Between 1989 and 1991, the rapid cascade of events that brought down Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe delivered economic, psychological, geopolitical, and, some would say, nearly existential shocks to the Cuban system. Cuba had closely and skeptically watched the introduction of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, and many young Cuban students on scholarship in Moscow, East Berlin, Dresden, Prague, and Warsaw had even lived the openings and subsequent political shifts directly. Closer to home, ideological tides were shifting as well, as both Cuba and the United States played constructive behind-the-scenes roles in the peace processes bringing an end to guerrilla insurgencies in Central America. Simultaneously, Cuba watched with horror as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua agreed to an election, and then lost it to the U.S.-backed candidate. All of these developments, coupled soon thereafter with movement in the U.S. Congress to tighten the embargo via Democrat-backed legislation, placed a shadow over celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
Nevertheless, although Gorbachev himself had visited Cuba in 1989 amidst a great wave of change, the new post–Cold War reality did not really set in for Cuba until 1991. That year, following a series of meetings with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would end its $4 billion to $5 billion annual subsidy to the Cuban economy and begin withdrawing its advisors and troops from the island. This declaration kicked off the darkest period in Cuban revolutionary history. Just as in 1962, when Kennedy and Khrushchev cut a deal to end the Cuban Missile Crisis without consulting Fidel, the Americans and Soviets had once again excluded the Cuban side in their negotiations, deciding unilaterally to remove the Cuban thorn from their diplomatic sides in a move that had everything to do with global politics. If the Cuban Revolution’s survival was put in jeopardy as a result of cutting off Castro, so be it, from Moscow and Washington’s perspective. Without the Soviet subsidy and with Cuba’s ties to Eastern Europe jeopardized as COMECON collapsed, Fidel had much more to worry about than a blow to his sense of propriety or pride. Feeding roughly 10 million people and holding the revolution together was Castro’s new and urgent challenge.
With the loss of the Soviet subsidy, the Cuban government recognized very quickly that nothing short of the revolution’s survival was on the line. Facing a virtually overnight external shock that would cause the economy to contract by 34% between 1990 and 1993, Fidel declared that the island was entering a “Special Period in Times of Peace.” This seemingly innocuous euphemism translated into devastating consequences. Government agencies were forced to sharply cut back social services, and Cubans saw the material conditions of daily life they had grown accustomed to over three decades precipitously deteriorate. Most dramatically and politically dangerous, food and electricity rapidly fell into very short supply. Rations that could once be supplemented by goods in state-run stores suddenly were cut; surpluses of anything disappeared. Cubans lost weight, became malnourished, contracted diseases like neuropathy from vitamin deficiency, and had to manage electricity blackouts of 12 to 15 hours at a time, often with only an hour or two of power daily to take care of basic needs. Gasoline vanished; cars and buses disappeared from the streets. The island’s infrastructure, which had slowly shed its dependence on U.S. parts and technology, fell into further disrepair and decay as Soviet bloc and other western imports became either unavailable or too costly.
With such widespread economic devastation, the Communist collapse created a small window of breathing room in which the Cuban leadership allowed the introduction of changes that began, in limited but still significant ways, to reflect a new international reality. In 1992, for example, the National Assembly of People’s Power approved a new constitution to replace the Soviet-era 1976 document. Four features especially demonstrated an awareness that the era of the Cold War and Soviet patronage had ended. First, the 1992 constitution disavowed the formerly atheistic nature of the Cuban state by recognizing the freedom of religion. Religious belief, therefore, was no longer an impediment to Cuban citizens wishing to hold elected or appointed office. Second, references to Soviet-style ideology and language regarding Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party were significantly toned down; emphasis was given to the Cuban Communist Party as the party of national unity in the spirit of Jose Martí more than Vladimir Lenin. Third, the new constitution made some gestures—albeit far short of a full-scale “transition”—toward the decentralization and expansion of popular participation. Cubans would now vote directly for their People’s Power representatives not only at the municipal level but also at the provincial and national levels. The constitution also allowed for a modicum of competition: Ballots could include a choice among a slate of candidates, albeit all members of the Communist Party, instead of just a choice of one candidate selected by the party. Fourth, in order to begin creating an improved investment climate, the new constitution explicitly recognized the ability of foreign joint ventures to legally own property. In the same period, Cuba would officially declare that all sectors of the economy—save public health, education, and the armed forces—were open for foreign investment, including, in theory, from Cuban Americans. And in 1995, the state would approve a new and complementary foreign investment law, one that provided greater security and incentive to invest in Cuba. The state was still required, however, to own a majority share of any joint venture.
Amidst these juridical changes and the legal, ideological, and political space they helped to open in Cuba, diplomats, economists, scholars, writers, and artists within the framework of party-approved institutions began to probe more directly—though not without some constraints—what Cuba could learn from debates in South America and Eastern Europe about societies in transition. Topics of great interest and intellectual fervor included the role of the state, the scope of civil society, the relationship between the two, and the role emerging for NGOs (some Cuban-based and international organizations were allowed to operate on the island during this period). Finally, and most important because of its impact on Cubans’ daily lives, Cuba’s intelligentsia fiercely discussed how to successfully reform the economy and the implications of any proposed reforms on the island’s overarching Socialist framework.
Speculation, especially outside of Cuba, that the revolution could not possibly survive the Soviet collapse began in 1989. Expectations of an imminent collapse only increased during the darkest years of the Special Period after the Soviet subsidy disappeared in 1991 and the United States tightened the embargo the following year. Books predicting Castro’s “final hour” hit the stands. Yet even as domestic and international conditions seemed to point clearly toward change, and even when in the summer of 1992 blackouts were nearly permanent and genuine hunger ubiquitous, the regime did not collapse.
The answer to this puzzle is both simple and not entirely obvious. In essence, the island’s government did not fall because the Cuban Revolution was not imposed by outside powers; it was homegrown. Even though Cuba came to rely for its economic lifeblood on its integration into the Soviet bloc, its political and ideological roots were nationalist, and deeply felt. Even amidst growing skepticism and frustration, made apparent during a 1994 riot in Central Havana known as the maleconazo and the concurrent balsero refugee crisis (see page 141, “What caused the 1994 balsero refugee crisis?”), many Cubans felt a sense of lasting ownership of their revolution that temporary allies in the Eastern bloc never felt, at least not as deeply. When the Soviet Union disappeared, Cuba was exposed and vulnerable on the material and security front, but the country also breathed a collective sigh of relief to no longer depend for their survival on an ideological and geopolitical taskmaster with whom they shared little cultural, political, geographic, or spiritual affinities. Thus, even in the context of terrible and debilitating material deprivation, leading Cuban thinkers embraced the opportunity to chart their own course and helped to usher in a period of enormous creative thinking. Fidel Castro’s personal leadership and charisma during this time cannot be underestimated as a factor in Cuba’s defiance and survival. Although he did personally oppose a more aggressive set of economic reforms that others in his cabinet, including his brother, supported, many Cuban people looked to Fidel, and not at the time to other political leaders, for solace and inspiration. It was through his ubiquitous presence that many Cubans, even as some of their neighbors receded into apathy or left for good, continued to see the revolution as a set of ideals in which they personally had a stake.
Economic reforms adopted out of sheer survival instincts unfolded in three different iterations between the end of the Cold War and Fidel Castro’s illness in 2006. But the most important window into the scope and limits of Cuba’s economic reform process was the period between 1991, when the first shock hit, and 1995–96. In these later years, it became clear that Fidel Castro and the hard-liners in the party leadership would do only the minimum necessary to guarantee the revolution’s survival, for fear that economic opening would be an invitation to the revolution’s enemies in Miami and Washington to undermine internal unity.
Although in the early 1990s Cuban economists based at party-affiliated think tanks and institutions debated a wide variety of potential economic openings, both in terms of scope and pace, their debates took place clearly within the framework of how to preserve the fundamental tenets of Cuban socialism. Equality and inclusion, with the state playing the role of guaranteeing the basic welfare of Cuba’s citizens, remained at the center of the discussion. What changed was the introduction of the notion, virtually anathema until then, that the market—the free market, the capitalist market—might actually be a tool Cuba could somehow harness in the interests of socialism and social welfare. This discussion was approached in what can only be described as a gingerly manner, because even in the direst circumstances of the early 1990s, Fidel never let anyone forget his profound allergy to the profit, accumulation, avarice, and social inequality inherent in the market. Yet, there were others close to Fidel, like his brother Raul, or the man who came to be known as the economy czar, Carlos Lage, who understood that some experimentation with the market might actually save the revolution from the dire potential consequences of Fidel’s penchant for orthodoxy.
By 1994, Cuban authorities had implemented the bulk of an economic reform program designed to help Cuba adapt to the new global environment. Among the first steps, Cuba opened up farmers’ markets where growers were allowed to sell their produce directly to Cuban consumers. Cuban state farms were also converted to cooperatives, and authorities somewhat relaxed the regulations governing the acopio, the state collection and procurement system linking agricultural producers to consumers. Together, these measures increased food production and allowed citizens to fulfill basic necessities at a time when the ration system could not do so.
The government also legalized the possession of the U.S. dollar. Cubans with relatives abroad, predominantly in the United States, had taken to receiving dollar remittances to supplement their woefully inadequate state salaries. Thus, the dollar had become the growing black market’s currency of preference, although holding foreign currency was still a crime punishable by law. By legalizing possession of the dollar in 1993 and allowing it to operate alongside the traditional Cuban peso, the Cuban central bank may have tacitly acknowledged the power of the black market, but it was also able to mop up at least some dollars circulating in the underground economy. It opened casas de cambio where Cubans could exchange pesos for dollars and vice versa, and it opened special “dollar stores” with western consumer goods and some locally produced hygiene and food items largely unavailable in peso-only shops or through the ration system.
To spur economic activity, the government authorized citizens to engage in limited private activities, commonly referred to as “self-employment” or trabajo de cuenta propia. Under these reforms, Cubans were permitted to sell their skills in about 200 categories of basic services: repairs, taxi driving, personal hygiene, and the like. An important subset of these activities was oriented more explicitly, but not exclusively, toward the growing tourism industry, a key focus of a renewed foreign investment strategy. Cubans were permitted to open paladares (small restaurants located usually in the homes of the families who owned and operated them) as well as casa particulares (bed and breakfasts), renting out rooms to foreigners by the night, week, or month. By design, all of these transactions would take place in dollars, with the expectation that the government would be able to capture some of the revenues for state expenditures through taxes and other fees. Yet state mechanisms for taxing the self-employed encountered public resistance, and many owners did their best to avoid regulations. As a result, in a decade of tiny steps toward private enterprise, the self-employed sector would experience a roller coaster of relative flexibility followed by crackdowns on their operations.
Despite these limited small business and agricultural reforms, the scarcity of money and other resources during the Special Period caused a significant degree of material hardship. City dwellers noted a decline in pet ownership and cats and dogs; many speculated hunger had become so dire that desperate Cubans sought protein wherever they could find it. The search for food occupied a huge portion of each family’s daily life, creating havoc in productivity and disenchanting many Cubans—especially a younger generation—with the promises of the revolution. At the same time, such scarcity inspired a number of practices that can only be described as ahead of their time for developing countries. Beginning in the early 1990s, urban gardens sprang up all over Cuban cities, from Havana to Santiago. A cuisine centered largely around pork, beef, and poultry was forced by circumstances to shift to soy, an unwelcome entry into Cuban culinary habits, but also seafood, an export that few Cubans, other than those who could afford lobster, really knew what to do with. Rice, beans, and bread remained staples, but over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s, more fruits, vegetables, and fare for the omnivore returned to the diet. Public education campaigns extended from how to cook and eat in the Special Period to how to stop smoking, drink less, and—as the economy recovered and weight gain replaced weight loss—get enough exercise. Although Cuba remained heavily dependent on imports for its food, as the world price of sugar in the 1990s steadily dropped, the government actively shrank Cuba’s sugar industry and reduced the amount of land dedicated to sugar cane. Though many anticipated and argued forcefully for a transformation of sugar-producing land to that for the production of edible foods, Cuban agriculture, with some important exceptions of ventures into organic and specialty produce for export, failed to adapt to the island’s new circumstances.
Another key component of Cuba’s economic reforms was the pursuit of foreign investment to stimulate ailing industries and renew the activity of others. Cuba’s new joint venture law—known as Law No. 77—created the framework for a limited but still economically significant level of foreign investment to come into the island (under $4 billion between 1994 and 2004). The Cuban government was extremely leery of allowing too rapid of an opening and, despite declaring that all but a handful of sectors were open to foreign participation, only welcomed foreign capital in a limited number of them. As with other reforms, Cuba’s new “openness” to foreign investment was contingent on these investments taking place in a regulatory and financial context the Cuban government could directly control. Cuba’s tourism, mining, energy, telecommunications, and biotechnology industries, along with tobacco, rum, citrus, and fishing, were the primary sectors open to foreign investment, with capital from Spain, Canada, France, the UK, Germany, Brazil, Israel, Italy, and Mexico among the first to enter. Under Cuba’s employment laws, companies requiring Cuban labor were prohibited from directly hiring Cuban workers; instead, they were and are still today required to purchase Cuban labor from a state institution in dollars. Cuban workers are then paid in Cuba’s less valuable domestic currency. Such practices have drawn criticism for depriving workers of direct payment or autonomous collective bargaining power. Over time, however, some pay structures allowed for Cubans to be paid partly in domestic currency and partly in dollars or other foreign currencies (although under-the-table, illegal tips in hard currency were also still widespread in many workplaces). As a result, many highly skilled Cuban professionals started to abandon their state jobs—doctors, nurses, professors, engineers—in search of employment in the foreign sector, a trend that fundamentally reinforced the public’s negative and skeptical views of the government’s antimarket economic orthodoxy.
The resurgent tourism industry was perhaps the most significant target of foreign investment. Beginning in the early 1990s, Cuba’s tourism officials began planning for a total of 10 million visitors per year, with an eye eventually on the American market. But in the interim, Canadian, European, and, more recently, South American, Chinese, and Japanese tourists flooded the island’s beaches, colonial cities, and cultural and architectural attractions. With significant Spanish and other European investment in the construction of new hotel chains and all-inclusive resorts, the industry soon became Cuba’s top earner of foreign exchange, along with remittances, mining, and medical services. But it also catalyzed a surge in prostitution and all manner of hustling (of black market cigars, rum, and other products) from Cubans—often with professional degrees—who found it easier, if also degrading, to make a real living with these activities. At times, Cuban authorities and society reacted with horror at the spectacle of teenage prostitution, and cracked down. At others, anecdotal evidence suggests that authorities turned a blind eye, tacitly recognizing that prostitution and the black market go hand in hand with tourism, especially in environments of scarcity and strong state control. Still, in an effort to shelter some visitors from these practices, authorities began prohibiting Cubans themselves from going to beaches and hotels designated for foreign tourists, a practice that earned the resentment of Cubans at home and accusations of “tourism apartheid” abroad. Seen in historical perspective, the resurgence of tourism was certainly necessary economically but also deeply ironic. After all, in the 1960s, the revolution had sought to wipe tourism off the map, seeing the industry as an outpost of the American mob and a disparaging sign of the island’s neocolonial status.
