In 1991, as the Soviet Union neared its end and Cuba began to experience the hardships of the “Special Period,” a Cuban official wryly remarked to one of the editors that “history has yet to record whether Cuba suffered more from U.S. imperialism or Soviet friendship.” Indeed, both countries had a significant impact on Cuba and on its foreign policies during the Cold War, and ironically Cuba’s relations with both countries had the qualities of a double-edged sword.

Soviet subsidies and military assistance enabled Cuba to pursue an egalitarian program at home and a revolutionary vision abroad. But the subsidies locked Cuba into the socialist trading bloc—the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA)—and fettered Cuban development. The CMEA designated Cuba as a producer of basic commodities within the network—sugar, citrus, and nickel—and production of these goods had to take precedence over other development possibilities. More than 85 percent of Cuba’s international commerce at the end of the 1980s involved CMEA countries. As a consequence, when the Soviet Union and the CMEA disappeared, Cuba suddenly had to find new markets and pay for its imports with an internationally recognized convertible (hard) currency that it did not have in reserve.

Cuba’s special relationship with the United States during the Cold War also produced benefits and ultimately costs that intensified the risks it faced. Cuba gained the admiration of Third World countries in part because it was a model of resistance to U.S. domination, and Havana was often an essential ally of progressive forces in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during direct confrontations against U.S.-supported forces or agents. Meanwhile, the ongoing U.S. threat to Cuba’s fundamental security justified the maintenance of a militarized state, which gave Cuba its capability to support Third World countries. Yet each peso or person devoted to national security was one less that could be directed to economic diversification and development. In addition, each new clash with the United States undermined nascent efforts to change the policy by U.S. opponents of the embargo. As a consequence, extreme right-wing Cuban Americans had little opposition in 1991 as they developed legislation intended to topple the revolutionary regime.

The dire circumstances at the start of Special Period makes the achievements of Cuba’s foreign policy during the ensuing fifteen years all the more impressive. By 2006, when Raúl Castro took over the leadership from his brother, Cuba had established new trading relationships with a broad array of countries. Spanish investments in Cuba’s leisure industries gave Cuba the capacity to accommodate more than 2 million visitors annually. Chinese financing promised to modernize Cuba’s nickel industry, pay for the exploration of deep-sea oil deposits in Cuba’s coastal waters, and provide a new source of hard-currency earnings. Venezuela’s cooperative agreements bestowed Cuba with affordable oil and enabled Cuba to send doctors and teachers to Latin American and Caribbean countries with a resulting triple benefit.

First, they have helped to carry out Cuba’s self-proclaimed internationalist mission by providing health care, education, and training to poor people who had never received such services in countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador. Second, the poor have bolstered governments in these countries opposed to neoliberalism, encouraging even moderates such as Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Argentina’s presidents, Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Kirchner, to champion alternative development strategies intended to reduce poverty and inequality in Latin America. Finally, these missions have reduced the risk of a brain drain because they have given Cuban professionals an opportunity to earn hard currency they cannot earn in Cuba. At the same time, they alleviate the glut of highly educated Cubans who cannot find jobs on the island for which they can use their skills.

Partly in response to Cuba’s foreign policy successes during the Special Period, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 2003 named Cuba for a second time as the host of it triennial summit. The meeting was held in Havana in 2006, and Cuba served as the NAM chair for the following three years. Founded in 1961 as a supposed neutralist haven for countries caught up in the East-West conflict, the NAM has been little more than a sounding board for Third World ire about unfair terms of global trade, neocolonial exploitation, apartheid, and infringements on the rights of “self-determination” by powerful countries. Still, the NAM’s 120 member states make up most of what is considered the Third World, and its selection of Cuba as host was a striking indication of Cuba’s standing. Also in 2003, the Latin American countries in the United Nations selected Cuba to fill one of the six seats designated for the region in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights despite vociferous objections from the United States.

It was said that during the Cold War that Cuba was a little country with a big country’s foreign policy. On one hand, the depiction accurately captured a distinguishing feature of Cuba’s international behavior. Small countries tend to focus narrowly on their immediate neighborhoods. Great powers act globally with a greater sense of freedom than small countries, because they perceive that only another great power can threaten or stop them. In contrast to most small countries, Cuba focused globally. Cuban leaders shared with Fidel Castro a vision that their country should lead a global revolution on behalf of the poor. This is evident in the way Cuba’s controlled media, which is hardly the model of a free press, does provide broader coverage of world events than is commonly found in most U.S. media. Their international focus has encouraged ordinary Cubans to think globally and to identify with the struggles of people in other Third World countries. The subtle denigration of Cuba’s foreign policy as being inappropriate for its size overlooks a key difference between Cuba’s international orientation and those of most great powers. Cuba has not sought to dominate and control other countries, nor has it sought to exploit the resources of another country for Cuba’s exclusive benefit. Rather, Cuba has understood that its own national interest is inextricably linked to a world order in which all small countries enjoy freedom from domination by great powers.

As anticipated, Cuba’s foreign policy under Raúl Castro did not depart much from the internationalist path it had taken under Fidel Castro. After all, the new leader had been vice president and minister of the armed forces for more than forty years and consequently a partner with his brother in establishing the path. The chapters in this section provide a basis on which to analyze the continuities and changes in Cuban foreign policy under the new president’s guidance. They highlight Cuba’s important new relations with China and the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the most important of which is Venezuela; Cuba’s use of “soft power” to strengthen its ties with other parts of the Third World; the country’s ongoing tense relationship with the United States and the changes that occurred during the first five years of Barack Obama’s presidency; and the way in which Cuban emigration affects the sustainability of the Revolution along with the potential role of the Cuban diaspora in shaping the future of the country.

One source of change has been external events. For example, the death of President Hugo Chávez in March 2013 could have created a serious hardship for Cuba because of its reliance on inexpensive oil from Venezuela, as Michael Erisman’s chapter notes. In fact, Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, maintained his country’s oil agreement in part because Cuba provided Venezuela with needed medical personnel and teachers. Erisman further explains that Raúl Castro has continued to pursue the three goals that had long been characteristic of Cuba’s foreign policy. The first is economic security, which he has attempted to achieve by expanding the number of Cuba’s trading partners so that the loss of a single connection does not undermine the whole economy. In this regard, China and Venezuela have been the most important new trading partners. Second, he has enhanced Cuba’s international stature by increasing the number of countries that receive Cuban assistance or with which Cuba cooperates and the number of international and regional organizations in which Cuba is actively engaged. Finally, Cuba has sought to protect its “effective sovereignty” by promoting and engaging in plans for Latin American and Caribbean integration.

Despite China’s large population, military capability, and economic power, Cuba has tended to be less concerned about losing effective sovereignty to the Asian giant than it had been with the Soviet Union or the United States. As Adrian Hearn explains in his chapter, China has shown sensitivity about the matter of sovereignty, in part by emphasizing its “Five Principles.” In addition, he reports,

Still, Hearn notes, “Chinese enterprises have found themselves subjected to the meticulous regulations of the Cuban state.” These have created some friction. But China’s larger efforts to change the rules and criteria in international financial institutions may prove the most important for Cuba’s future and pave the way for Cuba’s reentry into these organizations.

While Cuba has been less than enthusiastic about engaging with the International Monetary Fund, it has actively pursued membership in multilateral organizations not dominated by the United States. As Monica Hirst notes in her chapter, Cuba began in 1991 to attend the Ibero-American Summit and in 2009 joined the Rio Group. In 2013, it secured the presidency of the Rio Group’s successor organization, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC in the Spanish acronym), with the slogan “unity within diversity.” She adds that “Havana has cultivated close links with the CARICOM [Caribbean Community] countries based on a broad agenda of cooperation and solidarity.” Although Cuba is not a CARICOM member, it signed a Trade and Economic Cooperation Agreement with the Caribbean Community in 2000.

Cuba’s engagement in regional organizations has been reinforced by its growing bilateral trade with countries in Latin America. Hirst points to the reconstruction of the Port of Mariel, which a Brazilian enterprise manages. Officially opened during the January 2014 CELAC summit, it will service supercargo ships traversing the newly widened Panama Canal. The port’s terminal will have an annual capacity of 1 million containers.

Until at least 2013, the most important institution that helped to strengthen Cuba’s bilateral relations in the region has been the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA in the Spanish acronym). President Chávez put forward the idea of ALBA in 2001 to counter the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a plan the United States initiated in 1994 to integrate the Western Hemisphere. ALBA, which began operations in 2004, was envisioned to exclude the United States and Canada. Backed by Venezuela’s oil wealth and in conjunction with ALBA, Cuba has provided medical aid—including a program to restore eyesight to more than 2 million Latin Americans since 2005, as John Kirk reports in his chapter. In addition, Cuba has sent teachers, engineers, and scientists to countries in the region.

Kirk explains that Cuba’s “tradition of medical internationalism dates back to 1960,” and as of 2011, the program was sending about 41,000 health workers to sixty-eight nations. Notably, many of the cooperative missions (Kirk notes that Cuba prefers to designate the programs as “cooperation” rather than use the paternalistic term “aid”) involve training as well as the direct provision of health care. Cuba also has created a medical school with free tuition to train students from abroad. The commitment to medical internationalism, Kirk reports, has not diminished since Raúl Castro began to lead Cuba. But there has been an effort to make some projects self-financing by charging fees to countries that can afford them.

As noted earlier, medical internationalism serves multiple interests for Cuba. Michael Bustamante and Julia Sweig point to the program’s contribution to Cuba’s “soft power,” a term that connotes the ability of a country to influence others by example rather than by coercion. They explain that Cuba has accumulated its soft power through several mechanisms in the past fifty years. In addition to cooperative aid programs, these include making effective use of the mass media; exporting Cuban films, music, and ballet; appealing to other Third World countries as an underdog that resists U.S. oppression; supporting solidarity groups throughout the world; and focusing on Cuba’s own war against terrorism and its suffering from terrorism. These have contributed to a positive image that enables Cuba “to be seen as a trusted and valued partner in many international arenas and institutions” despite its lack of democracy.

Cuba’s effort to free the “Cuban Five”—a case that the late Saul Landau describes in his chapter—has been one of the country’s most ardently propagated campaigns. As Landau explains, the “Five” were Cuban agents whose mission was to monitor terrorist activities against Cuba that were organized by exiles in South Florida. Convicted of conspiracy to conduct espionage and murder by a jury working in Miami’s politically charged atmosphere, the treatment of the Five contrasts with the way the United States has treated Cuban exile terrorists who live openly in South Florida.

From Cuba’s perspective, the contrast highlights one reason for its continued wariness about the United States. Philip Brenner and Soraya Castro review U.S.-Cuban relations during the first five years of President Obama’s presidency in considering whether the “knot of antagonism and hostility” that has been tightened over many decades can still be untied. They observe that the president who promised change did modify U.S. policy but that he failed to overcome key elements of the legacy he inherited from President George W. Bush.

However, Brenner and Castro also point to several factors that could enable the two countries to cooperate and in the process possibly reduce the antagonism and begin to develop a modicum of trust. One factor is pressure from Latin America. By 2009, all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere except the United States had established diplomatic relations with Cuba, and many have been demanding that the United States end its embargo. Another factor is the constructive role Cuba has played in hosting and supporting negotiations between the Colombian government and the principal guerrilla organization in that country, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, aimed at ending the civil war in Colombia, a high-priority U.S. goal. Moreover, there are several issues on which Cuba and the United States share a common interest—such as drug trafficking, environmental protection, and epidemic disease—and cooperation would benefit both countries.

Emigration from Cuba has been both a source of tension between the two countries and a basis for imagining there could be improved relations. As Antonio Aja Díaz remarks in his chapter, the 1995 migration accord “suggested the possibility of regulating the legal migratory flow of Cubans to the United States and of trying to stop illegal emigration.” Since then, more than 20,000 have emigrated annually. In part, they are attracted by the benefits that go uniquely to Cuban immigrants under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. These émigrés tend to be younger and better educated than those who left since between 1965 and 1995. Half were unemployed, which indicates that their motive for leaving is economic. This fact provides a source of hope for improved relations because the newer exiles do not harbor the deep animosities against the Revolution characteristic of older generations.

Jorge Domínguez, however, suggests that dialogue between Cubans and members of the diaspora has many hurdles standing in the way. He notes that family visits, made easier by the Obama administration’s decision to end restrictions on travel to the island by Cuban Americans, can help overcome the obstacles, and he acknowledges that newer émigrés are more open to dialogue than previous generations. But he also points to the difficulties some members in the diaspora have in accepting any positive information about Cuban achievements. Honest dialogue, he concludes, is essential for Cuba to have a “better future” and will depend on a goodwill that is now too often missing.

Díaz explains that for Cuban leaders, the “brain drain and loss of talent” resulting from emigration have been a source of worry. As a result, permanent emigration generated pressure for developing “new legislation that takes into account the political, economic, and social importance of this issue.” His chapter, which was published originally in 2011, thus provides background for understanding the Cuban government’s decision in January 2013 to permit most citizens to obtain passports, to travel abroad without an exit permit, and to stay outside of the country for up to two years and return without forfeiting their property or their right to return. It was a reform many Cubans had been demanding, and it quickly increased the number applying for U.S. visas. (Notably, in July 2013, Cuba and the United States resumed talks over migration issues. These were held every six months as a result of the 1995 accord, but President George W. Bush suspended them in 2003. President Barack Obama resumed the sessions in 2009, but only for two rounds before suspending them again.)

Leonardo Padura, one of Cuba’s leading contemporary writers, concludes the “Foreign Policy” section with an evocative chapter that conveys how the current Cuban-U.S. relationship and Cuban migration laws have forced Cuban baseball players to choose permanent exile. Their situation is a metaphor for the country as a whole, he suggests, a country whose heart is broken by the detachment of so many Cubans from Cuba.

In sum, as the chapters in this section explain, the continuity of Cuban foreign policy under Raúl Castro has occurred in a context of significant changes in Latin America, the increasing influence of China, reforms within Cuba, and a relatively unchanged relationship with the United States. However, changes in Cuba’s migration laws and in the demography of Cuba’s diaspora may influence the U.S.-Cuban relationship, which could have a profound influence on the future of Cuban foreign policy.

Raúlista Foreign Policy

Even before the transition in leadership from Fidel to Raúl Castro, international events had transformed Cuba’s foreign policy in the 1990s. The disintegration of the socialist bloc destroyed a central pillar of the country’s foreign policy and presented Havana with the daunting task of radically reconfiguring its network of international relations. This was most apparent with respect to trade and related economic concerns.

Yet no matter how spectacular such changes may be, the basic rule of thumb is that elements of continuity will remain part of the scene. Or, to put it in historians’ terms, the present is always to some degree a product of the past. This cautionary note holds true with respect to contemporary Cuban foreign relations, for juxtaposed against the modifications that have taken place are certain important elements of the policy equation that have persisted over time. Specifically, revolutionary Havana has always defined its role on the world stage in terms of promoting and protecting three goals: economic security, international stature, and effective sovereignty.

Economic Security

One common conception of economic security focuses on the progress that occurs within a society toward higher levels of industrialization and modernization and the ability of the society to sustain these levels. But for smaller, lesser-developed countries, defending against potential external economic threats is often the most important dimension of this issue. For Cuba, the pursuit of economic security has been manifested in policies aimed at minimizing its vulnerability to hostile economic penetration or economic sanctions. In particular, since 1959, Havana has sought to use its international ties as a buffer against the economic war that Washington has directed at Cuba.

International Stature

Most revolutionary experiments are messianic to some degree if for no other reason than their supporters often tend to see them as having a relevance or a “mission” that goes beyond the borders of the societies from which they emerged. In this respect, the Cubans have not been markedly different from other rebels who have managed to triumph against tremendous odds, for they also have aspired to influence world affairs in a way that seemed unrealistic for a country with a modest population and limited natural resources. Yet unlike others, Cuba did attain an international influence and stature incommensurate with its size, as political scientist Jorge Domínguez observed in 1978:

Effective Sovereignty

Observers who are influenced by the realist school of thought tend to be pessimistic about the prospects for small countries to be able to control their destinies. They see such states as victims of global power differentials whose weaknesses often result in their incorporation into another country’s sphere of influence.^[2] Such observers highlight the importance of distinguishing clearly between formal and effective sovereignty. The former is in many respects symbolic, involving such things as admission to the United Nations and other similar badges of acceptance into the international community. Effective sovereignty, on the other hand, refers to circumstances where a country and its people truly control their own destinies; they are, in other words, exercising their right of national self-determination to the greatest extent possible. The architects of the Cuban Revolution, acutely aware of the island’s tragic history of encounters with imperial Spain and a hegemonically inclined United States, embraced the proposition that their highest priority must be to maximize their country’s effective sovereignty. Indeed, this pursuit represents the leitmotif underlying much of Havana’s foreign policy; in other words, it long has been and remains probably the single most important consideration influencing the dynamics of the Revolution’s international relations.

From a broad conceptual perspective, then, Cuba’s foreign relations can be understood in terms of the various strategies that Havana has employed in its efforts to guarantee the integrity of these three key national goals. The pursuit of these goals represents a constant within the Revolution’s foreign policy equation, while the methods used to try to secure them have often been “adjusted” due to such things as developments in the larger global environment within which the Revolution has had to operate (e.g., the transition from a Cold War paradigm to the post-Soviet world). More recently, the tides of change have manifested themselves in Raúl’s elevation to the Revolution’s top leadership position. It is the impact (or lack thereof) of this latter change on the style and substance of Cuba’s foreign policy in the three key areas detailed above that are examined here.

General Policy Trends in the Post-Soviet Era

In contrast to the more unitary nature of the late Cold War period, wherein practically all threads in Cuba’s web of international relations were anchored in Havana’s Soviet bloc connection, in the post-Soviet era Cuba has relied on two distinct strategies to pursue its foreign policy goals. First, trade restructuring has functioned primarily to promote economic security. Second, various aid/cooperation initiatives—two key examples being Alianza Bolívariana para las Américas (Bolívarian Alliance for the Americas [ALBA]) and Havana’s massive medical aid programs^[3] —have served to enhance the Revolution’s international stature and influence.

Necessity rather than choice forced the issue of radically reconfiguring Cuba’s economic relations in general and its trade networks in particular to the top of Havana’s international agenda in the early 1990s. The catalyst for this process was the turmoil that engulfed the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the time. One major casualty of this chaos was the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which was disbanded in June 1991. With it went the privileged trade regime and developmental aid packages that had long provided Cuba with a high degree of economic security.

Such a disruption in the increasingly interdependent modern world would be a matter of serious concern for practically any government, but it represented a disaster of epic proportions for an island country like Cuba, whose economic health tends to be heavily reliant on foreign trade. Making the situation even more precarious, of course, was Washington’s eagerness to intensify the crisis in yet another effort to drive a dagger through the Fidelistas’ political heart. These circumstances led many observers to conclude that the Revolution was finished—it would follow the Eastern European socialist countries into oblivion. Such dire predictions were obviously erroneous, and one major factor that contributed to the Revolution’s survival was Havana’s ability to radically restructure its shattered web of international economic relations. Supporting the campaign to expand its trade and related ties were such major initiatives as a drive to develop new export product lines (e.g., in the biotechnology field) and efforts to attract foreign investors by further liberalizing the laws that govern joint ventures on the island.

The post-Soviet era data clearly demonstrate that Havana has been quite successful in its efforts to restructure its trade and related ties by interjecting into their basic fabric an important element of diversification. Gone is the near-monopolistic position, rooted in the Revolution’s membership in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, that Eastern Europe once occupied. In its stead has emerged a much more complex web of economic relations, with the most important and multifaceted new threads radiating out to Western Europe and the Americas (see table 18.1), where in both cases Havana has developed a fairly varied list of trading partners. However, while such achievements can generally be seen as having a positive impact on the island’s quest for greater economic security, they have contributed little directly to the Revolution’s international stature and influence.

Cuban Trade Profile, 1989 and 2006 (percentage of total Cuban trade)
	1989	2006
Western Europe	8.0	27.8
Eastern Europe	77.1	3.2
Americas	5.9	43.3
Asia	5.1	20.9
Africa	0.9	2.0
Other	3.0	2.8

Source: Chart created by the author from data compiled by the Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas (Cuban National Office of Statistics).

Cuba had already gained considerable international prestige during the Cold War via its high-profile involvement in Third World affairs. In the post-Soviet era, however, this dimension of Cuba’s foreign policy has played itself out primarily in terms of Havana’s efforts to encourage its hemispheric neighbors to embrace neo-Bolívarianism. Although this concept entails important economic integration dimensions, its total scope is much broader in the sense that neo-Bolívarianism represents the Hispanic (and Anglophone Caribbean) alternative to a hemispheric landscape dominated by the United States.

The key idea here is that any contemporary (developmental) cooperation schemes launched by hemispheric states should be modeled along the lines of Simón Bolívar’s vision of a politically unified Latin America that would be clearly separate from and independent of the colossus to its north. As such, this approach rejects, at least for the time being, any significant involvement in the process on Washington’s part. Instead, it sees the whole enterprise unfolding under Latin American (rather than U.S.) leadership, the ultimate goal being to achieve a level of cooperation that would put the hemispheric community (defined as South America and the Caribbean Basin countries) in a position where its pooled power would to a great extent be sufficient to counterbalance that of the United States.

Not surprisingly, given its desire to inject a strong South-South dimension into its international/hemispheric relations and its penchant for playing the Latin American David to the U.S. Goliath, Havana has long been an advocate of neo-Bolívarianism in one form or another. Indeed, as noted by Luis Suárez, “The Revolution has always posited the doctrine of latinamericanismo, adopted in the Cuban constitution of 1976, which seeks the integration of Latin American and Caribbean nations.”^[4] The keystone of this neo-Bolívarian coalition, at least from Havana’s perspective, has been ALBA, which includes a very strong dimension of Cuba’s larger, globe-girdling medical aid programs.

Cuba’s post-Soviet initiatives to enhance both its economic security and its international stature have contributed to strengthening the island’s effective sovereignty by providing counterweights to Washington’s efforts to undermine it. In a nutshell, the essence of the U.S. strategy to replace the revolutionary government with a more acceptable (i.e., subservient) one has been to employ isolation as the mechanism to destabilize and ultimately destroy the Revolution. Trade sanctions have been the instrument used to pursue economic isolation, while the political side of the equation has involved attempts to convince the world community to sever all diplomatic ties with Cuba and thereby treat it as an international pariah. Thus far, however, Cuba has largely been able to frustrate and neutralize these ambitions. On the economic front, its widely diversified network of post-Soviet trade relations has replaced its Cold War communist bloc connection as an “insurance policy” against Washington’s trade sanctions, while its solid international stature has translated into diplomatic recognition and strong political support across the global landscape. As such, Cuba’s effective sovereignty does not currently appear to be in any serious jeopardy. Indeed, Washington’s policy has served to isolate the United States rather than Cuba. Consider that the UN General Assembly voted in 2012, as it had done similarly for the previous twenty years, to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba. The vote was 188–3 with two abstentions.

Raúlista Foreign Policy: Some General Observations

Whatever potential might have existed for dramatic policy transformations as Fidel withdrew into the background has not, for the most part, materialized. The substance of Cuba’s foreign affairs agenda has not changed radically. There have, of course, been some minor adjustments (e.g., in the rankings of trading partners), but the overall essence/nature of the island’s approach to international affairs has not changed drastically since 2006. Political scientist William LeoGrande succinctly confirmed this observation, utilizing a tripartite analytical paradigm similar to the one elaborated above, in writing,

Since he succeeded Fidel in 2006, Raúl Castro’s foreign policy has had three key components: first, to diversify Cuba’s international economic relations so that the disruption of ties with any one country will not throw the economy into chaos; second, to build diplomatic support both regionally and globally through active participation in a wide range of international organizations; and third, to pursue normal relations with the United States, reducing the threat Washington poses to Cuba’s security and opening the doors to expanded trade and investment.^[5]

What, then, represent some of the highlights of Raúl’s efforts in the international arena to promote and protect Cuba’s three key national attributes?

With regard to economic security, the record is somewhat mixed. As indicated in table 18.2, Cuba had achieved a high degree of regional diversification by 2006, when Raúl assumed leadership. A different dynamic emerges, however, when one looks at the percentage of total trade data in table 18.2. What was a fairly broad distribution in 2006 becomes much more concentrated in 2011 under Raúl’s watch, with Venezuela’s share nearly doubling to a point where it appears that Cuba could suffer serious economic problems if that relationship were disrupted. LeoGrande, for example, has noted that “by some estimates, Cuba would have to cut its oil imports by 20–25 percent, or else cut back on its other major import, food” if Venezuela ended preferential pricing and concessionary loans for Cuba or sent Cuban professionals home.^[6]

Cuba’s Primary Trading Partners, 2006 and 2011
Country	Imports from (1000s pesos)	Exports to (1000s pesos)	Total (1000s pesos)	Percentage of Total

		2006

Venezuela	2,232,423	408,787	2,641,210	21.26
China	1,571,130	243,971	1,815,101	14.61
Spain	859,625	156,908	1,016,533	8.18
Canada	351,604	545,381	896,985	7.22
Netherlands	67,932	788,045	855,977	6.89
Brazil	428,255	24,756	453,011	3.65
Germany	618,463	21,413	639,876	5.15
United States	483,591	0	483,591	3.89

		2011

Venezuela	5,902,286	2,432,200	8,334,486	41.68
China	1,281,742	786,200	2,067,942	10.34
Spain	1,019,677	165,400	1,185,077	5.92
Canada	479,257	718,800	1,198,057	5.99
Netherlands	72,978	656,400	729,378	3.65
Brazil	643,082	82,100	725,182	3.63
Germany	286,732	40,200	326,932	1.63
United States	430,420	588	431,008	2.16

Source: Anuario Estadístico de Cuba 2011, available athttp://www.one.cu/aec2011/esp/08_tabla_cuadro.htm.

This doomsday scenario loomed on the horizon when Hugo Chávez died of cancer in March 2013. Some feared that the main candidate opposing Nicolas Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, in the April 2013 presidential election might radically downsize Venezuela’s Cuban connection. Maduro’s victory, though, makes it unlikely that Raúl will confront any serious crises on this foreign affairs front for the time being because the new Venezuelan president had developed close ties with Cuba while serving as foreign minister.

What is surprising in table 18.2 is the slippage in China’s percentage of total Cuban trade. Beijing launched a major economic campaign in Latin America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its two-way trade with countries in the region jumped from U.S.$10 billion in 2000 to $183 billion in 2011.^[7] One would therefore have expected to see an expanding Chinese presence in Cuba’s foreign trade profile. Instead, Beijing, like Havana’s other main trading partners, has increasingly been overshadowed by Venezuela during Raúl’s tenure. Cuba’s history has repeatedly demonstrated the danger of becoming overly reliant on a particular economic partnership that may not stand the test of time. Admittedly, Havana’s current Venezuelan connection is not nearly as extensive as was previously the case with either the United States before 1959 or the Soviet bloc. Nevertheless, conventional wisdom suggests that Cuba’s long-term economic security will be best served by a strong commitment to diversification.

