President Raul Castro took office in 2008. By his own account, he will serve as president of Cuba for a total of two five-year terms, ending in 2018 when he will be 87 years old. Under newly established term limits, however, he may serve as secretary general of the Cuban Communist Party until as late as 2021. If so, upon retirement Raul will have presided over a 15-year process of succession and transformation, beginning the moment in 2006 when life-threatening illness first compelled Fidel to step aside.
In some ways, Raul has set out to rebuild the fundamental relationship between the state and the individual, dramatically increasing expectations of the latter and reducing the obligations of the former. Reforms that at a glance may look economic in nature are in fact deeply political, even as Cuba remains a one-party state. Impatient and clearly conscious that time is working against him, Raul berates and cajoles the party faithful and the Cuban public to get to work. His mantras? That equality of opportunity does not mean equality of circumstances, and that productivity, efficiency, private ownership, and even profit are not anathema to socialism. He has attempted to disaggregate the party from government and governance while imposing the rule of law over a bureaucratic, personalistic political culture. He has established systems for accountability at the ministerial level, cut budgets and superfluous ministries, and begun to give greater tax and budget authority to local governments. The old joke that Cuba is a country where “no one works but everyone is paid” no longer gets a laugh, because by 2014 nearly half of all Cubans of working age are expected to be off the state’s payroll, working in the private sector. Raul has overseen a slow expansion of private markets and ownership in agriculture and real estate. Likewise, a growing, but many would say excessively micromanaged number of occupations (largely in the service sector), have become eligible for private employment and business. With the iconic ration card, salary caps, and other subsidies slated to be phased out over the next few years, and with the government moving to widen a progressive income tax, the new Cuba molting from within the old will be one of considerably more autonomy and uncertainty for the individual, all within the context of a substantially transformed society. Building political support for such changes has meant taking the time to construct a consensus within the party for the very openings Fidel once warned would give the United States the opportunity it long craved to sew disunity and potentially destroy the revolution.
Making the Cuban economy productive without a massive privatization of its strategic sectors stands as Raul’s top challenge. To do so, he needs to not only change what he refers to as the “mentality” of the Cuban people but also institute several structural, institutional, and personnel reforms to make Cuba attractive to foreign investment without giving away the store. The obstacles are substantial. For one thing, Cuba’s labor force is shrinking and its population is aging. Elderly Cubans live longer because of the country’s fraying but still cradle-to-grave health care system, but the birthrate is too low to replace either the coming waves of retirees or the continued out-migration of younger Cubans seeking better opportunities abroad. Although wages should rise as the government trims the number of employees on public rolls, for the moment salaries in the state sector remain woefully insufficient for daily expenses, bolstering the black market and reliance on foreign remittances. (Indeed, whatever their overreliance on the state for big-ticket items like subsidized food, jobs, and health care, since the 1990s many Cubans have had to supplement state incomes or fend for themselves in the informal economy to get by.) Furthermore, excessive investments in higher education and underinvestment in vocational and technical training have left the Cuban workforce depleted in a variety of fields. Meanwhile, weeding out corruption, unifying the wacky and highly unpopular dual currency system, and creating a credit and wholesale market for new small businesses are all reforms thus far slow in coming. Management capacity is limited. Tourism, mining, telecommunications, transportation, and energy enterprises have been the subjects of substantial corruption investigations, leading to indictments of Cuban nationals and foreigners. Together with paying its foreign debt, these moves may represent essential housecleaning prior to a vitally necessary opening to foreign investment, an attempt to extirpate the bureaucratic and political beneficiaries of the status quo ante, or both.
How, then, are these developments perceived by everyday Cubans themselves? Reforms certainly have moved quickly by comparison to Fidel’s era. Depending on whom you talk to, the prospect of private sector expansion and continued state layoffs elicits enthusiasm, anxiety, or both, especially among state workers who may lose their jobs. Authorities insist the process will proceed gradually, and this has provided some reassurance. Nonetheless, in some areas, the government’s piecemeal, methodical, cautious approach to policy change “not in a hurry, but without delay” (to use Raul’s words) has caused considerable frustration. After Raul and other officials alluded to the liberalization of travel and immigration policy on numerous occasions, in 2013 a new law took effect eliminating the fees and permission slip required by the government for Cubans to leave the island (known as the “tarjeta blanca”), a major step in human rights with significant political and economic consequences. Although high-level officials have, on occasion, railed against the state media’s failures to engage in more analytical journalism, and while more expansive debates in academic circles and some investigative reporting by the state media are more prevalent than under Fidel, one can hardly say that an independent press is alive and well in Cuba. This is a shame, because an independent press would only facilitate the greater government transparency and accountability that Raul argues are necessary to save and reinvent Cuban socialism. More recently, a steep hike in import taxes has left many Cubans on island and off bewildered and angry. While intended to cut down on the illicit traffic of so-called mulas (members of the Cuban diaspora who, for a fee, routinely run remittances, clothing, and all manner of goods and supplies to the island), the measure is also likely to have strong consequences for Cuba’s small business sector, short of any government initiative to expand state-generated wholesale markets at home. As it is, members of the Cuban diaspora, through the mulas, play a crucial if informal role in the rather brittle supply chain on which many struggling small businesses have depended to get off the ground.