During much of this period, the Cuban military assumed a predominant role in overseeing and administering those sectors of the economy most attractive to foreign investors. In the wake of the Cold War, facing sharp budget cuts and a slackening international profile, the Ministry of Defense gradually evolved into the strategic and financial hub for the island’s tourism, real estate, sugar, and other agricultural industries. Much of this was accomplished through state-administered umbrella companies like Gaviota, CIMEX, and Cubanacan—all coordinated by the Business Administration Group (GAESA), headquartered at the Ministry of Defense. Often, flag officers retired to comfortable sinecures managing these enterprises. Technocrats from Cuba’s best schools were then recruited to oversee the finances and travel abroad seeking investment. To provide one example, Gaviota, the youngest and fastest growing of the military-run state enterprises, today controls 20% to 25% of Cuba’s hotel rooms in partnerships with foreign companies. By the end of the 1990s, the Cuban military had become self-financing and its economic involvement helped generate a political power base for Raul Castro and his closest deputies.
Foreign investment might have saved Cuba’s economy from imminent collapse. Yet with abysmally low state wages, a thriving dollar-denominated black market, and only 30% to 40% of the Cuban population with access to remittances from family members abroad, the inequality Cuba had long sought to ameliorate, if never fully eliminate, reappeared as a noticeable societal ill. The Cuban government’s decision to strictly limit the amount of foreign investment that would enter Cuba, as well as U.S. pressure against foreign countries and companies considering Cuba as an investment, only aggravated the problem by preventing a broader slate of capital flows from bringing benefits to a wider range of the population. Yet although many Cubans were frustrated with the unequal terms and restrictions of Cuba’s limited opening to the market, they, like Fidel Castro, also feared that a wholesale opening would only further undermine the revolution’s commitment to social equality and the revolution’s legitimacy. With Cuba’s enemies in Washington and Miami preaching the virtues of open markets, globalization, and the Washington Consensus, often as part and parcel of their vision for the island’s future, it was easy for government officials to capitalize on popular fears of dislocations from rapid market openings and circle the nationalist wagons in defense of a continuing, dominant role for the state in the island’s economic affairs. After over 30 years of an ethos of equality and social justice, Cubans across the island bristled at the prospect of inequality even as they participated in black-market activities that drove its growth.
The government eventually halted any push toward further reforms. Moreover, in the early portion of the new millennium, as Cuba’s international economic position began to benefit from an environment of rising commodity prices as well as growing external support from Venezuela (see page 138, “Did Cuba attempt to emulate any other economic models in this period?”), the state reasserted a degree of control over those sectors that had seen substantial liberalization. State enterprises were banned from operating in dollars and were required to switch to the CUC in 2003 (a parallel currency to the dollar with no international value, created in 1994 to boost the island’s dollar-driven economy). The peso-CUC exchange rate, and before that, the peso-dollar exchange rate, hovered in the area of 25:1. Likewise, new measures required the Central Bank to approve all hard currency transactions by state enterprises. In part to stem the tide of corruption, officials, members of the military, and state administrators were barred from participating in self-employment schemes, while employers and workers in the tourist industry faced greater restrictions on their interactions with guests and their ability to accept hard currency gifts/tips. New licenses for paladares and casas particulares were dramatically curtailed, with existing license holders facing increased taxes and restrictions on their activities.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Communist regimes in former Soviet bloc countries, Russia, China, and Vietnam as well as authoritarian governments in South America began shedding the trappings of statism to varying degrees and ends. In such an international context, it was only natural for observers abroad and some scholars on the island to begin asking what lessons Cuba might draw from the various transitions occurring beyond its shores. But Cuba’s path throughout the 1990s remained a hybrid one, with small concessions to private enterprise and pockets of foreign investment combined with significant public sector investments in health, education, and infrastructure. All the while, state payrolls didn’t pay workers enough to get by and certainly didn’t provide incentives for the kind of productivity that Cuba’s faltering industries desperately needed. Although Cuba did not and has not emulated any particular model, its leadership, economists, scholars, and population as a whole are not unaware of the alternatives. All of the top senior government officials traveled during this period to Asia, Europe, and Latin America, as have Cuban economists, scholars, and the managers who run the military’s umbrella businesses. Why, then, didn’t Cuba embark on bolder reforms? According to many of those elite Cuban officials who most closely studied transitions abroad at the time—some of whom may have even been sympathetic to more ambitious changes—because of its size (tiny), its proximity to the empire (but a sneeze away), and the designs on its riches by some eager exiles, Cuba after the Cold War did not have the luxury to retain one-party control while opening the economy, as in Vietnam, for example. Moreover, a barrage of studies funded by the U.S. government or conducted by Cuban American economists abroad spun out scenarios for various transition models Cuba might undertake, also placing regime officials on the defensive. By this time, a shrinking faction of the increasingly diverse Cuban American community genuinely aspired to reclaim economic, let alone political control of the island. Yet with backing from such companies as Bacardi and support from old-line families whose former properties were being developed for the growing tourism industry, Cuban American legislators continued advocating increasingly aggressive U.S. policies over the course of the 1990s, some of which resulted in new laws to help exiles recover nationalized property and block foreign investment on the island. These dynamics, combined with the opposition by senior Cuban officials to opening the door too quickly (including, most important, Fidel himself), meant that the political and ideological breathing room necessary for broader economic liberalization in Cuba just wasn’t in the cards. As the Cuban government saw it and as the Cuban population was keenly aware, the threat and lure of the United States was a constant reminder of the potential consequences of instability on the island. Control over property and economic activity was the heart and soul of the island’s future. Cubans off the island understood these stakes as well.
A convergence of factors—both internal and external—inspired Cuba’s cultural boom at the time. Artists benefited from additional state resources and support, greater room to maneuver and create, and increased market demand (particularly abroad) for Cuban artistry.
With the onset of the Special Period, the cultural sector, accustomed to receiving resources from the government, found itself cut off. The first years of the economic crisis witnessed a drastic reduction in the variety and number of books published, theater and cinema productions, television programs, and other cultural activities. After recovering from this initial shock, cultural organizations and individual artists discovered that as the government lost the capacity to support them, it simultaneously lost some of its capacity to control their art. Thus, despite continuing self and external censorship, artists were able to push the boundaries like never before, touching on themes (migration, exile, and the state’s economic inefficiencies) previously considered taboo (while others remained unmentionable). Starting in the early 1990s, the government also opened up aspects of the cultural sector to partnership with foreign companies, making financing and resources more readily available for Cuban artists. Joint ventures between Cuban artists and foreign investors became common, especially within the film and music industries. Indeed, the films of Cuba’s well-known and internationally renowned Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry (ICAIC) may not have survived without foreign partnerships. Likewise, well-known (and politically reliable) Cuban artists and musicians were granted greater freedom to travel abroad, tour internationally, partner with foreign companies, and keep a handsome portion of the earnings for themselves.
Externally, a number of dynamics drew attention to the island’s cultural production as well. In the wake of the Cold War, Cuba became not only one of the last remaining Communist regimes on earth but also one of the few to resist broader economic liberalization. As a result, during a decade where globalization was a buzzword and the spread of global mass commercial culture was celebrated by some intellectuals and denigrated by others, Cuba became a kind of historical artifact, seeming to echo or reinforce idyllic visions of a decommercialized past. Such conceptions fueled not only a significant portion of Cuba’s draw as a tourist destination but also a renewed attraction to Cuban artists and music. Moreover, beginning in 1987, a crack in the U.S. information embargo opened up when Congress passed what came to be known as the Berman amendment, for Congressman Howard Berman of California. Crafted to protect the First Amendment rights violated by the ban on American travel to Cuba, the new law allowed Americans to import “informational material,” interpreted as not only printed material but also any form of creative expression, including music, visual art, sculpture, etc. These liberalized cultural exchange policies under the Clinton administration, coupled with the growing power of digital technology, increased access to a veritable treasure trove of past and present Cuban art that had by and large not received significant Western attention. Perhaps the most prominent example and indeed the catalyst for Cuba’s cultural boom abroad was the Buena Vista Social Club, a collaboration of Cuban musicians; American ethnomusicologist, musician, guitarist, and composer Ry Cooder; and later, German filmmaker Wim Wenders. The resulting album and documentary became international sensations, spawning a resurgence of traditional Cuban son music throughout Cuba, the United States, and the world, and helping to breathe new life into the work of once towering musicians who had all but disappeared from public view. A quite different but equally important example was the growth of Cuban rap music during this period. Even in Cuba, where access to digital technology, music equipment, and (later in the decade) the Internet remained extremely limited, the globalization of culture could not be stopped as Afro-Cubans were inspired by American hip-hop to create their own local interpretation of the urban art form, strongly criticizing the re-emergence of racism during the Special Period as well as voicing a wide variety of economic, social, and political complaints. To varying degrees, the state has sought to support, suppress, or co-opt this diverse movement.
By the summer of 1994, three years into the Special Period, seemingly endless rolling blackouts, food and water shortages, deteriorating health conditions, and a decaying infrastructure, combined with the absence of adequate mechanisms to manage migration from Cuba to the United States, brought social tensions into acute relief. Not since the 1980 Mariel boatlift had public discontent been so high. That July, a group of Cubans hijacked a tugboat seven miles outside of Havana harbor. Rather than stopping the boat and arresting the hijackers, however, the Cuban coast guard chased it down and used high-pressure fire hoses in an attempt to impede its movement, an incident that ultimately resulted in the sinking of the boat and the deaths of 41 on board. The political damage of this episode left a legacy: The Cuban regime would no longer attempt to impede illegal attempts to leave the island, unless the United States (where liberal immigration laws and the presence of the Cuban American community implicitly beckoned Cubans to risk their lives at sea) would sign an immigration agreement providing for safe and legal migration between the island and U.S. territory.
A number of other boat and ferry hijackings followed. Migration pressures were clearly on the rise. Then, in August, a small riot broke out in a working-class neighborhood of downtown Havana. At least several hundred rioters—mostly young men, hot, hungry, and with no viable way to make a living—aimed their ire directly at the government’s failures and directly at Fidel himself. The riots didn’t last long, and no one was really hurt: Fidel Castro himself showed up not long after police arrived on the scene, and the event ended almost as quickly as it began. But it offered a palpable view of the anger and frustration pulsating through Cuba at the time. Clearly, the government needed an escape valve to let off some of the steam.
As in 1980, the Cuban government announced that it would not get in the way of those attempting to leave. Moreover, authorities made it clear that they would hold the United States responsible for failing to provide a safe mechanism and reliable number of visas for those Cubans wishing to migrate. Innovation and desperation carried the day. In boats at first, then in wide varieties of floating vessels made of inner tubes, wood, and even the shells of abandoned cars, increasing numbers of Cuban balseros, or “rafters,” began departing for Florida, eventually by the thousands. Their plight inspired art, literature, poetry, and, ultimately, tragedy. Although nearly somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 Cubans eventually made it to the United States—either directly or after being picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard and interned at Guantánamo for a time—no one knows exactly how many people who left the island perished at sea. Beyond the cost in human life and the disruption to Cuban families and society, the balsero crisis forced the United States to negotiate migration agreements with Cuba that remain in effect to this day, guaranteeing a minimum of 20,000 visas annually for Cuban citizens to migrate to the United States safely and legally (details of the agreement are on page 165, “How did the United States and Cuba resolve the 1994 refugee crisis?”).
Health care remains one of the revolution’s flagship achievements and is recognized as such not only by Cubans themselves but also by governments, international organizations, and poor citizens around the world who have directly benefited from Cuba’s global health policies. Keeping the population healthy in the aftermath of a significant blow to the economy was essential to sustaining the revolution’s social contract. Thus, even as the budget for the armed forces was slashed permanently, budgets for health care recovered and even began to show modest increases as Cuba moved beyond the darkest years of the Special Period. But budgets don’t really tell the whole story; priorities do. Cuba’s health care system is based on primary and preventive care, with front-loaded investments going to maternal, infant, and child health. A system of neighborhood or family doctors makes access to such basic care readily available. By the late 1990s, after recovering from the initial blow to the entire population’s nutritional intake, the revolution was able to devote more money to its primary care system and increase the training of new health care professionals, both from Cuba and other countries around the world—even young medical students from the United States.
Nonetheless, the deprivation, emerging inequality, neglect, and corruption evident in the rest of Cuban society during this period also crept into the health care system. Access to doctors remained relatively easy, but it became harder and harder to find pharmacies with medicines to fill their prescriptions. Likewise, with the consolidation of global health care multinationals and the U.S. embargo’s ban on imports of products with more than 5% American content, finding parts to replace mammogram, radiology, and cancer treatment equipment, for example, was no easy task. Neither was finding appropriate substitutes for U.S. patented drugs. Loopholes in U.S. law for sales of medicine and medical products made little appreciable difference because of the licensing, on-site verification, and politics involved. Especially during the dark days of the early 1990s, performing surgery with the help of generators during blackouts, and often with reused equipment, presented a number of risks. Hospitalization brought its own set of challenges, many of which persist today. Patients were required to bring their own bedding, food, and hygiene products with them. Staffing, when reliant solely on peso salaries, became increasingly unpredictable, and depending on the hospital administrator, conditions in Cuban hospitals ran the gamut from the gleaming, first-rate institutions depicted in Michael Moore’s 2007 film Sicko to dilapidated, decayed facilities lacking resources.
Likewise, as dollars and foreign tourists became a part of Cuban life, the health care system sought to capture the new market. Health tourism grew, with visitors from Latin America especially coming to Cuba for specialized care, paid for in dollars. Often the best health care facilities and resources were reserved for these hard-currency carrying visitors. Top Communist Party leaders also tended to have access to health-care sites with more ample resources, leading many critics of the Castro government to denounce the practice of what they called “health care apartheid.”
Despite these challenges and missteps, Cuba continued to send its health care professionals to remote parts of nearly every continent around the world on humanitarian missions (as it would memorably do in Pakistan after the 2006 earthquake and Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami), where they were effective at providing relief services and flying the flag of Cuba’s humanitarian ethos. With about one of every three Cuban doctors working overseas, Cuban medical professionals rank among Cuba’s most lucrative sources of human capital, with countries paying for their services in hard currency (with only a portion of the fees going to Cuban doctors themselves) or providing another hot world commodity in exchange. Most notably, in the case of Venezuela, the government of Hugo Chávez has benefited from the assistance of more than 20,000 Cuban physicians in exchange for subsidized supplies of oil to Cuba. Likewise, since 1996 South Africa has paid the Cuban government to supply physicians to hospitals across the country in response to the flight of many of its own doctors in the postapartheid era. On the street, Cubans occasionally complained that so many of their doctors were being sent abroad.
Nonetheless, not only did the health care system on the island hold together during this trying period, but also today Cubans are far less likely to suffer malnutrition, malaria, or other typical third-world afflictions than they are medical problems common in developed countries, such as heart disease (with the occasional but always rapidly contained outbreak of dengue fever). On the global stage, Cuba’s health care record remains undeniably strong. Indeed, according to UNICEF’s reporting on the status of the world’s children, Cuba’s infant mortality rates—at 5.3 deaths per every 1,000 births—are lower than any other country in the Americas except for Canada. Life expectancy on the island, at nearly 78 years, is on par with that of the United States. Similarly, Cuba’s records on immunizations for children and maternal health are among the best in the developing world and are virtually on par with (and sometimes superior to) many countries within the developed world. Today, Cuba spends 43% of its national budget on health, education, and social security.
