US Policy Towards Cuba: Another Roll of the Dice?
May 20, 2022 |
Politics often pushes each other. He
takes action because he has no choice, forced by circumstances. It is more
like a ship on the high seas, which weathers the storm, and tries to continue
without letting go of ballast, because it is difficult for it.
All policies have a conservative premise,
consistent in following the course they were leading. Except when the
turbulence is coming up, and there is no way to circumnavigate it, and course
changes are imposed. Sometimes those course changes precipitate actions
that go further, and that push the ship through unexpected seas.
To imagine that behind each new direction
there is a change plan that is followed as a map is to ignore its
nature. Even when there are contingency plans, circumstances force
politics to operate without all the elements at hand, that is, half-blindly,
making decisions that feed off each other or are denied, in continuous trial
and error. Paying the costs, or offsetting them with the benefits, or
claiming that this avoids higher costs. But especially trying to weather
crises, which contain a quota of what is expressed in English as hazard :
risk, danger, and therefore threat.
Like all those previous times, the Cuban
government has maneuvered to promote an exit at the negotiating table. As is
known, since the post-cold war here, Cuba ceased to be among the critical
issues in its global foreign policy, as are national security issues. And
uncontrolled migration is one of those issues for the US, because it represents
a hazard . Not for nothing is a powerful Department
of Homeland Security in charge of it.
Despite the continuous invocation of human
rights, nothing in the White House's package of measures towards Cuba can be
explained from that logic. Since the migration crisis is a premise and the
center of US interest right now, the cooperation of the Cuban government is
imperative. To achieve this, they have no other choice but to go back on
the most sensitive part of their harassment during the last 5-odd years: the
obstacles to Cuban travel and remittances.
Once they are forced to open the window with
Cuba, to negotiate the reactivation of the migratory agreement, some other
pending topics sneak in: visits by North Americans under general license,
including group people-to-people visits; direct flights to
provinces; visas for visits (B1 and B2) with multiple entries (five
years). And others are added, which had never existed, such as direct
banking operations to private entrepreneurs; and direct remittances to
Cuban banking institutions. Those with the banks favor, in the medium
term, expanding economic relations.
What other elements of judgment do these
measures contribute in relation to the factors that govern the policy towards
Cuba?
Despite the much talked about feud from Miami
and from Congress, this package contradicts it, once again. Although since
the end of the 1990s, commentators, media outlets, experts here and there have
often repeated that the policy towards Cuba is dictated by the right-wing
Cuban-American lobby in Florida, this repeated thesis has served more as a
perfect justification for all the administrations that they don't want to spend
the political capital required to loosen a 60-year ballast.
The proof is that Bob Menéndez, chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who a few days ago was something like
the Colossus of Rhodes, who would not let a pin pass in favor of Cuba, has now
become less than expendable. Marco Rubio himself, who attacks Biden for
taking "the first steps towards Obama's policies on Cuba", rebels
against the priority that the White House gives to the search for a negotiated
solution to the immigration problem.
Rubio is not alone. Some analysts seem to
attribute the causes of this step forward to a kind of latent Obamaism that
survives among veterans from 2009-2016, participants in this Biden
administration. One would have to ask where these lags come to light and
what can cause them. Looking at the many things of the first magnitude
that fill your hands only in foreign policy (Russia-Ukraine, the Taiwan issue
with China, the nuclear dispute with Iran, the global international trade
agenda), is it reasonable that the fulfillment of your “bell
promises” Regarding reversing Trump's measures against Cuba, can this be
the lever for this package of new measures? Is it that there are marches
in Hialeah demanding that compliance? Does a Democratic victory in the
next elections in Florida really depend on those Cuban-Americans?
In any case, it is a fact that the opening to
travel benefits Cuban-Americans and their relatives here. If we go by the
polls, that “silent majority” on the side over there changes its public
position regarding the blockade or normalization (what it dares to say to
pollsters when they ask it on the phone), depending on whether the administration
moves in favor or against these topics. So we might expect the polls
not only to favor travel and remittances, but to reestablish their disposition
in favor of normalization and against the blockade. Which would be very
plausible, if only as a consequence, not a cause, of this package.
Finally, what can this decision mean in the
perspective of the next Summit of the Americas? To what extent can it be
dressed as a "sand" that compensates for "lime" aimed at
excluding Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela?
What new space does it open to the countries
that have made their participation depend on the reversal of that
exclusion? How does it affect advancing a US-Cuba-ALyC* triangular
framework? What role can that triangle have in continuing to push normalization? To
what extent could it prevail over other more sensitive triangles, such as those
with China or Russia at their vertices, in a strategic perspective for the
US? Too early to tell, I'd
say.
Returning to the foreseeable consequences of
the package of measures, as it stands right now, and without falling into
further speculation, a horizon can be envisioned in realistic
terms. Although there is no plan in motion equivalent to a return to
Obama's policy, the multiplier effects that the implementation of these measures
may have are not negligible. Despite the fact that many continue to see it
only in economic numbers, the reopening of the communicating vessel represented
by US visitors constitutes a permanent bridge of what Ho Chi Minh called
people-to-people diplomacy, whose political effect on US society is difficult.
exaggerate.
We'll see.
(the comments reveal much about the debate in Cuba)
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