Cuba-United States relations for beginners (I)
One thing is each one’s respectable opinion and another, quite different, is to understand the nature of these relations.
Rafael HernándezbyRafael Hernández June 25, 2020 in Opinion
Cubans can confess ignorance in epidemiology or meteorology, but not about Cuba-United States relations. Perhaps nothing brings them so together on the same side―including those who don’t agree with the system―as that historical tension between a North that has sought to prevail at all costs, and a country determined not to let itself be dominated, at all costs.
If that were a trait of thinking as a country, surely it would be necessary to feel proud of a civic conscience. After all, as a history teacher friend says, “we are political animals” who have no choice but to opine on “a matter that concerns us.”
Here comes the basic idea (or the “theoretical framework,” as they used to say in the past at the University of Havana) of this conversation: one thing is each one’s respectable opinion and another, quite different, is to understand the nature of these relations.
Let’s assume that it is a couple in marital conflict. Those who care, are interested in and think about them don’t have to understand what is happening to them; opining hardly expresses “knowing,” for example, which of them “is right.” But the conflict itself, as Carl C. Jung would explain to us, is more than that. It isn’t as simple as among other beings in the natural world, say, the wolf and the sheep or the shark and the squid. Nothing compares to a conflict between human beings, especially if they live under the same roof, or almost.
Slipping by that same condition of human beings, some consider that Cuba’s relations with the United States are one of hate/love. Surely they refer to the many tastes Cubans share with American society and culture: baseball, jazz and rock, rumba and salsa, movies, swing, household gadgets, cars, etc. When comparing Cubans with other Latin Americans, probably an impartial third eye would find us closer to the gringos (pejorative Mexicanism), whom Cuban speech calls (affectionately) yumas (for that western, with Glenn Ford).
So how can you fight to the death with such yumas? The conflict, naturally, is not with the Americans, nor is it hate/love or Eros and Thanatos, as Jung would say, but with their nation-state and successive governments. Although the idea would seem most reasonable and accepted by all, the personalization of the conflict continues as if nothing had happened. Attributing character traits to political power is equivalent, for example, to diluting the role of president of the United States in a certain personality: authoritarian, sexist, brute, narcissistic, slanderous, arrogant, stupid; or if you prefer, smiling, collectivist and affable, friend of immigrants, war-abolishing, “dialoguer” and social-civilist. There are people like that or who bear that image, although they don’t always deserve it.
In any case, attributes of this type don’t explain, say, that the German nation followed Hitler. To consider Nazism as the collective madness unleashed by a psychiatric leader or, on the contrary, by the good man adorned by a paragon of virtues, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the embodiment of justice, totally lacks explanatory power, if it’s about politics. Otherwise, it will be difficult to understand that Donald Trump ends his mandate without having programmed (firmly) the dropping of several atomic bombs on another great nation (as FDR did); or that the brave civil rights fighter Bob Kennedy had something to do with paramilitary actions, incendiary bombs, machine-gunned farmers and fishermen in cities and fields on the island. “Nothing personal, just business,” as Vito Andolini, a native of Corleone, Sicily, would say.
Deciphering the reason of State from morality is not understanding it, Niccolo Machiavelli said to Lorenzo de Medici. Of course, that reason of State can be very cynical and atrocious, but you don’t gain much by simply condemning it, if it were to reason about it and glimpse what it proposes. Yes, because understanding a conflict between nation-states, like almost anything else, is measured by the ability to calculate what should come next, even if it isn’t in the extreme of “the possible,” but in the range of “the probable.”
In order not to constantly make mistakes in what is coming, and to identify the factors that keep the conflict alive, it is useful to begin by understanding the nature of politics: that of the United States, that of Cuba, that of any country. As almost always happens with the black box part of all processes, it is normal that there aren’t enough facts. “In politics, what is real is what cannot be seen,” Martí tells us.
This lack of clarity gives rise to all kinds of superficialities, particularly those that are built on “politics is conspiracy” and “politics is concentrated ideology.” In other words: “The twin towers were downed by the CIA,” “Cuban State Security must have known about the sonic attacks (those were the North Koreans),” “it’s impossible for a black man to be president,” “if The New York Times, CNN and all the mainstream media are against him, how can he beat Hillary?”.… Of course there are conspiracies and ideologies, but the architecture of politics is not revealed by the Da Vinci Code, speeches or editorials nowhere, but the dynamics of interests and values. Forgetting it involves making mistakes over and over again, as can be seen.