The Cuban state has become well known for intruding upon the private choices of Cuban citizens, but the bedroom has eluded its reach. It is not uncommon for married and single men and women to have multiple partners, a practice potentially conducive to a rapid spread of HIV. The conventional but unconfirmed wisdom in Cuba is that HIV/AIDS arrived on the island as Cuban soldiers returned from Africa at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. The first case was diagnosed in late 1985.
The Cuban government has implemented a number of programs to successfully contain and combat the spread of the disease, especially important as the tourist industry grew and authorities tacitly recognized the resurgence of prostitution. Even before the first Cuban case was diagnosed, in 1983 health officials launched a nationwide AIDS education program. Cuba also began investing in awareness and prevention programs, which are fully subsidized and readily available to all its citizens. Other strategies, including the controversial practice of isolating all patients diagnosed with the virus (suspended in 1993), received sharp criticism from some for being draconian, despite their effectiveness in containing the spread of HIV/AIDS.
A combination of quarantine and mandatory testing helped contain HIV rates in Cuba close to 0.5% in the 1990s, and AIDS-related deaths totaled 1,300 between 1991 and 2006. Compare this to the broader Caribbean, where HIV infection rates are among the highest in the world (at 2.3%), second only to sub-Saharan Africa (9%). By 2005, Cuba had 6,782 confirmed cases of HIV, and less than 2,800 cases of full-blown AIDS. In the Dominican Republic, by contrast, a country with a significantly smaller population than Cuba, as many as 77,000 people currently have HIV, with on the order of 6,000 to 7,000 patients dying of AIDS each ear. With neighboring Haiti, the contrast is even starker, with AIDS killing 30,000 people every year. The UN has recognized the extremely low infection rate in Cuba and in 2006 hailed the island’s program as “among the most effective in the world.” Notably, in Cuba only 29 children have become infected with HIV in the past 20 years as Cuba has effectively prevented mother-to-child transmission of HIV, mainly due to the government’s universal provision of antiretroviral therapy, which became broadly available in 2001.
In the late 1990s, Cuba’s pharmaceutical labs also developed a generic HIV test kit, exporting it for sale and as donations to developing countries around the world. At home, massive public education campaigns helped create the space to begin addressing homosexuality as a fact of life rather than as a forbidden and historically repressed component of Cuban society and culture. Furthermore, Cuba’s provision of openly accessible therapy has led fewer HIV-positive women to seek abortions than in the past, effectively addressing one of the difficult social challenges that often accompanies the disease.
Those looking for the end of the Cold War to transform Cuba into a western liberal democracy were sorely disappointed. Organized opposition parties and groups remained proscribed, free speech and assembly continued to be repressed, and, although their numbers had vastly diminished, political prisoners still languished in Cuban jails. (By the end of the 1990s, the number of political prisoners hovered in the range of 200 to 300.)
From the perspective of the Cuban government, the Reagan administration’s strong effort to press the issue of human rights on Havana and the world was politically motivated and deeply hypocritical in light of U.S. support for right-wing military regimes in Central America and elsewhere at the time. During the 1990s, and beyond, Cuban academics and officials within state-sanctioned institutions did actively discuss the topic of human rights, with some quietly pushing for greater openings. Yet with liberal western states in Europe, North America, and Latin America—Cuba’s new trading partners—gradually embracing the international human rights agenda, Cuba’s claim to exclusive sovereignty over its internal matters became a much tougher sell. As coalitions of international NGOs, Cuban American organizations, and foreign governments shined a spotlight on human rights violations in Cuba, sorting through the who’s who and what’s what of the issue became increasingly difficult, polarized, and ideological. In addition to calling attention to abuses, human rights groups from the United States and activists from former Soviet allies like Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as their governments, began actively channeling greater resources, some from U.S. federal agencies, directly to Cuban human rights activists on the island. Cuba’s dissidents faced an impossible position. They lacked resources and the means to communicate with the broader Cuban public, tools that foreign support could theoretically provide. Yet in light of decades of American attempts to unseat the regime, receiving funds from external sources (or simply the perception of being willing to do so) cast a pall of suspicion over their activities, leading to accusations that they were mere lackeys of foreign interests. As a result, Cuban activists found it difficult to build domestic legitimacy—especially when they were perceived to be close to the U.S. government or those Cuban Americans perceived to have adopted the ethos of human rights only to position themselves to benefit from the revolution’s collapse.
The Cuban government has offered a variety of responses to outside pressure and foreign support for internal anti-regime opposition activities. At times, the regime has infiltrated existing dissident groups; at others, authorities have simply ignored them. Additional tactics include public attacks (conducted by state-organized mobs in what are known as actos de repudio, or “acts of repudiation”) as well as more subtle forms of harassment, such as spying on dissidents themselves, their family members, and others suspected of receiving foreign government and/or Cuban exile largesse. Yet old-fashioned jailings and mass arrests, while certainly not as frequent as, say, in the early years of the revolution, did not disappear entirely. In March of 2003, for example, human rights activists were dealt one of their most significant blows since the end of the Cold War when authorities arrested some 75 independent journalists, prodemocracy organizers, and other dissidents. In what became known as the “black spring,” Cuban officials targeted those individuals allegedly collaborating with or receiving funds from the U.S. government, Cuban American groups, and/or international organizations agitating for more democracy and human rights. No such widespread action has occurred since.
Of course, repression and intimidation alone are not what keep dissident movements on the island weak and disorganized today. For reasons explored elsewhere in this chapter (see page 129, “Why didn’t the regime collapse?”), despite profound popular disillusion, the Cuban Revolution does retain domestic sources of legitimacy that limit the extent to which dissident activists might gain a foothold. Outside actors supporting nascent human rights/dissident groups in the hopes of recreating Poland’s Solidarity movement or Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution may very well be chasing unrealistic dreams. Still, the repressive tactics and human rights violations of Cuban authorities keep small remaining groups isolated and off-balance.
In the last 15 years, one outspoken and internationally well-known government critic has navigated Cuba’s difficult domestic terrain more successfully than any other: Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Christian Liberation Movement. Payá’s work focused on a little-known provision of the 1992 Cuban Constitution, Article 88, that allows citizens to introduce initiatives to be voted on through a national referendum, so long as they collect at least 10,000 signatures of registered voters in support of the proposed initiative. With a host of organizers, Payá set about drafting a petition of sorts, calling for five fundamental reforms: democratic elections, free speech, free enterprise, free assembly, and freedom for political prisoners. Inspired by Father Felix Varela, a 19th-century priest who advocated for Cuba’s independence from Spain, they called their initiative the Varela Project. All the while, Payá never too firmly embraced U.S. or European supporters, although they certainly embraced him, rather too tightly.
In 2002, Payá presented 11,000 signatures backing the Varela Project to the National Assembly of People’s Power in Cuba, coinciding with former president (and human rights champion) Jimmy Carter’s historic trip to the island. After meeting with Payá, Carter gave the Varela Project his full endorsement during his uncensored and nationally televised speech at the University of Havana. In response, the Cuban government held its own referendum, in which Cuba’s population was compelled, tacitly if not overtly, to vote overwhelmingly—with 8 million votes—in favor of declaring the irrevocable nature of Cuban socialism and amending the constitution as such.
The Varela Project is significant for a number of reasons, but not necessarily for its success. Payá’s referendum proposal went nowhere in the face of the Cuban government’s own dramatic response. Nonetheless, Payá was perhaps the first activist to attempt, on a wider scale, to use the legal means of the Cuban state to express profound opposition to the lack of democracy in Cuba. And the Cuban state, rather than blatantly repressing the initiative, was compelled to instead overwhelm it with its own counterproposal. Because of the attention that Carter’s visit had brought to Payá, and because Cuban authorities at the time still hoped for a marginal improvement in the bilateral relationship with Washington, they could not afford a repressive incident. Just a year later, though, when circumstances were different and international attention not focused on Cuba, the regime would arrest over 40 Varela Project organizers (though never Payá himself) during the “black spring.” Nonetheless, despite this delayed repression, at the time of Payá’s proposal, and even subsequently, the government tacitly recognized that the general sentiments of the Varela Project could well have been shared more broadly, including among some working within the regime’s officially sanctioned institutions. This, too, perhaps muted the government’s response to some degree.
Moreover, despite vituperative rhetoric from some Cuban officials denouncing Payá as a foreign agent, most were well aware that Payá’s tactics of working “within the system” had earned him the ire of traditional exile hard-liners as well as hawks in the U.S. government hoping to avoid any kind of negotiated transition in Havana. Indeed, although his group allied itself with the Christian Democrat International, a network of socially conservative, free-market political parties, many of Payá’s proposals attracted adherents of social democracy as well. In addition to opposing aspects of U.S. policy (calling on the United States to “de-Americanize” the Cuba issue), Payá supported the role of the state in providing health care and education, and consistently spoke of the need for reconciliation.
The regime’s ability to quickly organize a counterreferendum demonstrated its prowess at mass mobilization and cooptation. Likewise, the government’s targeting of Varela Project activists the next year signaled an abiding willingness to repress dissent. Yet, by 2005, subtle signs that the regime was indeed tuned into and worried about popular discontent began to surface in public. In November of that year, Fidel acknowledged in a speech that the revolution could cause its own demise, and without ever using the term human rights, Cuba’s top leadership initiated a public dialogue about the kinds of conditions and practices the government would have to amend if it wanted to save the revolution. These discussions would only accelerate after Fidel Castro’s illness sidelined him in 2006. The Varela Project was in no way directly responsible for this coming to terms. But because it articulated some criticisms of the regime that were shared within respected state institutions, and because it did so without appearing to be as much a tool or creation of outside actors as other dissident initiatives, the decision by the regime to allow the Varela Project to survive, even in a very low-key way, may have foreshadowed, if only by a matter of timing, the public’s eagerness for and the government’s capacity to manage a wider public debate about the revolution’s future without risking counterrevolutionary upheaval.
Beginning with the onset of the rectification process in 1987 (see page 71, “What was ‘rectification’? How did Fidel and Raul Castro view the prospect of market reforms in the 1980s?”), and compounded by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban government began opening up certain sectors of Cuban society to increased debate. The economy emerged as the natural and most critical topic as Cuba faced the loss of its Soviet/Eastern European trading partners. The question was not whether or not to implement a program of substantial economic reform, but how and how fast. Yet even though the regime allowed harsh criticism of the government’s economic failures to emerge during the course of these debates, the parameters of the discussion were significantly more constricted when it came to possible solutions for the country’s economic shortcomings. The fundamentally Socialist character of the island would be preserved, with the state as the critical arbiter of economic affairs.
Beyond strictly economic themes, written arguments and critiques of Cuban politics, society, and culture—again, all within the framework of socialism—appeared with increasing frequency in state-run literary publications. Indeed, some Cuban scholars refer to the period between 1993 and 1995 as a sort of “golden era” for Cuban intellectual freedom. Civil society networks and NGOs not directly affiliated with state umbrella institutions were allowed to operate with greater freedom as long as their activities remained largely apolitical and were not associated with opposition activism. Yet after 1995, this increased space was curtailed, with authorities strengthening restrictions on Cuban NGOs, specifically on those that partnered with international, especially U.S., organizations. This fluctuating pattern of relative degrees of openness and retreat has characterized revolutionary Cuba throughout its history and continues to this day.
A number of Cuba’s most well-known intellectuals, initially with the protection and support of senior Communist Party officials, tested the limits of permissible economic and political critiques. Some tentatively explored elements of the West’s concept of civil society, supporting greater autonomy for established organizations linked to the state as a way of broadening democratic channels in the making of public policy. Others developed proposals for major reforms of the Cuban economy, all while retaining the Socialist character of the government. But by 1996, the key institutions housing these debates were purged. Individuals most closely associated with ideas for reforming the state, all Communist Party members, landed in other posts, some in Havana and some abroad.
As described on page 127 (“How did Cuba adapt at home to the loss of Soviet subsidies and global realignment brought by the Cold War’s end?”), the 1992 Cuban constitution explicitly affirmed all Cuban citizens’ freedom to practice religion, thus clearing the way for religious believers to become members of the Cuban Communist Party. In an atmosphere of increased tolerance, organized religion experienced a dramatic boom, with congregations of varying stripes emerging from their quiet and even repressed past existences to reclaim a strong place in Cuban cultural life. Daily and especially Sunday Catholic masses filled. Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Jehovah’s Witnesses rediscovered their churches, encouraging new congregants to join their ranks. With outside support, training for new priests and ministers began, and as in the rest of Latin America, evangelical churches popped up, especially in Cuban cities. The Jewish community, which had shrunk from a high of 15,000 European war refugees to under 500 individuals by the 1980s, experienced a renewal as well with support from the Jewish communities of Mexico, the United States, and Canada especially. Among these varying groups, the Catholic Church maintained the most institutional weight. The Vatican stepped up an all-but-nonexistent dialogue with the Cuban government, which garnered the church enough leeway to create a space, as well as a resource for the needy, relatively independent of the Cuban state. Relationships between churches in communities in Cuba and the United States further helped provide the resources for rebuilding and expansion, all the while connecting Cubans to the United States in ways neither government could perfectly manage. Meanwhile, the syncretic practice of Santería, always a consistent part of daily life under the revolution, showed no signs of weakening, neither among traditional Afro-Cuban adherents nor among Cubans of all races who incorporated the popular lore of the faith into their lives to varying degrees. Even as Cuban citizens began to openly practice their more western Christian faiths and join or rejoin organized Christian and other religious institutions, the rituals, symbolism, and belief system of Santería remained common.
The Cuban state endeavored to manage this boom and contain its potential political consequences. The Communist Party’s Central Committee opened an office of religious affairs, whose officials served as the party’s liaisons with Cuba’s religious leaders and their international counterparts, including in the United States. Most churches, meanwhile, emerged eager to protect the newly found space they had been granted rather than aggressively pushing boundaries. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, for example, notably resisted suggestions from abroad that it could serve as a basis for overt political mobilization, as in Poland’s transitions, while at the same time slowly creating a space for open expression. For example, visitors to the Basilica of El Cobre, the church outside of Santiago de Cuba dedicated to Cuba’s patron saint, will find expressions of support for Fidel Castro alongside posters demanding freedom for political prisoners among the various offerings left at the shrine. Protestant Churches in some cases more explicitly aligned their theology with strongly liberationist approaches, creating a fusion with revolutionary principles, similar to the Cuban Catholic Church’s more limited foray into this area during the 1970s. Today, in fact, some leaders of Protestant churches, practicing Catholics, and other religious believers are members of the National Assembly of People’s Power and the Communist Party.
Still, the reemergence of religion did without a doubt challenge political boundaries. Indeed, Fidel Castro’s dialogue with the Vatican was perhaps the most graphic demonstration of this fact. Havana’s renewed spirit of open diplomacy with the Vatican sent a signal to Cuban believers and to the increasingly active Catholic dioceses throughout the country that the government and even Fidel Castro himself were tempering, if not entirely purging, their long-standing anticlerical tendencies. The high point of this new space for the church was the visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba in January of 1998. From the moment Fidel Castro greeted the arriving pope at the airport in a business suit—an oddly deferential gesture for a man rarely seen not wearing his famed verde olivo—there was a clear sense that this visit was indeed historic. Over the course of four days of highly choreographed but memorable activities—including a dramatic papal mass in Havana’s Revolution Square—the pope’s visit raised expectations at home and abroad for further openings on the island. His central message, that the moment had come for “Cuba to open to the world, and the world to open to Cuba,” captured the moment perfectly. In the aftermath of the papal visit, the Cuban state continued to regulate the activities of Catholic, Protestant, and other religious organizations. But today, Cuban citizens who attend mass and confession hold positions in the National Assembly, leading positions in the top tier of the Communist Party, and rank among the country’s top professionals, scholars, and intellectuals. Religion is no longer a stigma or impediment of any kind.
