Leaky Logic

A Canadian emigre living in Wynnewood is facing life behind bars for selling water-purification systems to Cuba.

Jim Sabzali seems like the last person to be facing life in prison. He hasn’t been violent, stolen anything or cost anyone a dime. In fact what he’s charged with might have helped save lives.

What’s more, 32 of the counts against him took place while he was in his native Canada, incapable of breaking U.S. law.

So why is Sabzali, currently living in suburban Wynnewood with his wife and two children, looking at possible life sentence in a U.S. penitentiary?

That’s what earned him a five-year investigation, a three-week trial that just ended, and the possible draconian penalties for 76 counts of Trading With the Enemy Act violations, plus a single charge of conspiracy.

“It’s insane,” said Pamela Martin, Upper Dublin’s acting secretary of the U.S.-Cuba Sister Cities Association. “Life in prison for trading with Cuba? From Canada?”

Actually, Sabzali isn’t alone in the unprecedented trial, in the hands of the jury as this is written. He’s in the dock with Donald and Stefan Brodie, executives of the Bala Cynwyd-based company Bro-Tech, along with the corporation itself. All but the latter Brodie -- charged solely with conspiracy -- face the same 77 counts.

The defendants were “trying to navigate … confusing and conflicting” laws in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, asserted Bro-Tech attorney Kevin Downey in his closing argument.

Both Canada and the U.K. have countered U.S. pressure for compliance with its embargo against Cuba through laws that make it illegal to comply with the U.S. embargo.

In other words, Jim Sabzali could be in a Canadian prison right now for not selling to Cuba.

But if Canada is a key issue in the Sabzali trial, you’d look in vain for its government around the courtroom. “Canada,” noted one commentator dryly, “has not leaped to Mr. Sabzali’s defense.”

Canada’s stance was signaled by a statement from Foreign Affairs department spokesman Reynald Doiron that “Mr. Sabzali knew pretty well when he moved to the U.S. that he might run the risk of being indicted.”

“That’s ridiculous,” responded Sharon Moss, Sabzali’s Canadian-born wife, on the trial’s final day. “That means that nobody [from Canada] who’s traveled to Cuba can cross the U.S. border.”

Ever since the 1959 Cuban revolution, U.S. policy has been to overturn it. An April 1960 State Department memo spelled out that “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly … to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of government.

The Cuban revolution was seen as a double threat -- first as a challenge to sweeping U.S. domination of Latin America, and second as the intrusion of the overriding “communist menace” into its hemisphere.

“That threat,” said Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1964, “can only be ended to Washington’s satisfaction with the overthrow of the Castro regime. … We regard that regime as temporary.”

And they still do. What would be the Cuban Embassy is instead an “Interests Section” on Swiss soil in Washington, D.C. And a vast array of laws, executive orders and regulations block U.S. citizens from nearly all legal contact with the island.

In fact, over the years, early-’60s domestic fears about the revolution have intensified. The unlikelihood of a government of illiterate peasants and ragtag idealists surviving -- then-CIA director Allen Dulles gave the revolution eight months in late 1959 -- became the reality of a country with the highest literacy rate, lowest infant mortality rate and most thorough-going health-care system of any country in Latin America.

And so the logic which still traps U.S. policy toward the island today: “Cuba has not been ruined, and it therefore has to be ruined,” as Fidel Castro put it.

Jim Sabzali and the Brodie brothers are hardly the first people to fall under the wheels of Washington’s anti-Cuban juggernaut.

Thousands get caught up in the machinery every year, especially Cuban-Americans trying to stay in touch with their families.

And so do people like Marilyn Meister, a 75-year-old retired Wisconsin schoolteacher hit with a $7,500 fine for a bike trip in Cuba. Or Cevin Allen, 56, of Washington state, fined for traveling to spread his parents’ ashes at the Cuban church they founded half a century ago.

Meister’s, Allen’s and others’ cases were given public airing at a Senate hearing called by Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, in February.

“Castro has been in office during the terms of 10 U.S. presidents,” the senator declared. “Maybe it’s time for someone to say, ‘This isn’t working.’”

Given that the central justification for U.S. hostility to Cuba was the Soviet threat, it’s either surreal or revealing that the early-’90s Soviet collapse set off a major escalation of anti-Cuba policy.

With Cuba losing a devastating 85 percent of its foreign trade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington upped the pressure with sweeping new laws, while deploying G-men at home to catch people like Sabzali, the Brodies and Meister.

And now it’s the Bush administration’s turn, as it puts Cuban emigre Otto Reich in charge of U.S.-Latin American relations and announces further hardening of U.S. policy toward the “failed, corrupt, dictatorial, murderous regime.”

But there are only faint echoes of this decades-long battle in the softly lit courtroom.

In it, attorneys clash over whether the defendants dutifully obeyed legal advice to isolate trade with Cuba within foreign companies, or if “there was American involvement all over it,” as one prosecutor told the jury.

And they clash over what the defendants were thinking. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” doesn’t apply in this case. Here the key question is whether the defendants “knowingly and willfully” violated the law.

As the jury reconvenes the day after Easter, no one’s ready to call the outcome. But the message has been sent either way.

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December 25, 2002
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