There is, however, one tantalizing “silver bullet” that entered the picture during the Raúlista transition and that has the potential to solve many of the island’s economic problems. Specifically, in 2008, reports began to circulate about the possibility of significant oil deposits north of Cuba in the island’s offshore exclusive economic zone. The estimates ranged from approximately 5 billion barrels (U.S. Geological Survey) to 20 billion barrels (Cuban government). If the mid- to higher range of these estimates were proven to be correct, Cuba would enter an exclusive club as one of the top twenty nations of the world in terms of petroleum reserves. Even using the lowest estimate, Canada and Venezuela would be the only nations in the Western Hemisphere to surpass the island on the basis of per capita reserves. This potential bonanza has, however, remained elusive. By mid-2013, five test wells had been drilled by various international partners, but none proved to be commercially viable because of geological problems (e.g., hard rock, which makes it extremely difficult to extract whatever oil may be present). While oil production remains an option to be pursued, Cuba will have to employ more conventional strategies in the near future to promote Cuba’s economic security.

On the international stature front, Raúl continued and expanded Havana’s medical aid programs, though with some revisions in their financial arrangements. The growth in these endeavors during his administration is summarized in table 18.3. There has been a 60 percent increase in the number of personnel deployed between 2005 and 2013. Initially, these contingents were dispatched at little or no cost to the host nations. Under Raúl, however, in some cases there have been changes in the financial arrangements. Specifically, some of the more affluent countries who receive such assistance are today being asked to pay or to pay more for it.^[8] In 2013, Cuba earned nearly U.S.$6 billion from its medical services exports, which made it “the leading source of hard-currency income for the nation,” according to Cuban Foreign Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca.^[9] Whatever the financial provisions might be, it is widely recognized that Havana reaps considerable nonmonetary rewards from its medical aid programs, as illustrated by President Obama’s comments in a press conference at the 2009 Summit of the Americas meeting:

Cuban Medical Aid Personnel Abroad
Year	Number
1999	3,600
2001	3,800
2003	15,000
2005	24,500
2006	28,664
2007	29,809
2008	36,770
2009	38,000
2010	37,000
2011	40,000
2012	38,000
2013	40,000

Source: Created by the author using data gleaned from various international governmental organization and media sources. An especially useful source of data and information about Cuban medical aid activities are the various issues of MEDICC Review, available at http://www.medicc.org/index.php.

One thing that I thought was interesting—and I knew this in a more abstract way but it was interesting in very specific terms—was hearing from these leaders who when they spoke about Cuba talked very specifically about the thousands of doctors from Cuba that are dispersed all throughout the region, and upon which many of these countries heavily depend. And it’s a reminder for us in the United States that if our only interaction with many of these countries is drug interdiction, if our only interaction is military, then we may not be developing the connections that can, over time, increase our influence and have a beneficial effect when we need to try to move policies that are of concern to us forward in the region.^[10]

Although previously Cuba’s international stature had been enhanced as a result of its leadership in various Third World groups (e.g., the Non-Aligned Movement), Havana interjected a new dimension into this aspect of its twenty-first-century hemispheric policies by moving, in conjunction with and as a result of its increasingly close ties with Hugo Chávez’s government in Caraças, to create a new organization designed to counteract Washington’s dominance of Latin American/Caribbean affairs. On December 14, 2004, Cuba and Venezuela signed the ALBA Pact in Havana, thereby transforming neo-Bolívarianism from an abstract philosophical concept into a formal international treaty with provisions for institutionalization. Among ALBA’s key objectives are to promote trade and investment between member governments based on cooperation and with the aim of improving people’s lives, not making profits; for member states to cooperate to provide free health care and free education to people across the ALBA states; to integrate the ALBA member’s energy sectors to meet people’s needs; and to develop basic industries so that ALBA member states can become economically independent.^[11] With Cuba and Venezuela playing leading roles, ALBA has evolved into a highly multifaceted undertaking that includes initiatives such as the following:

Operation Milagro (Miracle), a vision restoration project wherein Venezuela provides most of the funding while surgeries and related care are the responsibility of Cuban medical specialists.
The Cuban “Yo, sí puedo” literacy program, which taught approximately 1,700,000 Latin Americans to read and write through 2009, with Bolivia and Nicaragua joining Venezuela on the UN list of illiteracy-free countries in the process.
The ALBA Oil Agreement, which is modeled on a larger Venezuelan enterprise launched in 2005 known as PetroCaribe. The agreement allows ALBA members to finance their oil purchases on a long-term, low-interest basis of which a portion can be repaid in goods and services.
The Bank of ALBA, which was set up in 2008 to serve as a source of developmental capital for ALBA members.^[12]

Cuba also expanded its influence in the region in November 2008 when it gained full membership in the Rio Group, an informal association of countries that Brazil organized in the 1980s to help broker peace in Central America. In December 2011, the Rio Group formalized itself in creating the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Caraças. With thirty-three countries (every country in the Western Hemisphere except the United States and Canada) representing roughly 600 million people, CELAC presented a major challenge to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States as the major international organization for the region. Notably, the high esteem the region held for Cuba was demonstrated by naming it the organization’s chair for 2013.

CELAC and ALBA share several similarities:

Both view integration in more than simply economic terms, seeking also to promote political, social, economic, and cultural unity as well as sustainable development.
Both represent a conscious and collective effort to combat U.S. economic, political, military, and cultural domination in the region.
Both emerged as a result of efforts by Havana and Caraças, the two prime movers behind its establishment.

While it remains to be seen whether CELAC will develop into a viable, highly effective undertaking, it, along with ALBA and Havana’s expanding medical aid programs, is an indicator of the high priority Raúl has given to maximizing Cuba’s international stature and influence.

The litmus test for the revolutionary government’s effective sovereignty has always revolved heavily around its relationship with the United States. The key issue here has been its vulnerability, both real and perceived, to Washington’s hostility—the greater the vulnerability, the more severe is the threat to Havana’s ability to exercise effective sovereignty over its affairs (both domestic and, especially, foreign). But as noted previously, by 2006, Havana’s effective sovereignty in relation to the United States seemed secure. Indeed, it appears that Havana no longer even views Washington or relations with the United States as a major problem. As historian Julia Sweig reported in 2013 about conversations with Cuban officials,

Cuba no longer seems to need to see the relationship with the United States improve as rapidly as it might well have, for example, when the Soviet bloc collapsed and it lost its Soviet subsidy overnight. . . . The government seems to be quite gratified by the consensus in Latin America and globally that the U.S. policy should change, but is clearly not willing to tie itself up into pretzels in order to satisfy an American demand that it reshape its politics in our image.^[13]

Conclusion

When speculating about the transition to a post-Fidel political order in Cuba, many observers (particularly in U.S. governmental/mass media circles and especially in Miami) tended to assume that the process would somehow be extremely chaotic—Fidel would soldier on until the very last minute, and then his demise would create a power vacuum that would plunge the society into chaos. This speculation proved to be totally divorced from reality because Fidel had made provisions for an orderly changing of the guard. The Revolution had been Fidel’s life work, and he was not about to put his legacy at risk by allowing a situation to develop that might endanger it.

Given the orderly transition, it should not be surprising that there has been a significant degree of policy continuity under Raúl, especially in the realm of foreign affairs. Fidel and the party/governmental leadership have always shared, along with the general population, a strong commitment to the deep currents of nationalism that have long flowed through the island’s political culture. These sentiments have, from the very beginning of the Revolution, manifested themselves in an international agenda that stresses maximizing the country’s economic security, its prestige in world affairs, and its effective sovereignty. Raúl, of course, has been and remains a part of this tradition. Therefore, while there has been and will continue to be some tactical policy adjustments in response to changes in the domestic or international environments, the larger strategic vision summarized here should continue to characterize the basic dynamics of Cuba’s foreign relations under Raúl.

Notes

Jorge Domínguez, “Cuban Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, no. 57, Fall 1978, 83.

See, for example, William Demas, Consolidating Our Independence: The Major Challenge for The West Indies (St. Augustine: Institute of International Relations, University of the West Indies, 1986), 12.

For more regarding Cuba’s medical aid programs, see John M. Kirk and H. Michael Erisman, Cuban Medical Internationalism: Origins, Evolution, and Goals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and Julie Finesilver, Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Luis Suárez, “Cuba’s Foreign Policy and the Promise of ALBA,” NACLA Report on the Americas, January/February 2006, 28.

William M. LeoGrande, “The Danger of Dependence: Cuba’s Foreign Policy after Chávez,” World Politics Review, April 2, 2013, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/authors /947/william-m-leogrande.

LeoGrande, “The Danger of Dependence.”

Adrian H. Hearn, “China, Global Governance and the Future of Cuba,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, no. 1, 2012, 156.

Of the sixty-six countries hosting Cuban medical aid contingents in 2013, twenty-six paid some amount for these services. The rest, mostly sub-Saharan African nations, paid nothing. For more information on this topic, see “Los 66 países donde trabajan los médicos cubanos,” El Nuevo Herald, June 13, 2013, http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2013/06/18/1502724/los-66-paises-donde-trabajan-los.html

Quoted in “Cuba Nets Billions Each Year by Hiring Out Its Doctors to Asia, Africa and Latin America,” Agence France-Presse, June 19, 2013, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/19/cuba-nets-billions-each-year-by-hiring-out-its-doctors-to-asia-africa-and-latin-america/.

10.

Quoted from a transcript of his April 19, 2009, press conference, available at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/19/obama_summit_americas_ press_conference_96076.html.

11.

ALBA’s members are Cuba, Venezuela, Antigua/Barbuda, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Honduras was a member but withdrew in January 2010.

12.

For more information and analyses of the Cuban/Venezuelan relationship within the ALBA context, see H. Michael Erisman, “Cuba, Venezuela, and ALBA: The Neo-Bolívarian Challenge,” in Cuban-Latin American Relations in the Context of a Changing Hemisphere, ed. Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011), 101–47.

13.

Julia E. Sweig, “Wariness in Cuba toward the Obama Administration,” Council on Foreign Relations interview, March 9, 2009, http://www.cfr.org/cuba/wariness-cuba- toward-obama-administration/p18715.

Chapter 19

China and the Future of Cuba

Adrian H. Hearn

Financial instability in the United States and Europe has intensified China’s engagement with developing countries. Sino–Latin American trade skyrocketed from U.S.$10 billion in 2000 to U.S.$183 billion in 2011, and China’s priorities in the region are clear: tap new sources of foodstuffs and energy to sustain domestic growth and open new markets for Chinese-manufactured products.

Literature on the resulting transpacific relationships focuses mainly on the economic and strategic implications of this process, drawing predictable conclusions. With few exceptions (e.g., Gonzalez-Vicente 2011; Hearn and León-Manríquez 2011; Kotschwar, Moran, and Muir 2011), little attention has been paid to the influence of China’s rise on the coordination and development of Latin American industrial sectors and how this influence resonates—or not—with international conventions of governance. The case of Cuba is instructive, as no other country is so openly condemned by Washington and so publicly praised by Beijing. China is Cuba’s second-largest trading partner, and the two countries have pursued state-led cooperation in sectors as diverse as biomedicine, tourism, industrial manufacturing, nickel and oil mining, and oil refining (UN Commodity Trade Statistics Database 2011).

This chapter argues that in spite of continuing differences between international conventions of governance and China’s approach to foreign engagement, the line between the two is narrowing. The first part of the chapter traces the key points of contention to diverging evaluations of state intervention but finds that these tensions are diminishing as multilateral institutions evolve to accommodate China’s influence. For instance, adjustments to fiscal reserve policies within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as the gradual relaxation of the IMF’s benchmark guidelines on public sector expenditure, resonate with China’s vision of public-private integration as a basis for economic development.

As China becomes more integrated into the existing geopolitical architecture, its government has encouraged political outliers, most notably Cuba, to follow its example. The remainder of the chapter finds that the trajectory of Chinese cooperation with Cuba has evolved from state-centric bilateral accords to an increasing emphasis on economic liberalization. Consequently, even some of Cuba’s staunchest critics have recognized that, with China’s assistance, the island is headed toward rapprochement with the international economic system.

China, the State, and Global Governance

China’s “peaceful rise” is complicated by the existence of an international system in which the rules of appropriate conduct have already been defined. From political transparency to commercial conditionality, the controversies that distinguish China’s approach from international conventions stem from a common source: diverging views of the state. Richard Feinberg (2011) notes that the IMF’s aversion to state intervention is not set in stone: “Over the years, the IMF has admitted many new members whose statist economic policies diverged greatly from free market norms” (63). Nevertheless, the IMF recommends that developing market economies should not allow their ratio of public debt to gross domestic product to exceed 25 percent (IMF 2003). Although the IMF replaced its structural performance criteria with more flexible “structural benchmarks” in 2009, the underlying ideology remains the same: macroeconomic growth should be a prerequisite for government spending (IMF 2009). Chinese analysts typically view the development process in reverse, advising partner-country governments to undertake initial investments in infrastructure and technical upgrading to enable subsequent economic growth under “the supreme guidance of the state” (Yan 2011, 12–16).

To diminish the tensions that result from conflicting visions of development, Chinese negotiators have sought to influence the policy charters of multilateral institutions, particularly the United Nations and the IMF. The transformation of the G8 into the G8+5, the subsequent creation of the G20, and the formation of informal groupings, such as the G20 Developing Nations, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China), have augmented China’s confidence and international profile. The G20 in particular has provided a platform for President Hu Jintao to describe China’s transformation into a “leadership state” (Wang 2011).

If the G20 has augmented China’s diplomatic exposure, the IMF has enabled practical advances. China now holds the largest IMF voting quota after the United States and Japan, its rights having increased from 3.65 to 6.39 percent over the past two years. Prior to becoming managing director of the IMF in 2011, Christine Lagarde stated, “If the Chinese economy continues to grow and be a driver of the world economy, then clearly that percentage will have to further increase” (quoted in Hille 2011, 6). It is well known that Chinese negotiators are pushing to secure a place for the renminbi in the IMF’s multicurrency reserves (Special Drawing Rights [SDRs]) and promoting SDRs as an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the world’s base currency.

China’s vision of state-guided development can be traced to the communist revolution of 1949, but more influential are the lessons learned from the nation’s subsequent embrace of “market socialism.” Since the early 1980s, centrally designed pilot programs and “experimental points” have allowed adjustments and midstream corrections as market structures moved inward from the margins of the planned system (Devlin 2008, 129). Success with public-private integration at home has conditioned the formulation of Chinese overseas development programs, which are typically managed through bilateral governmental accords and joint ventures. China’s advocacy of reforms within the IMF, from securing a place for the renminbi in SDRs to building endorsement among member countries for greater public spending, aims to substantiate the legitimacy of this controversial approach.

According to Hu Jintao (2011), by the end of 2010, China had completed 632 infrastructure projects in developing countries. Across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region, these projects (many of them related to natural resource extraction) have been criticized for their excessive state intervention and inadequate transparency (Corrales et al. 2009; Eisenman 2006; Hanson 2008; Lam 2004; Santoli, Scheidel, and Shanks 2004). China’s deepening partnerships with the world’s commodity exporters, writes Cynthia Sanborn, are characterized by a lack of checks and balances: “There are no incentives for Chinese leaders to take a stand on social and environmental responsibility” (quoted in Kotschwar et al. 2011). China’s preference for negotiating directly with foreign governments has also attracted accusations that it is enabling undemocratic regimes, Venezuela and Cuba among them, to avoid public disclosure of ecological impact and labor conditions (Caspary 2008; Ellis 2009; King 2009). China, it is argued, is spreading the message that “discipline, not democracy, is the key to development and prosperity” (China–Latin America Task Force 2006, 21).

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintains that China stands ready to offer assistance within its capacity to developing countries having difficulties. Although China’s aid is limited, it is provided sincerely and without any conditions attached (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China 2003). Chinese officials defend their “no-strings” approach as a commitment to political noninterference and, following domestic experience, argue that it minimizes corruption because it substitutes cash transfers with self-contained projects, such as the construction of schools, hospitals, roads, and sports stadiums.

In 2008, the Chinese government responded to international concerns by publishing its first Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper refers to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence—unchanged since their establishment in 1954 to resolve a border dispute with India—to define the parameters of transpacific engagement (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China 2008). The Five Principles provide a general and hence adaptable framework for international cooperation: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual nonaggression, noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Chinese commentators have argued that the Five Principles reflect a Confucian perspective of nationhood and statecraft, particularly through their emphasis on consensual “harmonious” development, their pursuit of “holistic” outcomes, and their implicit advocacy of state stewardship over national and international affairs (Pan 2004; Wen 2004; Yang 2008). Notwithstanding the appropriation of Confucius to legitimize contemporary policy, analysts—Chinese and Western—detect genuine traces of traditional values in Chinese policymaking. David Shambaugh (2008), for instance, argues that “for the Chinese, cooperation derives from trust—whereas Americans tend to build trust through cooperation.”

In Argentina and Venezuela, Chinese enterprises have demonstrated a preference for long-term outcomes over quick returns, offering respective currency swaps and credits of U.S.$10.24 billion and U.S.$20 billion in return for natural resource concessions a decade into the future. In Brazil and Cuba, Chinese investments promote the integration of logistics, education, and manufacturing, achieving a degree of collective sectoral coordination beyond the capabilities of any individual firm-to-firm partnership. In Mexico and the Caribbean, Chinese business initiatives have relied on informal networks and guanxi (ethnic and family relationships) rather than official institutional channels, particularly when the latter lack local legal and public support (Haro Navejas 2011; Hearn, Smart, and Hernández 2011).

Like their Chinese counterparts, Cuban officials are often accused of excessive intervention in the economic and social lives of their citizens. Moreover, Cuba’s cooperation with China, managed exclusively through state channels, has drawn criticism for its undisclosed (hence suspicious) nature. From secret arms transfers and development of biological weapons to anti-U.S. intelligence gathering, commentators perceive a sinister intergovernmental strategy underlying the bilateral relationship (Cereijo 2001, 2010; Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies [ICCAS] 2004).

Sino-Cuban cooperation is indeed driven by a political strategy, but it is focused less on undermining the United States than on the long-term (and less newsworthy) goal of upgrading and coordinating Cuba’s industrial capacities. Although Chinese “assistance” to Cuba is managed through governmental channels, it has been accompanied by advice from Beijing about the benefits of incorporating a greater degree of private initiative into the existing state-led system. Under the leadership of Raúl Castro since 2008, the Cuban government has begun to heed this advice as it seeks to open the island’s economy in a controlled manner.

China and Cuba: The Long March to the Market

China’s relations with Cuba date back to 1847, when the first of more than 150,000 Chinese indentured laborers arrived in Havana’s port of Regla. These people and their descendants actively took part in Cuba’s two wars of independence (1868–1878 and 1895–1898) and in the social movement that culminated in the Cuban Revolution of 1959. On September 2, 1960, Fidel Castro declared that Cuba would sever ties with Taiwan; this was done within a month, on September 28, making Cuba the first Latin American country to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Since their inception, Sino-Cuban economic relations have been managed exclusively through governmental channels.

State-to-state cooperation has focused on building critical infrastructure as a basis for Cuban economic growth. Bilateral projects have targeted the upgrading of Cuban manufacturing, the gradual opening of markets, the coordination of industrial sectors, and, more recently, the controlled introduction of private entrepreneurship. As Chinese enterprises become increasingly comfortable with the rules of market exchange, Cuba’s slow implementation of reforms has generated bilateral tensions. However, since Raúl Castro replaced his brother as Cuba’s president, the pace of change has quickened, and China’s domestic experience with economic reform has assumed growing relevance for the island.

China’s interest in developing Cuban manufacturing capacities and markets extends back to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following an initial shipment of 500,000 Chinese bicycles to Cuba in the early 1990s, Mao Xianglin, a former envoy of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, visited Cuba in 1997 to assist in the establishment of a bicycle factory with Chinese capital and technical expertise. The success of the initiative led to a similar export-to-production scheme for electric fans. Mao described this as an “incremental” strategy that Chinese businesses have since employed across a range of sectors in Cuba:

I would hesitate to say that our Cuban manufacturing operations are entirely commercial, because what we’re doing is broader than that. We’re trying to help Cuba to incrementally upgrade its technical ability. If our products prove popular and useful then we assist by setting up factories. . . . Using Chinese expertise, Cuba could come to produce electronic goods for sale to Latin America. (interview with Mao Xianglin, December 14, 2007)

Chinese technical and financial assistance to Cuba demonstrates the sincerity of these words. During a 2001 visit to Cuba, Chinese President Jiang Zemin offered an interest-free credit line of U.S.$6.5 million and a loan of U.S.$200 million to modernize local telecommunications with Chinese products and a U.S.$150 million credit to buy Chinese televisions (Erikson and Minson 2006, 14). Following the successful sale of Chinese washing machines, televisions, air conditioners, and refrigerators to Cuba, Hu Jintao signed sixteen accords in 2004 pledging Chinese support for the domestic manufacture of these and other goods. This promise has materialized in a facility next to Havana’s Lenin Park, where television sets and other light consumer products are assembled. Indicating the success of the scheme, in November 2009 the Cuban Ministry of Information and Communication’s Grupo de la Electrónica entered into a joint venture with Chinese electronics giant Haier to domestically manufacture computer components and assemble household consumer goods (Cubaencuentro 2009). Visiting Cuba for a second time in November 2008, Hu offered extensions on the repayment of previous loans, a donation of U.S.$8 million for hurricane relief, and a credit line of U.S.$70 million for health infrastructure (Granma 2008, 5). The visit also cleared the way for the China National Petroleum Corporation to invest U.S.$6 billion in both the expansion of an oil refinery in Cienfuegos to produce 150,000 barrels per day and the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant on the same site (Hutchinson-Jafar 2011).

China’s pursuit of industrial integration is evident in the Cuban transport sector, which in 2006 received a U.S.$1.8 billion revolving credit line backed by the China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation (Sinosure), whose repayment was renegotiated in 2010 (EFE 2010; ICCAS 2009, 47). The Cuban government also announced in 2006 that contracts totaling more than U.S.$2 billion had been signed, primarily with Chinese counterparts, to improve Cuban road and rail transport (Nuevo Herald 2009). Five hundred Chinese freight and passenger train carriages were ordered for Cuba’s rail fleet, with twenty-one complete locomotives entering service in 2009. In 2008, the Chinese firm Yutong sold 1,000 energy efficient buses to the island, 200 of which were in circulation by midyear. According to Rosa Oliveras (interview, November 18, 2008) of the Grupo para el Desarrollo de la Capital, “The Chinese buses saved our city, and actually the whole country, from a very grave situation.”

Rather than deliver complete buses to Cuba, Yutong shipped components from its factory in Zhengzhou for assembly in Havana, saving 12 to 15 percent in transportation costs (Pizarro 2009). The scheme facilitated skills transfer through the training of Cuban automobile assembly technicians by a team of thirty Chinese counterparts. As with training in Cuban electrodomestic factories, a marsh gas extraction, a sheep-rearing farm, a reservoir fishery, and three pesticide production plants, this approach is building a valuable source of specialized talent that may facilitate Cuba’s entry into global production chains. The project’s integration into a broader, coordinated program of development and skills training distinguishes it from private sector investments from Europe (particularly Spain) that have focused on enclave sectors, such as hotel construction and tourism services.

The integration of infrastructure upgrading with information technology and electronics training has laid the foundation for a coordinated industrial chain that supports domestic manufacturing along with the shipment of goods to markets around Cuba and potentially to neighboring Latin American and Caribbean countries. Facilitated by the refurbishment of Cuba’s ports with Chinese equipment, this strategy could significantly advance both countries’ regional influence (Frank 2006).

The Chinese government adopted the strategy of gradual liberalization at home in the early 1980s and has repeatedly advocated it to Cuban officials ever since Fidel Castro’s 1995 meeting with Premier Li Peng in Beijing (Cheng 2007; Jiang 2009). After fifteen years of hearing their advice, Cuba’s reformers—led by Raúl Castro—are now listening.

Cuba’s sixth Communist Party Congress, which took place in April 2011, showed a growing acceptance of the market as a catalyst for national development. The Economic and Social Policy Guidelines approved by the congress declared that ownership of private property, long considered antithetical to socialism, is now considered acceptable on the condition that it is not “concentrated” (República de Cuba 2011, 5, 11). The critical concern has therefore become how the state might leverage its considerable institutional capacities to optimize and guide economic performance.

Effective implementation of the 2011 reforms will require a phased and coordinated approach, and in this regard China can provide some useful lessons. Among the insights that Cuba has derived from China—with varying degrees of attentiveness—are the gradual sequencing of reforms under the management of a state-appointed reform commission (Laverty 2011, 65; Lopez-Levy 2011a, 9; Lopez-Levy 2011b, 43–44), the adaptation of socialist principles to national conditions (Mao Xianglin et al. 2011, 199), the military management of commercial activities (Klepak 2010), the attraction of investment from emigrants (Ratliff 2004, 21–22), and the testing of liberalization in target territories prior to wider implementation (Heilmann 2008).

In November 2010, the president of the Cuban National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón, visited Beijing and officially recognized the relevance of China’s economic evolution to Cuba’s development. Raúl Castro had already expressed this sentiment during his visits in 1997 and 2005, which focused on labor market reform and the creation of hybrid state-market economic structures. In China’s experience, particularly since joining the World Trade Organization, these transformations were achieved through a blend of state oversight and privatization, an approach that Chinese officials now routinely recommend to Cuba. When Vice President Xi Jinping of China and President Jiang Jiemin of the China National Petroleum Corporation visited Havana in June 2011, they not only signed memorandums of understanding on oil and gas investments but also discussed banking and economic planning. As Feinberg (2011) notes, “Some observers opine, albeit with some exaggeration, that China has become Cuba’s IMF!” (42).

Cuban leaders have rejected the notion that they intend to follow a “China model” of development. A historically accrued wariness of excessive foreign influence has long colored the character of the island’s international engagement, and relations with China appear to be no exception. Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century, along with U.S. domination in the first half of the twentieth century and Soviet micromanagement in the second half each provoked strong nationalistic responses. Chinese enterprises have found themselves subjected to the meticulous regulations of the Cuban state. Technical cooperation is carefully monitored and subsumed by central policy objectives, leading Chinese entrepreneurs to complain about missed opportunities for expanding trade and deepening investment.

