US - Cuban Relations…Where Does Biden Go?
“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked…it is time for a new approach.”
President Barack Obama, December 17, 2014 on a new policy toward Cuba
The Trump administration reversed many of the Obama era reforms toward Cuba. It linked its policies toward Venezuela with Cuba and placed sanctions on companies that transported Venezuelan oil to Cuba. It allowed law suits under Title 3 of the Helms-Burton Act for the first time since its passage in 1996. It placed restrictions on travel and remittances by Cuban-Americans and prohibited the processing of remittances through entities on the “Cuba restricted list” which resulted in Western Union ceasing its operations in Cuba. It ended the “people to people” education travel by US citizens and limited flights to Cuba from the United States. In January, 2021 it designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. The administration reduced embassy personnel to a minimum and ceased processing visas creating a backlog of more than 22,000 family reunification immigration cases. (See Cuba: US Policy Review by Congressional Research Service, March 26, 2021 for a detailed description of changes under the Trump administration.) In essence, the Trump administration reverted, for the most part, to the old, hardline policies toward Cuba that had been in place until the Obama reforms.
The Biden administration has recently announced that it will move quickly to end the Trump restrictions on remittances to Cuba, allow Western Union to re-establish its businesses on the island, and make it easier for Americans to travel to the island. Despite a majority of Cuban-Americans voting for Trump in 2020, a large majority support the restoration of remittances and travel. Beyond that, the Biden administration has stated that it is currently reviewing US policy toward the island. It faces opposition to changes in Cuba policy by both powerful Republicans (Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott) and Democrats (Senator Bob Menendez) in the Congress. These hardliners insist that changes in US policy must be accompanied with a quid pro quo from Cuba in terms of political freedoms on the island.
It should be noted that Cuba is largely a domestic policy issue for the United States with family ties traced back to the middle of the 19th century through the post 1959 Cuban diaspora. Cuban Americans send millions of dollars to their relatives on the island each year. Cuban Americans play a primary role in determining the electoral votes of Florida. At the same time, many US businesses and trade groups are pressuring their members of Congress and the administration to resume normal relations with Cuba, in particular those in agriculture, food, energy, transportation, finance, internet services, pharmaceuticals, and hospitality. A majority of Americans support normalization of relations. Cuba could once again become an important foreign policy issue should Russia and China continue to assert their influence on the island. That will happen should the US continue to reject engagement with Cuba and continue its hardline policies. US hardline policies serve to isolate only itself from Cuba and open the door to a larger presence by China and Russia.
The history of US-Cuban relations since 1962 shows that a quid pro quo is a non-starter for US-Cuban policy changes (William LeoGrande, Michael Erisman, Peter Kornbluh, and other Cuban scholars and experts). The US lacks leverage to insist on a quid pro quo. The government of Cuba will simply continue on its present course without the United States, just as it did when it turned to strategic relationships with the Soviet Union, then Venezuela, and now possibly China and Russia. The Obama administration understood this when it enacted essentially unilateral changes in US policies. The goal was to engage Cuba and over time create dependencies that could eventually provide both leverage for future quid pro quo political changes and encourage change from within Cuba.
In the past few months, Cuba has engaged in some significant economic reforms that bode well for changes in US policy by Biden. These reforms include the devaluation of the peso on January 1; the phasing out of the CUC by June of this year; a reorganization of the monetary system; and some deregulation of state businesses and their ability to attract foreign investment. Just recently President Miguel Diaz-Canel announced that small private businesses will now be able to open in most business sectors. Currently there are only 127 sectors that allow private businesses. This reform will expand this to more than 2000 sectors. On the negative side, the economy is suffering from less tourism, a lack of oil, and high inflation. It is also dealing with the COVID pandemic.
This Friday (April 16), the Eighth Communist Party Congress will begin and Raul Castro will step down as the First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, the most powerful political position on the island. It is widely expected that President Miguel Diaz-Canel will replace him. Within just a few years, the revolutionary generation of Castro will no longer hold a veto over substantive change in Cuba and the post-revolutionary generation, led by Diaz-Canel, will be freer to possibly enact both political and economic reforms (see my essay on Miguel Diaz-Canel on my blog dated April 1, 2018). Engagement now by the US will create relationships with the new generation of Cuban leadership. On the negative side, the recent crackdown on protests by artists, musicians, and other performers in the Havana-based San Isidro Movement plays into the hands of US hardliners and works against policy changes by Biden. The publicity garnered by the recently ended hunger strike by Jose Daniel Ferrer of the Patriotic Union of Cuba in Santiago de Cuba also does not help the Biden administration move toward engagement. (See the dissident website 14ymedio.com - this site is led by Yoani Sanchez, a dissident living in Cuba. Some of you will remember her book that I assigned in my class on Cuba.)
With this in mind, there are key areas in US policy that need to be addressed in the short term. US-Cuban policy must be separated from US policy in Venezuela and Biden should reverse Trump’s designation of Cuba as a state-sponsor of terrorism. Waivers for Title 3 of the Helms Burton Act should be restored and there should be a move to return to a fully functioning US embassy in Havana. There should be an end to sanctions against emergency medicine and humanitarian assistance to the island from the United States. US-Cuban policy level and inter-agency groups dealing with weather and environmental issues, counterterrorism, cybercrime, narcotics, navigation services, maritime security, human trafficking, disaster risk reduction, oil spill prevention and response, and coast security need to be restored as soon as possible. Finally, it should restart negotiations to facilitate the closure of the US military base at Guantanamo Bay.
There is a scholarly and Cuban policy maker consensus that the US embargo against Cuba has been a complete failure. It has only served to isolate the US. The Biden administration should not waste any political capital on the embargo in the short term unless the balance of power in the Senate moves dramatically in favor of the Democratic Party. At the same time, the administration should move to change the nature of the policy making environment concerning Cuba. One of the primary problems is that the arguments against the embargo and other hardline policies toward Cuba are rarely made or heard in public. The Biden administration should begin to provide a public relations platform for the hundreds US business that are on record in favor of the re-opening of trade and investment opportunities in Cuba. It should enlist Cuban experts, think tanks, and CEOs of US companies to contribute OpEd pieces in major newspapers and social media platforms and to participate in discussion forums that explain the reasons why openly engaging with Cuba is good for both the US and Cuba. It should invite Cuban officials and scholars to contribute to these public discussions. The more than 80 House Democrats who favor engagement with Cuba should use their access to the media to explain their positions. The US should abstain from rather than opposing the annual vote in the UN General Assembly that condemns the US embargo.
At some point, there should be, at the least, internal discussions about revisiting the idea of a Cuban Consulate in Florida. The logical place is Miami but political opposition to this is quite strong in the immediate aftermath of Trump administration. The other option is Tampa which is much more willing to engage Cuba. Placing a consulate in Tampa will eventually overcome the political opposition to one in Miami.
While the Biden administration has greater priorities than Cuba, it must end the worst of the Trump administration policies and begin to cultivate a public environment to support a policy of engagement.
For more on the history of Cuba and US relations with Cuba, see my book The History of Cuba (2nd edition, 2015, ABC-CLIO).
Comments