On Thanksgiving weekend of 1999, a nearly 6-year-old boy named Elián González was found clinging to a piece of a destroyed raft adrift at sea off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His mother and her boyfriend, with help from Miami relatives, had paid smugglers to bring them out of Cuba, but only Elián survived the trip. Because U.S. immigration policies allow Cubans who reach U.S. shores to remain in the United States, local immigration authorities contacted the boy’s waiting relatives in Miami, who quickly took him to their modest home in Little Havana.
Upon hearing that his son had survived, Elián’s father, with the support of Cuban authorities, demanded that the boy be returned to his custody. The United States first ignored this request. Then, citing immigration regulations, and in an atmosphere of growing media and Cuban American scrutiny, the Clinton administration waffled on returning the boy to Cuba. Together with Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly and Cuba’s point man for dealing with the United States, Fidel Castro made getting Elián back to his father a priority for which he would ultimately mobilize public opinion in Cuba, in the United States, and around the world on the boy’s and Cuba’s behalf. Cuban authorities viewed the controversy over Elián not only as an indicator of all that was sour in U.S. policy toward Cuba but also as an opportunity to goad the Cuban American community into potentially damaging missteps in its quest to keep the embargo in place. Yet Fidel wasn’t the only one who saw Elián’s story and his ultimate fate as a potent symbol. Indeed, suspicious that the Clinton administration was leaning toward a broader opening with Cuba toward the end of its second term, the Cuban American exile establishment, led by the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), also sensed an opportunity to paint the Castro regime as a gulag to which no right-thinking parents would ever want their child returned, and to which no liberal democracy should extend the benefit of trade and recognition. On an emotional level, many Cuban Americans also tended to feel that if Elián’s mother had sacrificed her life to bring her son to the United States, they should honor her wishes. Likewise in Cuba, many felt equally passionate about their belief that the boy should be reunited with his father. Thus began an eight-month odyssey lasting until the end of June the following year, involving adjudication and appeals in local, state, federal, and, finally, the Supreme Court.
The home of Elián’s Miami relatives soon became a media circus, and Cuban American activists—from the well-known leaders of CANF to lesser known individuals who would go on to run Cuba policy for the Bush administration—certainly sought to mobilize attention to the case. Meanwhile, in addition to rallying domestic public opinion behind the controversy, the Cuban government took its case to U.S. public opinion outside of Miami, particularly in Washington, advocating for the fundamental rights of parents to be with their children. Castro didn’t have to do much to demonize the Cuban American community for getting in the way of that basic right: The very notion that the boy should be separated from his father flew in the face of basic common sense and human instincts, although his mother clearly disagreed before she perished at sea. Although Al Gore endorsed an effort to keep Elián in the United States, rather quickly, U.S. public opinion and that of many otherwise conservative pundits and members of Congress turned against the Cuban American community and Elián’s Miami relatives, while also questioning the merits of a policy environment that could generate such a spectacle and erect so many legal and political barriers to family ties.
By the spring of 2000, Elián’s temporary home in Little Havana was surrounded around the clock by crowds who at all costs hoped to keep Elián out of reach from possible government action to return him to his father. Meanwhile, Elián’s father Juan Miguel arrived in the United States to await reuniting with his son. In April of that year, both directly and through Catholic Church and third-country intermediaries, negotiations were ongoing between the United States and Cuba, as well as between the Justice Department and prominent members of the CANF board of directors. Yet before these talks yielded any results, U.S. authorities decided to take action. With Attorney General Janet Reno’s authorization, federal agents stormed the Little Havana house in a surprise, predawn raid, seized the boy, and quickly ferreted him away to his father. After two months in Washington waiting out a courts appeal process and under 24-hour protection by the ATF, Elián and his father returned to Cuba as national heroes. The entire episode inflicted great damage, first and foremost to the boy and his family, while dealing a withering blow to those in the exile community who attempted to exploit his odyssey. Elián’s father later translated his unexpected notoriety and political symbolism into a public career spending part of his time representing Matanzas province as an elected deputy in the National Assembly. Elián became a member of the Communist Youth at 14, in 2008. His Miami-based uncles and cousins have retreated to obscurity, while a local garage band, calling themselves “The Miami Relatives,” became regulars on the New York indie rock scene.
Ten years into the Special Period and with only marginal improvements in the travails of daily life, a new generation of Cuban young people was growing up with little direct appreciation for the revolution. A university or graduate education may have come at little or no cost at all, but there weren’t enough appealing jobs waiting on the other end. The dollarized economy and the black market drew in many talents, but for many young Cubans and their professional parents, leaving the country—whether on the arm of European tourists or for family closer by in Miami—increasingly looked like the best, if often bitter, option. Moreover, in the 1990s, a sizeable number of Cuban young people fell through the cracks of the educational system, leaving behind their education at some point during or after high school and entering the ranks of a disillusioned, apathetic, and often angry cohort with little stake in Cuban socialism.
Mass public mobilizations in response to perceived or real American provocations have often served as opportunities for the Castro regime to drum up and revive popular support. The Elián González case was no exception. Virtually every public figure and institution in Cuba made getting Elián home the dominant issue of the day. Fidel also used the opportunity and context of nationalist fervor to launch what he called the “Battle of Ideas,” an effort to mobilize constituents, especially Cuba’s youth, at home around the virtues of the revolution’s core ideological tenets. Emulating the 1960s literacy campaigns, the government started a social work program through which Cubans in their late teens and early 20s were sent around the country to begin putting a face on a government whose preoccupation with survival had left far too many Cubans in increasingly unlivable material conditions. Fidel also began to give a small group of ideologically committed Cubans in their 20 s (known sarcastically as the “red brigades” or talibanes by many of their elders) responsibilities in overseeing government activities long under the control of more seasoned professionals.
Elián’s return to Cuba was a huge domestic political and international victory for Cuba and for Castro. To this day, Elián remains a potent symbol for the Cuban regime, and his personal relationship with Fidel Castro in the aftermath of the Florida ordeal has become well known. Whether the Battle of Ideas has been as successful remains an open question. The social work programs and other associated initiatives to improve vocational and technical training have continued. But large pockets of Cuban youth remained disenchanted well into the new millennium.
Yes. But it’s not that simple. Music and art have always provided a way for people to voice opposition to or dissatisfaction with authority, the status quo, or societal ills. But by its very nature, much art allows artists to express themselves in code, leaving much of the artists’ true intentions or “messages” open to interpretation. Especially in Cuba, where censorship has been present at varying levels of intensity over time, but where there are also clear redlines that one simply cannot cross, artists and cultural producers have learned to carefully manage their self-expression.
Still, Cuban authorities have not been afraid to permit and promote what they deem constructive critiques of Cuban life today. Especially during the Special Period, a period that sparked renewed questioning and a certain degree of open debate on many themes, artists were also able to overcome old boundaries. A good deal of the art that emerged during that 1990s—whether music, film, literature, or visual arts—combines harsh critiques of the revolution’s failures with strong notes of nationalism and some acknowledgement of the revolution’s successes as well.
The evolution of the Nueva Trova movement, a distinct product of the Cuban Revolution and the government’s early efforts of cultural promotion, provides a good window into a number of these dilemmas. As alluded to on page 58 (“How did the regime deal with its adversaries in the exile community?”), after a period of initial ostracism, singers Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez emerged as preeminent figures in new movement of socially conscious Cuban folk song (with antecedents in Latin American leftist folk song of earlier years) deeply sympathetic to the idealism of the revolutionary project. Over time, as both have earned worldwide popularity, they have gained a significant degree of leverage with Cuban authorities and the space to be more open. As a result, Milanés in particular has often vocally criticized certain policies of the Cuban government, while always professing his support for the broader revolution. Today, new generations of Trova singers like Carlos Varela have pushed the boundaries even further, often penning songs with explicitly political content not lost on any informed Cuban listener.
The first Bush presidency saw the Soviet withdrawal of money and advisors from Cuba as the potential beginning of the end of the Cuban Revolution. Nonetheless, there was little official or public cheering from Washington. Within the State Department, officials reportedly were placing bets on when Castro’s regime would crumble, and during the annual May 20th speech commemorating Cuba’s prerevolutionary independence day, President Bush did openly speak of the potential for regime change. Yet by and large, in foreign policy, the White House was preoccupied with the consequences of German reunification, the first Gulf War in Iraq, the breakup of the Soviet Union into over a dozen separate countries, and bailing out Moscow. Moreover, the first Bush administration did not put a premium on schadenfreude, at least in public. A longstanding strategic objective of U.S. foreign policy had been met; there was no need to look ugly in victory. With Central America on the path to peace and democracy, the White House took the rapidly diminishing Cuban threat as an opportunity to issue an executive order ending covert operations on the island.
Consistent with this approach, while running for a second term in 1992, the first president Bush initially sought to avoid endorsing a congressional initiative to tighten economic sanctions against Cuba, especially because the law was likely to tread on the commercial affairs of key U.S. allies. But by April of that year, Bush tempered his preference for keeping foreign policy separate from domestic politics, following his Democratic rival’s lead. After meeting in Miami with Jorge Mas Canosa, the head of the Cuban American National Foundation, Bill Clinton took a bite of the domestic political Cuban apple. Proclaiming that the time had come to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro,” Clinton endorsed the Cuban Democracy Act, a piece of legislation conceived initially by Mas and sponsored by New Jersey Congressmen Robert Toricelli. Against his better judgment and to no political or electoral benefit of his soon to be one-term presidency, George H.W. Bush endorsed the bill and then signed it into law in October 1992, just before his defeat in the November elections.
Largely conceived by Jorge Mas Canosa, 1992’s Cuba Democracy Act (CDA) came to be known as the Torricelli bill for its principal congressional sponsor, New Jersey Democrat Robert Torricelli. Although his district was not as heavily populated by Cuban Americans as other New Jersey districts, Torricelli became the standard bearer among members of Congress hoping to coerce Cuba into conceding defeat in the aftermath of the Cold War. With increased economic deprivation at home and growing pressure from the Cuban people, CDA supporters hoped the Castro regime would implode.
The law had two principal components: sanctions and a series of limited openings. On the sanctions side, the CDA reimposed the ban on trade with Cuba by subsidiaries of U.S. companies based in third countries, previously lifted in 1975. By 1991, such sales had reached $700 million. By putting an end to that practice, the CDA incurred the ire of American allies where subsidiary U.S. companies were based. Additionally, the CDA aimed to further cut Cuba off from trade with the West by prohibiting ships from docking in U.S. ports that had been in Cuban ports within the previous six months. Other provisions restricted Cuba’s ability to use dollars for international transactions and in the international banking system. Finally, the law authorized the White House, through executive order, to impose restrictions on the amount of remittances that could be sent to the island.
To complement such punitive steps, the CDA, as its authors sometimes argued, also attempted to lay the groundwork for the Cuban people to begin seeing the United States not as their inherent enemy, but rather as a source of support in their struggle for freedom from tyranny. First, the CDA included provisions that allowed for telecommunications companies and the U.S. Postal Service to resume what until then had been nearly nonexistent phone and direct mail service with Cuba. Second, the CDA authorized the sale of medicine and medical products to the island, but required U.S. pharmaceutical companies to apply to the Treasury Department for export licenses for each sale. To ensure that the products were used directly by the Cuban people, “end use” verification by an independent monitor was required as well. In practice, this provision meant that should the Cuban government wish to spend its scarce dollars on U.S. medical products, it would have to affirmatively give the same country that sought to unseat the revolution the pleasure of its compliance with outside verification, a humiliation that went right to the heart of the country’s sensitivities about sovereignty and independence. As a result of these complex and politicized regulations, actual sales seldom transpired. Indeed, Cuba would claim that the embargo was directly responsible for the death or illness of patients for whom Cuba was unable to purchase key equipment and medicines. Third, and more significantly, the CDA authorized the United States to provide assistance to individuals and organizations working for nonviolent change on the island through relevant NGOs and external partners, whereas previously assistance had been delivered covertly by the CIA or through third countries. The era of “overt” covert action ensued.
The CDA thus contained several provisions that, in theory if not always in practice, promoted communication with the Cuban people and created loopholes in the embargo for humanitarian and/or human rights purposes. CDA supporters regarded these as important elements of a “Track II strategy.” In the Latin American context, however, where similarly named “Track II” programs had helped undermine Salvador Allende in Chile, Cuba regarded the CDA’s supposed carrots as yet another example of American-led destabilization, aimed at softening the population’s support for its government. As a result, Cuba interpreted the law’s provisions—especially its authorization for open support to opposition groups on the island—as a clear violation of national sovereignty.
Congressman Torricelli boasted that the effects of the CDA would bring down the regime “in a matter of weeks.” Clearly, such wild predictions did not come to fruition. The legislation would remain on the books, however, forcing the Clinton administration to mold its policies around the bill’s principal tenets. Over time, the CDA proved to be more flexible than initially thought. Although the people-to-people provisions of the law were intended to connect Americans and Cubans without benefiting the Cuban regime, the CDA framed these measures under a broad rubric of lending “support” to the Cuban people. Clinton was thus left with a potent loophole through which he would later push further openings. Equally significant, the bill retained nearly full executive privilege over the embargo; if he saw fit, the president could still do away with most sanctions with the stroke of a pen.
Images of thousands of Cubans in dilapidated, jury-rigged rafts reflected poorly on both governments. While Cuba was seen as a country that many wished to flee, the United States seemed unable to control Fidel Castro or protect its own borders. Many lives had been lost and more were at stake each day of August 1994 as balseros, or “rafters,” continued to leave the island. Hoping to avoid a Mariel-like crisis (and under increased pressure due to the simultaneous and mounting Haitian refugee crisis), the Clinton administration implemented a policy of temporary detention, under which Cubans intercepted at sea were brought to the Guantánamo naval base to await their fates. Yet the influx of detainees and the resulting overcrowding on the base highlighted the unsustainable nature of this temporary fix, pushing the Clinton administration to embrace immigration talks with Cuba.
Both countries had a stake in bringing the summer’s events to an end and preventing future such episodes. Thus, by September 1994, secret talks produced a U.S.-Cuba Immigration Agreement, which was strengthened by additional accords the following year. To provide for the “safe, legal, and orderly” migration of Cuban citizens to the United States, the United States agreed to a floor of 20,000 visas for permanent migration to its shores each year. Both countries agreed to take steps to ensure the safety of exit and entry, which meant that Cuba would actively police its waters and no longer allow its citizens simply to jump in a boat and leave. For the United States, this meant that the U.S. Coast Guard would pick up those balseros found at sea and, after interviewing them on board or at the Guantánamo base, return to Cuba those without a legitimate claim to political refugee status. Coast Guard vessels thus began regularly entering Cuban ports to deliver balseros back to Cuba, a process that required a previously nonexistent degree of regular communication and cooperation between the two countries. Cuba likewise agreed to allow the United States to send its Havana-based diplomats to visit migrants returned to the island in order to make sure they were not suffering reprisals from local authorities. By allowing the United States to stick its nose so directly into Cuba’s internal business, Castro helped the Clinton administration pacify critics of the agreement while simultaneously demonstrating how cooperation might advance the interests of both countries. The United States and Cuba also agreed to meet twice each year to monitor the agreement’s implementation and effectiveness, meetings the Bush administration would later terminate in 2004.