Political orthodoxy has also generated headaches for Cuba. The buses purchased from Yutong under a bilateral governmental accord, for instance, arrived in bulk in 2008, but their relentless use on dilapidated roads caused many to break down simultaneously in late 2010 and early 2011. According to an official close to the project, Cuban negotiators incorrectly assumed that open-ended “political goodwill” signified that Yutong, a state enterprise, would provide the Cuban fleet with ongoing maintenance and replacement parts. Electronics manufacturing has suffered similar setbacks: in the absence of independent quality control, televisions, rice makers, and appliances assembled in Cuba under Chinese brand names have lived notoriously short lives. The extensive circulation of spare parts recovered from antique Russian and U.S. appliances has done little to service the sleek, energy-efficient, but incompatible Chinese models. Together with the progressive economic recommendations of Chinese officials, these setbacks have served to remind Cuban leaders of the point conveyed to Fidel Castro during his 1995 visit to Beijing: political ideology no longer subsumes economic pragmatism.

Since the early 1990s, state-to-state cooperation has enabled Cuba to leverage Chinese support for the development and coordination of basic industrial infrastructure. The bilateral relationship has now moved into a new phase marked by strategic planning of economic opening and controlled privatization. Tensions and disagreements are to be expected, but since Raúl Castro assumed power in 2008, Cuban authorities have shown sincere interest in learning from China’s experiences with liberalization.

The Chinese government has a vested interest in the success of Cuba’s reforms, reflected in the negotiation of the first Five-Year Plan for Sino-Cuban cooperation in June 2011. As a longtime financier of Cuba’s development, many are looking to Beijing to underwrite the credits and loans that aspiring entrepreneurs need to grow small businesses.

As Cuba’s need for capital deepens, its leaders have expressed “no principled position against relations with the IMF or World Bank” (quoted in Feinberg 2011, 67). The internal evolution of the IMF to accommodate changing global conditions, including China’s deepening influence, makes engagement with Cuba more likely. Growing international reliance on the renminbi and greater provisions for public spending are important in this regard, but equally important are Cuba’s domestic reforms, which are bringing the island into closer alignment with conventions of economic governance. China sits at the crossroads of these local and global developments, encouraging Cuba toward rapprochement with international norms even as it works to reform them.

Conclusion

The Latin American operations of Chinese state enterprises, undertaken through state-to-state channels with “no strings attached,” challenge orthodox conventions of international cooperation. Alarmist reports of worst-case scenarios and potential threats, from disregard for human rights to telecommunications espionage, obscure the more encompassing and genuine challenge of building dialogue with China on Western Hemisphere affairs. As Daniel Erikson (2011, 132) has written, the energy of policymakers and publics would be better directed at leveraging China’s intensifying engagement with multilateral institutions as a basis for discussing regional codes of governance and approaches to state intervention. The changing internal dynamics of the IMF, including the increase of China’s voting rights, suggest that this process is now under way.

Recent changes in Cuba indicate that even in a country at diplomatic odds with the United States, Chinese initiatives are not inimical to mainstream principles of development and governance. Long-term market expansion, coordinated industrial sectors, and state oversight of private initiative are goals that drive the engineers and policy advisers behind Sino-Cuban projects. These goals also resemble the principles advocated by Latin American, European, and U.S. officials. The Cuban reforms formalized by the 2011 Communist Party Congress will support a further convergence of positions, as they propose a more balanced mix of state and market forces. Although Sino-Cuban initiatives are managed under the banner of state-to-state cooperation, Chinese support for Cuba’s liberalization agenda is prompting the Western Hemisphere’s only communist nation toward alignment with international norms.

Note

From “China, Global Governance and the Future of Cuba,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 1, no. 1 (2012): 155–79. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Chapter 20

Cuban–Latin American and Caribbean Relations

Monica Hirst

Challenges Beyond

As the Cuban regime celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, a wave of progressive governments unleashed a nonviolent process of change in Latin America. Holding stronger ties with Latin American countries while aiming to leave behind years of isolation and selective bilateral bonds is referred to in Cuba as a process of “normalization.” In fact, Cuban–Latin American relations are not nostalgic and do not at all follow a Proustian logic of the “search for a lost time.” Revolutionary processes that involve the use of violence and insurgency are no longer perceived in the region as a necessary pathway to social change and international autonomy. Widespread social inclusion policies accompanied by economic measures aiming to protect national sovereignty have been pursued with no major damage to the rule of law in various parts of the region, in certain cases maintaining and deepening the democratic foundations and preserving the rules of the market economy game.

Latin American democracy processes have contributed to restoring and deepening ties with Havana—so much so that during the past twenty years, Fidel and Raúl Castro have been invited to all Latin American presidential inaugurations of elected candidates regardless of political affiliation. “Normalization” is also used to underline the acceptance of political differences within the region and that ideology should no longer be considered the dominant criterion for intraregional relations.

The Question of Change: Between Reform and Transition

Cubans applaud the internal process of reform, although change is not associated with a political transition, as is often speculated about by Western governments, the media, and academia. The changes made essentially aim at the liberalization of the economy through structural transformations of the Cuban statist centralized model. Among Cuban intellectuals, the main dilemma challenging current reforms is that of establishing the most appropriate economic model and what its social impact should be. Political changes, albeit viewed as inevitable, are seen as challenges to be addressed down the road. Subsequently, Latin American experiences appear less attractive than certain Asian state–centered trajectories, especially those in Vietnam and China.

From a comparative perspective, the reforms in Cuba can be juxtaposed with three experiences: those in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ongoing sequence of regime changes known as the Arab Spring that started in Tunisia in 2010, and the Latin American democratic transitions initiated in the late 1980s.

Cuba is unlikely to replicate the South American and especially the Southern Cone’s experience of transition in which local/regional prodemocratic forces worked together based on an antiauthoritarian consensus with hardly any external pressure. This is and will not in the future be the case in Cuba. In fact, Cuba is a special—if not unique—case in which antidemocratic anachronism still endures, resisting the pressure of neocolonial interventionism. The most problematic aspect of Cuba’s uniqueness is its dimension that involves the United States and the U.S.-based Cuban exile community.

The principle of nonintervention is a strong feature of Latin American foreign policies, and within the region the acceptance of political diversity has been perceived as a sign of political maturity. The region’s foreign policies and domestic regional campaigns in areas of human rights or political pluralism that could influence the Cuban regime are expected to be feeble. Nonetheless, the expanded access to information on current Latin American politics within democratic contexts, thanks to the presence of global instruments of communication such as the Internet and the recent presence of TELESUR in open television broadcasting, unavoidably nurtures political questioning, particularly among younger generations. Also, the expansion of Latin American tourism on the island, together with an increase of cultural and educational programs, has renewed and extended areas of exchange and mutual knowledge between Cubans and Latin Americans.

Regional Partnerships

Latin American investment, commerce, and cooperation for development are considered more as doors of opportunity for the Cuban economy than as a source of inspiration, allowing the country to pursue sustainable growth, social equity, and political change. Cuban–Latin American trade has expanded steadily in recent years, yet when current Cuban–Latin American relations are closely observed, Venezuela and Brazil are the partners that seem to count most.

The Cuban-Venezuelan nexus was established as a natural outcome of the installation of the Hugo Chávez government in 1999. Perceived by Cuban officials and intellectuals as vital to saving the Revolution after the island had struggled through the difficult period after the fall of the Soviet Union, this relationship launched the ground ideologically for reviving Latin American leftist ideals. From the outset, Cuban-Venezuelan bilateralism has been sustained by three pillars: (1) high-level political dialogue, (2) military intelligence collaboration, and (3) compensatory trade.

Based primarily on personal friendship and deep ideological affinities, the Castro-Chávez connection was central to legitimizing the Bolivarian socialist project, promoting the ALBA group (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América [Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America], comprising Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuela), and unblocking communications between leftist guerrilla groups and the government in Colombia. Cuban military advisers in Venezuela became crucial for local intelligence activities and involved direct participation in presidential logistics, weapons training, and shared anti-U.S. strategic planning. Cuban-Venezuela cooperation in defense has involved the presence of 500 Cuban military advisers, exchange programs between defense academies, and the repair and maintenance of warships, ports, and transportation logistics (Romero 2010).

In 2011, trade with Venezuela represented 38 percent of total Cuban exchanges, while in Latin America the partnership with Venezuela represented 81 percent of Cuba’s trade with the region. The bilateral accord introduced in 2003 set preferential pricing for the export of Cuban professional services (mainly medical) in exchange for the provision of oil and joint investments in strategic areas, plus the provision of generous credit lines. Bilateral exchanges registered a large leap since 2004, jumping from $346 million to $1.487 billion in 2007 and $1.6 billion in 2012. In 2005, it was agreed that Cuba would supply Venezuela with 30,000 medical professionals, 600 clinics, 600 centers for physical therapy and rehabilitation, thirty-five centers for high-technology diagnosis, and 100,000 eye operations, besides the training of 40,000 doctors and 5,000 health workers and the provision of 10,000 scholarships. In exchange, Venezuela was to provide 53,000 barrels of oil daily at preferential rates of $27 per barrel (Benzi and Lo Brutto 2013; Feinsilver 2008; Serbin 2006).

Venezuela is the only Latin American country that could strongly affect the island, particularly if the Chavista regime were to be destabilized. The uncertainties of post-Chávez Venezuela have created uneasiness in the Cuban government in that a reconfiguration of the bond with Caraças could replicate the gap experienced in the past when the Soviet Union collapsed. After President Hugo Chávez’s death in March 2013, new presidential elections were held in Venezuela in which Nicolás Maduro won by a small margin of 1.7 percent over the opposition leader Henrique Capriles. Immediately afterward, President Maduro met with Fidel and Raúl Castro in Havana, when fifty-one cooperation projects were signed for $2 billion in the areas of food supply, culture, sports, education, energy, health, and transportation. Also, recent tension between the governments of Venezuela and Colombia may also become a source of concern for Havana, as they could affect the ongoing Colombian peace talks.

An unprecedented dialogue taking place between Cuba and Brazil has brought concrete results for investment, credit, and cooperation in biofuels, health, education, culture, agriculture, and infrastructure. The Brazilian strategy has been to maximize the opportunities created by Cuba’s economic reforms as an important partner of the Cuban state. For Brazil, this relationship allows access to myriad Cuban technological areas of accomplishments and human capabilities, such as those in biotechnology, in the pharmaceutical industry and public health organizations, and even in Olympic sports (Garcia 2013).

Food supply and cooperation for agriculture development are important parts of the ongoing collaboration between the Foreign Trade and International Investment Ministry in Cuba and the ABC agency in Brazil, with special attention extended to cooperative and family production. Brazilian investment has also connected with the Cuban sugar industry, an area until recently inaccessible to foreign investment since the first phase of the Cuban Revolution. Ironically, the Cuban government still holds strong ties with social movements in Brazil engaged in land struggles (such as the Movement of Landless Rural Workers), particularly in the preparation of organizational capacities and in health and education cooperation.

Brazilian-Cuban private-state joint ventures have expanded in various areas in spite of the different economic model in these countries. Instead of being perceived as an obstacle, the Cuban state is viewed by Brazilian entrepreneurs as a reliable and efficient partner that is fully responsible for sensitive issues, such as local labor contracts, environmental regulation, and foreign currency regulations. While it is true that Brazil’s economic presence in Cuba benefits from the absence of the U.S., Canadian, and European private sectors, which are restrained by the U.S. embargo, it also suffers in areas of Brazilian commerce and investment that are dependent on U.S. technology and/or industrial parts.

Brazilian investment is perceived as having promising effects for the local economy. The construction of the Mariel port by the Odebrecht group, registered locally as COI, is considered the most important infrastructure project in progress in Cuba. The Mariel port is expected to be completed by 2014 with a pier of 700 meters, giving access to ships with more than forty-five feet of draft, and a terminal with an annual capacity of approximately 1 million containers. This port will also include the logistics necessary for offshore oil drilling. Its construction involves 3,500 workers, of which only 100 are Brazilian, and an investment of $900 million, of which 85 percent has been financed by BNDES and 15 percent by the Cuban government. This project allowed for the participation of more than 400 Brazilian exporters. Beyond participation in the industrial zone planned to function next to the port, COI wishes to become a central investor in the modernization and expansion of Cuba’s airports. Prospects are also good if and when the U.S. trade embargo is suspended, which would give the Mariel port a privileged position in the Caribbean for trading connections with Florida and other southern U.S. states.

At first there were expectations that the Lula da Silva government would play an overall role in the Cuban process of change, but Brasilia has occupied more of an economic than political place in Cuban transformations. Furthermore, there are commonalities between the current Cuban reform process and the gradualism experienced in Brazil during democratization. (In Brazil, the first steps toward democratic transition took place in the mid-1970s, but direct elections for president were allowed only in 1990.) The refrain “without pausing but in no hurry” used by President Raúl Castro resembles the slogan “slowly and gradually” used by the Brazilian military authorities during the 1970s. Even more important is the Cuban military’s control of the main economic posts and commitment to a statist production structure intertwined with local and foreign private investment.

Brazil and Cuba have coordinated their efforts and are working well in multilateral arenas. Besides shared views on global and regional matters, Cuba’s closeness to other developing countries, particularly the left-wing grouping, has helped Brazil win support in Africa, Latin America, and Asia for the carrying forward of diplomatic initiatives in global governance.

Cuba’s Renewed Presence in Regional Organizations

Cuba’s attendance at Latin American meetings started at Ibero-American summits in 1991 and was followed by participation in the Rio Group in 2009 once diplomatic ties had been reestablished with all the countries in the region (El Salvador and Costa Rica were the last two). Immediate membership of the Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States [CELAC]) when it was created in 2011 came as a natural outcome, as did the current presidency of this organization according to its system of rotating presidencies. During the second CELAC Summit in Chile (2013), the rules were changed to allow for the appointment of a widened troika, which meant that the Cuban presidency was assisted by its predecessor, Chile, and its successor, Costa Rica, and by a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member state (represented by its pro tempore president).

Cuba sealed the presidency of CELAC with the slogan “unity within diversity,” suggesting that the political face of any individual country should not be a matter of division within the region. Havana aspired to use this post to promote the deepening of cooperation in the region according to its comparative advantages, particularly its well-known education and health capabilities.

The fact that the country presiding over CELAC should represent the Latin American and Caribbean Group in all multilateral stances has been extremely important to push for a Cuban regional-global diplomacy. This opportunity may contribute to opening new areas of interest and involvement in topics such as climate change, human rights, migration, drug-trafficking control, and nuclear technology, among others. This may also be advantageous to the facilitation of international negotiations, particularly with the European Union (EU).

Cuba’s presence in CELAC has also allowed it to underline in a regional scenario its historic support for specific claims of individual countries’ territorial and economic sovereignty, such as Argentina’s demand to be given sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands and Bolivia’s demand for access to the sea. Reciprocity has been assured by the systematic condemnation in CELAC of the U.S. economic blockade (embargo) of Cuba (CELAC 2011, 2013).

The Cuban presence in CELAC has been central to the deepening of Latin American–Caribbean relations. Havana has cultivated close links with the CARICOM countries based on a broad agenda of cooperation and solidarity and similar perceptions in terms of decolonization and nonintervention. Beyond this—and as part of its commitment to continuously assist Haiti with robust social programs—Cuba has moved significantly to keep the former under the region’s spotlight.

Although CELAC’s Latin Americanism has not been conceived to replace inter-Americanism, Cuba’s presence in CELAC has escalated the debate on its reincorporation into inter-American multilateral schemes, particularly the Organization of American States (OAS). The fact that the Cuban regime has shown no interest in recovering its seat in this organization has not kept its intellectuals from discussing if the time is ripe to do so. Between CELAC and the OAS lies the question of Cuba’s participation at the Summit of the Americas, which was raised at the 2012 Cartagena Summit. After lack of consensus on this matter prevented the approval of a final declaration, the ALBA group and countries like Argentina and Brazil conditioned their attendance at the 2015 summit, scheduled to be held in Panama, on U.S. acceptance of Cuba’s official presence.

Latin American/Cuban-U.S. and Cuban-EU Bilateralism

For many decades, connections with Havana had inevitable implications for U.S.–Latin American relations because closeness to Washington was defined by whether governments were friends or foes of Cuba. While it is true that such rigidity no longer exists, narrow mind-sets have not been completely discarded. From a Cuban perspective, closer relations with Latin America are perceived as part of a more distant and critical stance toward the United States. For the U.S. government, this is essentially a bilateral matter with long-standing ideological contents to be addressed in the context of bilaterally unsettled negotiations. For Latin American countries, the U.S. blockade represents an anachronism, and any step on Washington’s part to eliminate it would be read as a positive sign toward the region. For their part, Europeans have observed the recent Cuban–Latin American rapprochement positively and are themselves about to take a first step toward opening negotiations with Cuba. [Editors’ note: The first set of negotiations took place in April 2014.] Relations between European countries and Cuba have followed a dual pattern: while the EU has resisted proceeding with the negotiation of collective accords with the island, bilateral ties have been pursued by many EU members. EU-Cuba talks have been resisted by ex-members of the Soviet bloc and conservative governments, such as those of Spain and Sweden. In 2005, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and the Netherlands took up a negative position on negotiations with Havana (Knigge 2005). Yet the recent [2013] visit of Polish representatives to Cuba to expand bilateral cooperation and trade may be a sign of change that could contribute to expediting Brussels-Havana exchanges (Prensa Latina 2013).

Conditions imposed by the EU are focused on expected changes on the part of the Cuban regime regarding the protection of human rights, the rule of law, and adherence to the International Court of Justice. The seventeen bilateral accords in place cover investment, trade, and cooperation initiatives. Prospects have recently emerged for the drafting of a framework to start a negotiation process with Brussels. Europe is Cuba’s second-largest trading partner (after Venezuela), and relations therefore benefit from bilateral understandings and commercial preferences. The EU does not support the U.S. blockade in any way. In terms of business, European expectations are based on the “day after” the suspension of the U.S. blockade, particularly in areas such as tourism, services, and infrastructure, since European investments are affected by the limitations imposed by U.S. legislation. With the current economic crises Europeans face at home, the importance of expanding markets and foreign direct investment in Latin American and Caribbean countries has been reinforced. Even more meaningful than potentially expanding the Cuban domestic market are expectations that the island could become a regional hub to serve neighboring islands together with southeastern U.S. ports (Feinberg 2012, 15).

Regional/Global Performance and Soft Power Assets

Cultivating a spectrum of ties with the developing world has been a relevant dimension of Cuban foreign policy, contributing to the establishment of a coherent link between regional and global politics. Cuba’s activity in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and at the UN General Assembly has enabled the country to expand its visibility in two relevant areas of international expertise: peace negotiations and South-South cooperation. (Cuba, Yugoslavia, and Egypt have been the only countries to twice assume the presidency of the NAM; the Cuban presidencies occurred from 1979 to 1982 and 2006 to 2009.) Cuban diplomacy has aimed at projecting itself as a broker in complex international situations (Cuba cosponsored the UN General Assembly resolution changing Palestine’s status at the United Nations to that of observer), regional interstate tensions (Costa Rican–Nicaraguan and Colombian-Venezuelan tensions), and intrastate conflicts (the Colombian peace negotiations). Cuba has also downplayed the political impulses of allied countries that are aimed at challenging world powers. An illustration was the effort to stop Hugo Chávez’s idea of creating a pro-Iran group in the NAM as a reaction to the sanctions approved by the UN Security Council in June 2012.

Cuba’s role in the Colombian peace process, together with Norway and accompanied by Venezuela and Chile as observers, is vitally linked to the regional/global dimension of the island’s foreign policy. (The peace process was launched in Norway on October 18, 2012, after which negotiating rounds took place in Havana.) This involvement is not new, and previous attempts to promote a constructive dialogue between the Colombian guerrilla forces and the Colombian government had already taken place in the 1990s (Castro Ruz 2009). The present Colombian peace talks between the Santos government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which follow a single-undertaking approach, involves a five-point agenda: land reform, political participation, ending conflict, drug trafficking, and victim reparations. Havana’s role in getting negotiations started was decisive, and it has continued to ensure that the guerrillas participate in ongoing talks. For the Cuban regime, apart from deepening ties with Latin America, this involvement could facilitate relations with the United States and help remove Cuba from the U.S. State Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism.

However, Cuba’s performance as a peace mediator or facilitator does not imply acceptance of the current methods and prescriptions adopted or under debate in global governance arenas on conflict resolution and international intervention. Cuban foreign policy has a critical view of UN peace operations, normative innovations such as the Right to Protect, and recent NATO- and/or European-led interventions in the Arab world and Africa. These are perceived by Havana as conceptual and practical dissimulations that violate the principles of international law, perpetuate great power interests, and waste enormous amounts of resources. Accordingly, preventive action aimed at meeting the social and economic needs of poor nations should replace militarized intervention (Baró Herrera and Chailloux 2008). Cuba has been selective regarding multilateral organizations by giving preference to those dealing with the economic, social, and cultural needs of the developing world. Examples are the UN Economic and Social Council; the UN Development Program; the Food and Agriculture Organization; the Pan-American Health Organization/World Health Organization; the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; and, more recently, the Human Rights Council (UPR Watch 2009).

Similarly, the Cuban regime has been reluctant to expand its connections with the bilateral and multilateral donors of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee, acting much more as a southern partner than an aid recipient. Cuba proactively contributes with humanitarian assistance and as a provider of health and education cooperation in various parts of the globe, often in postconflict reconstruction scenarios in which UN-led missions operations take place. [Editors’ note: See chapter 21 in this volume.] Yet because of the current constraints in the state budget, Cuba now differentiates between what it considers to be services exports of public goods that can contribute to the establishment of reciprocal trade schemes and solidarity and humanitarian assistance for vulnerable countries.

Finally, Cuba holds a discretely defensive posture toward the ongoing configuration of a multipolar world order and has kept away from the debate regarding the reform of global governance structures. Cuban foreign policy espouses the belief that respect for the norms of international law depend on the full representation of the developing world without diluting the principle of the sovereignty of national states. Inner circles that reinforce the asymmetric distribution of power are questioned and considered detrimental to a genuine democratic multilateral system. Nonetheless, Cuba’s caution toward the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa ) and IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa) in no way affects the strong bonds with all members of these groupings.

Conclusion

Based on the above analysis, while Cuba and Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced a notable rapprochement, the trajectory is not conclusive because of the sensitive aspects of this process and to the challenges ahead:

Since 2007, the Cuban government has conducted a reform process without affecting the fundamental nature of its political regime. The present restructuring, however, is not understood as a transitional trajectory similar to those experienced in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or, more recently, the Arab world. The concept of transition is not part of the Cuban official lexicon.
The Cuban government expects that Latin America may understand and go along with its reforms by offering support in certain areas that may contribute to the ongoing reform process, mainly in terms of specific economic needs. Along the same lines, any sort of lecturing from governments or organizations in the region regarding the appropriate political route for Cuba would be considered misplaced by the Havana regime.
Lessons learned from the regional democratic trajectory indicate, however, that some sort of political openness can be anticipated as a natural consequence of Cuba’s ongoing reforms, especially in light of their impact on younger generations. The Cuban regime is more likely to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese example in which political opening is more likely to translate into a generational renovation of political leaderships than an acceptance of a competitive political system.
Venezuela’s future could affect the island, particularly if the Chavista regime were to be destabilized. While the most recent Maduro-Castro negotiations aim to avoid more dramatic scenarios, they also indicate the magnitude of the risks involved in this bond. In this context, ties with friendly oil-exporting countries such as Angola have become crucial for the Havana regime.
Cuba’s presidency of CELAC has occurred at a beneficial time when the role played by regional institutions is tending to expand in a setting increasingly prone to moderation and pragmatism.
When current Cuban–Latin American relations are closely observed, Venezuela and Brazil are the partners that seem to matter most. Condensed to actors, roles, and outcomes, it could be said that while the Fidel Castro–Hugo Chávez ties have been vital for the survival of Cuban socialism, those formed by Raúl Castro with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff are central to the current push for economic reform. While the first relationship (Castro-Chávez) applies to an ideological framework, the second reflects the pragmatic approach that increasingly characterizes the Havana regime.
Expanded relations with Latin America have accompanied the Cuban regime’s reform process, with careful consideration of its timing and priorities. This is a major difference between the United States and EU imposing conditions on the island for advancing the rule of law, democratic practices, and economic openness.
Latin American and Caribbean solidarity in the condemnation of the U.S. blockade hardly goes beyond rhetoric. Cubans and Americans agree on one point when addressing their complex agenda: both sides consider this a bilateral/intermestic and not a regional matter. Recent nongovernmental initiatives have suggested the formation of an ad hoc mediating regional group to push for a more flexible position on the part of the United States. Countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico that have a robust agenda in Washington and access to U.S. domestic actors would be crucial players for promoting an initiative of this kind.
Cuban diplomacy is regarded for its soft power assets, especially South-South cooperation initiatives and brokerage expertise, to foster peaceful solutions in areas of conflict. The possibility of expanding triangular cooperation initiatives is to be maximized by northern and southern partners, multilateral agencies, and philanthropic organizations. Recent Cuban joint action in Haiti with Brazil and Norway are positive examples of this process.
For Latin America and the Caribbean, a positive link with the Cuban process of change helps leave behind the damage caused by interventionism and ideological polarizations in regional politics. Yet if this rapprochement is to proceed, it will have to cover the bilateral/ intermestic dimension of U.S.-Cuban affairs, which inevitably includes the U.S.-based exile community and involves a more ecumenical and sustainable idea of normalization.

Notes

From “Cuban-Latin American and Caribbean Relations: Challenges Beyond,” NOREF Report, The Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, June 2013. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

I wish to thank Natalia Herbst for her work as my research assistant.

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———. 2013. “Comunicado especial sobre la necesidad de poner fin al bloqueo económico, commercial y financiero de los Estados Unidos contra Cuba.” January 28. http://www.gob.cl/media/2013/01/Combloqueo-Cuba.pdf.

Feinberg, Richard E. 2012. “The New Cuban Economy: What Roles for Foreign Investment?” December. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/12/cuba%20economy%20feinberg/cuba%20economy%20feinberg%209.pdf.

Feinsilver, Julie M. 2008. “Oil-for-Doctors: Cuban Medical Diplomacy Gets a Little Help from a Venezuelan Friend.” Nueva Sociedad 216 (July/August).

Garcia, Marco Aurelio. 2013. “Dez anos de política externa.” May 29. http://www.cartamaior.com.br/ templates/materiaMostrar.cfm?materia_id=22118.

Knigge, Michael. 2005. “Cuba-EU Relations Warming Up.” January 5. http://www.dw.de/cuba-eu-relations-warming-up/a-1449283.

