U.S.
Ralph Crane / Life Magazine / Getty Images
With the release of USAID contractor Alan Gross and the announcement of normalized U.S.-Cuba relations on Wednesday, one of the last remaining Cold War-era rivalries has finally begun to thaw.
But as President Barack Obama tacitly acknowledged in comments at the White House, it is the United States — not Cuba — that has come in from the cold. After more than 50 years of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, a policy introduced to pressure the Fidel Castro regime on freedoms and democratic reform, Washington has finally joined Europe, the Vatican and the rest of the Western Hemisphere in determining that a hardline approach vis-à-vis Cuba was simply not working.
“At times, longstanding U.S. policy towards Cuba has isolated the United States from regional and international partners, constrained our ability to influence outcomes throughout the Western Hemisphere, and impaired the use of the full range of tools available to the United States to promote positive change in Cuba,” Obama said. “Though this policy has been rooted in the best of intentions, it has had little effect — today, as in 1961, Cuba is governed by the Castros and the Communist Party.”
In the decades that followed the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which expanded the U.S. embargo on Cuba, successive presidential administrations have rebuffed calls to join the rest of the Western world in pursuing rapprochement. In a largely symbolic exercise, the United Nations General Assembly has voted annually to condemn the embargo, which is estimated to cost impoverished Cuba over $685 million each year.
But external pressure on the U.S. to change course has built up steam in recent years. The European Union, which does not observe an embargo, lifted diplomatic sanctions in 2008 and began another round of talks with Cuba earlier this year. The EU is still pressuring the Castro regime on its woeful human rights record, but has taken the position that punishing sanctions only serve to further impoverish the Cuban people.
The newly formed Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC, made a similar statement this year by holding its second annual conference in the Cuban capital of Havana. According to Marc Hanson, a Cuba expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, the meeting “made it clear that Cuba had been accepted by everyone else in the Western Hemisphere for a very long time.”
Obama and Raul Castro, who took over the reins from his ailing brother, Fidel, in 2008, have both signaled since they came to power a willingness to inch their countries toward a détente. To great fanfare last December, the two used the occasion of Nelson Mandela’s funeral to shake hands — the first such gesture between the two heads of state since 2000.
Wednesday’s announcement, which included setting up embassies, increasing remittance allowances for Cuban exiles, and lifting travel sanctions, constitutes the most significant change of course in bilateral relations for decades. Obama has also ordered a review of Cuba’s position on the list of state sponsors of terror, which is considered an important step for resetting bilateral relations.
But the embargo remains intact, removable only through an act of Congress. That front has long been cemented in place by a hardline Cuban-American contingent in the United States, which wields outsized influence as a powerful voting bloc in the swing state of Florida. Cuban exiles of the oppressive Castro regime, along with like-minded Congressional leaders, assert that lifting sanctions — however ineffective they have proven to be — will only serve to reward the Castros for refusing to embrace reforms.
Sebastian Arcos, associate director of the Cuba Research Institute at Florida International University, argued that it was a mistake for Obama to cave on a longstanding U.S. policy. He said it was too early to conclude that the European approach was having much luck in reforming Cuba, especially given that Havana postponed a scheduled third round of talks with the EU earlier this month. According to some skeptics, the Castro government is not ready to broach the more delicate human rights and democracy-building issues that those talks were going to address.
The Europeans, Arcos said, believe they can leverage other incentives to push for reform in Cuba, “but this is based on wishful thinking. The Cubans don’t actually want to give away control of Cuban society.”
Obama’s policy shift, however, reflects the growing faction within the U.S. that argues concessions, while potentially politically costly for both sides, are the only way forward after half a century. There is evidence that sea change may even be taking place among the younger generation of Cuban-Americans, too.
Advocates of rapprochement have cited the example of the Vatican, which apparently played a major role in brokering Wednesday's historic shift. Though the Catholic Church has long had a testy relationship with the Communist regime in Havana, it has nonetheless maintained diplomatic relations for the past 79 years while continuing to condemn the embargo. At long last on Wednesday, its patience was vindicated.
“The Cubans have proven that if you respect their sovereignty, they’re at least willing to hear you out," said Hanson.
Still, he underlined that democratic progress would take time. “At the end of the day, you still have a one party system in Cuba," he said. "But there’s a new environment in which the Cuban political process can unfold, which I think is a positive sign.”
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