The United States set up a lottery system to help fill the annual quota. Together these programs established a mechanism for Cuba’s government to safely export much of its opposition. The agreement also provided an important financial lifeline, allowing Cuban wage earners the chance to join their families in the United States while sending remittances back to an increasingly cash-strapped economy at home. Rafters would, of course, not entirely disappear from the Florida Straits, and a growing human smuggling trade (of people of many nationalities) became a regular feature in these waters as well. Yet by 2006, nearly 300,000 Cubans had migrated to the United States under the provisions of the 1994/1995 agreements, reducing a potentially serious cause of bilateral conflict. In addition, like the Mariel generation of immigrants before them, Cuba’s post-1994 émigrés were very different demographically from earlier émigrés, and would gradually help shift public opinion regarding U.S.-Cuba policy within Miami as well.
Officials in the Clinton administration viewed the agreements as essential tools for protecting U.S. national security interests. By contrast, for top figures in the anti-Castro exile community and members of Congress sympathetic to their cause, the accords represented a betrayal. The idea that the U.S. Coast Guard would pick up Cubans at sea and bring them back to what they regarded as a gulag seemed flagrantly immoral. They also saw the accords as a violation of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, a law that gave all Cubans reaching the United States the right to permanent legal status and a host of resettlement benefits. Yet even more to the point, because the agreements involved government-to-government cooperation, they compromised many exile leaders’ beliefs in a strategy of complete isolation from the Castro government. In their view, the migration agreements conferred sovereign status on a regime considered illegitimate by the exile leadership. Jorge Mas Canosa, leader of the Cuban American National Foundation, led the attacks on the White House, with public protests as well as a coordinated media campaign. In addition, because he had not been consulted as the migration accords were being developed, Mas Canosa withdrew his offer to help raise and provide the millions of dollars needed to help settle the remaining 20,000 Cuban refugees in Guantánamo at the time. Clinton was justifiably anxious about the crisis on his hands. As governor of Arkansas, he had seen his first ultimately unsuccessful reelection bid badly damaged in 1980 when several hundred marielitos interned at Fort Chaffee by the Carter administration rioted and set fire to their jails in protest to their long detention. But more important, his successful courtship up to that point of a traditionally Republican source of campaign finance money and votes was now potentially at risk. In the end, those remaining emigrants who were not returned to Cuba were either resettled in third countries or brought to the United States, with the federal government footing the bill.
Upon coming to office, the Clinton administration moved to signal its embrace of democratic movements, parties, and institutions in Latin America, distancing itself from the Cold War preference for stable authoritarian regimes. Yet when the Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections (only months after the balsero crisis came to an end), none other than Jesse Helms, a hard-core anti-Communist crusader, became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signaling that the Cold War was far from over.
On Cuba, the Clinton administration recognized both the limits of the policy framework then in place as well as the political constraints of the moment. With the Cuban Democracy Act designed to isolate the Cuban government and reach out to the Cuban people, the White House also sought to enlist U.S. allies’ help in persuading Castro to begin a transition to democracy. At the same time, the administration publicly opened the door for a potential relaxation of the embargo, contingent on reform on the island. Secretary of State Warren Christopher called this approach one of “calibrated response.” In other words, as Cuba took steps toward democracy and liberalizing the economy, the United States would respond by relaxing aspects of its sanctions against the island.
Yet even as Cuba adopted a number of measures that could have easily been described as economic reforms during this period, the administration did not respond with openings on its end. Many individuals within the U.S. government and Congress looked instead to the Eastern European experience, where the United States and other western countries had provided material assistance and political support to dissidents, civil society groups, and opposition leaders who over time built pressure upon their governments and ultimately succeeded in defeating communism. In that spirit, the administration emphasized human rights and civil society, awarding a $500,000 grant to Freedom House to advance those goals. USAID now supplies such grants to a range of U.S., Cuban American, and international NGOs that promote the government’s policy objectives in Cuba. For Clinton officials, couching this approach in the trendy language of civil society support allowed Washington to open informal channels between Cubans and Americans while navigating the politics of the exile community. Yet the White House also pushed the boundaries. Seizing on the spirit of the CDA’s mandate for actions that support the Cuban people, the government also slowly began issuing more licenses for travel to Cuba. American musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers began traveling to Cuba with greater frequency, taking advantage of a little-known 1988 provision of embargo laws (the Berman Amendment) that allowed trade in informational materials. Slowly, cautiously, and ever-conscious of the domestic political implications, Clinton pushed the boundaries of travel and other regulations governing the bilateral relationship with the island.
Havana greeted Track II with derision, suspicion, and a splashy propaganda campaign highlighting the government’s view of the policy’s nefarious intent. Yet despite his hard-core anti-embargo rhetoric, Castro also understood the politics Clinton was navigating. Cuban authorities issued visas to visiting American scholars and permitted Cuban scholars and artists to visit the United States on extensive exchanges. Indeed, both governments came to regard, if obliquely, the Track II policies as a practical way to gain intelligence about one another’s society. As a result, each was willing to tolerate the rhetoric the other used to frame the limited openings to their domestic constituents. United States newspapers opened bureaus in Havana for the first time since the early 1960s, and the two countries’ professional, religious, cultural, and academic communities began to get to know one another.
Beginning in the 1990s, Cuban exiles had taken to flying over the Florida Straits to find refugees lost at sea and radio their location to the U.S. Coast Guard. One organization, Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR, or Hermanos Al Rescate), led by Bay of Pigs veteran José Basulto, was even able to acquire, with the help of a recently elected Cuban American Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, old Cessna airplanes from the Pentagon’s fire sales. BTTR representatives claim that their efforts over the years have reportedly helped to ensure the safety of some 4,000 rafters. Yet during the mid-1990s, instead of just looking out for refugees in the waters between the two countries, Basulto’s flights took on a more explicitly political and provocative mission. With a fleet of several airplanes and a group of committed volunteer pilots, he started sending small planes into Cuban territorial waters, often dropping leaflets over Havana itself, exhorting the Cuban population to rise up against the government.
Not all of the Brothers to the Rescue flights flew over Cuban territorial waters, nor did they all fly over Havana. But enough did over the course of thousands of flights (with documentation to prove as much) that Cuba was on solid ground when it charged that Brothers to the Rescue’s activities represented a clear provocation, an encroachment upon its sovereignty, and a clear violation of international law. Indeed, Cuba was closely aware of BTTR’s activities, above all because at least one of the government’s spies had infiltrated the organization and even participated in its missions. Through a number of back channels, including via then secretary of energy Bill Richardson, Fidel Castro sent messages to the White House warning of grave consequences unless the overflights stopped. In response, Clinton officials reportedly did order the Federal Aviation Administration to pull Basulto’s license to fly. But, according to one former White House official (Richard Nuccio), because Basulto appealed the decision, he was able to retain his license as the appeal was being processed and continue his missions.
On February 24, 1996, with advance warning and intelligence from Cuba’s agent within the organization, Cuban MiG fighter pilots shot down two Brothers to the Rescue Cessnas, killing the four men on board, three of whom were U.S. citizens born in Cuba and one of whom was a Cuban who had yet to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Only one of the three BTTR planes flying that day, the one with Basulto on board, safely returned to Florida. Cuba claims that it was within its rights to shoot down those specific planes because they had entered Cuban airspace. Yet although Basulto’s operation had violated Cuba’s airspace in the past, the International Civil Aviation Authority, the adjudicating body where the United States and Cuba pled their cases, found the planes to have been outside of Cuban airspace at the time of the shoot-down. A subsequent UN investigation found that the two planes had knowingly violated Cuban airspace immediately prior to their shoot-down—something denied by Basulto. Even so, many also argue that because BTTR’s planes were clearly unarmed, common aviation practice should have dictated that the Cuban pilots attempt to force the planes to land before shooting them down. As the UN investigation also concluded, both Cuba and the United States share the blame for the incident.
The shoot-down provided the catalyst for Congress to move forward on a set of lingering, bipartisan moves to further tighten the embargo. Moreover, it occurred just as Bill Clinton was revving up his bid for a second term in office. With the GOP firmly in control on Capitol Hill and the Clinton team keenly aware of the importance of Cuban American campaign contributions and votes, the White House was loath to resist the strong legislative momentum and political pressure inspired by the shoot-down—even though it had at an earlier phase opposed the very same legislation. Co-sponsored by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Indiana Congressman Dan Burton, the Cuban Liberty and Solidarity Act, known as the Libertad (freedom) Act, or simply Helms-Burton, was passed and signed into law within less than a month.
The new law included a smorgasbord of measures intended to squeeze Cuba from abroad and restructure Cuban society from within. Title III of the legislation created a right of action for Cuban Americans and others who lost property on the island during the 1960s to use U.S. courts to sue the Cuban government and foreign investors who “trafficked” in that property. In another effort to deter foreign investment, Title IV of Helms-Burton required that the executive branch deny entry visas to foreign executives and board members (as well as their families) whose companies “traffic,” or invest, in confiscated properties. This prohibition applied to individual property owners as well. Behind many of these provisions was the active lobbying of the Bacardi distilled spirits company, founded in Cuba, but relocated abroad (currently, its headquarters are in Bermuda) after its property was nationalized in the early years of the revolution.
Helms-Burton also legislated a very specific and largely fantastical set of circumstances under which the U.S. government could eliminate its sanctions against Cuba. First and foremost, Fidel Castro and his brother Raul would have to be out of office, and a number of government institutions eliminated. Movement toward free elections, a free press, free labor unions, and the release of all political prisoners were also prerequisites for any substantial U.S. opening. To help this process along, Title II called for what would ultimately amount to hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to democracy promotion. In lieu of the anti-Communist covert action programs of the old days, under the new overt paradigm, dollars openly administered by USAID through U.S. NGOs were intended to breathe life into a domestic opposition in Cuba and lay the groundwork for the transition the new law’s champions felt was imminent.
In the final negotiations between the Clinton administration and Congress, the White House secured a waiver authority allowing the president to suspend implementation of Title III every six months. Clinton and his successors have exercised this authority like clockwork ever since. If Title III were ever enforced, the resulting claims for compensation from those who lost property would likely clog U.S. courts and expose the United States not only to widespread derision but also to counterlawsuits in courts abroad.
Yet even though the Clinton team was able to avoid such a logjam and save face with its allies, the president conceded a degree of executive authority that not even Jesse Helms had expected possible. Helms-Burton codified all existing provisions of the embargo. While the president would retain some authority to tinker with some restrictions on the margins, by and large the executive branch gave up its authority to lift or impose sanctions, turning over to Congress a substantial portion of its power to shape policy toward the island. Moreover, since Congress stipulated that sanctions could not be lifted without the Cuban government taking steps that would amount to committing political suicide, the United States had, in essence, given Fidel Castro himself the power to decide the pace of any potential change in U.S.-Cuban relations.
Helms-Burton allowed Castro to once again demonstrate that the United States was dead set on toppling the revolution. Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly, led a nationwide discussion about nearly every line of the law, going so far as to translate and print hundreds of thousands of copies so that Cubans could read it for themselves. Most ominous for many Cubans was not just the law’s implicit suggestion that the United States and Cuban exiles sought to remake the island in their own design, but that Cuban exiles might even be able to use U.S. courts to seek to recover from their current residents the houses, apartments, and other residential property they had left behind decades earlier. If ever Castro needed justification for the government’s siege mentality, or proof that he and the revolution were all that protected Cuban citizens from a return to the injustices of the Batista past, Helms-Burton was it. In response, Cuba passed legislation of its own imposing stiff criminal penalties against the unauthorized sharing of information about the island’s economy with foreigners. While the pace of foreign investment on the island slowed, it is unclear to what extent this was due to the law itself. Alternately, once Cuban officials saw that their enemies abroad were angling to pounce on any opening, Cuba’s leaders may have elected to be more cautious about permitting the entrance of foreign capital.
Bill Clinton’s endorsement of the Helms-Burton bill helped him secure 35% of the Cuban American vote in the 1996 presidential election, a margin almost 15% greater than in 1992. But by 1997, the White House was again looking for ways to craft a policy toward Cuba that gave Cubans a sense of hope and the United States a way to end the Cold War in Latin America. Put in less lofty terms, as much as the Clinton administration reviled Castro’s breach of human rights and Cuba’s lack of democracy, it recognized that, precisely because of the shoot-down, the two countries had real security interests that needed to be addressed together. Moreover, policy makers increasingly believed that sanctions and isolation were no way for the United States to be seen as a credible advocate of democratic reform. In addition, there was enough collective memory in Washington to know that throughout the Cold War and during the period of the end of communism, not only had the United States permitted travel and trade between East and West, but also these ties had been critical to activists on the ground pushing for change. Likewise, despite Clinton’s quick and politically motivated move to embrace Helms-Burton, the shoot-down brought home the need to extract U.S. policy from the vise grip of hard-line Cuban exiles, whose provocations could have brought the United States and Cuba into direct military conflict.
A new strategy emerged. Embracing the Cuban Democracy Act’s clause in favor of “support of the Cuban people,” it used its limited executive authority to create 13 categories for licensed travel by Americans for what was somewhat awkwardly labeled nontourist “purposeful” people-to-people exchange. The administration also effectively lifted the ban on family travel by allowing once-per-year family visits. As a result, hundreds of U.S. NGOs obtained licenses to sponsor travel to Cuba and connect with their counterparts on the island in a variety of fields. Hollywood’s film and New York’s literary scene descended upon the island, with Arthur Miller, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, Henry Belafonte, and William Styron among many making well-publicized visits. The administration sponsored several of its own higher profile exchanges. For example, Cuba’s national baseball team played a pair of exhibition games against the Baltimore Orioles, first in Havana, then in Baltimore. By the last year of Clinton’s second term, well over 200,000 Americans had traveled to Cuba, half of whom were Cuban Americans. All of this travel demystified Cuba for Americans, put a face other than Fidel’s on the Cuban population, and began to redraw the map of constituents within the United States with a stake and an interest in greater contact with the island. Couched officially as an effort to reach out to the Cuban people, Clinton officials also referred to the results of their Cuba policies as the “Buena Vista Social Club effect,” named for the collection of Cuban music produced by Ry Cooder in 1996.
On the economic front, an amendment to permit cash agricultural sales to the island became part of a farm bill that Clinton signed into law in 2000. Half a dozen other legislative initiatives—from lifting the travel ban to lifting the embargo—moved through Congress but were stopped by the Cuban American congressional delegation, the GOP congressional leadership, and Florida and New Jersey Democrats eager to keep a lid on the embargo. Contrary to the party’s political leadership at the time, many members of the Republican foreign policy establishment and business community did their part to help the White House push the door open further. With an eye on the 2000 election, however, the White House ruled out any bolder ventures, lest they damage Al Gore’s chances at the presidency.
Internationally, the Clinton administration continued to press its case against Cuba at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. At the same time, it attempted to broker settlements between foreign investors and Cuban Americans with claims on the island, while informally considering proposals that might have permitted direct negotiations with Cuba to settle uncompensated claims by U.S. companies that lost property in the 1960s. Likewise, Clinton endeavored to persuade Washington’s skeptical allies in Canada, Europe, and Latin America that by pushing Cuba for democracy and human rights, they would help provide the necessary international context for the United States to continue a series of official and unofficial openings in the bilateral relationship. The papal visit in 1998 was significant in this regard as well, for it supplied the Clinton team with the kind of unimpeachable political cover necessary for the United States to further its carefully triangulated moves.