The international context for this rather substantial reform agenda is far from benign. The global financial crisis raised energy and food prices while at the same time hurting Cuba’s tourist industry. The U.S. embargo, which Cubans call the “blockade,” remains solidly in place; while sales through the agricultural loophole proceed, and while Cuban-Americans are legally pumping remittances into the island as never before, the Obama administration has actually more aggressively enforced sanctions on third-country and third-party financial and commercial transactions than did its predecessor. In this kind of environment, cutting the budget deficit, repaying debt, and attempting to eke out a 3% growth rate in 2012 show a level of ambition that complements the cautious pace of change.
Raul has had some success diversifying the country’s trade and diplomatic portfolio. Challenging Venezuela’s primacy as a trade partner, Brazil has extended a $600 million line of credit for food and agricultural machinery imports and is beginning to invest heavily in infrastructure, health care, tourism, and the restructured sugar industry. One of its signature investments, the $900 million renovation of the port of Mariel, will give Brazil an anchor in the Gulf of Mexico just miles from the United States and position Cuba to benefit from the boom in Caribbean maritime traffic projected to result from the expanded Panama Canal.
Raul’s successor will almost certainly come from the rising ranks of problem-solving doers, next-generation party leaders and locally elected officials often from the provinces who have been promoted under his presidency to national positions. If he serves out two full terms as president, the Cuba he hands over will look substantially different from the one he set out to remake when Fidel stepped aside. Social democracy, market socialism, state capitalism—whatever the labels, combination of features, consequences, strengths, or weaknesses—Cuba’s political and economic system will be a hybrid engineered by Cubans on their own terms.
Since the 1990s, the Catholic Church has become the largest non-state social service provider in Cuba, sponsoring national aid programs, community-based soup kitchens, medical dispensaries, casas de ancianos (like retirement homes), and other initiatives supporting Cuba’s most vulnerable populations. But aside from its social and pastoral work, the institution has asserted a significant degree of autonomy with respect to political, social, and economic matters on the island. Catholic-sponsored publications like Espacio Laical and Palabra Nueva are elevating new voices within the island’s somewhat fragile public sphere—from agnostic intellectuals and socialists, to Christians and other believers, to members of the Cuban diaspora. Through their pointedly political and decidedly constructive commentary on a wide range of topics, these authors provide an important alternative to the state-controlled media.
In March 2012, Pope Benedict XVI visited Cuba, marking the second papal visit to the island coordinated by Cardinal Jaime Ortega, archbishop of Havana. Prior to the visit, Raul Castro announced that Cuba would pardon 2,900 prisoners as a “humanitarian gesture” to Catholic officials and relatives who had asked for their release. This significant step followed Raul Castro’s decision to abolish the death penalty earlier in his term, a policy change in alignment with Catholic doctrine. Shortly after the visit, Raul Castro satisfied a request from the Catholic Church, declaring Good Friday a legal national holiday.
These changes are symbolic of a further shift in how the Castro government perceives the Catholic Church. No longer deemed an adversary, the institution is seen as a partner of sorts, largely supporting the very reforms the government wants to move forward. The church’s role in mediating a solution for the release of political prisoners was unprecedented. Indeed, the church’s increasing influence is clearly on display in a variety of settings. Construction of a new seminary in Guanabacoa was recently completed, and in 2011, the church opened the country’s first-ever MBA program, structured to teach Cubans how to start, run, and market a business. After years of government-imposed limits, the church in 2011 organized an island-wide procession of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s Patron Saint.
