President Obama doesn’t often talk about the situation in Cuba.
When he touched on the topic two
years ago, before his re-election, he
spoke as if no changes were taking place in Cuba – no release of political
prisoners, no expansion of small enterprise.
Last Friday in remarks
at a Miami fundraiser, his view was different: “We’ve started to see
changes on the island.” He didn’t
specify, but he could have mentioned that restrictions on cellular phones,
overseas travel, home sales, and Cuban stays in tourist hotels have been lifted;
and that an opening to small entrepreneurship has moved about 300,000 Cubans
into legal private sector employment.
These developments don’t change
the fact that Cuba remains a one-party state with one-party elections,
state-controlled media, limits on free assembly, and more. But they do show movement of a kind that has
not been seen in Cuba before – movement that in any other context would be seen
as a diplomatic opportunity by the Obama Administration.
Which is why the other nugget in
the President’s remarks is interesting: that in U.S. policy toward Cuba we have
to be “creative” and “thoughtful” and “we have to continue to update our
policies.”
He continued: “Keep in mind that
when Castro came to power, I was just born. So the notion that the same
policies that we put in place in 1961 would somehow still be as effective as
they are today in the age of the Internet and Google and world travel doesn’t
make sense.”
The President’s first-term changes
in U.S. policy have had a positive impact.
Cuban Americans can visit their families and send money without
restriction, and many are investing in family businesses and even helping
relatives on the island to buy new homes.
As for the other 312 million Americans, those not of Cuban descent,
travel remains highly regulated but the President’s liberalized regulations are
enabling many thousands to go to Cuba.
When you add the fact that Cuba virtually ended travel restrictions on
its own citizens, the result is an increase in communication and exchange in
both directions.
If the Administration does “update
our policies,” there are all kinds of possibilities even with legal
restrictions in the Helms-Burton law that bar a complete lifting of sanctions
and normalization of relations.
And if President Obama is really taking
the long view back to 1961, maybe he will think about the posture he would
adopt toward Cuba if he had not inherited a set of policies that have piled up year
by year, like old junk in a closet, ever since the Kennedy Administration.
Hopefully, he will take the long
view and break at least two barriers.
The U.S. embargo was conceived as
a means to bring down a Cuban government that enjoyed popular support, had no
effective opposition, and would only be threatened if U.S. sanctions would deny
“money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring
about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” That is the line of reasoning in this April
1960 State Department memorandum.
No one expects the embargo to have
such an impact today. But still the
foundation of our policy, fully embraced by President Obama, is the idea that U.S.
interests are somehow advanced by harming the Cuban economy through economic
sanctions. Today’s embargo has
exceptions – we sell food and medicine, and U.S. travelers bring considerable
revenue to Cuba – but all other trade is banned, investment is not allowed, and
our sanctions attack other countries’ trade, investment, and financial
relations with Cuba. Embargo proponents
say these are sanctions against the Cuban government, but you can’t hurt an
economy without hurting the people who live in that economy.
If the embargo didn’t exist, it’s
hard to imagine that President Obama would invent it today. He lacks the power to do away with it but he
can alter it, and he can send a signal that today – especially as Cuba’s
economy is changing in ways that are expanding Cubans’ economic freedoms – the United
States does not want to block economic improvement in Cuba.
Then there is the issue of
diplomacy. Even in the absence of full
diplomatic relations there is ample contact between our governments, but what
is missing is a dialogue that goes beyond the issues that are almost imposed on
us as neighbors: migration, maritime rescue, drug enforcement, etc.
In the case of Iran, President
Obama is trying to solve the nuclear issue through diplomacy and he seems to have
a larger goal of improving overall relations if the security issue can be
solved. To that end, he quietly reduced
enforcement of certain economic sanctions once the new Iranian president
was elected.
The stakes are not as high in Cuba
because there is no security threat. But
there is opportunity – to achieve more on “neighborhood” issues including those
that affect U.S. security, to find a way to get USAID contractor Alan Gross
released, to encourage Cuba’s role in ending Colombia’s guerrilla conflict, to build
greater contacts with a government that is on a path of change and will soon
hand the reins to the next generation.
And then to use a stronger, more productive relationship to make a
stronger, more productive pitch for human rights.
Cuban officials, alas, are not
cream puffs. They will have demands involving
prisoners of their own in U.S. jails, a terrorist who downed a Cuban airliner
in 1976 and now lives freely in Miami, and more. They tend to invoke a century of reasons to
resist U.S. recommendations about their domestic affairs. But they say they want improved relations, so
there’s a lot to test, depending on how “thoughtful” and “creative” our
President decides to be.