Prensa Latina. 2013. “Cuba and Poland to Expand Bilateral Cooperation.” April 4. http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1277701&Itemid= 1.

Romero, Simon. 2010. “Venezuela’s Military Ties with Cuba Stir Concerns.” January 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/world/americas/15venez.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&.

Serbin, Andres. 2006. “Cuando la limosna es grande: El Caribe, Chávez y los límites de la diplomacia petrolera.” Nueva Sociedad 205 (September/October).

UPR Watch. 2009. “Universal Periodic Review—Cuba.” February. http://upr-epu.com/ENG/country.php?id=109.

Chapter 21

Cuban Medical Internationalism under Raúl Castro

John M. Kirk

At the beginning of this decade, Cuba had more medical personnel working in the developing and underdeveloped world than all countries of the G-8 combined. In 2011, Cuba’s medical internationalism program involved approximately 41,000 health workers engaged in sixty-eight nations. Indeed, the impact of five decades of Cuba’s medical cooperation (a term consistently employed instead of the paternalistic “aid”) has been enormous. Cuban medical personnel have “saved more than 1.6 million lives, treated over 85 million patients (of which over 19.5 million were seen on ‘house calls’ at patients’ homes, schools, jobs, and so on), performed over 2.2 million operations, assisted 768,858 births, and vaccinated with complete dosages more than 9.2 million people” (Feinsilver 2010).

However, Cuba’s ability to sustain its medical internationalism program has been called into question by the state of the country’s economy and the plans proposed to improve it. Cuban President Raúl Castro suggested in a 2010 speech that all projects were up for review as he starkly articulated the problems facing his country. He added, “We are convinced that we have to reject all forms of dogma, and we assume with firmness and confidence the continuation, which has already started, of our model to reform the economy” (Castro 2010b).

In light of the pressing economic difficulties facing Cuba, a logical question arises about how this important aspect of Cuban foreign policy has fared. Moreover, what can we expect in the future in terms of Cuban commitment to medical internationalism? Will it be cut in order to focus on domestic public health concerns? For example, there have been criticisms by Cubans about some shortages of doctors in local clinics, as approximately 22 percent of them are working abroad as internacionalistas. Accordingly, this chapter examines the evolution of medical internationalism since 2006, analyzing the degree of changes undertaken by the revolutionary government and offering an assessment on probable future developments.

The Context of Medical Internationalism since 1960

The tradition of medical internationalism dates back to 1960, just a year after the Batista dictatorship was overthrown—and at a time when approximately half of Cuba’s 6,000 doctors were in the process of leaving the island. In other words, Cuba’s first internationalist mission—to Chile in the wake of a devastating earthquake—could not have come at a worse time in terms of the island’s own economic conditions and the availability of medical personnel. Three years later, an even larger delegation of medical personnel went to newly independent Algeria to set up the bases of the national health system. The essential point to bear in mind is that, even fifty years ago, Cuban ideology and a spirit of humanitarianism trumped domestic economic challenges (Kirk and Erisman 2009).

In all, almost 130,000 Cuban medical personnel have served on such internationalist missions. In 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina battered Haiti, Cuba created the Henry Reeve Contingent to provide medical cooperation at times of natural catastrophes. The contingent has been sent to Guatemala, Pakistan, Bolivia, Indonesia, Belize, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, China, El Salvador, and Chile, a phenomenon often ignored by the media.

Another key dimension of Cuba´s approach is the focus on training medical personnel in poor countries—particularly people in those sectors of the population who would not normally be able to afford to study medicine. The theory is that, once they have been trained as physicians, they would have “buy-in” to their local community and would be prepared to work with those people who traditionally could not afford access to the appropriate treatment. As part of this effort, Cuba has established nine medical schools in the developing and underdeveloped world. In 2012, teachers from Cuba’s twenty-two medical schools were teaching in fifteen countries around the globe. Back in Havana, the Latin American Medical School (known better by its Spanish acronym ELAM) had graduated more than 20,000 doctors from more than seventy countries between 1999 and 2013 (MEDICC 2013).

It is widely recognized that health care and education are the two jewels in the Cuban crown. It is also understood that, among the various modalities of medical internationalism, providing free medical education to students from developing countries is a long-standing facet of Cuba’s most important solidarity activities with the developing and underdeveloped world. This trend began under the leadership of Fidel Castro and was developed for almost fifty years. There is no evidence that Cuba has in any way reduced its interest in training doctors for the Third World since 2006. In fact, as will be discussed later, it has become even more interested in doing so through nontraditional medical training and particularly in Cuba and Venezuela as well as in other countries—from Bolivia to East Timor. In early July 2011, for example, 115 Haitian medical graduate students graduated from the Caribbean School of Medicine based in Santiago, bringing to 731 the total of Haitian physicians trained for free in Cuba (Agencia de Información Nacional 2011). Many from earlier graduating classes joined their Cuban colleagues and fellow medical students from ELAM in January 2010, when they flew back to provide medical care to the victims of the earthquake that flattened Port au Prince. Students from scores of countries continue to study medicine in Cuba, spending the first two years at ELAM or in Santiago (a campus mainly for Francophone students) before being distributed around the island to work in clinics or hospitals while continuing their university medical education for a further four years. It is expected that, on graduation, they will return to their own countries and work with underserved communities there—or to other developing countries that need their assistance. (The latter opportunity is pursued by those students who at times encounter difficulties imposed by traditional—and conservative—medical federations in their home countries and cannot have their titles recognized. As a result, many return to Cuba for more specialized training or volunteer in other developing countries. Some, for example, joined the Cuban medical brigade in Haiti.) In this way, the traditional “brain drain” of medical personnel in developing nations in fact becomes a “brain gain.”

The largest contingent of Cuban medical personnel is currently working in Venezuela (roughly some 30,000 medical personnel). But more typical is the case of Guyana, where some 200 Cuban medical staff are working—while over 400 Guyanese are studying medicine in Cuba. Under Raúl Castro, there has not been any noticeable change in terms of the numbers of Cuban medical personnel either working abroad or studying at ELAM (where there is an annual intake of some 1,400 students from approximately fifty countries, including the United States). Both programs have functioned well, are relatively cost effective, and have produced a variety of benefits for both host country and recipient.

Another of the ongoing initiatives revolves around the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in April 1986 who have been treated in Cuba (at no charge) since 1990. By March 2010, an astonishing 25,457 patients (including 21,378 children) had been treated (Alvelo Pérez 2010), and at that time there were 160 Ukrainian patients receiving medical treatment. It is worth noting that the largest number were treated in the 1990s, just as the Soviet Union was imploding and economic aid to Cuba and trade were disappearing.

Despite the disastrous economic conditions in Cuba during the “Special Period,” Cuba continued to receive patients, mainly from Ukraine. The patients are based in Tarará, some twenty kilometers east of Havana, where they are evaluated on arrival; those needing specialized medical care are then treated in the appropriate hospitals. Room, board, and all medical services are provided by Cuba at no cost to the patients, an extremely generous act because medications alone have cost approximately $350 million (Grogg 2010). With reason, former Ukrainian President Leonid Tuchman noted on a visit to Cuba in 2010 that while other, richer countries had shown pity, Cuba had supported the victims in concrete terms (Álvarez 2010). Yet again, despite dire economic circumstances, humanitarianism and medical support for those less fortunate dominated. This project for the Chernobyl victims continues, although the number of patients continues to decrease as the impact of the nuclear meltdown does likewise.

Fresh Initiatives in Medical Internationalism

One of the most significant developments in recent years has to do with what is often referred to as the “new paradigm,” or the “Polyclinic Project,” in medical training, designed for students from nontraditional backgrounds who otherwise would probably not be able to afford a medical education. Cuba and Venezuela have stated that they will train—at no cost to students—100,000 doctors for the Third World within a decade, and they are well on their way to doing so. Dr. Juan Carrizo, president of ELAM, noted that in 2010, 24,000 students were being trained through this method in Cuba, with a further 25,000 being trained in Venezuela (Agencia de Información Nacional 2010). The complete name for the medical training program is the Nuevo Programa de Formación de Médicos Latinoamericanos (NPFML), although in fact it has also been employed in Africa and Asia, adapted to local conditions. It was introduced in 2005, largely in the wake of commitments made by Cuba and Venezuela in various agreements related to the Alianza Bolivariana para las Américas (ALBA), when Cuba offered to provide the massive training in medicine for young Latin Americans. A similar program was instituted in Venezuela, using Cuban medical personnel, called the Programa Nacional de Formación de Medicina Integral Comunitaria en Venezuela. The first 8,000 students of this program graduated in 2011 and are working in traditionally underserved regions of their country. The initiative was born from discussions between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez in 2005, the central idea being to train doctors for Latin America and in particular for those areas where medical care was either exorbitantly expensive or not available. As is the case with ELAM students, the focus was on selecting medical students from nontraditional backgrounds because it was believed that they would be more likely to return to their home communities on graduation.

The essence of the new programs is a hands-on form of medical training. The community itself becomes the “laboratory” for the training, with extensive work carried out by students in the various popular clinics, diagnostic centers, and technology and rehabilitation clinics. Between the two programs (in Cuba and Venezuela), almost 50,000 doctors were being trained in 2011. Students are taught alongside a professor (the vast majority of whom are Cuban) who is a specialist in medicina general integral (comprehensive general medicine). Significantly, most of these medical mentors already possess experience abroad and are familiar with conditions in the developing world. The practicum assumes far more importance in this new approach, as the student learns in the consulting room alongside the doctor and in the polyclinic. The central idea is to produce physicians who will be engaged with the community, will emphasize preventive medicine, will be prepared to work wherever they are needed, and will always place community needs before individual ones (Alvelo Pérez 2010). Clearly, this constitutes the professional formation of a radically different form of medical practitioner.

The impact of Cuban medical personnel was great in Venezuela, where the national Medical Federation was displeased with the new approach of the Cuban physicians, their ethic of hard work, their ability to provide care in chronically poor neighborhoods, and their low salaries. With the advent of a new wave every year of Venezuelan medical graduates, it is clear that there will be major tensions over the model of public health to be implemented.

One notable Cuban medical initiative has been the attention given to East Timor and other small countries in the southwestern Pacific. The initial contact dates from 2003 with East Timor, followed by ties with Kiribati, Nauru, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, and the Solomon Islands between 2006 and 2008. As Tim Anderson reported, “By 2008 there were around 350 Cuban health workers in the region, with 870 East Timorese and more than 100 Melanesians and Micronesians engaged in medical training” (Anderson 2010, 77). The first cohort of eighteen Timorese have now graduated as medical doctors following studies in Cuba (with their training being completed back home). It is worth pointing out that as late as 2002, there were only forty-seven physicians in that country.

The Cuban role in East Timor (and increasingly in the southwestern Pacific) has been multifaceted. In the first instance, it represents the major component of public health care delivery in the country. By 2008, there were some 300 Cuban health workers, and their role had been extremely important since their arrival in East Timor: more than 2.7 million consultations had taken place, and an estimated 11,400 lives had been saved because of their medical interventions (Anderson 2010, 82). Cuba is also training 658 Timorese medical students in Cuba, with a further 186 in Timor (Araújo 2009, 1). The first contingent of interns graduated in August 2010, with a total of more than 800 expected to have graduated by 2014. In other words, they will produce an astonishing seventeen times the number of physicians who were working in their country as late as 2002. There is no indication to date that this program will be curtailed or reduced by Havana.

One of the fundamental purposes of Cuban medical internationalism in 2010 was to provide the basics for recipient countries to train and replace Cuban personnel—in other words, to help them help themselves. In the case of East Timor, this can be seen in the Faculty of Medicine, established in 2005 in the National University with the support of Cuban medical professors. Until this point, Timorese students had either been trained in Cuba or in small groups by Cuban physicians working at local hospitals and district health centers, somewhat along the lines of the NPFML program noted above. Increasingly, students from the region will be trained locally instead of traveling to Cuba. Cuban medical personnel will also gradually withdraw as the need for their cooperation decreases and their role as physicians and educators is filled by Timorese—who in turn will be able to use their Faculty of Medicine to train medical students from several South Pacific islands. The multiplier effect of medical personnel is thus the goal, with the intention of gradually reducing the number of Cubans as local practitioners fill the vacuum.

As noted earlier, the first internacionalista medical experience came in the wake of a major earthquake in Chile in 1960. Given Cuba’s rich tradition of responses to natural disasters, which is deeply rooted in the Cuban medical psyche, and with the creation of the Henry Reeve Contingent, it is most likely that Cuba will maintain its pattern of sending emergency missions abroad. This commitment to employ Cuba’s medical prowess to serve people facing major challenges can be seen most clearly in the commitment to Haiti, in response to the January 2010 earthquake and a 2010–2011 cholera outbreak.

In both cases, Cuban medical personnel took the lead despite the international media ignoring their contribution. Within twenty-four hours of the earthquake, the first group of trauma specialists of the Henry Reeve Contingent arrived to support the work being carried out by the hundreds of Cubans and ELAM-trained Haitian graduates already working on the island. Cuban medical personnel had in fact been working in Haiti since the devastation of Hurricane Georges in 1998, when about 500 arrived to help there; there were still some 340 working there at the time of the earthquake. Indeed, by 2007, Cuban medical personnel were already treating almost 75 percent of the Haitian population, with corresponding decreases on a large scale of infant and maternal mortality rates (Kirk and Kirk 2010). In the case of the cholera outbreak, Cuban medical staff treated some 40 percent of the victims throughout the country.

After the worst of the earthquake emergency was over, Cuba volunteered to provide the principal support for the restructuring of the public health care system in Haiti, supported by Venezuela and Brazil. The outbreak of cholera in October 2010 posed a fresh challenge to the Cuban medical personnel, who were soon joined by reinforcements, both Cuban and ELAM graduates (from twenty-three countries). By the end of 2010, there were 1,398 members of the Cuban-led medical team, of whom 61 percent were working actively in cholera-affected areas. They had established sixty-six cholera treatment centers, treated 56,967 patients, and had a mortality rate of 0.48 percent, significantly lower than the national average (Gorry 2011; Somarriba López 2011).

Medical Internationalism in the Face of the Lineamientos

In November 2010, the Communist Party of Cuba published the Lineamientos de la política económica y social, a thirty-two-page discussion document on the suggested plans for the restructuring of Cuba’s political economy. In terms of medical internationalism, there were several key areas where government proposals might have a major impact on this policy. From a Western capitalist perspective, it would be normal to expect that, in times of financial belt-tightening, “frills” such as medical assistance abroad would be among the first cuts to be made. In the case of Cuba, this has not been necessarily so, for reasons analyzed below; in essence, it comes down to balancing a mixture of five decades of successful humanitarian solidarity with stark financial challenges. Also to be added into the analysis are factors such as the immense diplomatic value of Cuba’s medical internationalism, the financial opportunities it provides to medical personnel frustrated by the inverted social pyramid in Cuba with its corresponding poor financial remuneration, the process of socialization according to which Cuban medical personnel see this as a rite of passage, and the commercial value for the Cuban state resulting from the impact of having 40,000 working abroad.

In terms of market potential for Cuban medical internationalism and the sale of pharmaceutical products, this is clearly articulated in the Lineamientos. Number 74, for instance, notes the desire to create a strategy for market development in terms of exporting medical services and pharmaceutical products. In terms of the latter commercial interest, it is not widely known just how advanced (or how profitable) the Cuban biotechnology industry is. The polo científico in Havana, where thousands of scientists work in some fifty-two research institutions, has produced valuable pharmaceutical products for export—as well as 83 percent of the medicines consumed in Cuba.

As of 2010, Cuba was producing some thirty-eight pharmaceutical products exported to forty countries (Reuters 2010). A few examples will help to illustrate this. Over 120 million doses of a hepatitis B vaccine have been exported in recent years. Vaccines against meningitis B and meningitis C, leptospirosis, and typhoid fever have long been established and exported to many developing countries. Cutting-edge work on cancer and AIDS vaccines has resulted in successful trials and may soon be commercialized. The medication known as Nimotuzumab has been used in clinical trials in twenty-five countries and has shown an ability to significantly reduce tumor sizes in patients suffering from brain and esophageal cancer. After fifteen years of research into its ability to stop tumor growth, Vidatox (based on properties of the blue scorpion) has been recently launched. Particularly promising is Herberprot-B, an invaluable find for diabetics suffering from foot ulcers (who otherwise would face amputation). In addition, two Cuban pest control products, Griselesf and Bactivec, are widely used in Africa to control the breeding of mosquitoes and thereby reduce mortality rates from dengue, malaria, and other transmittable diseases.

Significantly, transfer technology of these products has resulted, with factories in China and Argentina now producing them and several others to be opened in another six countries. Likewise, Cuba and Brazil are producing a meningitis vaccine, mainly for distribution in Africa. Finally, Cuban scientists have initiated memoranda of understanding with Syria, established joint operations in India, China, Vietnam, Iran, and Brazil, and set up agreements for further research with the governments of Algeria and Belarus. In all these cases, a combination of commercial potential and solidarity (because the pharmaceutical products are sold at substantially lower prices than those charged by transnational drug corporations) can be seen. The potential for the export of pharmaceutical products is enormous, particularly if the United States drops the economic embargo against the island. Cuba has already been extremely active in the developing and underdeveloped world, but the largest potential market is Europe and, ultimately, the United States. The sale of over $300 million of pharmaceutical products in 2009 (placing it in second place behind nickel as Cuba’s most valuable exported products) illustrates this potential (Grogg 2010).

The export of Cuban professional services—particularly those in the medical and educational fields—has been generously supported by Venezuela, where some $6.6 billion in payments for professional services were disbursed in 2008. The official figures for 2009 in terms of the exportation of goods and professional services (mainly medical services) was $11.171 billion, while Reuters (2010) reported $9.9 billion resulting mainly from the contribution of medical personnel abroad. In 2010, there were approximately 39,000 Cubans working in Venezuela, of whom some 30,000 are in the health care field—roughly 75 percent of the total of Cuban medical personnel working abroad (Romero 2010, 110). There is little doubt that, as long as financial support is provided to Cuba by Venezuela in return for these professional services, Cuban medical services will continue at this rate. Once again, commercial logic, combined with a medical humanitarian spirit, has proved to be a successful model.

Cuban medical cooperation is currently being provided around the globe and in a variety of different formats. These include subsidies that Venezuela provides to Cuba for medical services in countries that belong to ALBA as well as to Haiti, where there are a dozen “triangulation cooperation” agreements from countries that pay the expenses of Cuban staff there. Norway, for example, pledged $885,000 to Cuba for supplies and medicines just ten days after the 2010 earthquake. Sub-Saharan countries typically provide a nominal contribution to Havana, while at the opposite end of the scale, Qatar and Kuwait pay full costs for the supply of Cuban medical personnel in their hospitals.

The Lineamientos have two clauses with a direct bearing on this situation, stressing the need to seek financial self-sufficiency while also repeating Cuba’s ongoing internationalist solidarity. Article 104 emphasizes the need to seek, where possible, at least compensation for medical services rendered abroad. It is significant that the sections of the document dealing with health care in Cuba emphasize the same two basic elements: a sound financial footing and the need for humanitarian medical collaboration. This approach will be employed in the field of medical internationalism, with solidarity and economic efficiency being key goals.

Concluding Thoughts

For over five decades, Cuba has shown a remarkably consistent record of medical collaboration with nations around the world. Significantly, in good times and bad, humanitarian needs have always been seen as more important than basic financial considerations. Under the government of Raúl Castro, the need for financial stability and sound economic planning has become of paramount importance, and at first glance there would appear to be an impossible gulf between the long-standing humanitarian tradition of the Cuban Revolution and the current financial exigency. Yet a study of events since he assumed power in 2006 shows clearly that, while all efforts will be made to cover costs of these ambitious programs, international cooperation will not be affected to any great degree. Instead, as recent practice has shown, it will remain more or less constant, ultimately diversifying in new directions.

A few examples help to illustrate this phenomenon. In the past years, the size of the Cuban medical brigade in Mozambique has been increased from 130 to 160. In June 2010, a new eye clinic was established in Botswana. Eleven Cuban medical school professors arrived in Ghana to teach in Tamale University. Early in 2010, thirty-one Cuban doctors arrived to work in Rwanda on a project financed by the government of South Africa. In Pisco, Peru, there are now three contingents of medical personnel. They had originally arrived after an earthquake in 2007, but their emergency mission has evolved into the staffing of community clinics. There has been an increase in the production of biotechnology products in joint ventures in India and China. Cuba has initiated a program of mosquito and malaria control in Ghana. In Tanzania, Malawi, Congo, and Ethiopia, sales of medical products by the Cuban company Labiofam have increased sharply in the past year. Mobile clinics have been set up in the south of Belize. Argentina has seen the rapid development of ophthalmology clinics staffed by Cuban personnel since 2005 (with over 30,000 patients treated). Likewise, the vision restoration program Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle) has increased its role in Jamaica (where a new ophthalmology clinic was opened in Kingston in 2010), and some 61,000 Jamaicans had been treated. In May 2011, sixteen Cuban nurses joined thirty-five others in Jamaica following the signing of a bilateral agreement. In February 2011, Cuban medical personnel initiated a new program for patients with diabetes in Algeria. In the summer of 2011, Cuba initiated the coordination of an eight-nation project to carry out research and to control the spread of dengue. Many of these projects do not provide any financial gain for the Cuban economy but are nevertheless pursued at the request of the host government and with the support of Havana.

There are several loose threads that need to be considered in seeking to appreciate the future path of this complex reality. It is clear that Cuba has no plans to expand its ambitious program abroad in any major fashion. At the same time, it is important to recognize that for the foreseeable future, it will not make any major reductions in its medical cooperation. Indeed, the Cuban medical presence in the ALBA nations, where Cuban medical personnel are subsidized by the Venezuelan government, will probably continue to grow.

Operación Milagro, for instance, continues to flourish. Funded by Venezuela and employing Cuban ophthalmology personnel, it has restored sight to over 2 million people since its inauguration in 2005. By September 2011, for example, some 600,000 patients had been operated on by Cuban doctors at twenty eye clinics in Bolivia. Of these, approximately 500,000 were Bolivians, the remainder being from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Paraguay who had traveled to clinics on the Bolivian border (Granma 2011). Operación Milagro will likely emerge largely unscathed from any considered cuts.

In addition, Cuba had sent in 2009 a medical brigade of 213 people to Bolivia in the Brigada Moto Méndez to undertake a nationwide survey of health needs there. In all, the Cuban mission visited over 3 million homes, making an inventory of people with physical and mental challenges and their needs (Elizalde 2010). Similar fact-finding health missions were also undertaken in Venezuela and Ecuador, and other similar public health initiatives are probable.

The Henry Reeve Contingent will also continue its exceptional program of relief in natural emergencies around the globe. Likewise, the Cuban role in Haiti will remain strong because of Cuba’s contribution since 1998 and the trilateral financial support from a number of countries. Supported by Brazil and Venezuela, Cuba has already made a commitment to restructure Haiti’s public health system and will undoubtedly maintain a large presence.

While there are no plans to develop large-scale medical faculties, it would not be surprising to see the development of the “hands-on” medical training now being employed by Cuba in several countries, such as Gambia, East Timor, and, of course, Venezuela. The first 8,000 students of Medicina Integral Comunitaria graduated in Venezuela in 2011, following their training by Cuban medical school teachers. Until the graduation of 50,000 in Venezuela (with a similar number in Cuba), Cuban medical faculty will remain fully engaged in this project. In East Timor, the Faculty of Medicine at the National University established by Cuba in 2005 will continue to broaden the intake of students from other South Pacific nations. During this rapid increase of medical training, the Cuban medical profile will understandably increase in the region. That said, when the mission is completed, the number of Cuban personnel will move elsewhere, leaving public health responsibilities to the local staff.

In sum, despite the many economic challenges facing the government of Raúl Castro, medical internationalism remains a major priority of the Cuban government, which views it as both a long-term investment and a necessary obligation, with a tradition stretching back to 1960. Medical cooperation abroad also brings in a substantial amount of funding—some of which is used to subsidize medical cooperation in poor, underdeveloped countries. It opens the door for the sale of Cuban pharmaceutical and surgical goods, and this has risen remarkably in recent years. In August 2011, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa announced that his country would prioritize the purchase of Cuban medical products over those produced abroad. In all, $1.3 billion would be spent on pharmaceutical goods: they would first try to source them from local producers (but after that would look to Cuba) before seeking medicines from transnational companies. It is likely that this trend will continue to rise dramatically both through joint ventures with other developing countries and through direct exports. The quality of Cuban medical products is well known, and if the U.S. embargo is ever lifted, biotechnology will become crucially important for the Cuban economy. It is also a significant part of the profoundly rooted essence of Cuban foreign policy. Moreover, it enhances Cuba’s international image, winning much goodwill in international fora. Indeed, so important is this fifty-two-year-old program that it is enshrined in the preamble of the Cuban Constitution.

Raúl Castro, presented as the quintessential pragmatist, desperate to balance the financial books in Cuba at a crucial stage in its development, has said little about medical internationalism. But he is hardly blind to the traditions and the international prestige that it has brought, the badly needed hard currency from Venezuela, or the massive needs in the developing world. In his February 2010 speech to the summit of the Latin American and Caribbean Community in Cancún, he spoke about Cuba’s commitment to support the Haitian population. This speech in many ways can be taken as a symbolic declaration of the broad sweep of Cuba’s program of medical internationalism:

The solidarity of the Cuban people did not arrive in Haiti with the 2010 earthquake. It has been present for over a decade . . . can assure you that the modest efforts of Cuban medical cooperation will remain in Haiti for however many years it is needed, providing that the Government of Haiti wants this to continue. . . . Our country is the victim of a harsh blockade, and has little to spare. Quite the contrary—we are short of everything. However we are prepared to share our poverty with those nations that have even less, and especially today the country in our continent which needs it more than anybody. (Castro 2010a)

One way or another, Cuban medical internationalism is here to stay.

Notes

From “Cuban Medical Internationalism under Raúl Castro,” in Rethinking the Cuban Revolution Nationally and Regionally: Politics, Culture and Identity, ed. Par Kumaraswami, published by Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Funding for this research project came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would also like to thank Emily Kirk, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham, for her editorial assistance.