To be sure, the church has an interest in guarding this hard-won institutional space carefully. Yet, lest the Cuban Catholic Church be seen as a mere lapdog for state interests (an accusation frequently, and unfairly, levied against it by its detractors in the Cuban exile community), voices within the church and the Catholic media also frequently hold the government’s feet to the fire, demanding that promised reforms proceed apace (or more quickly) while also spreading awareness about their limitations and potentially difficult consequences. In addition, the church promotes a nationalist message of building a more inclusive Cuba for the benefit of all Cubans, not just Catholics. On the one hand, this is broadly compatible with Raul Castro’s message of “updating” the revolution. But the church’s rhetoric is hardly inscribed strictly with the Revolution’s traditional ideological parameters. While sharing the state’s concern for Cuban sovereignty and its critique of U.S. policy, voices connected to the church speak not simply of a revised “revolution” but a newly founded “Casa Cuba” (or Cuban “home”) in which the foundations of not just economic but also political citizenship on the island undergo substantial redefinition.
The Catholic Church under Cardinal Ortega’s leadership has also served as an agent of family and personal conciliation with the Cuban-American community and more broadly with the Cuban diaspora, whose considerable charitable contributions help support a number of the church’s new institutions. Ortega’s message of moderation, national unity, and conciliation; his advocacy of gradual change; and his willingness to see the Raul Castro government as a legitimate agent in the broader transformations that Cuba needs have all inflamed the traditional hard-liners in the Cuban-American community. While Cardinal Ortega has refrained from using the church as a center for anti-regime opposition, choosing instead to play a mediating role, American tax dollars (from U.S government funding provided to Radio and TV Marti as well as U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID] regime change programs) have helped finance attacks against Cardinal Ortega’s leadership of the Cuban Catholic Church.
Cuba has made considerable progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights since the turn of the century. This shift follows a time, not so long ago, when gays, lesbians, transgenders, and other sexual minorities faced widespread, institutionalized ostracism: in the mid-1960s, for example many LGBT or presumed LGBT individuals were sent to labor camps for “reeducation.” In 2008, by contrast, the Cuban government began covering gender reassignment surgery under the country’s universal healthcare system. Transgender Cubans can now legally change their gender identity on official identification documents. The year 2012 also marked the fifth anniversary of Cuba’s now annual march against homophobia, centered in the capital Havana, with supporting activities in Santiago, Cienfuegos, and other provincial cities. As in all societies around the world, forms of prejudice and discrimination against Cuba’s LGBT community persist. Government-affiliated and independent activists continue documenting occasional police harassment of LGBT individuals.
The leading figure promoting the rights of gays and sexual minorities in Cuba is Mariela Castro Espín, the daughter of Raul Castro and the director of Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX). In the interest of fostering inclusiveness and wider social participation, she launched a nationwide educational campaign against homophobia and has championed efforts to provide greater government protection to LGBT individuals. Some of the clear results of these efforts are cited earlier. During a recent Cuban Communist Party Conference in January 2012, moreover, government and party leaders for the first time debated a provision to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sexual identity. Objectives under discussion include updating Cuba’s family code to legalize same-sex civil unions.
Skeptics criticize CENESEX’s dominant influence (under the auspices of the Ministry of Health) over gay rights activism to the exclusion of smaller independent civil society groups more critical of, and thus seen with suspicion by, the Cuban state. Still, when Cuba’s delegation at the United States voted in late 2010 to remove language referring to sexual orientation from a somewhat routine resolution condemning diverse motives for extrajudicial state executions, state and non-state actors on the island coincided in critiquing the Ministry of Foreign Relations’ equivocal position. In 2011, Cuba for the first time supported a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council condemning violence and discrimination against individuals because of their sexual orientation.
The number of political prisoners and regime opponents jailed in Cuba has fluctuated greatly for decades. Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson each negotiated large-scale releases. Notably, Pope John Paul II’s 1998 visit to the island prompted a release of political prisoners as well. The number then increased again during the 2003 government crackdown.
In 2009, Cuban foreign policy under Raul Castro moved pointedly toward a diplomatic rapprochement with the European Union, chaired during the second half of that year by Spain’s Socialist Party government under Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero. Together, the Cuban, Spanish, and EU members undertook a dialogue with an eye to eliminating the “common position,” partial economic sanctions, and standing prohibitions on full-blown aid and cooperation agreements with the island. The near permanent presence of political prisoners in Cuba, however, had become a political albatross for Castro, representing both a significant challenge to Havana’s Europe strategy as well as a substantial obstacle to writing a new chapter in U.S.-Cuba relations with the Obama White House. Quietly, and with Madrid’s assistance, Cuba had begun to release small groups of political prisoners who accepted exile to Spain.