Hence, Cuba-U.S. relations in the last 60 years, crossed as they have been by all kinds of conspiracies and ideological polarities, are only rationally explained if it is known that they have always included dialogue, understanding and cooperation. As Leogrande and Kornbluh demonstrate, based on declassified documents, the Cuban leadership did not stop responding to any U.S. signal to dialogue, negotiate or agree on anything of common interest, without excluding the most tenacious Republican administrations: Nixon-Kissinger, Reagan, G.H. Bush and G.W. Bush.
This means that conflict and cooperation have not taken place in a linear sequence, which led to cooperation when the Interests Sections were established (1977) or diplomatic normalization was agreed on 17D (2014), rather, they have accompanied relations, and they have almost always acted in parallel, with contradictory and zigzagging results. Appreciating relations in this way allows us to recognize their complexity, instead of attributing the contradictions to the classic god mounted on a machine that descends through a window. It is not an aberration; it’s that way and probably still is.
With these conditions, and to make a pause in this talk without a didactic purpose (and without rushing to meet the teaching program), it would be necessary to return to the nature of the conflict.
If it was triggered by the Agrarian Reform Law (May 1959), just five months after the taking over power, when the Soviet Union didn’t fully understand what was happening in Cuba, and the Popular Socialist Party still called it “the January revolution,” the cause of everything was the expropriation of the United Fruit’s large estates? Is that the egg of the huge conflict? What came next, the spiral that led to the civil war, the organized violence on the Bay of Pigs scale, months before the nationalizations of the summer and October 1960, was it because of those first expropriations? Was it the anti-communism of a Cuban upper class and an American government that saw the hammer and sickle silhouette behind any moderate reform? Is there an explanation that goes beyond listing “nationalizations” and attributing the root cause to “imperialist ideology”?
This, which may seem like a history lesson, is key to understanding the conflict here and now, and also to thinking about its horizon, as will be seen very soon.
https://oncubanews.com/en/opinion/cuba-united-states-relations-for-beginners-i/
Cuba-U.S. relations
for beginners (II)
What has happened between Cuba and the U.S. is closer to a
novel, whose plot becomes more complicated in each chapter.
“Cuban blacks look directly into the eyes of whites,” noted an
impressed U.S. visitor in 1907: “To the American at home, the negro as a
social, political or even industrial equal is an affront, an offence, nothing
less; to the Cuban he is not. It is because in Cuba the negro…is not everywhere
confronted and made hard in thought and feeling…. Schools, churches, theatres,
hotels, baths, street-cars, steamers, all are the black man’s and white man’s
alike.”
This is how R. L. Bullard described the differences
between Cubans and Americans, in The North American Review, less
than five years before the massacre of the Independent Party of Color.
Obviously, this U.S. army lieutenant colonel’s vision of interracial relations
in Cuba was not that of a Cuban who lived on the island, and even less that of
an anthropologist or sociologist. Usually, those who come to visit look at
things with the glasses they bring. However, even if it is an idealization of
Cuba as a “racial democracy,” when looking at it with the polarized lenses of
the United States, this military officer did not only reflect the remarkable
differences between the two sides.
GIF
Bullard: How Cubans differ from
us Americans.
Even today some Americans seem puzzled to discover that, compared
to the U.S., where a drop of African or “Latino” (Hispanic, in the Census
jargon) blood disqualifies them as white, in Cuba, whoever “seems white”
automatically is so on paper. In fact, you may not even be black or white, but
mulatto, for centuries. That mulatto (formerly “brown”), however, appear today
in official documents as “mestizo,” a census category that does not exist in
the U.S., but is present in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Naturally, no category or generic term exhausts the representations
about skin color and somatic features that really exist in Cuban society, which
the anthropologist Jesús Guanche took the trouble to compile in a list of 20
“popular phenotypes.”1 Compared to this, the U.S. categories are
rather bland.
The weight of the American in the construction of Cuban identity,
recognized by Fernando Ortiz in his theory of the melting pot, has been
thoroughly documented in works such as those of the great historian Louis Pérez
Jr., in the same way as the unusual weight of Cuba in the northern imagination,
since the 18th century, as well as in the monumental collection and editions of
Emilio Cueto. That Cuban-American space is not only symbolic, but so tangible
that it allowed blacks and whites from both sides to play for the first time on
the same baseball field, decades before Jackie Robinson did so in the United
States.