Even as the United States continued pressing the human rights and democracy agendas, Cuba responded in limited ways to American overtures. Cuba continued to accept the repatriation of Cuban refugees and allowed an American Coast Guard official stationed at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana to go out on counternarcotics missions with Cuba’s border patrol boats. At Guantánamo, the commander of the U.S. base and his counterpart on the Cuban side, along with their respective teams, began meeting each month.
By the year 2000, it seemed that the United States and Cuba had found an approach to one another that permitted each to open the door without risking domestic political suicide. Cuba could rail against the embargo and imperialism and organize the entire world to vote against Washington at the United Nations while reaping the benefits of remittances and visits from Cuban Americans, welcoming congressional delegations and American capitalists to huge trade shows, and sending its artists, musicians, and scholars on road shows around the United States, including to the Grammys and the Oscars. With economic sanctions still largely in place, the embargo allowed Cuba to determine for itself the pace it would integrate into the world economy, even as it began purchasing American agricultural products to feed its own population and growing numbers of foreign tourists. For its part, while continuing to emphasize human rights, the Clinton administration appeared to have hit on a strategy that ruptured the Cuban American hard-liners’ monopoly over the policy debate, while building a new popular and bipartisan consensus across the country and in Congress favoring engagement and contact with Cuba. While neither country made a priority of normalizing relations with the other, a low-key approach to relaxing the longstanding enmity suited both.
For nearly two decades until his death from cancer in 1997, Mas Canosa was the charismatic leader who gave the Cuban exile community its public face and its political strategy. In Miami, this meant that the Cuban American National Foundation had become without a doubt the most well-endowed and politically dominant exile organization. Mas Canosa and the CANF achieved this status through direct-mail fundraising that targeted the wealthiest among Cuba’s old-money sugar families, Miami’s newly moneyed entrepreneurial class, and viejitas (little old ladies) in Hialeah. Mas Canosa had a keen sense of the media’s importance, controlling the public debate and keeping alternative voices muted through his ubiquitous presence in the Spanish-language media and a healthy dose of intimidation. In Washington, though he often lobbied Congress with other CANF executives or board members, only Jorge Mas Canosa combined charm and pressure tactics in a package that could move Republicans and Democrats to see things his way. His checkbook and extensive Rolodex also allowed him to create a PAC that aggressively helped keep members of Congress (particularly new members) loyal to the anti-Castro cause.
After Mas Canosa’s death, his son Jorge Mas Santos took over leadership of the CANF. With the Catholic Church playing a role, a debate surfaced about whether some of the long-standing orthodoxies of the organization were the best way to ensure the regime’s collapse. Despite successfully lobbying for the Cuban Democracy Act and Helms-Burton, individuals within the group began to realize that the longer the Castro regime lasted without its Soviet patron, the more CANF’s strategy risked irrelevance. The pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 provided the opportunity for reform-minded CANF members, including Mas Santos, to steer the organization away from his father’s rigid isolationist approach by supporting family ties and dissidents on the island. After Mas Canosa, new Cuban American voices and organizations gained some political space in Miami and in Washington. By slowly adapting to a new reality of family ties and more forcefully promoting the potential of a viable opposition on the ground within Cuba, the CANF was able to retain a shot at relevance under a new generation’s leadership. But a more existential threat to exile unity and to the CANF was looming in the form of a nearly 6-yearold boy named Elián, soon to arrive on Florida’s shores.
The Elián González episode, followed by the contested 2000 election, dashed any expectation that the end of Clinton’s presidency would bring dramatic moves by the White House toward Cuba. If the Cuban American community was outraged by Janet Reno’s dark-of-the-night raid to seize Elián and reunite him with his father, Al Gore saw his political future on the line. Leaving no pandering stone unturned, the vice president had already called for the boy to be kept in the United States against his father’s wishes, going so far as to invoke his authority as president of the U.S. Senate and sponsor a resolution calling for Elián to be made a U.S. citizen. But when the administration he served decided otherwise, Gore knew he would be hard pressed to sustain Clinton’s impressive gains in Cuban American votes in 1996. And he didn’t: Gore lost Florida to Bush by 537 votes, but he lost Cuban American votes by a much wider margin, winning just under 20% to Bush’s 80%, a more than 15% decline relative to the Democrats’ win in 1996. Nothing dramatized the political backlash of the Elián affair as much as the spectacle of Cuban Americans participating among the crowd of demonstrators in December 2000 who succeeded in forcing, literally, an end to the Miami-Dade recount, and ultimately to Al Gore’s shot at the presidency.
In 1998, Pope John Paul II’s visit to Havana had provided a rare opportunity for Cuban Americans to connect to their families on the island and to their country of birth outside of the ideological and censorious environment of South Florida, making contact across the straits less taboo. By contrast, the 2000 Elián saga in some sense redrew the line between Miami and Havana. Yet although their votes damaged Gore and the Democrats, Cuban Americans ultimately did themselves no favor by aggressively exploiting the Elián affair. As betrayed as they felt by the Clinton administration’s handling of Elián’s reuniting with his father, Cuban Americans also recognized that the scandal had tarnished their national reputation. In the resulting quest to place blame and assign responsibility, Cuban Americans confronted just how much they had changed. Mas Canosa was dead, ties between families on and off the island would persist, and a younger generation less single-minded and passionate about overthrowing Castro had emerged. As a result, the community soon turned on itself. The CANF board of directors split, and the most conservative hard-liners went on to found the Cuban Liberty Council, an organization that opposes virtually all family or humanitarian ties to the island. Meanwhile, a group of Cuban American businessmen founded the Cuba Study Group (CSG) in order to promote certain forms of conditional engagement with the island. The CSG would also help spearhead the efforts of Consenso Cubano, a new umbrella group that brought together moderate to conservative-minded exile organizations with representatives of some dissident groups. Overall, however, political unity (one of Fidel’s signal historical achievements) eluded Miami’s Cuban American establishment.
By 2002, strong majorities in the community continued to support the embargo itself. Yet new majorities were also acknowledging the failure of current policies and supporting family travel and other humanitarian measures for reaching the Cuban people. By the 2004 presidential election, and with very little Spanish-language media advertising or direct campaigning among Cuban Americans, Democratic candidate John Kerry’s position supporting family travel and people-to-people ties helped the Democrats recover somewhat from their 2000 lashing in South Florida (although they still lost the Cuban American vote) and the state as a whole.
Shortly after taking office, the George W. Bush administration appointed a host of conservative Latin America hands to key positions in the government. Some had worked for Jesse Helms in the Senate during the heyday of Central America’s civil wars and as foot soldiers crafting the Helms-Burton legislation. Others of Cuban origin had lobbied for the bill and carried Reagan’s torch in Latin America during the 1980s. Together, they were intent on plugging a leaky embargo even though public opinion (whether nationally, in the business community, or among Cuban Americans) was clearly supportive of the Clinton-era openings. Moreover, the president himself (whose brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, had developed deep political and business ties with Cuban exile leaders) had campaigned on a promise to bring down Fidel. Nonetheless, prior to September 11, 2001, the new government paid scarce attention to Cuba. In Latin America it focused instead on a Summit of the Americas in Canada; migration talks with the new president of Mexico, Vicente Fox; and an emerging irritant in South America, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
For its part, the Cuban government felt a certain degree of confidence from its extensive ties to American business, political, and cultural circles developed in preceding years—not just among Democrats but Republicans as well (particularly among representatives of agricultural states that benefited from growing food exports to the Cuban market). The Cuban government was under no illusion about the hard-line proclivities of the Bush administration’s Latin America hands. Yet with the GOP’s emphasis on business and its taste for law and order, Castro probed signs that it might still be possible to establish a quiet modus vivendi with Bush while continuing momentum in the U.S. Congress for further economic openings. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, such possibilities would quickly fade.
On the day of the attacks, when the United States shut down its airspace, the Cuban government privately offered to open its airfields for American planes to land there and offered medical teams to assist with the disaster and recovery. Both offers were ignored. That night, Fidel Castro went live on Cuban television with a speech that, while reminding viewers of Cuba’s own experience with political violence, categorically and unequivocally condemned the attacks and terrorism. Moreover, Fidel personally expressed Cuba’s and his own solidarity with the people of the United States.
For Bush administration hard-liners, such gestures rang hollow. Instead, they came to believe that the attacks created an opportunity to accelerate plans to up-end the Clinton-era openings. After all, with Cuba still on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism—a designation that rang with new potential significance—the political climate seemed to favor a sharpening of the U.S. approach to Cuba. The president’s January 2002 State of the Union address threatened tough action against an “axis of evil,” and although Bush did not single out Cuba, his warning against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by such states created an opening. In a matter of months, and at the same time it was preparing its rationale for the invasion of Iraq, the administration started building a case that Cuba was developing biological weapons capabilities (with what was called “dual-use” biotechnology) and had the potential to export its know-how to other rogue nations such as Libya, Syria, and Iran. Hard-liner John Bolton, then a State Department official, claimed that Cuba’s potential threat to U.S. national security had been “underplayed.” In the inflamed post-9/11 war-on-terror zeitgeist that engulfed Washington, allegations of possessing weapons of mass destruction, which were advanced at the same time as the pretext for military action 9,000 miles away in Iraq, spelled extreme risk for a country long a U.S. enemy and just 90 miles away.
In Cuba’s case, however, cooler minds in the intelligence community and in the U.S. Congress prevailed. Strong push-back against the allegations strengthened the hands of more rational actors in the administration, while Cuba’s invitation for Jimmy Carter to visit its Biotechnology Institute helped dampen the plausibility of the charges. Though Bush administration hard-liners were forced to back down and instead focus on the far less glamorous work of rolling back the Clinton-era openings, they exacted personal and professional revenge against those intelligence professionals who had the integrity to substantiate a less politicized assessment of Cuba’s dual-use capacity.
The Reagan administration first added Cuba to this list for its support of the FMLN guerrilla in El Salvador in 1982. By 1992, the State Department reported that Cuba had stopped training and funding leftist rebel groups and was actively involved in pressing groups in Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala to pursue peace accords and renounce armed struggle. Throughout the 1990s, the State Department continued to believe that Cuba had ceased its support for armed revolution abroad, and a 1997 review conducted by the entire U.S. intelligence community concluded that Cuba no longer constituted a threat to American national security. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Cuba signed and ratified all 12 United Nations resolutions against terrorism. Nonetheless, the new Bush administration’s first “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report (produced by the State Department) in 2001 stated that Cuba still supported terror as a tactic of revolution, citing as evidence both Cuba’s broad rejection of the U.S.-led “war on terror” as well as the presence of Basque separatists, Colombian rebels, and U.S. fugitives (Puerto Rican separatists and Black Panthers) living in Cuba.
Such accusations lacked context. Castro gave members of the Basque group ETA a place to retire, essentially as a favor to then Spanish prime minister Felipe González. Likewise, at Colombia’s request, Havana has been the principal location for peace talks between successive Colombian governments and the smaller ELN rebel group for years, just as Mexico, without landing on the terrorist list, served as a third-country location for talks with the FARC. Finally, Cuba has offered to negotiate the return of some U.S. criminals living in Cuba in exchange for the return of Cuban-born citizens currently living in the United States who have committed violent acts against Cuba, such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.
Despite publicly charged rhetoric throughout the Bush administration, American military officials credit Cuba with consistently providing cooperation in counterterrorism (and counternarcotics as well) during this period.
The “Cuban Five,” known in Cuba as the Cinco Heroes, are counterintelligence agents and spies, sent by the Castro government to infiltrate several Miami-based exile groups in the 1990s. Based on their work, the Cuban government passed information to the Clinton administration’s State Department and directly to an FBI team that visited Havana to investigate the alleged plans of those groups under surveillance to commit terrorist attacks against Cuba. In the fall of 1998, the FBI subsequently arrested the five Cuban informants, charging them with a variety of crimes, from falsifying documents to conspiracy to commit espionage. Between the arrest and the beginning of their trial, the five spent almost three years in jail, including 17 months in solitary confinement. In June 2001, all were found guilty. In December of that year, three were given life sentences; the other two, shorter terms between 15 and 19 years.
Until the Cuban Five were sentenced, Cuban officials did not move aggressively to bring sustained public and international attention to the case. Coinciding with the launch of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” their sentencing gave Cuba an appropriate context and trigger to do so. Havana argued that the five agents had been carrying out a patriotic duty to defend their homeland against attack in a country with a long history of tolerating and at times supporting exile extremists and terrorists. In this way, the Cuban government impugned the Bush administration’s commitment to fighting terror as disingenuous and selective—yet another example of hypocrisy from the empire. United States prosecutors had argued that the five had intended to gather intelligence against the U.S. government itself. But attorneys representing the five strongly contested this notion, arguing that none of the accused, including one individual who had been employed as a janitor at the United States Southern Command, had any intention of inflicting damage upon the United States or the American people.
As the saga of the five was unfolding, Ana Belén Montes, a then Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was arrested in September 2001 and pled guilty to charges of espionage on behalf of Cuba in October 2002. The Cuban government raised no protest over the arrest. By contrast, the Cuban Five had infiltrated not the U.S. government, but exile groups like Commandos F4, Alpha 66, and Brothers to the Rescue. Unlike the first two groups, which openly market themselves as armed anti-Cuba paramilitary groups on their websites, Brothers to the Rescue carved out a reputation within and beyond the Cuban American community for ostensibly humanitarian activities. Nonetheless, because of BTTR’s close links to hard-liners in the U.S. Congress and because of its intentionally provocative incursions into Cuban airspace, the Cuban government regarded whatever humanitarian impulse that might have guided BTTR’s members as a flimsy cover for what the regime saw as a direct threat to Cuban national security. For Cuban authorities, the work of the five was thus viewed as a step necessary for national self-defense in the absence of greater U.S. efforts to crack down on the groups in question.
If the Elián González affair had handed Fidel a highly sympathetic, indeed photogenic opportunity for domestic and international political mobilization, bringing attention to the case of the Cuban Five proved more challenging. Still, the faces of the Cinco Heroes were plastered on public spaces all over Cuba (and remain so today). In cities across Europe and Latin America, as well as in Washington D.C., New York, and San Francisco, the government helped to make their case a cause célèbre among Cuba solidarity groups as well. Most important, as the constitutional and foreign policy dimensions of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” became increasingly vulnerable to charges of illegality and hypocrisy, the case of the Cuban Five suggested that the United States cannot stand for fighting terrorists while denying the right of other governments to do the same.
In 1990, following intensive lobbying from the Florida congressional delegation, the first President Bush pardoned long-time anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch, one of the two principal intellectual architects of the 1976 explosion of the Cubana Airline passenger flight that killed all 73 people on board. In 2005, his co-conspirator, Luis Posada Carriles, crossed into Texas from Mexico, and after a period of one month in detention, was released. Both now live in the Miami area.
In the 15 years between when Bosch and Posada each emerged from the anti-Castro underground, violent efforts against Cuba continued. Some thwarted assassination attempts and violent acts were associated with Posada, others with long-time terrorist groups such as Alpha 66 and Commando L. In 1998, for example, Posada told the New York Times that he had organized a spate of 1997 hotel bombings in Havana, one of which killed an Italian tourist, with financial support from Cuban American National Foundation leaders and its chairman, Jorge Mas Canosa. Mas Canosa and the other CANF executives denied the charges.