But the process hit a considerable landmine in February 2010 when a man named Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on a hunger strike. Zapata Tamayo undertook his hunger strike to demand better conditions in Cuban prisons. The legitimacy of these demands, Zapata Tamayo’s background, and the reasons for his imprisonment in the first place—not to mention the circumstances of his death—all provoked wide debate and controversy. Though Zapata’s prison term dated to a 2003 arrest concurrent with the detentions of better-known dissident activists at the time, he also possessed a considerable rap sheet for violent and petty crimes prior to that date. Cuban authorities, moreover, insist that his links to opposition groups on the island and their supporters abroad began only after his imprisonment. Sympathizers contest that account. Needless to say, his death prompted confrontations between opposition activists—especially the dissident group Las Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), who saw Zapata as a hero and martyr—and government supporters, who argued he was a common criminal manipulated by foreign interests bankrolling the dissident movement to begin with. Reports of the confrontations described incidents of intimidation, harassment, and violence; photos of pro-government demonstrators pulling the hair of the Ladies in White spread across the international media. These actions, along with Zapata Tamayo’s death, garnered international condemnation, threatening the prospect of normalizing relations with Spain and other European countries, as well as the regime’s efforts to create conditions internally that would support domestic economic reforms.
At this juncture, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, head of Cuba’s Catholic Church, emerged as an unlikely interlocutor. After Ortega condemned the so-called Acts of Repudiation against the Ladies in White and publicly called for dialogue, Raul Castro communicated to the cardinal a request that the church serve as mediator. Together with the input of the Spanish government, Castro, the Catholic Church, and dissident groups brokered a deal for the release of 52 political prisoners and their departure to Spain together with their families. Remaining prisoners from the 75 sentenced in 2003 who expressed a desire to remain in Cuba were also eventually released and permitted to stay on the island.
The number of political prisoners in Cuba is now at its lowest recorded level. All 75 of the political prisoners detained and sentenced in the 2003 “black spring” have been released. Moreover, in late 2011 Raul Castro announced the release of 2,900 additional prisoners, including some convicted of political crimes. In total, an estimated 166 political prisoners were released in 2011. That said, there have been increased reports of politically motivated, short-term “catch and release” detentions.
Shortly after taking office, President Obama raised expectations in Cuba, Latin America, and the United States by explicitly referencing the “failed” U.S.-Cuba policies of the past and hinting that his administration sought a “new chapter” in the bilateral relationship. But more urgent international and domestic priorities and the perception that domestic political repercussions could tilt the risk-reward pendulum soon overtook any White House taste for change.
For example, the Florida and New Jersey congressional delegations in both parties—including major power players like Debbie Wasserman Shultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee—maintain a strict allegiance to their Cuban-American members and reliance on their campaign finances. These members uniformly oppose any change in the hard-line status quo. Thus, despite bipartisan support for trade and travel openings, special interest congressional pressure, along with the administration’s erroneous readings of internal politics in Cuba and a mistaken assumption that Raul Castro’s top foreign policy priority is to get the embargo lifted, caused the Obama White House to resist spending its political capital on the Hill.
Misplaced electoral jitters provide another source of friction. At the outset of his first term, and in part to signal to Latin America Washington’s broader responsiveness to the region’s long-standing demands for U.S.-Cuba policy change, Obama moved quickly to eliminate restrictions on Cuban-American travel and to lift the cap on remittances for family members. Cuban-American legislators protested, but in relatively muted fashion: the move was broadly popular with their constituents. As many as 50 Cuba-bound flights per week now leave American airports (mainly Miami’s), packed with people, cash, and all manner of equipment to help relatives on the island survive and start small businesses. In fact, Cuban-Americans consistently favor more travel for all Americans and are clearly voting with their feet every time they board flights to Havana. A small majority even supports eliminating the embargo. Of course, those Cuban-Americans most frequently boarding the flights and most uniformly inclined to support wider policy change are less likely to be voting citizens, as they predominantly come from more recent generations of immigrants with lower rates of citizenship. But, Obama won the state of Florida in the 2008 election with only 35% of the Cuban vote as a whole, having dominated just the 18–35-year-old cohort. Non-Cuban Latino voters in the state proved much more crucial to Obama’s victory there; nor is the conservative (or liberal) Cuban-American vote driven by the Cuba policy debate alone. Still, the political mythology in Washington persists: Cuban-Americans (including Havana-bound frequent fliers) will punish Obama at the polls should the White House go further toward overhauling a clearly failed policy toward the island. Obama won 49% of the Cuban vote in 2012, a stunning indication of new attitudes among these voters.
