institutional reform and, by the way, to bring Cubans to Canada to see how an institutionalized country worked; and they sought to develop a better business atmosphere with the still largely closed island.

But it did not help when, a year ago, the Canadian prime minister traveled to Cuba and, on the tarmac of the airport in Havana, was submitted to a 20-minute harangue by Castro about the hated United States ("We felt, simply, used," one leading Canadian businessman recalled.) This winter, four Cuban dissidents -- people the Canadians had particularly wanted released -- were summarily sentenced to prison, despite all kinds of Cuban promises of leniency to Ottawa.

But then, like so many others, they never really reckoned with the personality of Fidel Castro, which was again revealed in all of its stubbornness and duplicity at the European-Latin Summit meeting in June in Rio de Janeiro. After being feted at his arrival, Fidel first insulted the Spanish by insisting that the respected Spanish secretary-general of NATO, Javier Solana, should be prosecuted for genocide over Kosovo. Then, when the final photograph of the leaders was being taken, he disappeared, only to return to tell the press that he was not there "because he was urinating" (observers naturally put a number of meanings onto that remark).

Yet, this very week, when the international press picked up the Canadian story, the attempts to "win over" Castro had not stopped. In fact, at exactly the same time, Thomas Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was in Cuba for a ground-breaking visit -- the first by a chamber of commerce chief in 40 years, and one that will surely refuel the debate in corporate America about economic sanctions against Cuba. Hope springs eternal.

The problem here is that all these foreign visitors are trying, with an irony they don't seem to see, to "normalize" with the abnormal -- indeed with a person and (for the most part) an entourage who don't want normal relations at all. They all go there, as to pilgrimages, thinking that somebody will be "saved." They go there as commercial penitents, thinking there is something Fidel wants, that they can give, which will transform the entire equation.

Still, they refuse to see that there IS something he wants. It happens to be what he has: total, irreversible, eternal control of his people. He is not at all stupid. In fact, he is very smart, and he is laughing all the way to holding onto exactly the power he has had for 40 years.

There is nothing wrong with making rational offers to Castro, offers that could out-strategize him at his own game, but there is something wrong in believing it. And it is arrogant and counterproductive to think that charismatic leaders like this, profoundly involved in their greatness and glory and potency in the world, will change because we so nicely proffer them our little commercial "gifts."

We are saying to them that, in the last analysis, they don't have their own will, which of course is the one thing left that they do have.