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Chapter 22

Cuban Public Diplomacy

Michael J. Bustamante and Julia E. Sweig

Attempts to link Venezuela and Cuba as part of a common left-wing axis diminish the significant differences in the ways each country promotes its image abroad and the success with which they accomplish their goals. Although Cuba and Venezuela employ many of the same tactics, the Cuban regime has proven more successful at playing the role of the victim and using this position as a way to increase its international legitimacy. In part, this is the result of Cuba’s longer experience forging links of solidarity with the Third World and serving as a symbolic center of anti-U.S. resistance on the global stage. But it is also the result of circumstance. Cuba faces a U.S. economic embargo that, according to a Zogby International (2007) poll, is opposed by 56 percent of the U.S. population. Internationally, denouncements of the embargo policy have become routine at the European Union, the Ibero-American summits, and the UN General Assembly. As a result, the cash-strapped island’s international health programs, even when they earn the Cuban regime hard currency, appear all the more unselfish. Cuba has also proven to be far more sophisticated at employing cultural products to support diverse political, diplomatic, and economic ends, many of which arguably serve a market-oriented purpose rather than a strictly anti-imperialist or antiglobalization agenda.

The term “public diplomacy” traditionally refers to ways in which governments use aid, cultural, media, and exchange programs to influence the ways in which they are seen by citizens in other countries (Schneider 2005; Tuch 1990). Yet as the Cuban and Venezuelan cases demonstrate, an analysis of public diplomacy cannot be divorced from an understanding of more traditional types of state-to-state interactions. Not only is the line between the two often blurry, but the nature of traditional commercial or political diplomacy can impact the extent to which public diplomacy efforts are received positively. The Cuban and Venezuelan examples also show that successful public diplomacy is not just about what governments do to promote themselves abroad but also about how they react to, take advantage of, or benefit from external circumstances and actors. These include the activities of citizens, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations that generate ideas, culture, art, and other messages with the power to influence public perceptions (Nye 2002, 2004; Ruggie 2004).

Cuba Solidaria

Across the world, from Argentina to Andalucía, from small clubs of fifteen members to large conferences with hundreds of attendees, private citizens seem to voice their support for the Cuban Revolution’s achievements and criticize current U.S. sanctions against the island with surprising consistency. T-shirts stamped with Che Guevara’s image are ubiquitous. The Pew Global Attitudes Project (2007) found that pluralities in Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and even Canada thought Fidel Castro had “been good for Cuba” (75–82). Leaving aside the argument about the “gains” of the Revolution and acknowledging that many of Cuba’s achievements in health and education are impressive, it seems worth examining to what extent this apparently sizable reserve of international public support is the result of concrete public diplomacy efforts on the part of the Cuban government. To what extent is it simply an expression of resistance to an apparently ineffective and widely unpopular set of U.S. policies? And to what extent do the visions of such people and groups matter politically?

From the moment they took power, Cuba’s political leaders have supported left-wing movements across the globe in an effort to internationalize their own socialist and anti-imperialist goals. By the end of the 1960s, however, Cuba’s attempts to directly sponsor armed insurrections had by and large failed. Particularly in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba found itself isolated diplomatically, forbidden from participating in such bodies as the Organization of American States, and threatened by U.S. intervention. As a result, seeking ideological allies beyond traditional diplomatic ties became vital to sustaining the revolutionary government’s legitimacy in Latin America and preserving some semblance of independence from its increasingly dominant financial patron: the Soviet Union. The Cuban Revolution perhaps possessed a unique potential to forge lasting people-to-people ties with citizens across the globe. An uncertain and at times tense diplomatic environment in the Western Hemisphere only reinforced the strategic value of this approach (Domínguez 1989, 111–83).

Officials in Havana designed several initiatives to help Cuba achieve these goals. One prominent program was the Organization for Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Cuban officials also spent much time and energy attempting to show off the benefits of their social and economic model to foreigners. To complement these efforts, Cuba works equally hard to promote its message in the international media. Between 1959 and 1961, the still-young revolutionary government founded Prensa Latina and Radio Habana Cuba, news outlets akin in purpose (though not influence) to the Voice of America or Radio Moscow. Today, Prensa Latina has correspondents in twenty-two countries around the world, its own active radio station with international broadcasts, and a website that promotes the Cuban state’s anti-imperialist world vision (Prensa Latina n.d.). The advent of the Internet has likewise allowed Granma and other Cuban state publications to reach a broader international public while also supporting the efforts of “alternative” media outlets elsewhere in the hemisphere. It is in these venues that Cuba most often trumpets the successes of its universal health care and education systems, key selling points for the regime. Similarly, partnerships with sympathetic publishers, such as Australia-based Ocean Press, the only foreign publisher with an office on the island, help Cuba diffuse the political thought of the Revolution’s past and present leaders to the broader global public.

But a far more important element of the Cuban government’s public diplomacy strategy has been the U.S. embargo itself. Without it, the narrative of victimization repeated by regime officials would lack credibility, and because of it, Cuba has received an inordinate amount of sympathy, not necessarily for the entirety of its political and economic programs but for the government’s defiance in the face of all U.S. efforts to undermine its stability. In a hemisphere with a long history of U.S. interventionism, resistance to the United States possesses intrinsic political value (McPherson 2003; Sweig 2006, 2–17). And for many citizens across the Americas and the world, Fidel Castro’s perseverance after years of U.S. plots to unseat him merits tremendous respect despite the Cuban government’s widely recognized and continued failure to abide by fundamental international norms concerning freedom of expression and other basic political rights. Over time, Cuba’s symbolic importance as the anti-U.S. rebel par excellence has gradually superseded its role as a practical revolutionary example (Norris 2006). The fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s subsequent abrupt economic collapse, the progressive strengthening of U.S. sanctions (in 1992 and 1996 as well as several occasions under the George W. Bush administration), and the Cuban government’s ability to withstand all of these obstacles have only reinforced the gradual mythologizing of the island’s resistance to U.S. aggression.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the pressures of economic recession forced Cuba to make a number of notable concessions to the global marketplace. Yet as the 1990s progressed and new voices emerged protesting the inequalities, injustices, and other inadequacies of the Washington Consensus, Cuba came on a new framework through which to sell its ideas to the broader public: the antiglobalization movement. Even as they opened the country to limited foreign investment and established joint ventures with foreign tourist enterprises, the island’s leaders also embraced the language of “sustainable development” and “biodiversity” (Perez Roque 2002). They also expressed solidarity with nascent political movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the cocaleros in Bolivia. (In the case of the Zapatistas, it is important to note that Cuban officials let it be known that they were not providing material assistance to the rebels.) They also joined the chorus of regional actors denouncing U.S.-led free trade agreements (Harris 2003). In this context, Cuba’s education and medical programs have become increasingly important as symbols (and a material demonstration) of the island’s commitment to grassroots solutions for global problems. Solidarity has taken on a new meaning, and Cuba’s intransigence in the face of the capitalist West has garnered a fresh wave of sympathizers (Erikson 2004).

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the launch of the Bush administration’s campaign against global terrorism introduced yet another paradigm through which Cuba would seek to gain grassroots support abroad. Members of Fidel Castro’s government have long been the targets of violence and threats from their primarily Miami-based opponents, and on several occasions, even Cuban civilians have been attacked. The most well known terrorist act was the bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet in 1976, widely suspected to be the work of Luis Posada Carriles, a former agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Posada has routinely evaded prolonged incarceration or capture. In the early 1980s, while being tried in a Venezuelan court for his involvement in the 1976 bombing, he escaped from prison. And despite being convicted by a Panamanian court in 2000 for his role in an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro, Posada received a pardon in 2004 from the country’s outgoing president, Mireya Moscoso (Bardach 2002, 171–222; Bardach 2005).

Thus, when Posada reemerged on American soil in April 2005 and was charged only with minor immigration violations, Cuba was handed the perfect pretext to publicize its very own “war on terror.” After more than two years in prison, Posada was set free when a Texas judge found that he had been unlawfully interrogated by immigration authorities. In Havana, the quest to bring Posada to justice for the full extent of his crimes remains a key rallying cry promoted amply through government media outlets and in international forums (Cuba contra el Terror n.d.).

Closely related to this initiative is Cuba’s international campaign to free five men imprisoned in 1999 for their alleged roles in Red Avispa, a Cuban spy network in Miami. Cuban authorities claim that the so-called Cuban Five were only seeking to obtain information about the activities of exile organizations plotting terrorist attacks on Cuban soil, acts that have been historically sheltered and abetted by U.S. authorities. [Editors’ note: See chapter 23 in this volume.] The Cuban government has responded fervently to their incarceration, mounting a broad international media campaign. The wives of the imprisoned have gone on international tours to seek support, and a documentary about the case (Misión contra el Terror [Mission against Terror] 2004) has been heavily circulated by Cuban diplomats and independent activists. Moreover, committees to free the Cuban Five have spread throughout the globe and have staged protests in prominent locations, including Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

Cuba’s war on terror, while a clear and obvious political maneuver, has generated a considerable amount of support and even started to reap concrete rewards in more traditional diplomatic forums. For example, at the Fifteenth Ibero-American Summit held in Salamanca, Spain, in October 2005, heads of state from across Latin America denounced Washington’s “selective approach” to terrorism and issued a statement demanding that Posada be tried for his crimes (Giles 2005).

In sum, Cuba’s approach to the concept of solidarity has proven to be enormously adaptable to changing times and situations. We can also see strong indications that Cuba’s public diplomacy is often not proactive but reactive to external conditions. In the case of the U.S. embargo, the regime actively works to disseminate a narrative of its victimization through the promotion of antiembargo campaigns, documentaries, and literature (Cuba vs. Bloqueo n.d.), but the opportunity to do so is sustained by factors outside of Havana’s direct control. Similarly, in the case of Luis Posada Carriles and the campaign to free the Cuban Five, an external series of events (the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the beginning of the Bush administration’s war on terror) provided a rhetorical space in which prior disputes gained new international relevance.

On the surface, it may seem that the political impact of Cuban public diplomacy remains somewhat limited. After all, three members of the Cuban Five are still in prison, Posada Carriles has been released from custody, and the U.S. embargo persists. Yet solidarity has mattered for Cuba. Opposition to the embargo, even within the United States and, even more remarkably, in the halls of the U.S. Congress, has grown, and the policy is condemned almost unanimously by the UN General Assembly year after year (Bachelet 2007; Mack 2005).

Other results are more indirect but no less important. Cuba remains an important symbol for many members of left-of-center parties across the hemisphere. The seeds of Cuba’s early outreach efforts have thus begun to bear fruit. By gradually cultivating deeply felt bonds of loyalty among many Latin Americans, the island’s leadership has successfully secured a source of sympathy within foreign electorates and thereby inoculated itself from most attempts to pursue more hard-line anti-Castro policies. For example, the notable cooling of Mexican-Cuban relations under the presidency of Vicente Fox outraged members of Mexico’s former ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, who for years had prided themselves on their commitment to diplomatic noninterference and relatively close ties to Havana. The backlash was so large that incoming President Felipe Calderon quickly moved to indicate his government’s willingness to reopen a bilateral dialogue with Cuban officials (Bachelet and Hall 2006). In this way, links of solidarity that Cuba has fostered over time, however superficial, do indeed affect political outcomes.

Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Cuban Culture

Cuba has also engaged in many cultural promotion activities that are not explicitly political in their orientation or purpose. Particularly in the post–Cold War era, the promotion abroad of Cuban art, music, and film has helped the island fulfill other, equally important national interests: the attraction of tourists and hard currency, for example. Although nearly all Cuban cultural products sold or promoted abroad are channeled through state-run cultural institutions, their connection to political actors and traditional foreign policy objectives often appears indirect (Fernandes 2006, 9–16). Such state involvement in the domestic culture industry is not in and of itself politically motivated. Throughout Europe, state-sponsored film subsidies have helped directors confront Hollywood’s tremendous economic and cultural power (Cowen 2002, 73–82). Yet from the early days of the Revolution, Cuban cultural authorities have heavily screened the types of narratives and messages that artists on the island are able to disseminate. As a result, painters, filmmakers, and musicians alike are by now familiar with the general parameters of what is and what is not acceptable (Aguirre 2002; Fernandes 2006, 47–51).

Still, notwithstanding notable and continuing instances of censorship, the relationship between the government and the artistic sphere is not strictly hierarchical. In other words, the themes that artists treat and the ways in which they are treated are subject to more debate and flexibility than in other realms of Cuban domestic politics. Since the end of the Cold War, Cuba has been forced by economic necessity to turn to foreign partners to help sustain domestic cultural production, a process that has naturally exposed the island to the commercial demands of the international market. The rebirth of tourism as a strategic sector of the Cuban economy has also helped introduce themes that were previously frowned on by cultural officials. In many ways, then, what we are discussing here is the flow of cultural discourses in a globalized economy and how the Cuban state attempts to influence or benefit from their diffusion. Rather than simply mandating the type of art or music to be produced, Cuban cultural authorities help reframe and orient grassroots trends to match their own objectives (Fernandes 2006, 33–41; Moore 2006, 251–65).

One of the early noteworthy cultural movements to serve a public diplomacy purpose for the Cuban government was the rise of the nueva trova music style in the late 1960s. Observing the growing power of protest songs throughout the hemisphere (nueva canción), Cuban authorities recognized that music could play a powerful role in uniting domestic and international audiences alike in the fight against U.S. imperialism. Despite their origins as underground performers viewed suspiciously by the state, artists like Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez were eventually embraced by government institutions and came to be identified with the humanitarian and selfless spirit that ostensibly guided the Revolution, writing songs dedicated to Che Guevara and other noted revolutionary figures and events. Casa de las Americas, Cuba’s well-known publisher and cultural house, created the Centro de la Canción Protesta (Center for Protest Song) to support their efforts (Fairley 1984; Moore 2006, 135–69). As Rina Benmayor (1981) put it, even when the lyrics were not overtly political, singers of the nueva trova were often “seen by foreign audiences as live representations of the Revolution, and their songs [were] heard as documents of the history, struggles, loves, problems, and dreams of that social process” (11). To this day, both Milanés and Rodríguez remain important cultural figures with domestic political influence, global artistic appeal, and sizable profit potential.

Film is another arena in which Cuba has obtained notable international success. Motivated by the idea that a revolution in politics simultaneously required a revolution in culture, Fidel Castro’s fledging government established the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Arts and Industry (ICAIC), just eighty-three days after it took power. ICAIC-sponsored productions have demonstrated a striking degree of sophistication and independence over the years. In particular, the films of noted director Tomas Gutierrez Alea have challenged simplified, triumphalist depictions of the Revolution and its progress. As uncomfortable as some Cuban officials may have felt about such films as Memorias del Subdesarollo (Memories of Underdevelopment 1968) (a nuanced account of a young man grappling to understand the rapid changes the Revolution has brought to Cuban society) or La Muerte de un Burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat 1966) (a caustic critique of the Revolution’s inefficient bureaucracies), the richness of these works as compared to the social realism of other Soviet bloc countries helped sell the idea that the Cuban Revolution, despite headlines about political prisoners and repression, could be seen as a vibrant, stimulating, and intellectually creative endeavor (Schroeder 2002).

In the post–Cold War era, ICAIC has been able to survive only by partnering with international distributors and at times foreign directors. As a result, Cuban film today, though still rich in social content, also incorporates narratives that fulfill a market purpose. In line with the island’s revived role as a prime tourist destination, Cuba is once again portrayed as an alluring land of music, dance, sex, and darkly pigmented skin. Yet these portrayals are often coupled with story lines that reinforce political discourses supported by the Cuban state (Soles 2000).

Take, for example, the feature Habana Blues (2005), written and directed by Spaniard Benito Zambrano, coproduced by a Spanish company, and widely played in commercial theaters across Europe and Latin America but filmed on the island with ICAIC’s full input and a cast of well-known Cuban actors. The film tells the story of Ruy and Tito, two best friends frustrated with Havana’s poverty and determined to achieve international success as rock musicians. As they had hoped, Ruy and Tito are offered a contract from a foreign record company, but the agreement includes provisions stipulating that they will be marketed abroad as antigovernment exiles, an approach with apparently more commercial potential. The quintessential dilemma between “making it big” and “selling out” is thus reconfigured as a choice between global commercialism and patriotism. Ruy eventually sides with his country and decides to stay behind. While the screenplay’s frank portrayal of the problems Cubans face each day is revealing, the film’s pulsating rhythms, sexually suggestive dancing, and romanticized depiction of Cuba’s cultural underground reinforce common stereotypes of the island’s exotic appeal and depict Cuba as a commodity to be consumed by tourist dollars. Of course, each of these narratives serves the public diplomacy interests of the Cuban state. In the end, Cuba is both a grassroots ideal that Ruy cannot abandon and a land that foreigners should visit as an escape (Del Pozo 2005).

With such active international participation and broad commercial success (most Cuban films typically travel on the international film festival circuit), Habana Blues (2005) stretches the definitions of “Cuban cinema.” While the film may have been conceived by a foreigner, because it was produced in consultation with Cuban cultural officials at ICAIC and (more important) because it participates in creating a distinctive imaginary of contemporary Cuba, it is relevant to a discussion of Cuban public diplomacy. In fact, it is precisely this interaction of public and private actors that makes the film an apt example of the complex sources of public diplomacy in the globalized world.

Other contemporary Cuban films possess similar dualities. The critically acclaimed La Vida Es Silbar (Life Is to Whistle 1998), for example, confronts the alienation that many Cubans feel in an economically deprived country struggling to find itself in the post–Cold War wreckage. In the end, the film’s various characters reconcile themselves to their pasts, and their faith in Cuba’s future is restored. Yet at the same time, the film employs tropes of Afro-Cuban spirituality that have become highly marketable to international audiences as signs of Cuba’s “otherness” (Fernandes 2006, 61–71).

Recent trends in Cuban music demonstrate many of the same contradictions and subtleties. The Buena Vista Social Club (1997), a Ry Cooder project that reunited long-forgotten musicians of traditional Cuban son, sold millions of records internationally in the 1990s, won a Grammy Award, and generated numerous spin-off albums. As the owner of the copyrights on each of the disc’s tracks, Editora Musical de Cuba, a government-owned publishing company, has benefitted financially from direct sales of the disc abroad. Yet the government has arguably gained more from the project’s perpetuation of discourses and imagery that drive the tourist industry. An integral part of Buena Vista’s success stems from the ways in which the disc as well as the subsequent documentary directed by Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club 1999) “represent Cuba as a nostalgic fantasy that has been preserved intact from the 1950s” (Fernandes 2006, 94). It is no casual coincidence, then, that in almost every café on Old Havana’s tourist-friendly Obispo Street, small music groups dutifully replay the album’s most well-known songs. In fact, the international orientation of the project was so important that the group did not give its first public performance in Cuba until 2000, a full four years after the initial recording was made (Neustadt 2002; New York Times 2000).

Less well known is the rise of Cuban rap music during the same period that Buena Vista achieved its success. As Sujatha Fernandes explored in her book Cuba Represent! (2006), rappers on the island generally fall into two categories. Commercial rappers, like the members of the hugely popular group Orishas (the members of which now reside in Europe), tend to portray Cuba as an exotic land of dance, rum, cigars, and sexuality, the ideal hedonistic tourist getaway, while shying away from explicitly political themes. The relationship of the group Orishas to the Cuban state is perplexing. With origins in the influential underground group Amenaza, Orishas formed in Paris when two of Amenaza’s members were permitted to travel to France on an educational exchange trip and joined forces with other expatriate Cuban musicians. While the group has continued to reside abroad, signing major record deals, collaborating on film projects from across the world, and undoubtedly amassing a fortune from touring and disc sales, they have performed in Cuba, sampled one of the Buena Vista Social Club’s most well-known songs, and even, according to their website, met personally with Fidel Castro. They continue to be promoted by the Cuban press as legitimate representatives of Cuban youth culture abroad. Yet although nationalistic displays of the Cuban flag form an integral part of their act, they have generally refrained from overt political activity and have even collaborated with popular Cuban American rapper and outspoken Fidel Castro critic Pitbull (Fernández 2005; Orishas n.d.).

On the other hand, more politicized groups, such as Anónimo Consejo and Obsesión, popular internationally via grassroots networks, echo the Cuban government’s critiques of materialism, globalization, and the United States. Many of these noncommercial groups, however, have also pushed the domestic envelope, boldly inserting racial issues into public discourse and suggesting that Cuba’s leaders are complicit in the growing inequalities emerging in their own society as the island is slowly inserted into the global economy. Nonetheless, as Fernandes (2006, 85–134) detailed, Cuban cultural institutions have proven to be quite effective at co-opting and containing these critiques at an acceptable level.

Cuba’s government has clearly benefited internationally from the spread of certain cultural phenomena. While some of the island’s cultural promotion activities took direct cues from Soviet precedents (e.g., both the Soviet Union and Cuba heavily promoted their respective national ballets abroad, and Cuba continues to do so), Cuba was and remains unique among communist nations in the degree to which it has successfully mobilized more popular art forms (Gould-Davies 2003; Nye 2004, 74). Yet analyzing Cuban cultural politics as public diplomacy presents a number of unique challenges. It remains unclear how and to what extent the symmetries between the island’s cultural, economic, and foreign policy needs are coordinated across governing institutions. While different branches of the island’s government receive guidance from the central organs of the Cuban Communist Party, tacit understandings also are likely to influence the criteria that cultural authorities use when assessing their approaches to the arts. On the other hand, the government is not all-powerful, especially when confronting the demands of the international market and the increasing pace at which artists themselves have pushed the thematic agenda in recent years. Nonetheless, whether by virtue of conscious manipulation, luck, or a bit of both, Cuba has successfully managed these competing imperatives in ways that both boost the government’s reputation abroad and sustain primary sources of income. And despite their strong criticisms of Cuban society, films like La Vida es Silbar or the music of Obsesión indirectly reinforce the power of the state by suggesting that the ideals of the Cuban Revolution are constantly evolving but never entirely irrelevant.

Successes, Failures, and the Search for Soft Power

If we define public diplomacy as the quest to build symbolic capital on the world stage, both Venezuela and Cuba have achieved noteworthy levels of success. Officials also frequently describe public diplomacy as an effort to build “soft power,” a term coined by Joseph Nye (2004) to denote “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments” (x). While Nye’s work has focused largely on projections of U.S. power, Cuba demonstrates the concept’s validity as clearly as any other example. With little military or economic might, especially after the disappearance of Soviet subsidies, Cuba’s diplomatic successes in recent years are almost wholly attributable to the island’s soft power—the gradual but persistent branding and projection of a series of intertwined discourses generating sympathy for Cuba’s culture, social achievements, and revolutionary mystique. In public, Cuban officials might resist the implication that their exchange programs, humanitarian aid efforts, or cultural activities are designed to help the island accumulate “power” of any kind on the world stage. Such a suggestion undermines the carefully constructed narrative of victimization so central to the regime’s public identity. However, Cuban leaders are also clearly cognizant that public diplomacy is a fundamental source of international legitimacy and influence, both of which are crucial to the preservation of the government’s power at home.

Cuban and Venezuelan foreign aid programs also elucidate one of the most insightful elements of Nye’s theory—namely, that the line between hard and soft power is rarely clear. The ability to provide foreign aid ultimately stems from economic resources and can therefore be considered a form of hard power. Yet Venezuelan and Cuban aid programs, marketed as more than just humanitarian gestures, are deployed to reinforce an association of each government with anti-imperialism, Third World solidarity, and social justice, thereby enhancing each country’s national prestige on the global stage. A tool of hard power is thus used to pursue soft power. Conversely, in Cuba’s case, elements of soft power—film and music—sustain narratives that help Cuba earn sizable quantities of cash, a form of “hard power.”

When compared to the United States, another distinguishing characteristic of Cuban and Venezuelan public diplomacy is that many of the same tactics, tools, and messages used to promote each country’s interests abroad are equally popular as promotional tools at home. While an average U.S. citizen has little knowledge, for example, of the activities of USAID or may be unexposed to the Voice of America, Cuban and Venezuelan officials aggressively market their social achievements, cultural products, and narratives of revolutionary solidarity in pursuit of domestic as well as international support. Tensions do exist, however. Frustrated with the quality of health care and without a public forum to voice their concerns, Cubans may privately object to the thousands of doctors being sent abroad by authorities on international missions.

Cuban public diplomacy is far from uniformly successful. The 2003 incarceration of seventy-five independent journalists elicited outrage internationally and motivated many longtime supporters of the regime to speak out in opposition to the government’s repressive actions. Cuba’s sustained material and human assistance programs, combined with its geopolitical success at defying the United States, may have helped the island’s government earn enough clout to serve on the new UN Human Rights Council as well as its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights. Yet the island’s own deplorable human rights record is still regularly examined—not just by the United States but also by independent organizations, other countries, the European Union, the United Nations, and, of course, the Cuban American community.

Still, in a period where basic democratic practices remain a litmus test of a country’s acceptance in the international community, it is remarkable that Cuba’s one-party government continues to be seen as a trusted and valued partner in many international arenas and institutions, including the United Nations, UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the Non-Aligned Movement, and others. In the end, Cuba’s public diplomacy, indeed its soft power, has been instrumental in helping Havana wield a degree of international influence far out of proportion to the size and relative strategic importance of the country.

Note

From Michael J. Bustamante and Julia E. Sweig, “Buena Vista Solidarity and Cuban Public Diplomacy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616, no.1 (2008): 223–56. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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Moore, Robin. 2006. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Neustadt, Robert. 2002. “Buena Vista Social Club vs. La Charanga Habanera: The Politics of Cuban Rhythm.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 14, no. 2: 139–62.

New York Times. 2000. “Buena Vista Social Club, Little Known in Cuba, Is Glad to Be Home.” August 13.

Norris, Michelle. 2006. “Cuba’s Castro an Inspiration, Not a Role Model.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, September 15.

Nye, Joseph, Jr. 2002. The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs.

Orishas. n.d. “Biografia.” http://www.orishasthebest.com/lndex2.html.

Perez Roque, Felipe. 2002. Speech given at the Global Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, South Africa, September 3.

Pew Global Attitudes Project. 2007. “Global Opinion Trends 2002–2007: A Rising Tide Lifts Mood in the Developing World.” July 24. http://www.pewglobal.orglreports/display.php?ReportiD=257.

Prensa Latina. n.d. “Quienes Somos.” http://www.prensalatina.com.mx/Section.asp?Section=WHO&language=ES.

Ruggie, J. G. 2004. “Reconstituting the Global Public Domain: Issues, Actors, and Practices.” European Journal of International Relations 10, no. 4: 499–531.

Schneider, William, Jr. 2005. The Schneider Report: A National Model of Strategic Communication. New York: Cosima Reports.

Schroeder, Paul A. 2002. Tomás Gutierrez Alea: Dialectics of a Filmmaker. New York: Routledge.

Soles, Diane. 2000. “The Cuban Film Industry: Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” In Cuba Transitions at the Millennium, edited by Eloise Linger and John Cotman, 123–35. Largo, MD: International Development Publications.

Sweig, Julia. 2006. Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century. New York: Public Affairs.

