Luis Posada Carriles, R.I.P.

He certainly was one of “a group of fighters who dedicated their best years to fighting the Fidel Castro regime,” as a Miami television station put it when he was featured on its recent “Legends of Exile” series. He was also someone willing to put his life on the line, and to use violence in service of his ideals, and to direct his violence against civilians – tourists in a hotel at the wrong place at the wrong time, or young Cuban athletes on a plane returning from an international competition – which made him a terrorist too. While many scoffed at the Bush Administration’s failed attempt to nail him on immigration charges, this was more than any U.S. Administration attempted to do. He lived out his retirement in Miami, finding social acceptance in a segment of the community consisting largely of lifelong sedentary revolutionaries who admired a man of action and had no moral qualms about his tactics. He died last Wednesday.

Coverage here from the New York Times, Granma here and here, the Herald, and 14yMedio.

Controlled panic on Calle Ocho

A smart friend reminds me regularly that everyone is talking about a coming change in U.S. policy toward Cuba – except the officials who make that policy in the U.S. government.

Still, the talk has provoked unease among embargo advocates, who may be wondering if the wheels are starting to come off the wagon that has dragged this foreign policy relic well into the 21st century.

For some time now they have tried to deny what Republican political operatives know – that the Cuban-American vote in Florida split evenly between President Obama and Governor Romney in 2012, that demographics dictate that Cuban-American support for the embargo will continue to decline, and that Cuban Americans are losing importance in Florida politics as Puerto Ricans and other Latinos have increased greatly in number.

They now see activism in their own community promoting engagement with Cuba (including this recent television ad urging voters to defend their right to travel), and it’s coming not from the Venceremos Brigade but rather from Cuban Americans who want change in Cuba and are not tied to el exilio’s ideas.

They are seeing a united front in Latin America and the Caribbean insisting that Cuba attend the next inter-American summit in Panama next April, and they see the Obama Administration accepting that political reality. A State Department official told reporters in Panama last month that the United States insists on the meeting’s “democratic character,” but “if the Cuban delegation comes, I believe it will be important that the region have the opportunity to hear its vision,” as well as “the vision of the United States, the Pacific Partnership, the countries of the Caribbean where democracy has prospered.” The result could be the first serious meeting between the Cuban and American heads of state since 1959, albeit in a multilateral setting. It would represent a normalization of sorts, where we deal with Cuba as we deal with others, expressing disagreement directly rather than through a policy of non-contact.

They see that the Cuban government is reacting to the Ebola crisis by sending hundreds of doctors to Africa to treat patients in dire need of care. The Obama Administration has welcomed Cuba’s help; our UN Ambassador says she is “proud” of the work of “American, European, and Cuban doctors” in Africa, and adds that while U.S. and Cuban missions “are not an integrated effort, we are working shoulder to shoulder.” You don’t need a poll to figure that most Americans dislike Cuba’s form of government but admire Cuba’s doctors and its government’s decision to contribute so strongly. But if your supreme goal is to prevent movement in U.S. policies toward Cuba, this is a big problem; the Cuban medical mission is “thinly disguised propaganda” and a U.S. official’s attendance at a meeting on Ebola in Havana is a “disgrace.”

They see a series of New York Times editorials calling on President Obama to normalize relations, including one today that calls for a prisoner swap to get USAID contractor Alan Gross home before he marks five years in jail. (The editorial prompted one dissident to tweet, “Let Alan rot!” – give him points for frankness!) No one likes prisoner exchanges, a sometimes distasteful but necessary adjunct to war and covert operations. If this involved any situation other than Cuba today, a swap would be effected to live up to the Administration’s responsibility to the man it sent to Cuba.

They see that the 2016 Presidential campaign, which is about to begin, will have something unprecedented: a major-party frontrunner calling not for re-examination or adjustments to Cuba policy, but for the end of the embargo itself. (Also, we may soon have a Florida governor-elect who opposes the embargo.) Secretary Clinton’s move is surprising because she, like President Clinton, used “tough” approaches toward Cuba to counter the Republican rap that the Democrats have a weak foreign policy. Her reversal leads to questions about how many more U.S. political figures might be prepared to reverse long-held positions on Cuba, as if they were held for convenience rather than conviction.

The pro-embargo forces, along with the rest of us, are left wondering about President Obama and his year-old musings about “updating” his Cuba policy. That policy has been largely to embrace and continue that of President Bush, except for some very constructive changes involving travel, remittances, and diplomatic contacts. The economic sanctions in effect in 2008 are almost entirely intact. It’s an approach deserving of President Obama’s favorite epithet – a “20^th century” policy. If there’s conviction behind it, it’s hard to discern; it seems to be sustained by inertia. That inertia could last two more years, or it could be swept away by a decision to form an actual Obama policy toward eleven million neighbors in Cuba. That would make me a little skittish too.