Although some Americans of non-Cuban origin can now travel under “people to people” programs (requiring strict institutional licenses issued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control), by 2012 the administration had ceded to congressional demands that licenses comply with Helms-Burton criteria explicitly designed to use American visitors to foster anti-regime dissent. Thus, a major and probably unconstitutional paradox now holds. Cuban-Americans, whose representatives oppose change in U.S.-Cuba policy and are the convenient excuse for White House stasis, now have unlimited access to visit family, travel as tourists (they are Cuba’s second highest source of tourism revenue), and invest (via remittances) in Cuba’s emerging small business sector and real estate market. Yet almost all other Americans must beg (or pay lawyers to cajole) an under-staffed and politicized government bureaucracy for a sliver of that very privilege. A cynic might come away concluding that beneath the threats and tantrums prompted by any hint of White House common sense, Cuban-American members of Congress have carved out a stunningly exclusive earmark for their constituents: ethnicity-based access to a new market just a stone’s throw from U.S. shores, without competition from the American public, and in likely violation of the 14th amendment.
Not all of the action has transpired in the narrow world of congressional-executive, or even electoral, politics. Obama’s more open but still equivocal visa policy has authorized more Cuban scholars to attend conferences and teach in American universities (while still denying the petitions of others). Likewise, unprecedented numbers of Cuban artists, dancers, and musicians have toured throughout the United States. With help from both governments, in 2009 the Colombian megastar Juanes filled Havana’s Revolution Square with 1,000,000 Cubans for a concert with 15 other bands from around the world. More recently, a children’s theater group, La Colmenita, toured the United States with a play that promoted Cuba’s top political request from the United States: the release from American prisons of the Cuban Five. Raul Castro’s daughter, gay rights activist Mariela Castro Espín, did the same, while also publicly endorsing Obama’s support for gay marriage and, not without controversy, explaining her father’s policy priorities in major institutions such as the New York Public Library and the Council on Foreign Relations. Cuban-American financiers long opposed to change started visiting the island and talking to senior officials, quite plausibly assessing the possibility for investments in the not-so-distant future.
By the end of his (first) term, President Obama’s Latin America policy had crashed on the shoals of domestic politics. The region’s leaders delivered a stinging rebuke over the failure of his Cuba policy when he traveled to Cartagena, Colombia, for the 2012 Summit of the Americas, pledging there would be no more summits without Cuba present. Yet neither candidate dwelled on Cuba during the 2012 general election; as in 2008, the non-Cuban Hispanic role in allocating Florida’s 27 electoral votes will likely prove more decisive in the outcome of the presidential race than the much-coveted, much-feared paper tiger of the voto cubano. The state of Florida itself, however, bought into some of the hype when it passed laws of questionable constitutionality aimed at mega corporations such as Brazil’s Odebrecht, barring state government contracts with companies that do business with Cuba. Miami-Dade’s media markets, meanwhile, are a bundle of contradictions. Hate speech toward advocates of policy change still flourishes on the airwaves, yet, increasingly, so do visiting artists and musicians from the island who themselves criticize U.S. policy. Some rancorous legacies of the past die hard, however. In April 2012, arsonists in Miami allegedly burned down the headquarters of one of the area’s longest standing charter companies that flies Cuban-Americans to the island.
Two factors having nothing to with Cuban-American politics or campaign finance conspired against boldness from the Obama White House. Most obviously, neither Cuba nor Latin America rank as a high foreign policy priority. The second might be called the annoyance factor. Washington policy makers do not have the patience for navigating the frustrating diplomacy and toxic politics associated with Cuba. They express annoyance with the Cuban government for its skepticism of Washington’s motives and political will. Americans policy makers can talk themselves into a view of Havana as obstreperous at best, or worst, likewise lacking interest in improving relations. In the second term, only President Obama himself will be able to cut through this thicket. With a series of unilateral steps requiring neither approval by the U.S. Congress or negotiations with the government of Cuba, the president can use his executive authority to substantially overhaul American policy toward Cuba and cement for his own legacy in the Americas the reputation as a courageous and visionary president, a stance he campaigned on in 2012.
The George W. Bush administration increased spending for regime change programs in Cuba (also known by the more benign term “democracy promotion”) from about $5 million in 2001 to $45 million by FY09. Upon taking office, the Obama administration allowed the programs to continue. Since the 9/11 attacks, moreover, the United States has outsourced to private firms a wide range of activities on an often blurry continuum between national security and development assistance.
