THE UNITED STATES AND CUBA: STRAINED ENGAGEMENT William M. LeoGrande School of Public Affairs American University Washington, DC [email protected] Prepared for Presentation at the Latin American Studies Association 2004 Congress, Las Vegas, Nevada, October 7-9, 2004. ©All rights reserved. THE UNITED STATES AND CUBA: STRAINED ENGAGEMENT William M. LeoGrande School of Public Affairs Amerian University Washington, DC At each other’s throats for the past 45 years, Cuba and the United States remain, in the words of a former head of the American Interest Section in Havana, “the closest of enemies.” 1 Since 1898, with one exception, no relationship has been more important for Cuba than its relationship with the United States. From the Bay of Pigs to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba’s partnership with the Moscow took Washington’s place. But when the Cold War ended, so too did the geographically implausible triangular relationship between Cuba and the two superpowers, leaving Cuba alone once again to confront what José Martí called the “turbulent and brutal North.” 2 Since George W. Bush became president, the Cuban and U.S. governments have not had much direct interaction, other than trading invective. Like hostile next-door neighbors who have built a tall fence between their properties, they rarely see one another, but delight in hurling insults back and forth. This is hardly a new development. Although Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter sought to normalize relations with Cuba in the 1970s, their efforts faltered over Cuba’s support for liberation struggles in Africa. No U.S. president since has made a serious effort to negotiate normalization. With U.S. foreign policy adopting a more aggressive posture toward adversaries under the mantle of the war on terrorism, U.S. Cuban-relations appear destined to get worse before they got better. Yet despite the persistent hostility between the two countries, the relationship is by no means static. The end of the Cold War set off a cascade of significant changes in U.S. interests, Cuban interests, and the domestic political dynamics that shape policy on both sides of the Florida Straits. Before 1991, Cuba’s partnership with the Soviet Union and ideological antagonism toward the United States made it a security issue for Washington. Aiding revolutionaries in Latin America, sending troops to Africa, denouncing global capitalism in the Nonaligned Movement--at every juncture, Cuba stood opposed to U.S. foreign policy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, any plausible Cuban threat evaporated. The troops came home from Africa, Cuba stopped promoting revolution in Latin America, military ties to Moscow were severed, and even the Russian intelligence facility at Lourdes was closed. Castro continued to denounce global capitalism, especially as manifested in U.S. proposals for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), but Cuba was no longer seen as a model by the underdeveloped world. By the mid-1990s, virtually all U.S. security concerns about Cuba were gone, yet Washington’s antagonism remained undiminished. As the security issue faded from the U.S. agenda, the promotion of democracy rose to replace it. The idea that U.S. foreign policy should promote democracy has a long pedigree, but it was eclipsed during most of the Cold War by the realist argument that security and the balance of power were preeminent concerns. When the end of the Cold War made containment irrelevant as an organizing principle for foreign policy, democracy promotion emerged as a consensus alternative. George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all embraced this new aim, though not (as China policy demonstrated) to the exclusion of more traditional economic and security interests. In Cuba, however, where security concerns were nil and potential economic interests modest, the promotion of democracy became a key element in the revised agenda of U.S. demands. This shift in the U.S. rationale made normalization even more 2 difficult, because Washington was now demanding not just an end to objectionable Cuban behavior abroad but to the very character of the socialist state. There were countervailing forces, however. As the Cuban economy integrated into global markets and opened up to foreign direct investment, the potential economic benefit for the U.S. business community came into clearer focus. By the late 1990s, a growing lobby of farm interests, travel and entertainment companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers were working for a relaxation of U.S. policy. In addition, the Cuban-American community was changing with the regular flow of new immigrants whose reasons for departure were more economic than political. That, plus the aging of the original exile generation, produced a more heterogenous Cuban-American community with more heterodox politics. Commerce Trumps Anti-Communism: The Eroding Power of the Cuba Lobby The explanation for the persistence of the Cold War in the Caribbean lay in U.S. domestic politics, in particular, the considerable political clout of the conservative Cuban- American lobby. In the early 1970s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Assistant Secretary for Latin America William D. Rogers could contemplate normalizing relations with Cuba, confident they would face no domestic opposition of any consequence except perhaps some demonstrative acts by Cuban exile terrorists. 