Quotable

“It’s not just that 40 Cuban and American personalities have asked Barack Obama to ease the embargo against Cuba. It’s that the powerful Chamber of Commerce of the United States traveled to Havana and returned delighted; it’s that ex-Governor Charlie Crist also wants to go to the legendary capital and lift the embargo; it’s that Tampa doesn’t know what to do to to be closer to Havana and and wants to start a ferry. It’s Fanjul’s calculated statements, the memoirs of Hillary Clinton, and now the poll. What to say about the poll, because polls are like appearances of the virgin: some fall to their knees and others say it’s a hallucination. I say that it is a serious indication that there winds of change not only in the relations between Washington and Havana, but also in Miami.

“It is true that there are moral and ideological reasons to oppose Washington, as they say, ‘giving oxygen to the dictatorship.’ But the Cuban political exile community long ago delivered the solution to its national problem to the United States. And the interests of this exile community, whether beneficial or not for the Cuban nation, need not coincide with those of Washington.

[…]

“There is no reason to fear accepting and evaluating the facts of Cuban reality, both the good and the bad. The bad are repeated every day. But the others are not. Yes, there is a change in Cuba toward new forms of production. Today the Cuban public is freer socially and economically than two years ago, freer to travel, to emigrate and if they don’t like it, to return; with more rights in entrepreneurship and property than at any time since 1968; government opponents leave and return to their homes in Havana. Raul Castro says that he’s putting everything on the table to negotiate with the United States. Is there an internal debate, no less important for being outside the official media, over the future of the country? Why negate it and insist that all this is nothing more than a pantomime?

“In the standard and acceptable narrative about the Cuban state, its power is on the edge of the abyss. A never-ending abyss into which it never falls. Because the criminal hand of Castro blocks it. That narrative is unchanged for the past half-century. But in the past 23 years that government survived the fall of the Soviet bloc and strengthened its influence in Latin America; since 2007 it has been off the list of human rights violators and for 22 years has managed to have the UN condemn the U.S. embargo. Is that government weaker than in the spring of 1991? No. In the equation to understand its power, there are other crucial factors than those considered in the repeated anti-Castro narrative. In 1996 they rejected Clinton’s olive branch because they were weak, now they are seeking it because they are not.

“The 61 years that have passed since the Moncada attack are an indelible part of Cuban reality and history. There is no way to make them disappear and it would not be right to do so. The same applies to the 57 years of the Republic. This is, whether we like it or not in Miami or in Havana, the history of the Cuban people. There is no other. It carries on by the friendly or terrible hand of a powerful neighbor whom it is as dangerous to idolize as to look down upon. Let’s not continue turning our backs on ourselves.”

   – Jorge Davila Miguel, in Friday’s Nuevo Herald

The end of El Exilio?

El exilio is not going away, either as a state of mind or as a voting bloc never forgets the pain, loss, and grievances of 1959 and its aftermath.

But as the Cuban-American community is increasingly populated by younger generations and immigrants who departed Cuba after the 1970’s, it is no longer defined solely by the exile experience. It is turning instead into an immigrant community with diverse outlooks and political preferences.

To see that this is the case, one need only to observe the flights going to Cuba and to talk to the Cuban Americans on them. They visit and support their families, have their kids stay with their aunt in Cuba for the summer, and think of buying a family home in Cuba in a relative’s name. For them, getting on the plane is not a political act.

Elites are changing too, increasingly looking at Cuba and figuring out ways they can engage in a positive way. The Fanjuls are interested in investing. And Facundo Bacardi has given an interview to Cigar Aficionado, a magazine that offends many in the community because it treats Cuba as a luxury tourism destination. Bacardi reveals that his family is divided about the embargo question. In contrast to the hard-liners’ typical dismissal of Cuba’s changes as “cosmetic,” he has this view: “The society is slowly opening up a bit, and there are reforms. So long as the reforms continue, the people who benefit the most are the Cuban people. Every country does things at its own pace, and Cuba is no different. It’s doing things at its own pace. I can understand that the Cuban government doesn’t want to run the risk of a revolution, so they’re implementing these changes in piecemeal fashion over a period of time. The question is, will Raúl go all the way, or will he not?”

And now, there’s a new poll from Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, which has been surveying Cuban American attitudes since 1991.

For the first time, a majority of Cuban Americans, 52 percent, wants to end the embargo. By contrast, in the five polls conducted during the 1990's, support for the embargo averaged 85 percent.

The poll shows that support for hard-line policies is concentrated in the over-65 age bracket, which means that this is a trend, not a fluke.

Examples:

Support for lifting the embargo is 52 percent overall: 62 percent of those 18-29, 55 percent age 30-44, 55 percent age 45-64, and 40 percent age 65 and higher.

Support for re-establishing diplomatic relations is 68 percent overall: 88 percent of those 18-29, 78 percent age 30-44, 68 percent age 45-64, and 41 percent age 65 and higher.

It’s no wonder that politicians – so far, only Democrats – are taking notice. Charlie Crist and Hillary Clinton are not simply questioning the policy but opposing the embargo head-on; they are, respectively, the first significant Florida statewide candidate and the first (presumptive) major Presidential candidate to do so. The electoral penalty once attached to that position no longer exists.

And President Obama, the first candidate to really figure out the new Miami-Dade math,  continues to think about it.