The US embargo on Cuba — or what is left of it after US President Barack Obama’s dramatic Cuba policy announcement — may be a futile gesture. But it is, or was, not an empty gesture. It put the US firmly on record that it would have as little as possible to do with a regime whose misdeeds have included inviting Soviet nuclear weapons onto its soil, sponsoring violent guerrilla groups throughout the Western Hemisphere, harbouring fugitives from US justice and — last but certainly not the least — systematically trampling its citizens’ most basic rights.
In place of this clear position, Obama has taken a stance that is more nuanced morally but, he assures us, more efficacious practically. He may be right, too — if you believe that this administration, or its successors, will have the diplomatic smarts, and the attention span, to manoeuvre the Castro regime into letting its people have more freedom. Count me among the sceptics. As Obama’s former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner used to enjoy saying, “Plan beats no plan” — and Havana has more of a plan than Washington.
To be sure, President Raul Castro is in a world of trouble, what with his failing economy and the likelihood that declining oil prices will force Havana’s Venezuelan sponsors to reduce their subsidies. The one thing he does have is a clear goal: Keeping himself and Cuba’s Communist elite in power and a time-tested approach for doing so by permitting the minimum economic and political liberalisation consistent with total control, and nothing more.
Greater engagement with the US does pose risks to the regime, not the least of which is that incoming tourists and businessmen will start to erode a pervasive system of social and political control. But Cuba’s authorities have years of experience manipulating foreign investors from Latin America, Canada and Europe and with controlling Cubans’ interactions with foreign visitors, who tend to be more interested in exploiting the local population than liberating it.
And on the plus side for Havana, Obama’s measures, particularly greater remittances from US-based Cubans, promise to bring much-needed hard currency to the perennially cash-strapped island. By contrast, Obama not only abandoned long-standing US policy, he also denounced it, giving the regime a huge propaganda victory. “Long weeks of cheers and victory cries await us,” dissident journalist Yoani Sanchez observed ruefully.
The president traded these valuables for the wrongly imprisoned American Alan Gross — but no verifiable, irreversible democratic reform on Cuba’s part. To the contrary, Obama came dangerously close to endorsing the argument by Raul and his brother, Fidel, that there is a binary choice between status quo and chaos.
“It does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba towards collapse,” the president said. “Even if that worked — and it hasn’t for 50 years — we know from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos.”
In describing the reforms he does support, the president was vague: In particular, he made no forthright demand for free elections, just freedom for Cubans to “participate in the political process”, a right the Castros already claim to guarantee.
Instead, Obama spoke more loosely of “empowering Cubans to build an open and democratic country”, with the help of greater remittances from their stateside relatives, more contact with US travellers and businesses and so on. Raul can live with that. He knows that when the hoopla over last week’s big policy move is over, when Obama has finished collecting kudos from foreign policy mavens who have been clamouring for a more “rational” US policy towards Cuba, Obama and most of the rest of the officials in Washington will move on to other things.
Meanwhile, Castro and his fellow military officers will remain in firm control of the political and economic levers of power in Cuba, including the little things — jobs, visas, building permits, export and import licenses, court cases — that really determine whether and how Cubans and Americans get to interact and how much freedom seeps in to the deeply traumatised society.
Castro can look forward to dealing with second-tier US diplomats, torn between their belief in democracy and the bureaucratic imperative to keep their bosses’ “engagement” project on track. When needed, a new Cuba lobby in Washington will help explain why it would be counterproductive to press Havana for immediate reform.
If this scenario sounds familiar, it is because it has already worked for China and Vietnam, with which the US once made war, but now does business. As Obama noted last Wednesday, American policy towards Cuba is now more consistent with its policy towards those unfree states. For better or worse.
— Washington Post