The last known assassination attempt against Fidel Castro took place in November 2000 on the eve of a speech Castro planned to deliver before a group of university students while in Panama for the 10th Ibero-American Summit. Working off information from Cuba’s security forces, Panamanian officials arrested four exiles, among them Posada, found with weapons, explosives, a map of Fidel’s route to the forum, and an agenda of the summit’s meetings. After three and a half years in Panamanian prisons, all of them were suddenly pardoned by President Mireya Moscoso, who left office under a cloud of corruption charges. It was a year later when Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, snuck across the Mexican border using a false U.S. passport.
Particularly since Posada’s reappearance on American soil in 2005, Venezuela has aggressively sought his extradition from the United States. In part, this activism relates to Hugo Chávez’s own ties to Castro. Yet beyond this obvious ideological link, Venezuela also has much at stake in this case. In the early 1970s, Posada had become a naturalized Venezuelan citizen and risen to serve as chief of operations for Venezuelan intelligence. It was while running a private security agency in Caracas that he planned the 1976 Cubana bombing. He was prosecuted in Venezuela for this crime, but escaped from custody twice. The Bush administration largely ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, arguing that Caracas failed to present enough evidence. More likely, given the amount of declassified documentation available on the case, Bush officials bowed to pressure from Posada supporters who claim he would be tortured if returned to Chávez’s Venezuela. Yet neither has the United States endeavored to hold Posada accountable for his crimes. Although the Patriot Act permits the United States to indefinitely detain “excludable aliens” who are authors of terrorist attacks, Posada now lives, and is occasionally and publicly celebrated, in Miami, though generally by an aging group of his peers rather than by the majority of Cuban Americans. Posada may eventually be extradited to Panama, where the Supreme Court has ruled that former president Moscoso’s pardon was unconstitutional.
As the United States entered the new millennium, Elián fatigue, embargo fatigue, and widespread annoyance with the domestic politics of the Cuba issue had helped create a bipartisan consensus in favor of dramatic policy change. No one necessarily thought this would be easy. Prior to 9/11 and the subsequent accusations about Cuba’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities, Bush’s nominee for secretary of state, Colin Powell, was forced to retract comments in his confirmation hearing that mildly acknowledged Cuba’s successes in health care and education—not an encouraging sign. Still, the momentum for policy change continued into the next year, when the GOP-controlled House of Representatives voted to end trade and travel restrictions. By then, however, the Bush White House had made clear its intention of vetoing any such legislation.
Nonetheless, for most of 2002, Havana gingerly probed for evidence that it was possible to reach a modus vivendi with Washington. Raul Castro offered to return detainees from the war in Afghanistan to Guantánamo in the event they tried to escape. At the request of the Colombian government, it sent a Colombian drug trafficker to the United States. Even in the wake of early 2002’s specious accusations regarding Cuba’s supposed potential to develop and proliferate technology for bioweapons, the Cuban government still permitted President Carter’s historic visit in May and allowed the Varela Project petition to be submitted without significant incident. This gesture would mark the high point of their generosity, however.
Beginning in early 2003, the Bush administration set out to largely undo the people-to-people openings launched by the Clinton administration. Acquiring or renewing a license for NGO-sponsored or educational travel became more difficult. New requirements obliged American groups wishing to travel to Cuba to demonstrate how their travel would benefit religious, human rights, dissident, or other opposition groups on the island. Soon, almost all of the legal travel categories created under the rubric of “supporting the Cuban people” had been eliminated.
Yet it was the run-up to the war in Iraq and the new mantra of preemptive security that really shook Havana’s expectations of the Bush White House. One dimension of the Castro government’s efforts to cultivate positive vibes in Washington had been its relative tolerance of a variety of dissident groups (many of which had been infiltrated), from small scale to higher profile. Congressional delegations visiting Havana could return to their districts and to Washington having met with such individuals, lending their visits, which often explored possible commercial ties with the regime, an air of human rights credibility. But the benefits of allowing such oxygen evaporated once Washington started to advance its regime change agenda with military power, albeit in Iraq. Havana reasoned that allowing the groups to continue to function could also give an in-road to an enemy whose designs may well turn belligerent. Thus, in the eyes of Cuban officials, the national security prerogatives of cracking down on domestic opposition activists were well worth the near-universal international backlash Cuba was likely to (and did) incur. It is no surprise that the “black spring” arrests of 75 dissidents occurred in March 2003, the day before Bush formally declared war on Iraq.
Several months later, President Bush launched the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba (CAFC), a new interagency initiative chaired by a series of cabinet officials. The commission’s recommendations offered few surprises: Keep sanctions in place, step up efforts to penetrate the government’s “information blockade,” interrupt any moves by a successor regime to replace Fidel Castro, but offer assistance to a transitional government willing to hold elections, release political prisoners, and adopt the marks of freedom stipulated by Helms-Burton. In the scenarios envisioned by the commission’s first 500-page report, an American “transition coordinator” (a position created soon after at the State Department) would judge when conditions in post-Castro Cuba would make it eligible for aid and other accoutrements that accompany a U.S. seal of approval.
One policy change to emerge from the commission’s work was the president’s move, notably in 2004, an election year, to massively scale back Cuban American family travel and remittances. Since 1999, Cuban Americans had been permitted to travel annually to the island to visit any member of their extended family. The new regulations cut these visits to once every three years, and only to see immediate family. New restrictions on remittances reduced the legal quantity that could be sent and also stipulated that only immediate family would be eligible to receive such transfers. Previously, they could be sent to “any household.”
Measuring the impact of these changes with any certainty is nearly impossible. In 2006, the CAFC could only claim that the new policies had reduced remittances “significantly.” Yet while Cuban families certainly felt the pinch, there was no appreciable effect on the Cuban regime’s capacity to stay in power or repress its citizens. As relatives found alternative and sometimes illicit ways to get money to their loved ones (sometimes through illicit travel), it is likely that remittance flows experienced some recovery. Travel numbers have not bounced back, however. In the same period, Washington denied virtually all requests by Cuban professionals to travel to the United States unless applicants could claim they had been victims of political persecution by the regime. With the exception of a host of institutional exchanges, such as those conducted by Harvard University, most professional collaboration in science and the humanities dried up. In 2004, the United States also called a halt to the twice-annual migration talks because the meetings allegedly gave the appearance that the United States conferred legitimacy upon the Cuban government. Cuba’s annual allotment of 20,000 migration visas continued, but human smuggling in the Gulf of Mexico did as well.
In response to these measures, Cuba reduced its public relations campaigns around lifting the embargo, convinced that they were not, for the moment, worth the effort. Guantánamo once again became a tool to mobilize domestic nationalism. Initially, Cuba’s security establishment had hoped to show off its national security bona fides by tolerating the base’s conversion into a detention center for suspected terrorists. Yet as allegations of torture surfaced and the legality of the detentions came into question, Guantánamo became, as it did for many of America’s global critics, a symbol of American imperial hubris, one which in the Cuban case also allowed Havana to highlight the island’s own history of grievances over American violations of its sovereignty. At the same time, fully cognizant of George W. Bush’s bellicosity, the Cuban government appeared to cautiously avoid dramatic provocations of the sort that could lead to a repeat of past migration crises or the 1996 shoot-down.
Among the last public gestures of goodwill under the George W. Bush administration was Fidel Castro’s offer to send hundreds of medical professionals and disaster relief workers to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But Washington wrote off the offer as a publicity stunt. The embarrassing prospect that Fidel’s teams of doctors and nurses might have something to contribute to New Orleans residents outweighed any calculus that could actually deliver help to Katrina’s victims.
With the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, political, material, and ideological resources for supporting revolution abroad dried up, forcing Cuba to develop new strategies for projecting itself as a global player. In a sign of the times, after nearly four years of negotiations, nine Cuban generals joined counterparts from the Soviet Union, South Africa, and the United States at the United Nations in late 1991 to celebrate an agreement calling for the withdrawal of remaining Cuban troops from Angola, the independence of Namibia, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. By 1992, there was no money and little strategic capacity for Cuba to pursue military activities outside of its own borders. Instead, still reeling from the Ochoa affair (see page 73, “Who was General Arnaldo Ochoa and why as he executed?”), Cuba’s chastened and more modest military services turned their attention to defending the homeland and administering major portions of the island’s economy.
The break with Moscow had not been easy. On one hand, Cubans made no secret of the relief they felt upon being freed from the ideological constraints of their Soviet benefactors, whom they largely disrespected. But on the other, Moscow had left Cuba saddled with an enormous amount of debt and a plummeting economy. Meanwhile, reformist, anti-Communist governments in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest—newly independent from the iron curtain—railed against Havana’s insolence and revolutionary defiance, conspiring with the United States to promote a tropical velvet revolution. Continuing a trend begun in the 1980s, Cuba’s foreign service cultivated trade and diplomatic ties regardless of ideology, improving relations with Mexico, western Europe, Canada, the English-speaking Caribbean, and many Latin American countries as well. In Asia, Cuba worked to improve its on-again off-again relationship with China, while also forging ties with Japan and an increasingly capitalist-minded Vietnam.
Public diplomacy became gradually more important as well. Cuban artists and scholars began performing, studying, traveling, and living internationally. Doctors and nurses became part of an aggressive strategy of highly effective medical diplomacy combining charitable impulses (disaster-relief operations in Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, among others) with revenue-earning foreign medical missions.
American allies in Canada and Europe were noticeably peeved when the U.S. Congress twice took aim at their trade and investment ties with Cuba in the 1990s. So was the Cuban government. But Havana also adapted to renewed efforts at U.S. isolation to suit Cuban interests. The extraterritorial reach of U.S. laws not only helped Cuba highlight its victimization by the United States at various international forums, bilaterally, and with the American public but also increased the determination with which other countries sought to distance themselves from the U.S. approach. Over the course of the 1990s, Canada became one of Cuba’s largest investors and trading partners, principally in energy, mining, telecommunications, and tourism. Though a solid diplomatic ally of the United States, Canada represented to Cuba a kinder, gentler version of Anglo-America with none of Washington’s heavy baggage. At times, Canada even played a useful balancing role between the White House and Havana. Yet in the instances when Canadian heads of state fancied themselves as brokers of grand bargains, poised perhaps to extract human rights and democracy concessions from Castro in exchange for a relaxation of U.S. sanctions, Cuban diplomacy, directed always by Fidel himself, set Canada straight. Cuba might well have appreciated Canada’s independence from the United States and its investments on the island, but the embargo was never painful enough to force Fidel to accede to third-country initiatives that might require him to make internal changes for which any foreign power, however benign in its intentions, could take credit.
Across the Atlantic, Cuba faced the dual challenge of dealing with the common foreign policies of the European Union and also building bilateral relations with each of the EU’s member states. As with Canada, Europe came to be an important source of trade and investment for the island. Also like Canada, throughout the 1990s, the EU pursued dialogue with Havana around themes of human rights and democracy. For its part, Cuba was at times amenable to discussion and interested in the financial assistance an associated cooperation agreement could yield. Spain was a particularly important partner in boosting this renewed spirit of engagement. Over the course of a decade of openings, the former colonial power gradually became Cuba’s largest foreign investor, mirroring its overtures throughout Latin American during the 1990s, dubbed the reconquista, or “reconquest,” by some. Hopefuls in both countries looked to the post-Franco-pacted transition to democracy in the late 1970s as a possible model for Cuba to follow. But as with Canada, Cuba was never willing to entertain the kinds of political reforms imagined by numerous European interlocutors and required by the EU for formal cooperation and assistance packages. With the election of José María Aznar as Spain’s primary minister in 1996, and the subsequent Spanish assumption of the EU’s rotating presidency in 2000, Europe’s posture toward Cuba gradually evolved. By 2003, when Cuba arrested and jailed over 75 human rights activists and dissidents, the prospects for a human rights dialogue to add any real value collapsed, and the EU imposed diplomatic sanctions to limit high-level contacts and support Cuban opposition groups. Yet after the terrorist bombings of Madrid’s metro system in 2004 (widely thought to be the result of Aznar’s involvement in the Iraq war, despite the prime minister’s initial attempt to pin the blame on Basque radicals), the Socialist Party swiftly returned to power in an election scheduled just days after the attacks. Aided by the growing antipathy in Europe for any policy associated with the presidency of George W. Bush, incoming Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero would soon launch Spain and Cuba, and Cuba and the EU, on a path to diplomatic recovery.
Like most Latin American countries, Cuba regards its active membership in multilateral institutions as part of a strategy to help deflect encroachments upon its sovereignty by American power. Although the United States has successfully kept Cuba out of international forums like the OAS, the World Bank, and the IMF, Cuba has been able to remain quite active in organizations across the globe, first and foremost the United Nations. In fact, one could argue that Cuba’s multilateral diplomacy has actually been strengthened as a result of U.S. isolationist tactics. There are also intrinsic reasons motivating Cuba’s activism multilaterally. As a founding member of the WTO and of the UN, Cuban diplomats take pride in carrying on a tradition that preceded the revolution. Whether to promote its social agenda, organize a global coalition against the U.S. embargo, or attempt to refute accusations of human rights abuse, multilateral institutions are a critical component of Cuba’s diplomatic resources. Cuba has been among the leading countries of the developing world to argue for diluting the veto power of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members and allowing more representative participation from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Although not always successful in deflecting U.S. criticisms of its human rights record, for many years, Cuba went toe to toe with the United States at the Geneva-based UN Commission on Human Rights until its abolition and replacement by a new Human Rights Council (in which the United States declined to participate) in 2006. And, beginning in 1992, for 17 straight years Cuba has secured widespread and increasing support for its resolutions at the UN General Assembly condemning the U.S. embargo. In 2008, for example, the resolution was approved by a lopsided vote of 185 to 3.
After the Cold War came to an end, Castro viewed the emerging liberal democratic capitalist order in Latin America as a threat to social justice and a potential recipe for the political marginalization of the left. But he also knew Cuba stood no chance of altering this state of affairs. In Nicaragua, it was painful for Castro to watch the Sandinistas lose an election he had advised against even allowing. Still, by the early 1990s, Cuba stopped supporting leftist guerrillas in Central America and had even begun playing a constructive role in brokering peace throughout the region. As the decade progressed, Castro watched as social activists and left-wing politicians with longstanding ties to his country embraced the new rules of the game, assuming leadership positions as elected officials, heads of national organizations, or business leaders—all within a framework of multiparty, and essentially capitalist democracy. Yet rather than criticize former comrades for compromising their earlier revolutionary aspirations, Cuba’s leadership emphasized the importance of respecting political “diversity” (including Cuba’s own one-party system) as a signal feature of democracy in Latin America. The end of Soviet support reinforced the need for such pragmatism.
In Brazil, for example, Cuba and Fidel had long cultivated ties to the Brazilian Workers Party (PT). Headed for decades by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the PT was originally organized around the principles of democratic centralism, but had made a strategic decision in the early 1980s to participate in democratic politics. Over two decades, as the party came to run towns, cities, states, and eventually the entire country, its leaders continued to view Fidel and Cuba as spiritual comrades and steadfast allies, even as they lost interest in the practical applicability of the Cuban model. As a result, when Lula was elected as president first in 2002 and then reelected in 2006, Cuba found itself with a loyal friend holding the presidency of the eighth largest economy in the world.