Alan Gross is an American sub-contractor retained by one such private firm, Development Alternatives International (DAI), which received multimillion-dollar contracts authorized under the Helms-Burton law to conduct “technological outreach” in Cuba—mainly by disseminating services related to mobile devices and Internet access. After Gross made five trips to the island, Cuban police arrested him in December 2009 for importing and distributing sophisticated communications equipment in violation of Cuban law. According to his own trip reports, Gross designed a $600,000 program to help Cuba’s small Jewish community (predominantly though not exclusively in Havana) install equipment intended eventually to give anti-regime activists (supported by additional USAID programs) access to Internet service. He confirmed this account to CNN host Wolf Blitzer subsequent to his arrest, relaying that his primary purpose was to test technology for future DAI programs using the Jewish community’s network for his experiments. According to the Associated Press, on his trip in December 2009, Gross brought a surveillance-thwarting, wide-spectrum subscriber identity module (SIM) card to the island intended to be used in connection with satellite phones capable of providing a localized wireless Internet network (known as BGAN). This card would thus not only allow Cuban users access to uncensored Internet through non-state networks without risk of surveillance but also presumably give USAID contractors and their sub-contractors a way to communicate with activists on the island undetected by Cuban police and intelligence services.
Cuba’s Jewish community has substantial and long-standing ties with Israel and the American Jewish community. Importantly, Cuba’s Jewish institutions have never been a source of anti-regime activities, and they are among the few NGOs on the island with Internet access. In fact, Gross chose the Jewish community to test-drive the SIM/BGAN technology precisely because of its established national network, independent status, and relatively wide access to information and foreign contacts and support.
In August 2011, a Cuban judge sentenced Gross to 15 years in prison for attempting to “undermine the integrity and independence of Cuba.” Cuban authorities accused Gross of carrying out a covert operation on behalf of the United States government in violation of Cuban law. U.S. officials, in turn, contended that Gross was only working to provide assistance to the Jewish community and was not involved in activities to threaten the government. In his trial, however, Gross stated that he was a “trusting fool” who was “duped”—though he never clarified by whom. By framing Gross as an experienced development worker striving to boost the prospect of his fellow Jews, the Obama administration quite cynically drew the American Jewish community into the dispute. Likewise, Gross’s family and his lawyer actively sought the advocacy power of the American Jewish community to campaign for Gross’s release. Weekly protests in front of Havana’s “Interests Section,” a mile from the White House, soon commenced, as did regular briefings at synagogues around the country. But for the first three years of his incarceration, the family showed little interest in publicly pressuring the White House itself to pursue Gross’s release.
Talks between the two governments to gain Gross’s release never got off the ground, foiled by accumulated mutual distrust and a lack of political will—especially in Washington. Ironically, Secretary Clinton declared there would be no negotiation regarding Gross’s fate on the same day the U.S. government released $5 million to the government of Egypt in return for the release of “democracy promotion” workers there. Until 2012 when the Gross family filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, his family and advisors, steered clear of publicly acknowledging that Gross had played a role in a broader program of U.S. policies aimed at destabilizing the regime, acknowledging only that Gross had no intention of doing harm.
Two years after his arrest, journalists substantiated the Cuban government’s claims that Gross’s activities were part of a larger covert program. In a long published dossier, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the SIM card Gross installed was in fact a sophisticated communications chip available only to the U.S. Defense Department, CIA, and the U.S. State Department under special government license. The chip is designed to prevent satellite transmissions from being tracked within 250 miles. Gross claimed subsequently that he was merely testing “off-the-shelf” technology. But neither USAID nor the State Department refuted the AP’s reporting, which has since been further substantiated by Gross’s contracts with DAI.
In order to get members of the American Jewish community to transport computers, smart phones, and other equipment to Cuba, Gross introduced himself as a humanitarian development worker, not as a U.S. government contractor. A number of American Jews thus participated unknowingly in Gross’s program by agreeing to bring equipment to Havana in their carry-on luggage while visiting the island on religious missions. Gross’s trip reports—procured from his laptop at the time of his arrest by Cuban authorities and obtained separately by the AP—make clear that he understood the highly sensitive nature of his work as well as the risks to which he was exposing unwitting collaborators. Gross’s reports describe the work as “very risky,” offer guidance on “how to communicate securely in repressive environments,” and warn that “detection of satellite signals will be catastrophic.”