This meeting between societies, essential to understand Cuba-U.S.
relations, has always been made up of multiple layers and nuances, which
permeate not only the mutual perceptions below, but also above. Seen with
lenses from the North, Cubans have lacked, for example, any appreciation for
the rule of law, according to an influential reporter in 1917: “We have given
them the great gift of freedom and constitutional government, but we have never
taught them how to use them…. Our responsibilities therefore do not end in
giving Cuba the forms and titles of freedom. We have to help keep Cuba libre,
saving Cubans from themselves.”2
Why this “heavy burden of the white man” about Cuba―among all the
lands in the world―for the United States? How to explain its excessive space in
the American mind, before the Soviet threat, the cold war, communist
totalitarianism and other abominations emerged? Will it be the quintessential imperialist
ideology? The monopoly interests of corporations? Recurring racism? The evil
condition of its rulers?
The explanation for this comes from a founder: “I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.” This is how Thomas Jefferson explained that “good spirit that loved freedom and instilled strength in sleepy people” (according to Martí) to President Monroe, anticipating 75 years of military intervention on the island, and what we modernly call geopolitics.
In the summer of 1960, American oil companies did not like the
idea of refining Russian oil. But they were willing to do it. It was the
Secretary of the Treasury who let them know that they should not accept it, in
the best interest of the United States, as Ambassador Philip Bonsal himself
regrets in his memoirs. What followed was the application of Cuban law from
before 1959: the companies were nationalized. That fact, naturally, gave a
boost to the spiral of U.S. sanctions already underway, and led to the conflict
with the massive nationalizations in October of that year.
However, it was not those nationalizations that brought bilateral
relations into a collision course. The CIA’s 500-man infiltration plan devised
in late 1959, which Eisenhower officially stamped in March 1960 (when they
already reached 1,400), was under development almost a year earlier, with
Operation Pluto, better known later as the Bay of Pigs invasion. So the
Treasury Secretary’s orientation was part of a hot war that dragged Esso and
Texaco with it, not the other way around.
This detailed sequence illustrates that neither the
nationalizations nor the strengthening of relations with the Soviets determined
the plan to forcibly sweep away the Revolution, but a geopolitical reason, not only
reducible, incidentally, to an ideology, to an imperialist vocation and less to
a presidential personality. The logic that hierarchized the geostrategic
environment was joined to the idea of preserving, to put it in Jeffersonian
terms, “the political well-being” of the United States.
Of course, the definition of this well-being and the means used to
achieve it are not insignificant. Politics is precisely about identifying the
national interest and choosing the means to achieve it. So changing these means,
even if it is to try to achieve the same goals, is significant. I mean, except
for those who don’t see differences between aircraft carriers and cruise ships.
A discourse that does not pay attention to these distinctions is equivalent to
that of a physicist who, in order to differentiate similar elements or
isotopes, some stable and others very unstable or radioactive, prefers a
watercolor rather than a spectroscope (and paints them more or less the same).
Recognizing geopolitical reason is also not equivalent to
admitting the droit de seigneur of a great power over a certain space where
others live. The same reason advises precisely to compensate the geopolitical
imbalance, for example, through a policy of alliances. When it became clear―to
the Cuban government and to the large landowners―that the United States was
irritated more over the style of that Revolution than even at its moderate
reforms; when it was clear that something was going to go wrong between the
two, once again, the young government launched its ambassadors around the
world, looking for allies, wherever they could be found. “It was a mistake to
ally with the USSR and communism” is a phrase repeated ad nauseam, as if Cuba
had too many open doors at the time. What some dismiss as an irrepressible
ideological drive―in Cold War jargon, “exporting the Revolution” and “becoming
a Soviet beachhead”―occurred amid a critical political situation of survival.
The private conversation that Che and Richard Goodwin had four
months after the Bay of Pigs invasion is quite well known, where he had the
impression that “Cuba wanted an understanding with the United States.” Less is
known about some details of this dialogue. According to the report of the JFK
senior adviser, Che stated that Cuba was willing to compensate the companies
nationalized the year before (“by commercial means”), not to establish
political alliances with the socialist bloc (although they did maintain
relations and express sympathies) and suggested that they would accept “even
discussing the issue of the activities of the Cuban Revolution in other
countries.” For Goodwin, Che only set a limit: the Cubans were not going to
discuss “any formula that implied abandoning the type of society they were
dedicated to.”