In Chile, the 2006 election of Michelle Bachelet produced another sympathetic ally. Like many of her compatriots, Bachelet’s family had suffered dearly under the repression of the Pinochet dictatorship. After the murder of her father and her own imprisonment, she and her mother would flee to exile in Australia, East Germany, and the United States before returning to Chile in 1979. As president, she also expressed gratitude to Cuba for welcoming so many exiles of the fallen Allende regime, some of whom were leftists close to Havana ideologically, while others were Social Democrats who bristled at Cuba’s authoritarian bent but in some cases owed their lives to the country’s magnanimity. Early into her term, she announced her intention, unrealized at this writing, to visit Cuba during her presidency.
A similar story repeated itself in Bolivia (2005), Ecuador (2006), Nicaragua (2006), El Salvador (2009), and earlier (1998) in Venezuela, where newly elected heads of state or their cabinet members had often studied in Havana as teenagers and young adults or traveled there later in life as part of the Latin American Left’s conference-trotting cohort of revolutionaries, professionals, and social activists. By 2009, Cuba had restored diplomatic ties with every country in the hemisphere but the United States.
Mexico, however, presented a greater challenge. For 70 years, Mexico’s one-party state had never broken ties with Cuba, defending the principle of self-determination even at the peak of the OAS’s efforts to isolate the island in the 1960s. With the inauguration in 2000 of Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive and head of a conservative-leaning opposition political party, Mexico took a different tack as it embarked upon its own political transition. Fox brought a new foreign policy to Mexico, one that sought to closely tether the country to the United States for domestic political, economic, and strategic reasons. Fox also sought to distance Mexico from the repressive domestic policies of the long-dominant Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI). Thus, together with foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, its principal architect, Fox’s foreign policy set about casting the country as a champion of human rights and democracy, not only at home but also abroad. In that context, relations with Cuba would have to change. Mexico soon dropped its habitual opposition to the yearly American resolution against Cuba at the UN Commission on Human Rights while also cultivating ties with Cuban exiles and dissidents on the island. In 2002, an embarrassing incident almost brought Cuban-Mexican relations to the point of rupture. In the lead-up to the UN Development Aid Summit in Monterrey that year, Fox suggested over the phone that Fidel attend but simply “eat and then get going,” before President Bush was to arrive, so that Fox could avoid an awkward diplomatic moment. The episode came to light publicly when Castro subsequently played on Cuban television a recording of his phone conversation with Fox. A deeply angered Mexican Left quickly denounced Fox’s abandonment of Mexico’s historic stance of nonintervention. Castro’s gesture also put the rest of the region on notice that his shift from promoting revolution to forging official diplomatic, trade, and commercial ties required reciprocity. Any country seeking to meddle in Cuba’s internal affairs risked the prospect that Cuba might exploit its extensive and long-standing social and political networks throughout the region to do the same.
Between November 2005 and the end of 2006, Latin Americans went to the national polls in 12 countries. Left and center-left leaders were elected or reelected in 8 of the 12—Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and Uruguay—and came within striking distance of victory in Peru and Mexico. Beyond the national level, a spate of municipal, provincial, and gubernatorial elections put left-leaning political parties in office and in national legislatures in many countries as well. Together, these impressive electoral outcomes (and close losses) signaled an increasingly empowered electorate’s demands for public policies to address vast inequality, poverty, social exclusion, and rampant crime.
With Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez absorbing the lion’s share of Latin America’s public oxygen on the regional and, at times, global stage, and with Cuba and Venezuela’s deepening ties, much discussion focused on to what extent either country had anything to do with this apparent re-emergence of the Left in Latin America. Venezuela was accused in a number of cases of interfering in elections or supporting the campaigns of leaders it deemed favorable. Cuba had few resources for such schemes. But had the island played a roll? Indirectly, yes.
As described above, by the late 1980s to early 1990s, the Latin American Left had by and large renounced armed struggle and actively participated in democratic political processes. Ceasing its support for armed movements, Cuba pragmatically encouraged this process. Today, no contemporary Latin American leftist political party, with the possible exception of some factions in Venezuela, seeks to emulate the Cuban model. Ideology has become vastly less important than pragmatically solving the region’s enormous economic, social, ethnic, and security problems. Nonetheless, Cuba’s long-standing critique of “savage capitalism,” American power, and the failure of regional elites to invest in their own people came to be shared not only by the democratic Left but also by political parties, leading intellectuals, scholars, and increasingly elites themselves, across the ideological spectrum. Moreover, during the 1990s, when the mantra of neoliberalism called for a dramatic scaling back of the state as Latin America confronted the consequences of debt crises and import substitution industrialization, Cuba served as an important symbolic anchor in a broader debate about the role of the state in providing social welfare and sustainable development. Governance in Cuba could hardly be characterized in most cases as efficient or well managed. Still, in Latin America today, with the Left resurgent, Cuba can be credited with having contributed to a new regional consensus: That is, through well-funded and fiscally competent institutions, a government’s primary role is to deliver the building blocks of opportunity, dignity, and social rights to populations long excluded from the region’s wealth and resources. By the end of his presidency, even George W. Bush indirectly conceded this point by attempting to frame U.S. policy toward the region as helping Latin Americans achieve social justice, appropriating language once the preserve of Cuba and the region’s Left. Still, unlike Cuba, the Democratic Left in Latin America (again with the partial exception of Venezuela) continued to believe that social justice could not be divorced from basic individual and democratic rights. Thus, while Cuba’s international message continues to resonate, its domestic model is largely seen as an anachronistic holdover from a prior era.
In the years since Hugo Chávez was first elected president in 1998, Venezuela and Cuba have grown increasingly close. Chávez and Fidel Castro’s public displays of affection demonstrated a deepening alliance, and the two share similar critiques of American power, often collaborating to build new alternative regional organizations that embody their distinctive world views. Of course, Venezuela has also provided Cuba with substantial sums of discounted oil—approximately 100,000 barrels per day—a critical source of support for Cuba’s struggling economy. Yet many outside observers have wrongly assumed that Chávez has positioned Venezuela to exercise substantial influence over Cuba internally. If anything, the opposite is the case. Despite its apparent economic leverage via the oil subsidy, Venezuela is not a domestic political player in Cuba. By contrast, Fidel and a host of close advisors have been crucial in helping Chávez consolidate executive power and build new institutions at home. It is Cuban doctors and personnel who have largely staffed Venezuela’s most important social initiative: the misiones, or social, medical, and educational teams deployed to poor neighborhoods throughout Venezuela. Likewise, Cuban advisors have helped Chávez in his attempt to unify an array of leftist parties under one “Boli-varian” political umbrella.
In 2000, Cuba and Venezuela signed the oil-for-doctors arrangement that to this day forms the substantive core of their bilateral ties. But in political terms, and loosely tracking the estrangement between the United States and Venezuela, the Caracas-Havana link has evolved in two stages, 1998–2004 and 2004 to the present, with a critical turning point in 2002 when a coup attempt briefly removed Chávez from office. During his initial years in power, Chávez held out some hope that he could articulate a critique of Venezuela’s political elites as well as their allies in the United States without jeopardizing long-standing and largely healthy bilateral diplomatic and commercial ties with Washington. Early in his tenure, however, Bill Clinton refused to invite the new head of state to the White House, and Chávez stopped the DEA’s overflights to monitor drug trafficking. Both moves set the United States and Venezuela on a path toward estrangement. Once George W. Bush came to office, hard-liners in his administration picked upon a theme that emerged by the end of Clinton’s tenure: Chávez was moving Venezuela disconcertingly toward the “Cuban model.” Turned off by Chávez’s provocative rhetoric and leery of his government’s proposals for agrarian reform and a host of other structural, economic, political, and judicial changes aimed at wresting power from traditional elites, the Bush administration offered tea and sympathy, and some financial assistance, to a host of opposition groups in Venezuela and pouring into Washington at the time. When in April 2002 Chávez was briefly ousted in a coup, the White House and the U.S. embassy in Caracas issued statements indicating that they looked forward to working with the new government. The president of the congressionally funded International Republican Institute even praised the coup attempt. Leaders throughout Latin America were justifiably appalled at Washington’s seeming approval of a fundamentally undemocratic act. Indeed, just months earlier in September 2001, Colin Powell had stood with Latin Americans to sign the OAS’s Inter-American Democratic Charter, which explicitly banned coups from the region’s political playbook. From that point on, U.S.-led “democracy promotion” would ring hollow in the region; Cuba and Venezuela’s own approach to “participatory democracy,” meanwhile, gained some breathing room.
With significant experience confronting Cuba’s own domestic opposition as well as Washington’s destabilization efforts, Fidel closely counseled Chávez throughout the weekend-long coup, even preparing to receive him in Havana in the event that he was unable to return to power. Short of a clear way back to the presidency, Fidel advised Chávez to ensure his safety, lest he meet Salvador Allende’s fate and allow his ousters to fill a power vacuum (in 1973, Allende committed suicide when troops led by coup leader August Pinochet began bombing the presidential palace). Several days later, however, the coup leaders backed down under international pressure, and Chávez returned to Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas.
In the aftermath of the coup, the Cuba-Venezuela partnership deepened significantly despite the fact that a number of important differences continued to separate the two countries. Perhaps most fundamentally on the political front, unlike Castro, Chávez had been elected and reelected as Venezuela’s head of state in multiparty elections deemed by credible international observers to have been, by and large, free and fair. Facing increasing opposition at home, he again prevailed in a 2004 national referendum that had the effect of strengthening his government’s hand domestically. But to translate these various electoral successes into the kind of political staying power Chávez desired, he needed help. Cuba was a natural partner. With significant experience abolishing old institutions and creating new ones to advance a revolutionary political project and consolidate power, Cuba provided advice and advisors to do the same in Venezuela, along with up to 20,000 doctors serving in the country at the high point of bilateral cooperation, always in exchange for discounted oil. High oil prices and ideological sympathies made this relationship mutually beneficial. On the global stage, Chávez relished the role of provocateur, absorbing many of the American slings and arrows Fidel had so expertly managed in years past. Chávez deeply admired Fidel’s revolutionary example, and Fidel seemed to enjoy the stagecraft of anointing Chávez as his seeming successor in the hemisphere. Yet Chávez was no Fidel, and Venezuela was no Cuba. Despite his bluster and rhetoric, Chávez continued to rely on democratic elections to legitimate his power. Dissent and free expression remained strong, and a weak but organized opposition gained strength, especially as Chávez’s radicalization alienated many even among his long-time supporters in the military and in the country’s “Bolivarian” political establishment. Under such constraints, Havana knew full well that it could not rely indefinitely on largesse from Caracas nor depend exclusively on only one outside patron. As a result, many in Cuba took Chávez’s firm embrace and ideological affinity as politically expedient, happy to pursue a range of cooperation agreements knowing full well that while interests remain permanent, alliances never are.
With a population of just over 11 million, Cuba’s GDP (roughly $45 billion in 2007) falls closest to neighbors like the Dominican Republic or Ecuador. GDP per capita is comparable to that of Guatemala or Honduras. But unlike any of these countries, Cuba has attempted to shield most of its population from the dynamism and pressures of globalization, remaining committed to spreading its wealth (or lack thereof) more equally than in the outside capitalist world. While largely weaning itself off of sugar, Cuba has channeled foreign capital to tourism, mining (mostly of nickel), biotechnology, oil exploration, telecommunications, and, more recently, infrastructure development in energy, housing, and transportation. Foreign exchange earnings are generated primarily from tourism, nickel, medical services, tobacco and related products, citrus, and fishing. Remittances offer an important influx of foreign exchange as well. Overall foreign direct investment has reached only $6 billion since 1991, with $3 billion actually disbursed. In the Dominican Republic, by contrast, a country with a smaller population, FDI during the same rough period has exceeded $10 billion. Contracts for offshore exploration and drilling have been signed with state and private companies from Spain, Norway, China, Canada, Venezuela, and Brazil, among others. Although agriculture has been somewhat decentralized and private farmers’ markets are now ubiquitous, Cuba still imports over 80% of the food consumed by Cubans and foreign tourists, with a sizeable percentage from the United States since 2001.
From the mid-1990s into the new millennium, it looked as though the economic crisis would oblige Cuba to gradually open its economy to a wide variety of joint ventures, with state enterprises gaining a degree of financial independence from the central government. Cuba also considered opening sectors outside of traditional export-oriented or strategic industries to foreign capital, such as beach-front and residential property in upscale Havana suburbs. But particularly from 2004, and as discussed more thoroughly on page 134 (“What kind of foreign investment began in Cuba, what consequences did this investment bring to the island, and how did authorities respond?”), Cuba began to benefit from a more favorable global environment (minerals and other commodity prices began rising) as well as a bigger cushion from Venezuela. As a result of this stronger position, the government actually reversed some of the measures that had given state enterprises a degree of autonomy in managing their external affairs. In addition, the Ministry of Foreign Trade resumed greater control of all imports and exports.
Cuba certainly welcomed the outsized role that Venezuela played during this period, but the government has also slowly built a diversified though modest trade and investment portfolio, thus endeavoring to break with its past dependence on a single crop, commodity, or country. Going forward, trade with and capital from Venezuela, Canada, Spain, Brazil, China, Russia, and, over time, perhaps the United States will grow in importance to Cuba’s global integration.
During the first Gulf War, Cuba held a rotating seat on the UN Security Council and, while denouncing Iraq’s land grab in Kuwait, had been one of only two countries to oppose resolutions authorizing U.S. military action. Not surprisingly, the second time around, with George W. Bush lacking the kind of broad international support that his father had gathered previously, Cuba was again a vocal opponent of U.S. war plans. As a result, while most countries quickly closed their embassies in Baghdad, Cuba’s diplomats defiantly kept their doors open in a stand of solidarity with several other countries critical of U.S. unilateralism (though not necessarily supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime).
Like many nations and publics around the world, Cuba believed the United States’ preemptive invasion of Iraq lacked international legitimacy. As evidence mounted regarding the manipulation of prewar intelligence, civilian casualties, the destruction of Iraqi historical sites and infrastructure, and the torture of detainees, Cuba joined the chorus of international actors whose opposition to the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation became even more resolute. But unlike many western opponents of the war, Cuba also saw in the Iraqi experience—and in the doctrine of preemptive attack that had framed the invasion—its own possible fate at the hands of the United States. In this way, and as explored in more detail on page 187 (“What were the main features of U.S. policy toward Cuba under George W. Bush and how did Cuba respond?”), the outbreak of the war in Iraq reinforced a closed national security mindset at home, contributing to the motivation for the March 2003 crackdown on dissidents. Moreover, U.S. policies of “de-Baathification” in Iraq (or the wholesale purging from public office of virtually all Iraqis employed in Saddam Hussein’s Baath party institutions) seemed to strongly mirror the Bush administration’s own recommendations that Cuba rid itself of nearly all vestiges of the revolutionary era, outlined in detailed fashion by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. Thus, in addition to serving as a general warning about the implications of unchecked American power, the Iraq war helped the Cuban regime highlight to its own population the risks of opening the door too quickly to reform policies that would leave Cuba vulnerable to an American-designed transition plan. Abroad, the war in Iraq helped Cuba to further establish its bona fides on the international stage as it associated itself with a broadly shared critique of the United States—whether at the UN, at the Ibero-American Summits, or within the Non-Aligned Movement—that transcended politics, ideology, and geography. With the prisons at Guantánamo a daily reminder of the human consequences of one country rewriting the international rules of war, Cuba was able to deflect attention from its own prisons and political prisoners onto those jailed by a foreign power on its own territory.