Up until Gross’s detention, many observers felt that, despite a slow start falling far short of his rhetoric about a “new beginning” in relations with Cuba, President Obama might seek a gradual shift in attitudes and policy toward the island. Early in his administration, for instance, Obama had removed restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances. Gross’s imprisonment, however, brought diplomacy to a standstill. In January 2011, the administration did proceed with a long-considered but limited expansion of government-regulated educational and cultural travel. Numerous Obama administration officials, however—particularly from the State Department—made public statements suggesting that further liberalizing steps would be contemplated only if Cuban authorities first released Gross. Such statements risked sending the implicit message to hard-liners in Congress that the only way to hold the line against further change and keep the embargo and other Cuba policies in place might well be prolonging Gross’s imprisonment, or at least the programs that sent him there, programs the Cuban government clearly sought to compel the administration to change. Over the course of Obama’s first term, protecting the fundamental strategy behind the Helms-Burton programs became one of the top political objectives of hard-liners in Congress. The Obama administration, in turn, allowed itself to be pressured into shelving any broader new agenda toward Cuba. In 2010, for instance, the Senate Foreign Relations and the House Foreign Affairs committees led an initiative intended to detoxify the programs that sent Gross to Cuba in the first place. Initially agreed to by the State Department, the proposed measures were presented to the Cuban government in recognition that securing Gross’s release would require changing the context that had set him on the path to arrest. This effort, however, died when the House of Representatives changed hands in the November 2010 mid-term elections. Unwilling to risk a fight with hard-liners, the Obama administration began attacking the legitimacy of Cuban laws and demanding Gross’s immediate, unilateral release. The Cuban government concluded that the Obama administration lacked the political will to undertake a new set of policies and gradually raised its position to include a full-blown prisoner swap: Alan Gross for the Cuban Five.
Cuba has been on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1982. The U.S. government’s rationale for keeping Cuba on this list has changed only slightly in recent years. Continuing the Bush administration’s logic, the Obama White House at first justified Cuba’s presence on the list in part with Havana’s sustained critique of “the U.S. approach to combating international terrorism.” But by this standard, dozens of countries, including close allies of the United States, would likewise be eligible for censure.
The Obama administration later removed the Bush-era criteria and settled upon three long-standing explanations for Cuba’s continued inclusion on the list: first, that individuals affiliated with extremist groups like the FARC in Colombia and ETA in Spain “continue to reside in Cuba”; second, that fugitives wanted in the United States are now living in Cuba, where they have received government benefits; and third, that Cuba has “strategic deficiencies” related to money laundering.
In 1998, American intelligence agencies concluded that Cuba no longer posed a threat to U.S. national security. This conclusion still stands. Indeed, intelligence experts have been hard-pressed to find evidence that Cuba currently provides weapons or training to any active international terrorist groups. Moreover, the State Department has recently acknowledged Cuban collaboration with global counterterrorism efforts in several written reports, specifically citing Cuba’s cooperation with Spanish efforts to investigate ETA members suspected of living on the island. Also, Cuba assists the United States in running security checks at several Cuban airports at times. Cuba, like Mexico, has long hosted talks in Havana between successive Colombian governments and representatives of the Colombian insurgent group, the FARC. In 2012, Cuba’s diplomatic mediation helped pave the way for the first serious set of peace talks between the FARC and the government of Colombia since the 1990s.
The continued designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism reinforces the perception that U.S. policy is outdated and politicized—particularly at a time when actors in states such as Yemen (operations base for a powerful terrorist affiliate group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and Pakistan (where Osama Bin Laden lived before his death in 2011) pose considerably greater national security threats to the United States. Ultimately, Cuba’s continued presence on the list responds not to foreign policy or national security considerations but to the perception that removing it would involve too high a domestic political cost. In order for trade and investment between the United States and Cuba to take off, Cuba must be removed from the list. The executive branch has the authority to do so without an act of Congress, but any White House ready to take this step will have to notify Congress in advance. That means having the political will to face down the handful of legislators, Cuban-Americans in large measure, who remain avidly committed to the status quo.
Despite his well-documented ties to the bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight in 1976, as well as a string of Havana hotel bombings in 1997, today Luis Posada Carriles lives as a free man in Miami. In 2007, a federal district court in El Paso, Texas, indicted Posada on multiple counts of fraud, making false statements, and using false identification documents in connection with his 2005 reentry into the United States after several years in hiding. A few months later, Judge Kathleen Cardone dismissed all counts against him, and Posada was released. A U.S. appellate court overturned this decision in 2008, ordering the case returned to trial. In 2009, under President Obama, the U.S. Department of Justice filed several new charges against Posada, including charges for making false statements about his involvement in the 1997 Havana bombings. This represented the first time Posada’s role in violent acts against Cuban targets had been referenced specifically in connection with the charges levied against him. It thus appeared to represent a notable and symbolically resonant shift in the U.S. government position, given that Posada got his start in the early 1960s as a Central Intelligence Agency recruit. However, in 2011, Posada was found not guilty on all counts: perjury, obstruction of justice, and immigration fraud. The Cuban government denounced the acquittal and charged the United States with continuing to protect a known terrorist.