Tuch, Hans. 1990. Communicating with the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Chapter 23

The Cuban Five and the U.S. War against Terror

Saul Landau

In September 1998, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Miami arrested eighteen Cubans. Miami newspapers identified them as part of Red Avispa, or the Wasp Network of Cuban intelligence agents. Most of them pled to benign charges and served short sentences or fled back to Cuba. However, the U.S. attorney charged the five Cuban men who pled “not guilty” with twenty-six counts of violating U.S. laws, twenty-four of which were relatively minor and technical offenses, such as the use of false names and failure to register as foreign agents. None of the charges involved violence in the United States, the use of weapons, or property damage. The two remaining charges, conspiracy to commit espionage and conspiracy to commit murder, were not minor.

At the 2001 trial, it became clear that Cuban intelligence had sent the “Cuban Five” to the United States as a kind of early warning system to stop a wave of violence against Cubans and foreign tourists on the island. The attacks had been orchestrated by a network of terrorist groups drawn from the Florida Cuban exile community. The perpetrators whom Cuba suspected had long and bloody records.

For example, in 1978, right-wing exiles murdered Eulalio Negrin, a New Jersey–based Cuban exile who favored reconciliation with Havana. On April 28, 1979, Cuban exile hit men murdered Carlos Muñiz in San Juan, Puerto Rico, because he favored reconciliation and had started a travel agency arranging for charter flights to Cuba. On September 11, 1980, a Cuban exile gunman shot and killed Félix García, a Cuban UN diplomat, on a New York City street. Shortly afterward, the New York bomb squad defused a bomb that Cuban exiles had attached to the car of Cuba’s UN chief of mission, Raúl Roa. Routinely, over five decades, Cuban authorities discovered periodic landings by armed exiles from Florida who came to the island to kill people and destroy property.

For over forty years, successive U.S. administrations had either supported or tacitly tolerated these activities and allowed the presence of most of the violent anti-Castro exile organizations in the United States. Some of the groups had received U.S. money and weapons. Numerous Cuban protests to the U.S. government and at the United Nations fell on deaf ears, though Cuba suffered significant casualties (more than 3,000 dead) and significant property destruction at the terrorists’ hands. Indeed, the violent exiles held frequent fund-raisers in Miami to garner cash for their missions inside Cuba or their targeting of allegedly pro-Castro people in the United States. Their lives revolved around violence directed against Cuba. For each terrorist act they committed, they proudly assumed responsibility, which they then turned into a fund-raising technique. “You heard about what we did to the Cuban airliner right? You have a nice store here in Miami, and we could protect your store for a small contribution to our cause.”

Following the demise of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European socialist bloc in the early 1990s, Cuba struggled to establish a viable tourist industry to earn foreign exchange. Some of the militant Cuban exiles in South Florida, to discourage foreigners from visiting the island, organized a campaign of violence to create a “free fire zone” in Cuba. Luis Posada Carriles, allegedly backed by his rich exile patrons in Miami, paid Salvadoran nationals posing as tourists to travel from Central America to Cuba, to plant bombs at leading tourist hotels, bars, restaurants, and clubs. Cuban authorities even discovered some of their bombs on tourist buses and at the airport.

The Salvadorans detonated bombs at the Sol Melia, Capri, and Nacional hotels. Dozens of people (mostly Cuban hotel and restaurant employees) were injured. A waiter at the popular Bodeguita del Medio was knocked out by a blast that also burned all his hair. The face of a Sol Melia hotel maid was pummeled with shrapnel. One bomb at the Hotel Copacabana killed Fabio di Celmo, an Italian tourist.

Otto René Rodríguez, one of the Salvadoran bombers, confessed to Cuban police after they caught him that Posada Carriles had masterminded his bombing plot, given him the material to make the bomb, and bought his round-trip ticket to Cuba from San Salvador. Posada Carriles paid him $1,000 plus a free tourist stay in Cuba—just for planting bombs. “Not a bad deal, huh?,” said Otto René during an interview shown in the film Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?

Five Cuban intelligence agents (part of a larger group called the Wasp Network) had been able to infiltrate several groups that Havana had designated as violent. They volunteered for their assignments, despite its inherent risks to their lives, with the intention of monitoring these groups from the inside in order to prevent future terrorist incidents. The U.S. government, however, charged that the Five were spies whose mission was to obtain U.S. military secrets. But the prosecutors marshaled no facts for their case. They relied instead on having an intimidated jury whose license plates were photographed in the court’s parking lot so they could all be identified. Jury members were thus assured that an acquittal of the Five would result at best in the firebombing of their homes by militant anti-Castro exiles.

Beyond problems with an intimidated jury, the Five had to face the problem of an extremely hostile atmosphere in the trial’s venue, Miami. After all, they admitted in court that as Cuban intelligence agents, their mission was to monitor and report to Cuba the planned activities of the exile terrorists. Under normal circumstances, judges would regularly permit a change of venue in light of the prejudicial nature of the publicity surrounding the trial and the community’s history. But motions to change the venue were denied.

The trial exposed the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s claim to be fighting terrorism. When faced with charges against two Cuban exile terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles, the Justice Department faded away or was overruled by the president. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the FBI had compiled ample evidence about both men, which included their own boasts of committing terrorist acts and numerous documents that demonstrated their involvement in organizing the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner. The Cuban plane exploded in midair in October 1976, killing all seventy-three people on board. Documents later declassified showed that the CIA had information even before the bombing that Bosch and Posada Carriles had planned the hit. In 1990, Bosch applied for legal residence in the United States. The Justice Department recommended that his application be denied, following an investigation that exposed Bosch’s thirty-year history of criminality and terrorist actions, including the bombing of a Soviet freighter in Miami harbor. Its report concluded that “over the years he [Bosch] has been involved in terrorist attacks abroad and has advocated and been involved in bombings and sabotage.” President George H. W. Bush, however, ignored the recommendation and official findings and granted legal residence to Bosch.

Posada Carriles had worked for the CIA in the 1960s and early 1970s. Toward the end of his tenure with the CIA, he became a high official in Venezuela’s secret police, DISIP. Linked to extrajudicial murders and cases of torture, DISIP typically had intimidated judges who attempted to bring any of its agents to justice. Thus, when Venezuelan prosecutors accused Posada Carriles of masterminding the 1976 bombing of the Cuban airliner, it surprised no one that two courts declined to convict him. But prosecutors persisted, and he was still awaiting the determination of an appeals court when he “escaped” from a Venezuela prison in 1985—with a $50,000 bribe for the prison guards and warden. The warden actually escorted him out the front door. The bribe payer was Jorge Más Canosa, who directed Miami’s Cuban American National Foundation.

In 1998, Posada Carriles admitted to two New York Times reporters, Anne Bardach and Larry Rohter, that he orchestrated a series of 1997 bombings in Havana. In 2000, a Panamanian court convicted Posada Carriles and three other Cuban exiles of “endangering public safety” by having several dozen pounds of C-4 explosives in his rental car, which he intended to detonate at a public gathering featuring Cuban President Fidel Castro at the University of Panama. Had the Panamanian police, tipped off by Cuban security officers, not prevented the explosion, it certainly would have killed Castro, along with the audience of hundreds of people, mostly students.

Despite CIA and FBI documentation about Posada Carriles’s violence, he became the recipient of U.S. hospitality, like Bosch. After Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned the four Cuban exile terrorists on her last day in office, allegedly with a large payment made to her offshore bank account, Posada Carriles found his way to Miami. Although he was on an antiterrorist watch list that nominally barred him from entering the United States, his illegal presence in Little Havana became an open secret; U.S. marshals finally took him into custody but only after Posada Carriles called a televised press conference that made it impossible for U.S. officials to claim any longer that they had no knowledge of his whereabouts.

Venezuela immediately requested his extradition so that he could be tried for the prison escape and on the earlier charges of murder. The Justice Department refused the request, asserting that he would likely be tortured in Venezuela and could not receive a fair trial there. The Justice Department then charged him with the minor offense of having inappropriate immigration documents and lying on his immigration forms, crimes that could have led at worst to his deportation from the United States. At his El Paso, Texas, trial, U.S. prosecutors did show the jury evidence of Posada Carriles’s terrorist activities, but they had charged him only with lying on his immigration forms, not with terrorism. The jury acquitted him.

Contrast Posada Carriles’s and Bosch’s treatment by U.S. authorities with the way the U.S. government dealt with the five Cubans whom they arrested without a struggle. They threw the Five into solitary confinement cells reserved as punishment for the most dangerous prisoners and held them there for seventeen months until the start of their trial, which lasted seven months.

In December 2001, in the wake of 9/11, they were sentenced to maximum prison terms: Gerardo Hernández received a double life sentence, Antonio Guerrero and Ramón Labañino were sentenced to life in prison, and Fernándo González and René González received sentences of nineteen and fifteen years, respectively.

The government separated the Five into maximum-security prisons (some of the worst in the United States), each hundreds of miles from the other, where three of them remain today. (René González was released on parole in 2011 and was permitted to return to Cuba early in 2013. Fernándo González was released on parole in February 2014 and also was permitted to serve out his parole in Cuba.) Two have been denied visits from their wives in violation of U.S. laws and international norms. The Bush and Obama administrations rejected the validity of protests from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations about the “arbitrary arrests” and inhumane treatment of the Five.

The Long Pursuit for Justice

The Five immediately appealed their convictions and sentences to the Eleventh Circuit Court, which sits in Atlanta, Georgia. Nearly four years later, on August 9, 2005, a distinguished three-judge panel of the court reversed the convictions and sentences on the ground that the Five did not receive a fair trial in Miami. In a comprehensive ninety-three-page analysis of the trial’s process and evidence, the judges found that the fundamental rights of the accused had been violated, and they ordered a new trial. Notably, for the first time in the history of American jurisprudence, a U.S. federal court acknowledged (on the basis of evidence produced by the defense) that terrorist actions emanating from Florida against Cuba had taken place. The court even cited Posada Carriles’s activities and appropriately referred to him as a terrorist.

The decision stunned the Bush administration. A federal appellate court had declared that Miami—with hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles who provided the margin of victory for George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election—was a venue incapable of providing a fair forum for a trial of these five Cubans because of an atmosphere that was overtly hostile to the Cuban government and supportive of violence against it. Moreover, it found that the behavior of the U.S. government prosecutors, in making exaggerated and unfounded arguments to the twelve members of the jury who decided the case, reinforced the underlying prejudice, as did media reporting before and during the trial. A decade after the trial, evidence emerged that the government had paid journalists in Miami’s press, television, and radio to report negative stories on the Five and on Cuba before and during the trial, thus providing a poisonous atmosphere that would infect the jury as well as the larger public. In 2012, lawyers for the Five cited this evidence in a new appeal to reverse the trial decision and called for the U.S. Supreme Court to nullify the jury’s verdict.

The appeal panel’s findings corroborated those of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which had concluded that the deprivation of liberty of the Five was arbitrary. The UN Working Group also called on the U.S. government to remedy the situation.

The U.S. attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, who had been President Bush’s White House counsel, responded by taking the unusual step of ordering prosecutors to file an appeal to the full twelve-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit, asking the court to review the decision of the three-judge panel. Such an appeal is both rare and hardly ever successful, especially when all three judges are in agreement and express themselves with the kind of scholarly and lengthy opinion that the three-judge panel in Atlanta had issued. Yet a majority of the Eleventh Circuit judges agreed in October 2005 to review the panel’s decision and then reinstated all of the convictions. Subsequent court rulings reduced the sentences for three of the five Cubans.

The seven-month duration of the Miami trial had made it the longest criminal trial in U.S. history until that time. More than seventy defense witnesses testified, including two retired U.S. generals, one retired admiral, and a former White House presidential adviser. The trial record consumed over 119 volumes of transcripts. In addition, there were fifteen volumes of pretrial testimony and argument. The defense introduced over 800 exhibits into evidence, some as long as forty pages. The twelve jurors, with the jury foreman openly expressing his dislike of Fidel Castro, returned verdicts of guilty on all twenty-six counts without asking a single question or requesting a rereading of any testimony, unusual in a trial of this length and complexity.

The two main charges against the Five turned on prosecution allegations ordinarily used in politically charged cases: conspiracy. A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime. The crime need not occur. Once such an agreement is established, the guilt of the accused is complete. All the prosecution need do is to demonstrate through circumstantial evidence that there must have been an agreement. In the absence of evidence that an actual crime had been committed, juries often infer agreement in political cases on the basis of the politics, minority status, or national identity of the accused. This is precisely why and how the conspiracy charge was used here. The first conspiracy charge alleged that three of the Five had agreed to commit espionage against the United States. The government argued from the outset that it did not need to prove espionage occurred but merely that there had been an agreement to commit espionage at an unspecified time in the future. The media were quick to refer to the Five as spies. However, the legal fact and actual truth was that this was a case not of spying but of an alleged agreement to spy. Thus relieved of the duty of proving actual espionage, the prosecutors set about convincing a Miami jury that these five Cuban men living in their midst must have had such an agreement.

In his opening statement to the jury, the prosecutor conceded that the Five had not possessed a single page of classified government information, even though the government had succeeded in obtaining over 20,000 pages of correspondence between the five defendants and people in Cuba. Moreover, that correspondence was reviewed by one of the highest-ranking intelligence officers in the Pentagon. General James Clapper testified that he could not recall seeing any national defense information among the papers. The law requires the presence of national defense information in order to prove the crime of espionage.

The prosecution relied chiefly on the fact that one of the Five, Antonio Guerrero, worked in a metal shop on the Boca Chica navy training base in South Florida. The base was completely open to the public and even had a special viewing area set aside to allow people to take photographs of planes on the runways. Guerrero had never applied for a security clearance, had no access to restricted areas, and had never tried to enter any. Indeed, while the FBI had him under surveillance for two years before the arrests, there was no testimony from any of the agents about a single act of wrongdoing on his part.

Far from providing damning evidence for the prosecution, the documents seized from the defendants were used by the defense because they demonstrated the noncriminal nature of Guerrero’s activity at the base. His objective was to “discover and report in a timely manner the information or indications that denote the preparation of a military aggression against Cuba” on the basis of “what he could see” by observing “open public activities.” The information, visible to any member of the public, included the comings and goings of aircraft. Surveillance also discovered that he had clipped articles from the local newspaper that reported on the military units stationed there. Former high-ranking U.S. military and security officials testified that Cuba presents no military threat to the United States, that there is no useful military information that could be obtained from Boca Chica, and that Cuba’s interest in obtaining the kind of information presented at trial was “to find out whether indeed we are preparing to attack them.”

Information that is generally available to the public cannot form the basis of an espionage prosecution. In his trial testimony, General Clapper agreed: “Open source intelligence is not espionage.” Nonetheless, the prosecution repeated in three separate arguments that the five Cubans were in this country “for the purpose of destroying the United States.” The jury, swayed more by passion and fear than by the law and evidence, convicted all five defendants of the charge on the basis of this fraudulent prosecution assertion.

The second conspiracy charge was added seven months after the first. It alleged that one of the Five, Gerardo Hernández, conspired with other nonindicted Cuban officials to shoot down two aircraft flown by Cuban exiles from Miami as they entered Cuban airspace. The planes had been intercepted by the Cuban air force, which killed the four crewmen. The prosecution conceded that it had no evidence regarding any alleged agreement between Hernández and Cuban officials to shoot down planes or to determine where and how they were to be shot down. In consequence, the law’s requirement that an agreement be proven beyond a reasonable doubt was not satisfied. The government subsequently filed papers in which it proposed to modify the accusation because it faced an “insurmountable obstacle” in proving the charge against Hernández. The court of appeals rejected the government’s request, the doubtful charge remained, and the jury convicted him on that count.

The case of the Five stands out as a historic episode in American jurisprudence. It is similar to the Nixon administration’s attempt to use the court to muzzle the New York Times and the Washington Post when the newspapers sought to publish the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the lies supporting the Vietnam War and the failed U.S. policy. The United States did not prosecute the Five because they violated American law or harmed the United States. They languish in prison because they attempted to expose those who actually did hurt U.S. global credibility by committing terrorist acts, which broke U.S. and international laws. Through their infiltration of the terror network, which continues to exist in Florida, the Cuban Five demonstrated the hypocrisy of America’s proclaimed opposition to international terrorism.

Bosch no longer remains alive to conspire against Cuba. In 2014, Posada Carriles still lived in Miami and routinely received awards for his “heroic” efforts to destroy the Cuban Revolution, efforts he formally denies while accepting the honors.

Three of the Five remain in prison. Two will be released over the next decades. Gerardo Hernández continues to live out his two life sentences in a high-security prison in the California desert.

In 2009, Cuba arrested Alan Gross, a contract agent working for a company that agreed to provide work for the U.S. Agency for International Development, as part of a covert program to destroy the Cuban Revolution by creating networks of U.S.-recruited “dissidents.” Gross provided high-tech satellite and laptop equipment to establish an impenetrable and nontrackable signal that an internal network could use for messages among its members for communications with controllers in the United States. Gross was tried and convicted of crimes designed to subvert the Cuban government. He received a fifteen-year term. Cuba has offered to engage in independent humanitarian gestures with the U.S. government as a result of which Havana would free Gross and Washington would free the remaining four members of the Five.

Thus far, the White House has not responded.

Chapter 24

Untying the Knot

Philip Brenner and Soraya M. Castro Mariño

The Possibility of a Respectful Dialogue between
Cuba and the United States

At the height of the October 1962 missile crisis, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev sent an urgent letter to U.S. President John F. Kennedy. He implored the American leader to join him to stop pulling on the ends of a rope tied in “the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be pulled.” The Cuban-U.S. relationship today is neither as tense nor as dangerous as the 1962 confrontation. But it remains fastened in a knot of hostility and antagonism that both countries have been tightening for more than fifty years and that benefits neither of them.

This chapter starts from the assumption that it is still possible for both countries to loosen the knot of hostility and replace it with positive ties. The authors appreciate that the legacy of conflict between Cuba and the United States, whose roots may extend to the political identity of each country, creates a significant obstacle to the development of a respectful dialogue. Those who disparage the tension between the two countries as a mere vestige of outdated Cold War thinking overlook how each actually perceives the other’s current behavior as a threat. For example, Cuba’s commitment to hemispheric relations based on equality—as expressed through its support for the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) an organization developed to counter hemispheric integration under U.S. leadership—does provide a serious challenge to the role that the United States perceives is central to its core interests. On the other hand, U.S. covert programs in Cuba that fund operatives who seek to encourage or facilitate regime change carry with them an implicit promise of U.S. military support if the activities lead to violence and at the least violate Cuba’s sovereignty, the maintenance of which is a core interest.

At the same time, Cuba and the United States are bound together by their propinquity, by shared elements in both cultures, and by an intimacy born from close interaction and family connections. These positive factors, along with a changing domestic and international political environment, are the basis for the possibilities we identify for improving relations between Cuba and the United States. As a prelude to examining these possibilities, we provide an overview of U.S.-Cuban relations during the first five years of President Barack Obama’s presidency.

Failing to Overcome the Bush Legacy

President Obama took office with little obligation to Cuban-American hard-liners.^[1] Yet inertia can have an insidious effect on policy. Legacies become obstacles even for a president committed to “change.” He inherited from the Bush administration a set of regulations that severely limited travel even for Cuban Americans, several projects aimed at subverting the Cuban government, and a policy based on the precondition that Cuba had to move significantly in the direction of a U.S.-style capitalist democracy before a meaningful dialogue could occur.^[2]

At the start of George W. Bush’s presidency, there was little overt indication that his legacy would turn out to be such a hostile Cuba policy, even though he initially appointed virulent anti-Castro officials to Latin American policy posts throughout the government. In deference to European allies, he continued President Bill Clinton’s practice of waiving implementation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Law, which would allow U.S. citizens to sue in a U.S. federal court persons who “traffic in property confiscated in Cuba.” Then, in November 2001, in the wake of Hurricane Michelle’s devastation, President Bush also relaxed some cumbersome provisions of the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 in order to facilitate the sale of some food and medical supplies to Cuba.

However, by 2003, the relentless pressure from hard-liners compelled President Bush to pursue a more hostile policy, the heart of which emerged in two reports produced by the Presidential Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba (CAFC). The first CAFC set of recommendations, which the president accepted in May 2004 and then implemented with executive orders, were explicitly intended to create the “means by which the United States can help the Cuban people bring about an end to the Castro dictatorship.”^[3] While much of the report seemed to be the stuff of fantasy, Cuban officials could not dismiss the plans so easily. President Fidel Castro asserted plainly that the Bush administration’s policy was an attempt “to intimidate, to terrorize this country and eventually to destroy its socio-economic system and independence.”^[4] Indeed, in July 2005, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appointed a Cuban transition coordinator to head the newly created Cuban Transition Office, she remarked that the goal was “to accelerate the demise of Castro’s tyranny.”^[5] The second CAFC report, issued in July 2006, similarly proposed active measures aimed at “hastening change in Cuba . . . not succession.”^[6]

The CAFC restrictions on travel and remittances were not popular in the Cuban American community, especially among those who had arrived most recently and had close relatives in Cuba whom they wanted to visit or support. A 2008 poll of Cuban Americans found that two-thirds of the respondents favored both “ending current restrictions on sending money to Cuba for Cuban Americans” and “ending current restrictions on travel to Cuba for Cuban Americans.”^[7] Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) smartly appealed to this discontent in 2008 by vowing to loosen the restrictions if he were elected president. When he fulfilled his pledge in April 2009, he attempted to portray the changed regulations as evidence of his willingness to respond to the demands of Latin American leaders that the United States end its hostile policy toward Cuba. But the hemispheric leaders at the 2009 Summit of the Americas appeared to interpret President Obama’s move much as Cuban President Raúl Castro did: as merely fulfilling a campaign promise.^[8]

Had President Obama truly desired to change U.S. policy toward Cuba, he could have justified a new policy on the basis of U.S. interests and relied on many domestic and international sources of support. On winning the election, he was greeted by a flurry of proposals from several ad hoc groups made up of former U.S. government officials and members of Congress, leading scholars, and prominent public intellectuals, several of whom had previously supported harsh measures against Cuba. They shared a consensus that the policy undermined U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere and that the stable succession in Cuba has “challenged the effectiveness of a half century of U.S. economic sanctions,” as a Council on Foreign Relations task force report declared.^[9]

Indeed, the hostile U.S. policy against Cuba had virtually no international support. In October 2008—for the seventeenth year in a row—the UN General Assembly supported a resolution calling for the end of “the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” The vote was 185–3 (the three votes against being cast by the United States, Israel, and Palau), with two abstentions. At a June 2009 General Assembly meeting of the Organization of American States, the United States needed to apply significant political pressure to gain a compromise resolution that paved the way for Cuba to return to the organization.^[10]

Meanwhile, President Raúl Castro made clear several times that Cuba was willing to negotiate with the United States over all issues of concern. But he insisted, as he said in a December 2009 speech to the Cuban National Assembly, that engagement with the United States had to be “based on a respectful dialogue between equals, on any matter, without prejudice to our independence, sovereignty and self-determination.”^[11]

The Obama administration’s limited actions disappointed many of those who sought to improve Cuban-U.S. relations. Still, during President Obama’s first two years, there was an evident reduction in U.S. hostility toward Cuba in four areas:

Cuban American travel and remittances: The president went beyond his promise as a candidate to loosen restrictions on travel and remittances for Cuban Americans. He abolished all restrictions on travel, permitted Cuban Americans to send unlimited funds to families, and broadened the definition of “family” to embrace aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Migration talks: Following the 1995 migration accord between Cuba and the United States, the two governments agreed to hold meetings every six months to review the implementation of the accord and to discuss related matters. President Bush canceled the talks in 2003. The Obama administration renewed the meetings in July 2009 and sent Craig Kelly, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, to the second meeting in Havana. He was the highest-ranking U.S. official to have visited the island in a decade.^[12]
Increased diplomatic contact: During the Bush administration, formal contact between the two governments was limited to brief meetings between the chief of each diplomatic mission (Interests Section) and a midlevel official. This changed early in 2009 when Ambassador Jorge Bolaños Suarez began to meet with Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon. (Cuba reciprocated with similar meetings in Havana.) In September, the United States sent Bisa Williams, a deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, to Havana for discussions with Dagoberto Rodríguez, a Cuban vice minister of foreign relations.^[13]
People-to-people engagement: U.S. and Cuban officials opened discussions about the possibility of direct postal service between the two countries. Since 1963, mail sent from one country to the other has been routed through a third country, in part because the international treaty governing postal services requires mail to be carried on regularly scheduled airlines. Both countries viewed direct mail service as a way to facilitate communication between family members. The Obama administration also moved forward on other people-to-people efforts: it eased embargo regulations so that organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution could once again apply for travel licenses to take Americans on short educational trips to Cuba^[14]; the State Department began, albeit slowly, to issue more visas to Cuban scholars to do research in the United States; and the Treasury Department removed some restrictions on telecommunications companies doing business with Cuba.