In order to respond to this olive branch offered by none other
than Che Guevara, Goodwin recommended to JFK emphasizing economic warfare,
“direct sabotage activities against key sectors of the economy,” carry out
unannounced military maneuvers, “continue and raise the level of covert
actions” and “create a Security Pact in the Caribbean,” that antagonizes the
“psychology of peaceful coexistence that Castro is trying to create” and can
“serve as a screen for some of our activities.”3
When looking closely at this fact, one cannot help but wonder what
would have happened if the U.S. had sat down to talk with a government so
threatened, in the midst of a civil war situation, that nevertheless responded
with an olive branch. What would have happened is not a waste
of time, both to those who present the Revolution as a kind of syntactic error
in the grammar of History, as to those who believe, on the contrary, that this
story springs from an invisible hand that writes with a single calligraphy,
almost like dictation.
For those liners on both sides, what has happened between Cuba and
the United States is a tragedy or an epic, when in reality it is closer to a
novel, whose plot becomes more complicated in each chapter.
It is somewhat rare that Cuba “exported the Revolution” and, at
the same time, orbited as a “satellite of the USSR,” when the Soviets never
really liked “Cuban guerrilla adventures” in Latin America and Africa. In any
case, if those were the two engines driving the Cuba-U.S. conflict, the
“exporting the Revolution” to Africa and Central America ended in the late
1980s and the USSR ceased to exist in the early 1990s.
Thus, the enigma seems to be: what has kept that plane flying,
with its two engines not working? Perhaps it was that the core of the conflict
was really, paraphrasing the limit drawn at that meeting in Punta del Este, in
“the type of society to which [Cubans] were devoted.” In other words, the
system itself.
If so, does it means then that it is not geopolitics, but Cuban
domestic policy that is the real source of the conflict? Or that, on the other
hand, that source has moved from Washington to South Florida? Would it mean,
then, that the course of relations depends on how the changes are moving on the
island? Or rather from a squad of uncompromising Cuban-American congressmen who
keep the antagonism alive?
If an effort were made to understand the present and the future as
the flow of a complicated history, and not just like that “bilateral dispute”
that some repeat, the first thing would be to identify the basic questions to
have a glimpse of the horizon of those relations, behind the opinions that
cloud it. What these questions are would require a moment’s pause.
Notes
1. Jesús
Guanche, “Etnicidad y racialidad en la Cuba actual.” Temas # 7, 1996.
2. George Marvin, “Keeping Cuba
Libre,” World’s Work, Sept. 1917, p. 553-67.
3.
Memorandum for the President, Dick Goodwin, “Conversation with
Comandante Ernesto Guevara of Cuba,” August 22, 1961. Classified SECRET.
Declassified on 8/8/94.
https://oncubanews.com/en/cuba-usa/cuba-u-s-relations-for-beginners-ii/
Cuba-U.S. relations
for beginners (III)
Perhaps the darkest side of the recalcitrant Cuban-American
group is not the preaching of hatred or the real damage it may cause to the
understanding between the governments of the United States and Cuba, but its
capacity to dominate the political culture of emigration.
in Opinion
Where did one of the
architects of President Kennedy’s main program for Latin America, godfather of
the Alliance for Progress, come from in 1961? In what hands did Ronald Reagan
(1981-88) and George W. Bush (2001-2008) place their most important offices for
the western hemisphere: those that coordinated the contra war in Nicaragua in
the 1980s, and in the Department of State during the failed coup against Hugo
Chávez in 2002? Who did Clinton and Obama pick for second position in the
Department of Defense bureaucracy toward the region? What led George W. Bush to
choose his commerce secretary in his second term? What is the reason for
President Trump’s proposal for the presidency of the Inter-American Development
Bank?
The answers to all
these questions have one ingredient in common: it’s a Cuban-American. More
exactly, one that is opposed to the government and the prevailing economic,
political and social order in Cuba.
Now, if it’s a
question of U.S. policy towards the island, what would have to be clarified
would rather be to what extent the presence of Cuban-Americans in hierarchical
positions within Republican and Democratic administrations proves that this
policy is dictated by a pressure group entrenched in Miami. Or seen
differently, to what extent the command organs of that great power have been
penetrated by some Cuban-Americans who share the same ideological fixation,
with the evil purpose of “redirecting” it against the Cuban order.