Washington loves a good charismatic caudillo to anoint as its foil in Latin America. Over the last decade, Fidel Castro deftly, albeit unofficially, turned over that job to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Though the Cuban revolution’s ties to Venezuela stretch back over half a century, Fidel didn’t invent Chavez—the former army paratrooper emerged from his own country’s history. The Cuba-Venezuela relationship, however, extends beyond the Castro-Chavez friendship and is not one that will be cast aside once either man is gone.
Chavez came of age during the Cold War, when, to avoid a repeat of the 1959 Castro revolution, the United States deployed throughout Latin America its considerable arsenal to keep the left weak through covert operations, counterinsurgency, coups, or meddling with elections. During this period, between the 1950s and the late 1980s, unelected generals ran most of Latin America, with American blessing, training, and support. At the time, Venezuela (and Colombia) stood out to a self-satisfied Foggy Bottom and to some political scientists as reassuring exceptions to South America’s right-wing military regimes: twin poster children for democracy, albeit elite-brokered, shallow, and one that coexisted with extreme inequality and poverty—not to mention disfranchisement of poor majorities. Although solidly ensconced in the barracks, a nationalist strain in Venezuela’s military seeded Chavez’s skepticism about American power, which in turn became in his view inseparable from Washington’s entrenched backing of Venezuela’s elite.
Although Hugo Chavez was only five years old when Fidel Castro took power in 1959, their fates were already intertwined. Before launching an insurgency against Washing-ton’s Cuban surrogate Fulgencio Batista, as a young Havana lawyer Castro also had developed a belief in the inextricable link between American power and Cuba’s and Latin America’s thwarted economic and political development. As armed revolution unfolded in Cuba, in Venezuela in the late 1950s a coalition of church, society, student, labor, and business groups peacefully pressured the military to ease itself out of power. But Cuban revolutionaries needed international help. In 1958, the political wing of Fidel’s 26th of July Movement persuaded a transitional Venezuelan president, navy commander Wolfgang Larrazabal, to ship weapons to Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, giving a boost to Fidel’s final push to topple Fulgencio Batista. Just three weeks after taking power, in January 1959 a triumphant Fidel flew to Caracas to say thank you. In contrast to the stoning of Richard Nixon’s motor-cade received during a 1958 visit, crowds cheered as Fidel preached the new gospel of Latin American unity, people-to-people solidarity, and revolution, themes Chavez would try to advance decades later.
But with oil rents greasing the wheels, Venezuelan elites looked aghast at the Cuban revolution and took up the banner of social democracy and Christian democracy, organizing themselves into a two-party system that lasted until the end of the 1980s, when their heavily subsidized petro-state became financially and politically unsustainable. And a short-lived guerrilla insurgency supported by Cuba was crushed in the 1960s, and non-violent leftist efforts to diversify Venezuelan politics never truly got off the ground. As a young army officer and with the spirit of General Simon Bolivar animating his political thought, Chavez incubated his anti-elite, anti-imperial vision of continental, popular unity in this context.
The Venezuela-Cuba relationship developed in three distinct periods. The first, likely one element that persuaded Chavez of Fidel’s value as a resource for reshaping Venezuela’s military and security institutions, dates back to the flight of Batista loyalists to Venezuela after Castro’s revolution in 1959. These exiles worked for the CIA and with Venezuelan counterparts as a rearguard during the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose. That deeper and still untold history is essential to understanding the significance of the second period.
Fast forward to Fidel’s illness in 2006, when the first photos we saw of him were with Chavez at his hospital bedside: by then, the Cuba-Venezuela relationship had become linked by billions in subsidies, transfers, direct investment in energy and infrastructure, thousands of advisors, and a joint drive to build new regional institutions without the United States to shove member countries around.
As for the next phase, Chavez’ successors—whomever they may be—won’t quickly undo the layers of bilateral and regional togetherness. Venezuela’s poor, whom the opposition now understands it must attract, derive direct benefits from the misiones, which would not be possible without Cuba. ALBA and Petrocaribe will not immediately unravel without Chavez. In his absence, we might expect a modified status quo for the near to medium term.
Contrary to the clichés, Cuba, the biggest beneficiary of Chavez’s largesse, never put all of its strategic eggs in one basket. After learning the bitter lessons of excessive dependence on Spain, the United States, and later, the Soviet Union, Fidel and Raul Castro likewise recognized that Hugo Chavez was to be a transitional figure in Venezuelan history, even if the party machine they helped him construct continues to dominate politics in Venezuela. And the new regional institutions forged from the Havana-Caracas relationship helped Cuba engineer its way back to the center of Latin American diplomacy.