As a contrast to the continuous hostility emanating from the Bush administration, the Obama administration’s actions in these four areas might be seen as a fundamental shift in approach. In fact, the Democratic administration neither offered a new framework for policy nor overcame the Bush legacy. The essential continuities from the Bush administration, at least through mid-2014, were evident in four features of the Obama policy:

Framework of reciprocity: During his second term, President Bill Clinton reframed Cuba policy in a way that facilitated change. He moved from “calibrated response”—a framework of reciprocity that tied any U.S. initiatives to reciprocal changes on Cuba’s part—to a framework of “America’s interests,” shaping policy in terms of what best served the United States. This enabled his administration to expand opportunities for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba without requiring that Cuba take steps to become a Western-style democracy. The Bush administration returned to reciprocity, and as of mid-2014, the Obama administration has maintained the reciprocity framework. For example, in 2012, President Obama said at the Summit of the Americas,

Since I came into office, we have made changes to our Cuba policy. . . . But the fact of the matter is, is that Cuba, unlike the other countries that are participating, has not yet moved to democracy. . . . I am hopeful that a transition begins to take place inside of Cuba. . . . We haven’t gotten there yet. But . . . we recognize that there may be an opportunity in the coming years, as Cuba . . . starts loosening up some of the constraints within that country.^[15]
Disparaging Cuban reforms: The president’s repeated statements about Cuba’s lack of meaningful political change not only ignored major reforms on the island but also limited his freedom of action within a framework of reciprocity. Similarly, U.S. officials have denigrated the significant changes in the Cuban economy that have created considerable space for nonstate enterprises.^[16] For example, in an interview with Univision after the Cuban Communist Party had approved the “Guidelines” for economic reform, President Obama said, “For us to have the kind of normal relations we have with other countries, we’ve got to see significant changes from the Cuban government and we just have not seen that yet. . . . The economic system there is still far too constrained.”^[17]
State sponsors of terrorism list: Despite overwhelming evidence that Cuba was not a state sponsor of terrorism, the Obama administration continued to include Cuba on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Even the authors of the 2012 report had difficulty in making the case for including Cuba, one of four countries still on the list. For example, they observed, “There was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups.”^[18] As former ambassadors Carlos Alzugaray and Anthony Quainton have pointed out, a country on the list suffers from “draconian . . . provisions against banking transactions,” which have “created problems for the United States with allies whose embassies and companies in Cuba have run into problems because of banking restrictions.”^[19] Of course, the rules also adversely affect Cuba’s international commerce.
Harmful covert programs: Since 2006, the United States has encouraged Cuban doctors serving abroad to give up their citizenship and emigrate to the United States. The Wall Street Journal reported that as of 2011, the Cuban Medical Professional Parole (CMPP) program had enticed nearly 1,600 of them.^[20] The CMPP was one reason a planned U.S.-Cuban cooperative project to help Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake failed. Cuba was concerned that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would use the project to recruit Cuban doctors, and USAID refused to provide assurances it would not do so.^[21]
USAID has been the lead agency in spending funds on covert programs that Cuba considers to be subversive. Although other options were available, USAID sought appropriations for its “democracy promotion” projects under authorization from the 1996 Helms-Burton Law, which has the explicit purpose of changing the regime in Cuba. Since President Obama took office, the United States has spent at least $20 million annually on these projects.^[22] Until 2014, the most notorious project involved Alan P. Gross, a subcontractor for Development Alternatives International, a USAID contractor. Arrested in December 2009, Gross and the State Department claimed that he was in Cuba merely to provide the small Jewish community with telecommunications equipment that would enable its members to access the Internet without Cuban government interference. The Jewish community had not requested such assistance. In fact, what Gross provided was sophisticated satellite communications transmitters that included a subscriber identity module (SIM) card usually available only to the U.S. military or intelligence community. The SIM card could prevent detection of signals from the transmitters for a radius of 250 miles.^[23] From the Cuban government’s perspective, his mission was “to establish illegal and covert communications systems . . . intended to destabilize the existing order.”^[24] In April 2014, the Associated Press revealed a possible purpose for the network that Gross was creating. It reported that USAID had tried to establish a secret Twitter-like project for Cuba that could have been used to incite Cubans to join flash mobs of the sort that contributed to regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt.^[25]

Factors Propelling a Thaw

By 2011, U.S.-Cuban relations seemed to have become frozen again, as the Obama administration refused to meet publicly with Cuban officials because of Gross’s incarceration. It had even suspended the migration talks in 2010. Meanwhile, Cuba pulled back its outstretched hand because of the continuing covert U.S. programs, U.S. refusal to remove Cuba from the terrorism list, U.S. unwillingness to consider pardoning or commuting the sentences of the “Cuban Five” (intelligence agents imprisoned for monitoring terrorists in the United States who had attacked Cuba),^[26] and numerous unsubstantiated allegations by the United States against Cuba, such as the claim that it was involved in human trafficking.^[27] Trade with the United States in 2010 dropped to $363 million from a high in 2008 of $711 million.^[28]

In reality, the two countries found ways quietly to maintain and even increase contact over some matters of shared interest. U.S. and Cuban military representatives continued their monthly meetings, begun in 1997, about issues related to the fence line at the Guantánamo naval base. Technical experts from both countries participated in multilateral talks dealing with ecological and safety problems arising from deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Straits. In addition, for the first time in eleven years, the State Department granted visas to more than sixty Cuban scholars to attend the 2012 Latin American Studies Association conference in San Francisco, though it did deny visas to eleven prominent academics, including one of the authors of this chapter.^[29]

Then, in 2013, several events and circumstances offered renewed expectations for improved relations. In January, Cuba began to implement a new law that enables most citizens to obtain passports, to leave the country for up to two years without an exit permit, and to return without forfeiting their property.^[30] President Castro viewed this reform as fulfilling his commitment to deepen an irreversible process of normalization between Cubans and the diaspora.^[31] The United States had highlighted Cuba’s travel restrictions in attacking its human rights record.^[32] From either perspective, the new law held out the possibility of being a game changer.

In May 2013, with the concurrence of the Justice Department, a federal judge permitted René González, one of the Cuban Five, to stay in Cuba permanently after he was allowed to travel there to attend memorial services for his father. He had been released on parole in 2011 after thirteen years of imprisonment but was forced to serve out his parole in the United States. Then, in June, Obama administration officials met with their Cuban counterparts to continue negotiations over direct mail service, and the State Department agreed to resume the semiannual migration talks with Cuba.^[33] It was spurred to do so, in part, by the increased number of visa applications that resulted from Cuba’s new migration law.^[34]

Meanwhile, negotiations between the Colombian government and the country’s largest insurgent organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), made significant headway in Havana in 2013.^[35] Aimed at ending the fifty-year-old Colombian civil war, the peace talks were made possible as a result of Cuban efforts in February 2012. The first meeting between the negotiators took place in Oslo, Norway, and the sessions then moved to Cuba in November 2012.^[36] The United States has devoted billions of dollars to ending the war in Colombia, and successful negotiations improved the possibilities for a U.S.-Cuban rapprochement.

International Factors

Cuba’s importance in the FARC-Colombian government negotiations suggests one international factor propelling a thaw in Cuban-U.S. relations: Cuba’s stature in the Western Hemisphere. By 2009, all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere except the United States had established diplomatic relations with Cuba. In November 2008, it had become a full member of the Rio Group, an informal association of twenty-three regional countries that formalized itself in 2011 as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). As Michael Erisman explains, “With 33 countries . . . representing roughly 600 million people, CELAC presented a major challenge to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States as the major international organization for the region.”^[37] Notably, CELAC selected Cuba to cochair the organization for 2013–2014.

The growing isolation of the United States in the hemisphere was evident at the 2012 Summit of the Americas. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos pointedly spoke on behalf of the region’s leaders in asserting that there would be no summit in 2015 unless Cuba were invited to participate.^[38] The significance of his remarks was clear to President Obama, who reportedly replaced his national security adviser for Latin America as a result of the meeting. The United States had been spending nearly $1 billion annually on aid to Colombia, and President Santos had solid credentials as a conservative and a former minister of national defense.

It may be possible that the Obama administration did not care if there were a 2015 summit because in 2013 it seemed to be focused on developing a new plan for relating to Latin America. As an aspect of the general shift in U.S. foreign policy toward Asia, U.S. officials began to highlight the U.S. interest in gaining observer status in the “Pacific Alliance”—a group of four countries: Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru—and linking the group to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade network.^[39] Yet the United States has far too many interests in the region to turn a blind eye on all the other countries, especially with China’s increasing investments in Latin America and Brazil’s rise as the sixth-richest country in the world. As the White House itself highlighted in an April 2012 fact sheet, “The Western Hemisphere is the destination for approximately 42 percent of U.S. exports, more than any other region across the globe.”^[40] At some point, Cuba’s stature in the region is likely to be a factor the United States takes into account.

Moreover, the United States continued to be isolated internationally outside the region because of its Cuba policy. This was evident once again in October 2013, when the UN General Assembly voted 188–2 (with three abstentions) to condemn the U.S. embargo. One year earlier, the European Union decided to engage Cuba in discussions about a new framework that could open the door to improved relations in the medium term by discarding the “common position” that had created significant tension.^[41] Notably, in 2013, the European Union designated CELAC as its official counterpart for Latin America, replacing the Organization of American States.^[42]

Domestic Factors

President Obama’s relaxation of the embargo for Cuban American travel and remittances to the island appears to have been a smart political move. In 2012, he collected a greater proportion of the diaspora’s vote in Florida than any previous Democrat had won.^[43] At the same time, Joe Garcia (D-FL) won his election to represent the Twenty-Sixth Congressional District, replacing Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), an anti-Castro extremist. Garcia had called for a dialogue with Cuba.

The voting results in part reflect demographic changes in Florida’s Cuban community. For the grandchildren of those who emigrated in the 1960s, overthrowing the Cuban government is an issue far less salient than it was for their elders. Cubans who arrived in the United States since 1995 have an interest in improved relations with the island so that they can easily maintain family ties and send remittances. Poll data indicate that two-thirds of these émigrés favor a dialogue with Cuba.^[44]

While the so-called Cuba Lobby continues to have some influence—it spent more than $3 million on political campaigns from 2008 to 2012—its greatest influence appears to come from the fear that a few Cuban American legislators instill in executive branch officials.^[45] For example, Senator Robert Menendez held up passage of President Obama’s stimulus package in 2009 until he received a promise that he would be consulted on any changes in Cuba policy. But such power is illusory; it seems real only until a president is willing to counter it.

If President Obama or his successor did want to pursue a cooperative, respectful policy toward Cuba, there are interest groups that could provide political cover for such a policy. Several state chambers of commerce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, agribusiness groups, pharmaceutical companies, tourism industry organizations, and petrochemical firms have shown an increasing interest in doing business with Cuba, especially as economic updating on the island progresses. In short, domestic factors—the changing views of the Cuban American community and interest groups—could provide the necessary political space a president would need to engage Cuba in a dialogue.

Issues for Discussion

Over the past fifty years, Cuba and the United States have had a succession of negotiations leading to expectations for rapprochement that have been shattered subsequently by new sources of conflict. This pattern has frustrated Cuban officials, some of whom have worked on Cuban-U.S. relations for decades and still have foreign policy responsibilities. It also has made U.S. officials leery of sticking out their necks too far on the Cuba issue for fear that a setback will quickly change the atmosphere and create political problems for them.^[46]

Analysts have offered several explanations for why Cuban-U.S. negotiations have failed to generate better relations. These include domestic Cuban politics and the way that Cuban leaders use the U.S. “threat” to stay in power,^[47] domestic U.S. politics,^[48] the asymmetry between the two countries,^[49] and even the metaphors that each side uses to describe the relationship, metaphors that may contribute to misperceptions and mistrust.^[50]

One factor rarely considered is the process by which Cuba and the United States reach agreements. In order for negotiations to act as a spur for continued good relations, they must function as confidence-building measures. As Johan Jørgen Holst explains, diplomatic negotiations may actually undermine trust because they can “include the concealment of facts” and “the manipulation of uncertainty,” both of which breed distrust.^[51] Above all, negotiators must engage each other with mutual respect in order for an agreement to serve as a stepping-stone to further talks.

Confidence building is a necessary element in creating the possibility for continued successful negotiations between Cuba and the United States because both maintain deep wells of distrust of the other. For this reason, direct negotiation rather than mediation is better suited to building trust because it requires the two parties to communicate only with each other and to resolve disagreements together. When two antagonistic parties are able to achieve agreements that satisfy each of their interests, the process of positive engagement itself may challenge firmly held beliefs about the implacability or unreasonableness of an opponent. Undermining those beliefs can begin to create space for empathy, which is essential in establishing mutual respect.^[52]

Consider how the following four issues might be approached to engender confidence:

Counterterrorism: Both countries have condemned international terrorism and have been the target of terrorists, and this should make cooperation against terrorism a natural goal for the two neighbors. But each has charged the other with harboring and supporting terrorists. The issue is more pressing for Cuba because there are groups in the United States that continue to plan terrorist actions against Cuba and because the United States identifies Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, triggering provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that impair Cuba’s interaction with international banks. Still, U.S. officials tend to fear that once they unilaterally relinquish a bargaining chip, such as Cuba’s removal from the State Department’s terrorism list, Cuba will take advantage of the situation and worse outcomes will emerge. In short, an important step would be for each country to express its underlying security needs and fears in a way that the other country will listen to it. For example, as a group of former government officials and scholars close to their governments recommended in a 2013 joint report, the two governments could “undertake visits by former U.S. military officers, ambassadors, and other national security officials for the purpose of helping each government appreciate more accurately the perceptions and analytical frameworks of the other government.” Further, they should “acknowledge publicly any proposals submitted by either government aimed at improving security cooperation.”^[53] Notably, Cuba is party to thirteen international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism and has signed thirty-five bilateral agreements on legal assistance in this field with other states. Initial cooperation in this area could be directed to exchanging all judicial and police information about individuals or groups for which there is strong evidence that they may constitute an imminent danger to humanity.
Orderly migration and trafficking in persons: Both countries have an interest in allowing orderly migration to occur, and both experienced unsettling episodes when there was disorder. It would thus benefit Cuba and the United States for both to acknowledge to each other that Cuba’s new migration law might require an update of the 1994–1995 immigration accords and to use their semiannual meetings for that purpose. As a confidence-building measure, the United States should consider terminating the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. It acts as a powerful magnet because it provides Cubans with benefits that migrants from no other country receive, including a shortened path to U.S. citizenship. Migration discussions also could productively take up the issue of human trafficking. As noted, the United States has used this issue to level unfounded charges against Cuba, listing it as a “Tier 3” (worst offender) country in its 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report. Were the United States willing to reevaluate its claim, such an action could lead to a positive attitudinal turning point for Cuba. In turn, the two countries could then cooperate in protecting the security of their borders, as they have done successfully in dealing with the problem of drug trafficking.
Drug trafficking and related crimes: In its 2013 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), the State Department acknowledged that “Cuba maintained a significant level of cooperation with U.S. counternarcotics efforts” and that “bilateral cooperation in 2012 led to multiple at-sea interdictions.” But the report also notes, “In 2011 the Cuban government presented the United States with a draft bilateral accord for counternarcotics cooperation, which is still under review. Structured appropriately, such an accord could advance the counternarcotics efforts undertaken by both countries.”^[54] In fact, according to Cuban officials whom we have interviewed, the United States has neither responded to the Cuban proposal nor explained what it means by “structured appropriately.” Among other features, Cuba’s proposed bilateral agreement would establish direct communication channels for exchanging real-time information and implementing joint actions. Such interactions could go beyond interdiction by including the reciprocal exchange of databases and information about ships, individuals, and groups involved in drug trafficking. It also could include bilateral cooperation in training and be expanded to matters of port security, customs and border control, and money laundering. In short, the 2013 INCSR is a good first half step in that it acknowledges Cuba’s cooperation, but real movement will come only when the two countries actually talk to each other about an accord.
Environmental protection: Given that Cuba and the United States share ecosystems for several species, such as migratory birds, sea turtles, and manatees, they have a common interest in marine environmental protection. Discussion of this concern could begin with noncontroversial matters, such as a review of their 1977 fisheries agreement, which focuses on the demarcation of boundaries. These talks could be broadened to include environmental concerns about managing and limiting fishing in the region. A second issue could be coral reef protection. In turn, agreements about these problems could open ways to develop cooperative environmental and wildlife conservation projects between the United States and Cuba. In Johan Galtung’s joint reconstruction approach for reconciliation, he suggests that when two opposing parties approach a project “shoulder to shoulder and mind to mind,” they can begin to “build moral equality around positive acts.”^[55]

Similarly, both countries could benefit from cooperative projects related to the prediction of and protection from severe weather events, natural disasters, and the effects of climate change as well as the prevention of and recovery from human-made disasters, such as oil tanker spills and drilling explosions. But in both cases, the seeming noncontroversial objective of protecting human life and the environment runs headlong into controversy because of the U.S. embargo. Sanctions by the United States prevent Cuba from buying meteorological technology or safety equipment, even from a non-U.S. company, as long as 10 percent of a machine is manufactured in the United States or is based on U.S.-patented technology. Such rules potentially could harm the United States more than Cuba. For example, currents would carry the oil from a leak at a deep-water Cuban well to Florida’s shores, not to Cuba’s. Yet when the Spanish petroleum firm Repsol sought to use U.S.-made safety caps in 2012 for drilling in Cuban coastal waters, the Treasury Department denied it a license. Ultimately, the Treasury Department agreed to allow the Federal Emergency Management Administration to use or loan safety equipment on such rigs if there were a leak.

Challenges to the embargo by Cuban and U.S. scientists and oil companies could be a wedge that would break down the embargo on related environmental issues. For example, U.S. technology could enable Cuba to develop alternative energy sources—such as wind, solar, and biomass—that would enable it to diversify its dependency on a few suppliers of oil, give U.S. companies an additional market, and reduce Cuba’s contribution to greenhouse gases. Both countries might work together, then, on training scientists and engineers in the Third World.

Conclusion : The Art of the Possible

Curiously, “politics” has become a term of derision in both Washington and Havana, used by younger generations in discussing their leaders to imply that they are engaged in a form of manipulation, obfuscation, or self-serving gamesmanship. But an older, perhaps quaint, meaning of politics is that it is action intended to achieve the “possible.” The four examples of possible Cuban-U.S. engagements we have highlighted do not directly address the legacy of hostility between the countries or even some pressing current concerns, such as the release of Alan Gross from a Cuban prison and the remaining members of the Cuban Five from U.S. prisons. They involve policies that make no sense, that serve neither country’s interests, and that rational actors should be able to abandon easily.

Yet politics is the art of merely the possible precisely because it attempts to direct irrationally based behavior toward rationally based goals. The policies we highlighted are not so easily abandoned because it is so difficult for policymakers in both countries to act rationally when dealing with the other country. In order for them to serve the best interests of their own countries, they need to start with problems that can be solved feasibly and with a process that encourages further engagement. We are at a moment when the dynamics of global affairs and the domestic dynamics in each country provide a supportive environment for a respectful dialogue between Cuba and the United States. There are issues ripe for discussion between the two countries. Engagement is possible.

Notes

This chapter is based on papers presented by the authors at the XI Workshop “Cuba in the Foreign Policy of the United States of America: Projections, Trends and Perspectives of Cuba-US Relations in the Context of the 2013–2017 Presidential Mandate,” December 17 and 18, 2012, Center for International Policy Research, Institute of International Relations Raúl Roa García, Havana, Cuba. Philip Brenner appreciates the support he received from American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies to attend the workshop.

Obama’s margin of victory in Florida—204,600 votes—was large enough that he virtually did not need any votes from Cuban Americans, though he received approximately 35 percent of the Cuban American vote, about 10 percent more than John Kerry received in the 2004 election. See Casey Woods, “Obama First Democrat to Win Florida’s Hispanic Vote,” Miami Herald, November 6, 2008.

For an elaboration of the Bush administration’s policy toward Cuba, see Soraya M. Castro Mariño and Philip Brenner, “The George W. Bush–Castro Years,” in Fifty Years of Revolution: Perspectives on Cuba, the United States, and the World, ed. Soraya M. Castro Mariño and Ronald W. Pruessen (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).

U.S. Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, Report to the President, May 2004 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2004), 2. Notably, chapter 1 of the report is titled “Hastening Cuba’s Transition,” http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB192.pdf (accessed August 25, 2013).

Fidel Castro Ruz, “Proclamation by an Adversary of the U.S. Government,” May 14, 2004, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2004/ing/f140504i.html (official translation).

U.S. Department of State Archive, “Announcement of Cuba Transition Coordinator Caleb McCarry,” July 28, 2005, http://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/50346.htm (accessed September 3, 2013).

Condoleezza Rice and Carlos Gutiérrez, Report to the President: Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, July 2006, 5, http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/68166.pdf (accessed August 25, 2013).

Institute for Public Opinion Research, Florida International University, “2008 Cuba/U.S. Transition Poll,” December 11, 2008, 7–8, http://www2.fiu.edu/~ipor/cuba-t/ (accessed September 1, 2013).

Ginger Thompson and Alexei Barrionuevo, “Rising Expectations on Cuba Follow Obama,” New York Times, April 19, 2009; Associated Press, “World Briefing/The Americas; Cuba: Raúl Castro Belittles U.S. Overture,” New York Times, April 30, 2009.

Charlene Barshefsky and James T. Hill, chairs, U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality, Independent Task Force Report No. 60 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, May 2008), 72, http://www.cfr.org/mexico/us-latin-america-relations/p16279 (accessed September 1, 2013). Similarly, in an early December letter to President-elect Obama, several major business groups—including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—urged “the complete removal of all trade and travel restrictions on Cuba” (Doug Palmer, “Business Urges Obama to Loosen Cuba Embargo,” Reuters, December 4, 2008). See also Ernesto Zedillo and Thomas R. Pickering, Rethinking U.S.-Latin American Relations: A Hemispheric Partnership for a Turbulent World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, November 2008).

10.

Ginger Thompson, “Imposing Conditions, O.A.S. Lifts Its Suspension of Cuba,” New York Times, June 4, 2009. Within days of the meeting, Costa Rica and El Salvador became the last two countries in the hemisphere other than the United States to establish diplomatic relations with Cuba.

11.

Raúl Castro Ruz, “No tenemos derecho a equivocarnos,” Intervención del Presidente Raúl Castro en la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, December 20, 2009, http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2009/12/20/discurso-de-raul-castro-en-la-asamblea-nacional/ (accessed August 25, 2013).

12.

Paul Haven, “US, Cuba Discuss Immigration Issues in Havana,” Associated Press, February 19, 2010.

13.

“US and Cuba in High-Level Talks,” September 30, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8281756.stm (accessed August 25, 2013).

14.

The travel regulations were announced in mid-January 2011. In addition, any U.S. citizen was permitted to send money to a Cuban (other than members of the Communist Party or government) in limited amounts. See Ginger Thompson, “Restrictions on Travel to Cuba Are Eased,” New York Times, January 15, 2011.

15.

Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama and President Santos of Colombia in Joint Press Conference,” Cartagena, Colombia, April 15, 2012, Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/15/remarks-president-obama-and-president-santos-colombia-joint-press-confer (accessed September 3, 2013).

16.

Julia E. Sweig and Michael J. Bustamante, “Cuba after Communism: The Economic Reforms That Are Transforming the Island,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013; Richard E. Feinberg, Soft Landing in Cuba? Emerging Entrepreneurs and Middle Classes (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, November 2013); Philip Peters, “Cuba’s Entrepreneurs: Foundation of a New Private Sector,” chapter 11 in this volume.

17.

As quoted by EFE (Spanish news agency), “Obama Sees No ‘Significant Changes’ in Cuba,” May 14, 2011, http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2011/05/14/obama-sees-significant-changes-cuba/ (accessed September 1, 2013).

18.

U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism, Country Reports on Terrorism 2012, May 30, 2013, chapter 3, http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2012/209985.htm (accessed August 31, 2013).

19.

Carlos Alzugaray and Anthony C. E. Quainton, “Cuban-U.S. Relations: The Terrorism Dimension,” Pensamiento Propio, no. 34, July–December 2011, 76, 80.

20.

Joel Millman, “New Prize in the Cold War: Cuban Doctors,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2011.

21.

H. Michael Erisman, “Brain Drain Politics: The Cuban Medical Professional Parole Programme,” International Journal of Cuban Studies 4, nos. 3/4 (Autumn/Winter 2012): 277–79, 284–85. In contrast to other Cuban refugees who must reach the United States or a U.S. territory in order to apply for asylum, under the CMPP program Cuban doctors can apply for asylum at a U.S. embassy.

22.

Fulton Armstrong, “Time to Clean Up U.S. Regime-Change Programs in Cuba,” Miami Herald, December 26, 2011. Armstrong reports that in 2009, USAID spent $45 million on the covert programs.

23.

Desmond Butler, “USAID Contractor Work in Cuba Detailed,” Associated Press, February 12, 2012. The communications setup that Gross established would allow a Cuban enemy to communicate with operatives inside Cuba or allow subversive groups to communicate across the island if any of its members were within a few blocks of the equipment that Gross had donated to Jewish communities in three Cuban cities.

24.

Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, “Press Conference,” December 5, 2012, http://www.cubaminrex.cu/en/press-conference-josefina-vidal-ferreiro-head-united-states-division-cuban-chancery-international (accessed September 6, 2013).

25.

Desmond Butler, Jack Gillum, and Alberto Arce, “U.S. Secretly Created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to Stir Unrest,” Associated Press, April 3, 2014.

26.

See Saul Landau, “The Cuban Five and the U.S. War against Terror,” chapter 23 in this volume.

27.

U.S. Department of State, 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2012, 133–34, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/192594.pdf (accessed September 3, 2012).

28.

U.S. Census Bureau, “Trade in Goods with Cuba,” http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2390.html (accessed September 5, 2013). The United States was Cuba’s fifth-largest trading partner in 2008. See Reuters, “World Briefing/The Americas; Cuba: U.S. Trade Rises,” New York Times, August 15, 2008.

29.

Pamela Constable, “U.S. Grants Visa to Raúl Castro’s Daughter but Denies Visit by Cuban Academics,” Washington Post, May 18, 2012; Editorial, “The Refuseniks of Cuba,” Washington Post, May 21, 2012.

30.

Consejo de Estado, Decreto-Ley No. 302, Modificativo de la Ley No. 1312, “Ley de Migración” de 20 de Septiembre de 1976, Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, October 16, 2012, 1357–87.

31.

Raúl Castro Ruz, “Discurso pronunciado en el Séptimo Período Ordinario de Sesiones de la VII Legislatura de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular,” August 1, 2011, http://www.cubadebate.cu/raul-castro-ruz/2011/08/01/discurso-de-raul-en-laasamblea-nacional/ (accessed September 1, 2013).

32.

U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012, April 19, 2013,http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport/index.htm?year=2012&dlid=204441(accessed September 4, 2013).

33.

Associated Press, “U.S., Cuba Agree to Resume Immigration Talks,” USA Today, June 19, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/06/19/cuba-immigration-talks/2439915/ (accessed September 3, 2013).

34.

Fabiola Santiago, “The Endless U.S.-Cuba Chess Game, Miami Herald, August 18, 2013. The United States granted 79 percent more tourist visas to Cubans in the first six months of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012.

35.

Chris Kraul, “Colombia, FARC Rebels OK Land Deal: The Pact on Agrarian Reform, One of Six Points in a Possible Peace Accord, Gives the President a Boost,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2013; Helen Murphy, “Colombia’s FARC Talks at ‘Critical’ Stage, Government Negotiator Says,” Reuters, September 3, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/03/us-colombia-rebels-farc-idUSBRE9820VS20130903 (accessed September 5, 2013).

36.

William Neuman, “Rebel Group in Colombia Announces Cease-Fire,” New York Times, November 20, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/world/americas/colombia-rebels-announce-cease-fire.html(accessed September 5, 2012); Peter Beaumont, “Revealed: How Castro and Chavez Helped Colombia Peace Talks to Begin: Meetings in Havana Paved the Way for Negotiations with FARC in Oslo This Week on Ending the Long-Running Civil War,” The Observer (U.K.), October 14, 2012.

37.

H. Michael Erisman, “Raúlista Foreign Policy: A Macroperspective,” chapter 18 in this volume.

38.

Andrew Cawthorne and Brian Ellsworth, “Latin America Rebels against Obama over Cuba,” Reuters, April 15, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/15/us-americas-summit-idUSBRE83D0E220120415 (accessed September 4, 2012).