The previous question
could give way to two questions: is the appointment of the aforementioned
decision-makers explained by the power of a Cuban-American lobby that
represents historical exile? Is it up to these distinguished Cuban-Americans to
engage or directly influence Cuba policy? What history reveals is not so.
Ernesto Betancourt, a former official at Banco Nacional de Cuba, was already a
technocrat for the Organization of American States (OAS) when he was chosen by
Kennedy advisers for the Alliance project. Otto Reich had served as a military,
business consultant, and administrator in USAID (US Agency for
International Development) for the region when he joined the Oliver North team, survived
the Iran-Contra scandal, and earned merit to be co-opted again by the
Republican diplomacy. Pedro Pablo Permuy and Frank Mora passed the revolving
door that gives congressional staffers and professors from military
universities access to inter-American positions in the Department of Defense,
thanks to the ebb and flow of Democratic administrations. Carlos Gutiérrez was
the CEO of Kellogg (the cornflakes one) when he was appointed to Commerce by George
W. Bush. Mauricio Claver-Carone held Treasury positions under that same
Republican presidency, long before Donald Trump noticed him, not precisely for
his anti-Cuban lobbying work in Congress, but during the electoral campaign in
Florida, and invited him to the transition team in a Republican administration
that had already raised the flag of reversing the entire Obama policy.
Certainly, in the
selection of U.S. government personnel to prevent “other Cubas” in the
hemisphere, in the 1960s and 1980s, the anti-Castro anti-communist harvest must
have had some weight in the Reich curriculum and especially of Betancourt.
Surely it was decisive when the director of Radio Martí had to be appointed in
the 1985-2000 period, or whoever co-chaired (with Condoleezza Rice) the
resounding Commission for Assistance
to a Free Cuba,
of which, by the way, nothing has been heard again since 2006. In any case,
they all served the government that employed them, not as representatives of
any Cuban-American lobby.
Until the early 1980s,
it never occurred to anyone to argue that the Bay of Pigs, the multilateral
embargo also known as a blockade, the October (or Missile) Crisis, the covert
operations plan called Mongoose, the insurgency that unleashed a bloody civil
war (1960-1965), the impunity of Omega 7, Alpha 66, CORU and other paramilitary
organizations in the 1970s or any of the other axes of hostility against the Revolution
responded to the power of a Cuban-American pressure group. Rather, they were
part of a policy of force, conceived, formulated and applied by the national
security command bodies, articulated in the National Security Council, where
the decisive levers of that relationship have resided since the beginning of
the conflict, above any of the congressional committees.
That, or rather, those
diverse Cuban-American interest groups were there when the United States and
Cuba sat down to negotiate peace in Southwest Africa in 1988, the migration
agreement in 1994-1995, the return of Elián González in 2000, the cooperation
in anticipation of an oil spill in Cuban waters, collaboration in the
interception of undocumented migrants and drug traffickers between the Coast
Guard and Border Patrol, the exchange of meteorological information, and other
practices throughout the 1990s and 2000s, including for two Republican terms.
They also preceded the exchange of prisoners and the restoration of diplomatic
relations on 17D 2014.
All those actions were
opposed in vain by that influential Cuban-American lobby that the media in
Miami and Havana identify, in unusual coincidence, as an efficient cause of the
Cuba policy.
What, then, was (and
is) the real power and role of these anti-Castro lobbies in American politics?
Their raison d’etre?
Take as a small
example the political action committee (PAC) chaired in Washington by Mauricio
Claver-Carone since 2003, with the title of US-Cuba Democracy PAC, whose stated
objectives have been “the transition to democracy, the rule of law and the free
market,” “opposing legislation that prolongs the Castro regime,” “defending the
Western Hemisphere against the threats of this regime” and “preparing the next
generation of Cuban democratic leaders.”
In its objectives and
means, this conspicuous PAC did nothing but follow in the footsteps of the
Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), which emerged 20 years before in the
shadow of the Reagan administration, and which patented the formula of “American-style”
local politics. In the footsteps of CANF, which incidentally lowered the flag
of the embargo in 2009, the formula of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC has
consisted, in its words, in “raising funds to distribute in the form
of political contributions to candidates nominated to the Congress of the
United States and those who oppose any economic measure that, directly or
indirectly, finances and prolongs the repressive machinery of the Castro regime
and that commit to supporting legislation that seeks to intensify support for
the internal opposition movement in Cuba.”