3 No president since has enjoyed that luxury. The political and financial power of conservative Cuban-Americans, organized most effectively in the 1980s by Jorge Mas Canosa in the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), gave the community virtual veto power over U.S. policy. Wealthy, well-organized, single-minded, and strategically concentrated in the key electoral states of Florida and New Jersey, Cuban-Americans dominated the issue field. Foundation directors and their political 3 action committee, the Free Cuba PAC, contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to dozens of sympathetic Congressional and presidential candidates in each election cycle--a total of several million dollars since 1979. 4 Any public official who even hinted at a policy of engagement with Cuba came under attack. When Senator Lowell Weicker (R-Conn) traveled to Cuba in October 1980, met with Castro, and returned to advocate normalizing relations, CANF made an example of him by working diligently, and successfully, to defeat him for reelection. 5 Jorge Mas Canosa's ready access to Congress and even to the White House was testimony to CANF's success at positioning itself as the voice of Cuban-Americans. 6 Although polls showed that a majority of the U.S. public in the 1980s and 1990s continued to favor normalization of relations with Cuba, the issue was not highly salient. 7 No domestic group stood to reap any significant gain from a relaxation of relations with Cuba, at least in the short term, so there was no countervailing constituency to the Cuba Lobby. Successive presidents have followed the path of least political resistance by leaving the policy of hostility in place. The first crack in the Cuban-American right’s policy dominance was the embargo’s loss of legitimacy after the Cold War. Without a national security rationale, the embargo looked less and less justified. In light of Cuba’s economic hardship, it looked downright cruel. When it included food and medicine, the embargo against Cuba constituted the most severe sanctions Washington maintained against any country in the world, including countries with notably worse human rights records (such as Indonesia and Afghanistan under the Taliban) and reputed terrorist states (such as Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein). Every year since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution calling on Washington to end the embargo, in 2002 by the largest margin ever: 173-3 with four abstentions. 4 The suffering endured by ordinary Cubans during this crisis prompted a significant humanitarian response in the United States. A number of new and existing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) launched relief projects, including Pastors for Peace (which refused on principal to seek the required licenses from the U.S. Treasury Department), U.S.+Cuba Medical Project, Madre, and Catholic Relief Services (CRS). From 1992 to 2001, the Treasury Department granted licenses for $334 million in humanitarian medical assistance. 8 Except for CRS, these NGOs combined their direct aid campaigns with popular education projects aimed at mobilizing public opinion against the embargo on humanitarian grounds. In Congress, Democrats introduced legislation to exempt sales of food and medicine from the embargo, arguing that U.S. policy aggravated the shortages in Cuba, especially of medicine. Despite their undiminished hatred of Fidel Castro, Cuban-Americans were also moved by the plight of their brethren, and responded by increasing the flow of in-kind assistance and cash remittances. Cuban-Americans had been sending such aid ever since 1978, when family visits were first authorized by the U.S. and Cuban governments. The growth of in-kind assistance was slow during the 1980s, however, because the Cuban government sharply curtailed the number of Cuban-American visitors after the 1980 Mariel boatlift crisis, and mail service was unreliable. Getting cash to Cuba faced similar obstacles, and until 1993, it was illegal for Cubans to hold U.S. currency, so dollars could only be used on the black market. Nevertheless, by 1990, rough estimates of the cash remittances being sent to Cuba totaled about $150-200 million annually. 9 Desperate to acquire hard currency, the government legalized the holding of dollars in 1993 so that it could capture part of the remittances stream. By 1994, the estimated value of private cash transfers to Cuba had risen to $500 million a year. 10 5 Conservatives in the Cuban-American community, led by CANF, initially opposed sending remittances on the grounds that they helped Castro stabilize the economy and therefore prolonged his rule.