Measured by its
deployment on that panel of interest groups and capital flows that interweave
the curious fabric of democracy in the United States, this PAC has achieved
punctual achievements, as the CANF did before in the domain of the political
machinery of the south of Florida. However, not so much in its declared
objectives towards the island, that is, to change the regime, defend the
hemisphere from its threat (isolate it) and train new Cuban leaders. To put it
in baseball lingo, while they have made runs in the American political
championship under Republican administrations, they have failed to win a game
in the Cuban league.
Now, if it were
thought that this game doesn’t find its meaning in the terrain of Cuba here,
but that rather it’s a pennant to compete in that of domestic politics there,
in particular to dominate that of Florida and influence that of New Jersey, as
well as placing itself in the major league of foreign policy towards the
region, it would be seen more clearly, apart from its patriotic speeches, that
the logic is not so much that of an exile determined to return and take charge
of the island at an indefinite moment, but rather to manage a very specific
local industry called anti-Castroism, which produces political and financial
dividends.
If it were to be
imagined for a moment, let’s say that for heuristic purposes, that this
recalcitrant Cuban-American group had its hands firmly on the levers of the
policy towards Cuba and that its motivations were strictly ideological, then it
would not compromise for anything less than the stated requirements in title I
and II of the Helms-Burton Act, that is, the surrender and unconditional
transfer of decisions, according to its own program of reversal and dismantling
of everything established in Cuba.
In other words, this
scenario would not be limited to agreeing that everything called Revolution and
socialism has been a mistake, a deviation in the course of the nation’s life,
and to redeem the parties in a process of reconciliation and mutual confession
of guilt and forgiveness, as some imagine in the framework of the possible. On
its own terms, it would be a matter of approving those who are going to lead,
certifying the rules of a pure neoliberal economy, redesigning security and
defense institutions and, of course, recasting the status of relations with the
United States and a political system to ensure it.
Regardless of this
virtual scenario, and returning to the realm of real politics, perhaps the
darkest side of the recalcitrant Cuban-American group is not the preaching of
hatred or the real damage it may cause to the understanding between the
governments of the United States and Cuba, but its capacity to dominate the
political culture of emigration, stigmatize anyone who seeks understanding,
preserve anti-Castroism as a pattern of correct-correct political culture,
tighten the pegs of a silent majority that prefers normalization, but doesn’t
want to get mixed up in problems, as well as to offer arguments to those who,
on this side, are suspicious of dialogue with Cubans related to the national
interest of the United States. The main effect of this force is to rekindle the
anger and mistrust between the Cubans of the island and those of the
emigration.
The milestones that
this rapid time machine has recovered for our beginners’ chat, and that some
connoisseurs seem to avoid when they define the conflict as a “bilateral
dispute,” illustrate the role assigned to the “cadres” and the constituency of
historical exile for the region. Although in the long run they have been inept
for the purposes of the United States’ Cuba policy, they have been instrumental
in pursuing their goals in Latin America and the Caribbean.
An example of this
is the recent appointment of
Claver-Carone as
Trump’s candidate for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in order to
ensure “the leadership of the United States in important regional institutions
and the advancement of prosperity and security in the western hemisphere.” This
event also serves as a thermometer to measure the contradictory Latin American
situation with respect to the years of the cold war. Although a few governments
in the region have already aligned themselves with the Washington candidate, a
notable group of former Latin American presidents and former foreign ministers,
not exactly related to Cuban ideology, have expressed their joint rejection of the “proposed appointment of a U.S.
citizen in the IDB” and their dismay at “this new attack by the United States
government on the multilateral system based on rules agreed by member
countries.”
This last-minute
appointment, obviously not related to relations with Cuba, implies that
Trumpism, even if defeated in November, seeks to place in the inter-American
system cadres dedicated to continuing America First, a much more threatening
prospect for the hemisphere than the vicissitudes of the United States’
relations with the island, which, as is known, is not a member of the IDB, the
OAS, or the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Pact).
As can be seen, future
U.S.-Cuba relations, like past ones, continue to be played in several fields at
once, under the already indicated geopolitical arc.
How what happens
within Cuba affects the dynamics and the degree to which the Cuban government
modifies its policies, including the one applied during the Obama
administration, is something much more complex than a struggle over “Obamism”
or the supposed Cuban will to “implode” the course of normalization to what is
reduced by ideological visions on one side and on the other. Analyzing this
geopolitical complexity requires looking further.