39.

Philip Brenner and Eric Hershberg, “Washington’s Asia-Pacific Response to a Changing Hemispheric Order,” Pensamiento Propio, no. 39, January–June 2014.

40.

The White House, “Fact Sheet: The U.S. Economic Relationship with the Western Hemisphere,” Office of the Press Secretary, April 13, 2012, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/13/fact-sheet-us-economic-relationship-western-hemisphere (accessed September 5, 2013).

41.

Joaquin Roy, “El fin de la Posición Común de la UE sobre Cuba,” El Nuevo Herald, November 22, 2012, A23.

42.

Council of the European Union, “EU-CELAC Action Plan 2013–2015,” January 27, 2013, Press Release No. 5748/13, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/EN/foraff/135043.pdf (accessed September 5, 2013).

43.

Data from exit polls indicated that the president won between 40 percent (Reuters) and 49 percent (NBC/Pew) of the Cuban American vote in Florida.

44.

Cuban Research Institute, 2011 Cuba Poll (Miami: Florida International University, 2011); Peter Schechter and Jason Marczak, US-Cuba: A New Public Survey Supports Policy Change (Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council, February 2014); Jorge I. Domínguez, “Dialogues within and between Cuba and Its Diaspora,” chapter 26 in this volume.

45.

William M. LeoGrande, “The Cuba Lobby,” Foreign Policy, April 11, 2013.

46.

Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “Like Sisyphus’ Stone: U.S.-Cuban Relations in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

47.

Jorge Domínguez, “Secrets of Castro’s Staying Power,” Foreign Affairs, Spring 1993.

48.

Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban American National Foundation,” International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1999); Morris Morley and Chris McGillon, Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989–2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–21; LeoGrande, “The Cuba Lobby.”

49.

Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

50.

Philip Brenner and Soraya Castro, “David and Gulliver: Fifty Years of Competing Metaphors in the Cuban-U.S. Relationship,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 20 (June 2009).

51.

Johan Jørgen Holst, “Confidence-Building Measures: A Conceptual Framework,” Survival 25, no. 1 (1983): 2.

52.

Ralph K. White, “Empathizing with Saddam Hussein,” Political Psychology 12, no. 2 (1991); Ralph K. White, “Misperception and War,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 10, no. 4 (2004).

53.

Cuba-United States Academic Workshop (TACE), “Opportunities for U.S.-Cuban Relations: Working Paper,” November 2012 (Buenos Aires: CRIES, 2013), 13, http://www.cries.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/tace-final-web.pdf (accessed September 6, 2013).

54.

U.S. State Department, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, 2013 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, March 5, 2013, http://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2013/vol1/204049.htm#Cuba (accessed September 5, 2013).

55.

Johann Galtung, “After Violence, Reconstruction, Reconciliation and Resolution,” in Reconciliation, Justice and Coexistence, ed. Mohammed Abu-Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 16.

Chapter 25

Emigration and U.S.-Cuba Bilateral Relations

Antonio Aja Díaz

Although the Cold War has ended, confrontation between the United States and Cuba has continued, as has an absence of dialogue, persistent hostility on the part of several U.S. administrations, and resistance by the Cuban Revolution. Within this context, the tendency of emigration from the island to the north continued. In the contours of the bilateral relations between the two countries, migration talks have provided almost the only concrete channel of communication.

Main Tendencies in Cuban Emigration to the United States

From 1959 until today, the United States has been the main destination of emigrants from the island, and the United States has used this pattern as part of its hostile policy toward the Cuban Revolution in different eras and in accordance with the destabilization tactics of each.^[1] A new such era began in 1989, with subdivisions covering the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The unfolding of the “Special Period in Time of Peace” under the impact of the deep economic crisis besetting the country imbues the 1990s with a special role in the following analysis, particularly because of the role that relatives abroad began to play in Cuban daily life. Their role gained new dimensions with a perception that linked having such relatives with the possibility of economic help in confronting the crisis.

In the 1990s, the flow of migrants was characterized by a mix of permanent and temporary emigration as well as significant numbers of visitors to the island (estimated at more than 100,000 between 1995 and 1996 alone). Legal emigration remained low until early 1995, while illegal departures mushroomed. In just 1994, an estimated 40,000 people were involved in the latter process, successfully or not. The composition and motivation of the emigration during this decade was different from those of earlier waves. An economic component (including one of labor mobility) dominated alongside political factors and others, such as family reunification or lack of confidence that the social project of the Revolution would provide a way out of the crisis.

Since 1959, due to the politicized and ideological atmosphere surrounding the issue of Cuba-U.S. migration, the act of emigration was seen in Cuba as “abandoning the fatherland,” and therefore it acquired levels of stigmatization in accord with the historical moment of revolutionary victory. The policies of both governments serve as influences that can stimulate or retard the migratory flow. They introduce elements of regulation and deregulation, and they even affect the practical means by which the emigrants carry out their journeys. In the United States, independently of the motivations of Cubans migrating to that country, these immigrants are seen as “fleeing political persecution,” “escaping from communism,” or “dissidents.” Although these interpretations began to be questioned in the late 1990s, they remain essentially in force up to today.

In terms of potential normalization of migratory relations, 1995 represented a turning point. The signing of a new agreement suggested the possibility of regulating the legal migratory flow of Cubans to the United States and of trying to stop illegal emigration. This possibility was formalized and raised to a potentially definitive level when, on May 2 of that year, the “Joint Communiqué” on normalizing migratory relations was issued. That document, which resolved the issue of the Cuban emigrants being held at the Guantánamo naval base, reaffirmed a joint interest in avoiding “dangerous departures.” These migratory accords, in attempting to solve the serious problem created by the interruption in legal migration, offered an opportunity for preferential treatment. Applying various provisions contained in the U.S. General Law of Immigration, during 1995 more than 26,224 visas were issued to Cuban citizens who applied for them.^[2]

Emigration at the Start of the Twenty-First Century

The first six years of the twenty-first century may be classified as the second most important period of emigration since 1960–1962 because of the size of net emigration from the country—226,078 individuals, of whom 54.5 percent were female. For 1994–2006, that figure is 407,145, of whom 51.1 percent were female.^[3]

To better understand this dynamic requires analyzing international migration as a variable in the context of Cuban demographic tendencies. In brief, demographic figures show insufficient population growth, low birthrates, and a clear increase in the age of the population. Emigration’s impact on this situation can be seen in the above-mentioned net outflow and the slight female majority among emigrants. In addition, the most common age groups among the emigrants are those between ten and twenty-nine years of age (46.6 percent).

In Cuban emigration at the turn of the twenty-first century, the presence of young professionals can also be observed. Professionals account for 12 percent of the total in the most recent five-year period, which locates Cuba within the current of “brain drain,” the loss of important human capital. Studies of a possible “return to Cuba” and the conditions that would propitiate such a return reveal that 40 percent of individuals who have considered a possible return or who had not previously thought about it say that they would go back if the country’s economy improves or if they do not succeed in achieving their goals for life abroad. As far as political factors, 80 percent of subjects who do not reject the idea of returning say that possible changes in the country’s political system do not play a significant role. Alongside this analysis, we may note the growth over the past four years of attempts to return from the United States and from other parts of the world. Those making such attempts are mostly elderly people and emigrants who left the country since the mid-1990s.^[4]

The flow of temporary return visits by Cubans residing abroad has also been studied in the case of individuals living in the United States and Puerto Rico. The results show a sustained growth of interest in trips back to Cuba to visit and also to send remittances to relatives in Cuba. Similarly, these emigrants wanted travel restrictions lifted and travel costs lowered, more mechanisms to encourage family relations, and broader options to enjoy with their families during their stay in Cuba.^[5]

Illegal departures by sea to the United States remained a component of Cuban emigration. One study shows that this phenomenon increased after 1998, especially in 1999, 2001, and 2004 and during the first nine months of 2005. These figures are based on successful departures (as indicated by arrival in and admission to the United States) and on would-be emigrants returned to Cuba by the U.S. Coast Guard or by the services of third countries where those attempting to reach U.S. territory had landed. The total of such participants between 1995 and 2004 exceeded 21,900, not counting those who may have reached other shores without being sent back.^[6]

The increase in those successfully reaching U.S. soil after 1999 was due in part to the growth of human smuggling operations. Moreover, given the difficulty in reaching U.S. shores without interception by the U.S. Coast Guard, new southern routes have been used for illegal departures, such as to Honduras, directly or by way of the Cayman Islands, so as to then cross through Mexico into the United States.^[7]

Those opting to leave Cuba by sea are primarily young men (68 percent of them between fifteen and thirty-five years old) with secondary or higher-secondary education, a notable level of unemployment (50 percent), and criminal records (20 percent) and 8 percent having made repeated attempts to depart illegally. Studies of the causes and motivations of the decision to emigrate point to economic elements in a context where other social and political factors vary according to individual characteristics.^[8] In sum, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Cuba continued to display the traits that typify it as a country of emigrants, although Cuban emigration does not contribute greatly to overall worldwide migratory flows.

Cuban Migration Policy

Cuban migration policy has passed through varying periods from 1959 (when there were no travel restrictions in place) to the present. A continual influence on Cuban policy has been hostility and permanent aggression on the part of the United States as well as internal situations.^[9]

Since 1961, the Cuban government has viewed migration as a matter of Cuba’s national security. Thus, Cuban laws and regulations reflect and are linked to the intense counterrevolutionary activity and the utilization of U.S.-Cuba migration toward such counterrevolutionary ends. The application of Cuban law has been based on a series of criteria, related mostly to security issues, such as age, professional level, occupation, political affiliation, and conduct as a citizen.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the main shifts in Cuba’s migratory policies took shape. Since then, there have been several periods of greater flexibility involving significant changes with respect to permanent and temporary departures from the country. The differential relations with Cuban emigrants in many regions of the planet, as compared with those in the United States and especially in South Florida, reveal elements of both continuity and change.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been a process of adjustment in Cuba’s policy toward migration and emigrants in accordance with the characteristics of the country of destination and domestic and international political realities. There are many challenges involved in developing and applying a policy that is modern, objective, and consonant with the demands of both citizens and national security.

U.S. Political Asylum Policy

U.S. immigration policy with respect to Cuba openly declares offers of political asylum. Its effect is to build up critical pressures on the island that are then released through periodic escape valves that produce cycles related to internal situations over the past fifty years.

In November 1966, the United States enacted the Cuban Adjustment Act, which more clearly and directly reaffirmed the special treatment of Cuban emigration by offering Cubans practically automatic status as political refugees. This act affords an opportunity to change one’s immigration status to permanent residence after one year and one day on U.S. soil without having to leave the United States, as regulations require all other immigrants to do. The act was approved without an expiration date and remains in force.

Beginning in 1991, when Cuba was hard hit by economic crisis, the rafter phenomenon reappeared. Illegal departures by sea (including frustrated attempts) rose to more than 60,000 between 1991 and 1994, the year of the so-called rafter crisis.^[10] In the months leading up to this event, a new contradictory behavior by the U.S. government could be observed in granting or denying temporary visas for Cuban citizens to visit their families living in the United States. The number of temporary visas granted significantly declined, with allegations that many of those applying were potential immigrants. As many as 80 percent of such applications were denied, in turn stimulating illegal departures and creating an additional conflict associated with the migratory flow.

The rafter crisis generated a new wave of migration (36,900 people in the first nine months of 1994) that represented a continuation of the changes in Cuban migration patterns begun with Mariel (1980). In this new case, the economic crisis and its social effects were among the main detonators of the people explosion. Most of the rafters were young white men, with secondary or postsecondary education, motivated essentially by personal aspirations for fulfillment that they felt could not be met on the island in the short term given the situation there.

The pressures generated by the illegal departures culminated in public disorder, which led the Cuban government to decide on August 12, 1994, to eliminate the restrictions on this type of departure. Thus, the histories of the events at Camaríoca^[11] in 1965 and Mariel in 1980 were repeated; in those incidents, too, legal migration from Cuba to the United States had been interrupted, and illegal migration took on significant dimensions.

Faced with the new situation, the United States changed course in its immigration policy with respect to Cuba, intercepting the rafters before they could enter the United States and sending them temporarily to its naval base near Guantánamo, thereby breaking a tradition more than thirty-five years old. This U.S. naval base and Panama received nearly 30,000 people who, for the moment, had no defined migratory status. In this new situation, the dynamic of migratory relations between the United States and Cuba required a new understanding. The migratory accords signed in 1994 referred, in particular, to the control of illegal emigration by sea from Cuba to the United States; they signified a substantive change in U.S. migration policy toward the largest island in the Antilles. Both parties committed themselves to preventing the use of violence in the act of emigration. For the first time in more than thirty-six years, the United States committed itself to return any Cubans intercepted on the high seas with the intention of entering the country, and Cuba declared that it would accept these individuals without taking any action against them.

This could have been a decisive step in discouraging such departures if the United States had treated Cuban migrants the same as it did the thousands of people from all over the globe who tried to enter U.S. territory in illegal or undocumented fashion. However, for this to occur, the United States would have had to end the special immigration policy for Cubans begun in 1959 and, in particular, to rescind the Cuban Adjustment Act. This did not happen.

Still, a key factor in encouraging legal and orderly emigration from the island to the United States was broached when the figure of 20,000 annual visas, as a minimum, was considered. To fulfill this goal for 1994–1995, the accords included the application of a set of powers inherent in U.S. immigration laws for the purpose of easing the awarding of such visas. That was exactly the opposite of what had been put in practice after the migration accords of 1984.

In addition, the United States established a special lottery for Cuba separate from its annual lottery for the rest of the world—thus providing another avenue through which Cuban citizens could present their immigration requests.^[12] This method of granting immigrant visas was oriented toward the population sectors of greatest interest to the United States. The visas were obtained by young emigrants, with education and professional training, the majority of them white, who presumably would not represent a burden to the United States because they could quickly enter the labor market.

Once these accords were put into effect in 1994–1995, a legal, orderly, and regular migratory flow began. However, the illegal departures were controlled only to a degree because the Cuban Adjustment Act remained in effect. From 1995 to 2008, by the author’s estimation, no more than 190,000 visas were awarded to Cuban emigrants. These were granted primarily through the lottery process for family reunification, to political refugees, or to those “paroled” as household members of those who had obtained visas in one of the three primary ways.

One issue remained pending from the events of August 1994: the situation of the people interned in Guantánamo and Panama. New talks were carried out, and on May 2, 1995, it was announced that an amendment to the accords had been signed, providing for the gradual admission of those interned Cubans to the United States. The joint communiqué of May 1995 underlined the prohibition of illegal migration by sea, with the commitment to return rafters captured on the high seas to the island.

Nonetheless, the survival of the Cuban Adjustment Act provoked a different outcome. Although the application of the migration accords stopped further avalanches of rafters, it could not completely close this door because any Cuban emigrant who managed to reach U.S. territory by sea retained a high likelihood of not being returned to Cuba. The case of the boy Elián González revealed what the extreme results of the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy could be.^[13]

This problem remains unsolved. Since 1998, the problem has included the thorny and dangerous component of human smuggling, organized and financed by groups of Cuban Americans in South Florida, putting human lives at risk. Between 1997 and 2008, about 8,000 people reached the Florida coast by this means.

One of the myths that has persisted most strongly is that all Cubans migrating to the United States are members of a homogeneous group. The image remains durable largely because members of one part of the emigration define themselves as exiles. Nonetheless, the social class differences and other distinctions stemming from the sociodemographic characteristics of each migratory wave refute this. The political element is still present, but the classification of those who migrate should reflect their motivations, social affiliations, life expectations, and ties to the Cuban social system.

Perceptions of the Internal Situation in Cuba

Fidel Castro’s relinquishing of his responsibilities because of illness also had repercussions for the migration issue. The first reaction by the U.S. Coast Guard was to announce that there would be no special change in its activities. Nonetheless, press reports on that announcement referred to contingency plans for a crisis in Cuba and U.S. government fears of a new exodus, or of hundreds of Florida Cuban Americans setting off in small boats in search of their families. This impression was confirmed by the governor of Florida in statements affirming the existence of a plan to prevent a massive wave of immigration that could create a great risk to human life.

Another interesting event occurred on August 2, 2006, when the Bush administration showed concern about possible departures by sea from Florida to Cuba. White House spokesperson Tony Snow declared an intention to prevent movement in either direction: “It’s also important . . . to tell people stay where you are. This is not a time for people to try to be getting in the water and going either way.”^[14] Once again, it became clear that, when the interests of Cuban-born counterrevolutionaries occasionally fail to coincide with those of the United States, the balance tilts toward the U.S. interests. Allowing uncontrolled migration between Florida and Cuba does not fit with U.S. policy premises. President Bill Clinton’s decision to send Cuban rafters to Guantánamo instead of permitting them access to Florida in 1994 indicated the same.

The first reports of a possible change in U.S. policy on Cuban immigration coincided with President George W. Bush’s first public statements, after the news of the Cuban president’s illness, at a Texas press conference on August 8, 2008. Although the U.S. government did not refer to possible changes, word filtered out that a “working draft” was circulating among legislators and government officials. This document contained a plan to put a brake on illegal immigration from Cuba and prevent the entrance of “regime officials who have suspicions of human rights abuses hanging over them.”^[15] The administration’s idea, apparently, was to use the 20,000 annual visas to aid family reunification. In this way, U.S. officials may have hoped to prevent Cuban Americans from encouraging illegal entry by way of smugglers. In the award of immigrant visas, there would also be the goal of promoting the entrance of Cuban professionals, particularly doctors working in third countries who would have a right to take advantage of the 20,000-visa quota.

Changes in U.S. immigration policy announced in 2006 included an increase in the proportion of visas for family reunification, a denial of consideration for U.S. entry for those intercepted at sea who had family residents in the United States, the implementation of a system to inform relatives of the latter in the United States, the denial of migratory benefits to Cuban government officials who were “human rights violators,” and the use of the power of parole for the benefit of Cuban doctors in third countries.^[16]

The first of these policy changes was based on the joint communiqué of September 4, 1994, which permitted the United States to process a minimum quota of immigrants for the purpose of family reunification. Each year, a significant number of the individuals who applied for family reunification visas had failed to obtain them. The new plan sought to reduce this backlog by recognizing those individuals as a fourth category of immigrants. In addition to the lottery winners, the plan proposed to allow discretionary entrance of this category by means of parole. With this new policy, family reunification would account for approximately 60 percent of those receiving visas each year, with the rest going to lottery winners.

If family reunification benefits were denied to Cuban migrants intercepted at sea, this practice could discourage illegal departures by sea, although it would not be decisive as long as the Cuban Adjustment Act and its interpretation in the form of the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy remained in effect. The denials could be seen as a continuation of the initial intent of the existing migration accords but still as partial, fragmentary, and not addressing the heart of the matter, which truly promotes and facilitates the arrival of Cuban rafters. Therefore, this measure seemed more a response to the U.S. immigration context, in which the subject of undocumented immigrants and smugglers occupies a central and controversial place, rather than a real attempt by the administration to definitively solve the migration problem with Cuba.

With respect to family reunification and the supposed preference offered by the new U.S. immigration measures for Cubans, these actions would not necessarily have a dissuasive effect on the approximately 55 percent of potential illegal emigrants who have no family in the United States or whose relatives are uncles, aunts, or cousins who cannot request visas for them. A process of family reunification that would allow petitions from a greater number of relatives and have a truly dissuasive role should not be limited to the closest kinship relations, as the immigration laws now require. Moreover, the implementation of procedures to inform U.S. relatives regarding Cubans intercepted at sea will increase the demand for news about those returned to Cuba and thus also for news about U.S. immigration authorities’ attempts to visit those people or send representatives to do so.

Continuation of Migration Talks

On July 14, 2009, a new round of migration talks between Cuba and the United States got under way, the first since the United States broke off talks in 2003. Previously, in April 2009, the Obama administration had lifted the restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban Americans. Less than thirty days later, the administration proposed to Cuba a resumption of talks, and on May 31, Cuba agreed. [Editors’ note: The United States suspended the immigration talks in 2010 but in 2013 agreed to resume them. The first set of renewed talks were held in Washington in July 2013.]

Although the key measure to change in U.S. immigration policy toward Cuba would be to end the Cuban Adjustment Act, this is unlikely in the short or medium term, that is, in the second term of the Obama administration. Nonetheless, this administration is faced with a set of measures and precedents favorable toward making progress in the normalization of migration relations, which would be of value given the pressures swirling from the larger immigration problem facing the United States. At the same time, such progress on migration could allow for channels of communication and dialogue with Cuba, taking advantage of the Cuban side’s repeated willingness to discuss any subject on a plane of full equality.

Cuba, for its part, faces significant challenges in the area of migration, in particular toward the United States, which it has to face with objectivity and with regard to its national interests. It needs a strategy to confront an erosion of its population resulting from a combination of temporary and permanent emigration. Such a strategy must take into account profiles of age, gender, and professional-technical training in various regions of the country. There is also a need to foresee a return to previous Cuban migration patterns, including possible emigration over the next ten to fifteen years, taking into consideration (among other factors) migration currents and tendencies in the region of the Caribbean where Cuba is located; the country’s traditions in this regard, especially in eastern Cuba; the economic and social situation of the region, especially in labor force terms; and Cuban perspectives on society and labor in the context of the island’s economy and of globalization and interdependence among nations.

Cuba must assess the complex problem of brain drain and loss of talent, a phenomenon now present in almost every society, from a perspective that considers all professional sectors and with an eye toward policies that favor social and personal development. Cuba must perfect its legal and constitutional provisions regarding emigration, which will require new legislation that takes into account the political, economic, and social importance of this issue. The current state of such regulations indicates the need, within the Cuban legal system, for a branch of law dealing with migration rights so as to make the legal system more efficient as a means of social reform. This suggests legislative review of all the current regulations. Each of the above points implies specific effects on Cuba’s migration policies and specifically its policy toward emigration, both of which involve important challenges in which national security cannot be relegated to a secondary plane. [Editors’ note: Since January 2013, Decreto-Ley No. 302 has eased travel restrictions for most citizens. It enables them to depart without an exit visa, to leave the country for up to two years, and to return without losing their property.]

Notes

From Debating U.S.-Cuban Relations: Shall We Play Ball?, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez, Rafael Hernández, and Lorena G. Barberia (New York: Routledge, 2011). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Antonio Aja Diaz, Al cruzar las fronteras (Havana: CEDEM-UNFPA, 2009), 108–10.

Antonio Aja Diaz, “Cuban Emigration in the 1990s,” Cuban Studies, no. 26, 2000, 1–25.

Aja Diaz, Al cruzar las fronteras, 199–212.

Aja Diaz, Al cruzar las fronteras, 201–10.

Study by Consuelo Martin and Antonio Aja Diaz, investigating the temporary return of Cubans living in the United States and Puerto Rico, in Fondos bibliográficos del Centro de Estudios de la Migración Internacional (CEMI) (Havana: Universidad de La Habana, 2004).

Antonio Aja Diaz, Consuelo Martin, and Magali Martin, “Estudios de las salidas ilegales por vía marítima desde Cuba hacia los Estados Unidos: Continuidad del análisis a partir de los acuerdos migratorios de 1994–1995,” in Fondos bibliográficos del Centro de Estudios de la Migración Internacional (CEMI) (Havana: Universidad de La Habana, 2006).

Aja Diaz, Al cruzar las fronteras, 199–212.

Martin and Aja Diaz, Fondos bibliográficos del Centro de Estudios de la Migración Internacional (CEMI), 24–40.

Aja Diaz, Al cruzar las fronteras, 129–31.

10.

Aja Diaz, Al cruzar las fronteras, 142.

11.

The first of the three very large scale migration episodes took place in 1965, leaving from Cuba’s Camaríoca harbor.

12.

Ruth Ellen Wasem, Cuban Migration to the United States: Policy and Trends, Congressional Research Service Report R40566 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2009).

13.

This is a policy applied by the Clinton and subsequent administrations to undocumented Cuban immigrants attempting to reach the United States by sea who are captured by the U.S. Coast Guard. When captured at sea, they are regarded as “wet foot” and are returned to the Cuban government as stipulated in the U.S.-Cuba migration agreements of 1994 and 1995. If they reach U.S. soil, they are regarded as “dry foot,” at which point they are not returned to Cuba and have the right to regularize their immigration status in the United States under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966.

14.

Tony Snow, press conference, Agence France Presse, August 2, 2006.

15.

“Con Castro enfermo, los Estados Unidos se preparan ante posíble ola migratoria,” Reuters, August 2, 2006.

16.

Snow, press conference.

Chapter 26

Dialogues within and between Cuba and Its Diaspora

Jorge I. Domínguez

Cuba and its diaspora have never had easy relations. The reason is no mystery. The Cuban diaspora, particularly the most renowned, have been organized and consolidated in opposition to the prevailing political regime in Cuba—a regime they are attempting to overthrow and replace with another. It was so during the independence wars of the last third of the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, just as much before as after the revolutionary triumph in 1959.

Throughout two centuries, Cuba and its diaspora have enriched the vocabulary of Spanish insults and opprobrium. A single word brings to mind the resentment of those who use it and the pain it seeks to provoke in the target. That word is “treason.” Treason, as many in Cuba have said for a long time, is the fundamental characteristic of the diaspora. Treason, also sometimes said in Cuba, is what characterizes all who lift up the slightest criticism against everyday circumstances. Treason, as many in the diaspora have said for a long time, characterizes all who have anything good to say about something that has been achieved in Cuba or that conflicts with the prevailing views among the more powerful social and political groups in the diaspora. In fact, the word “treason” is often the recourse of those, here or there, who lack arguments, logic, and evidence and who fear that their ignorance will be revealed if they come to a debate with people willing to respect each other.

The relationship between the diaspora and the country of origin is also complex because at various times some members of the diaspora, even when naturalized citizens of another country, manage to return to their country of origin. José Martí lived most of his adult life in the United States. The main leaders of the war-of-independence Cuban Revolutionary Party, Tomás Estrada Palma and Gonzalo de Quesada, were citizens of the United States. Similarly, generals of the Liberation Army, such as Francisco Carrillo, Pedro Betancourt, Emilio Núñez, and Carlos Roloff, among others, were U.S. citizens.^[1] Diaspora members were disposed to return only in 1898 as in 1959, when the previous regime was overthrown, and in both cases after a war.

The challenge for Cuba and its diaspora today is how to explore the possibility of a different relationship that does not require violence, much less a war; that does not prolong the verbal violence that brands anyone who disagrees as a “traitor”; that does not exclude those who for many reasons became citizens of another country; that values what those who call themselves Cuban have achieved, as much in Cuba as elsewhere in the world; and that deems those achievements as part of the same national heritage, that is, a relationship that accepts that the Cuban nation is found wherever there are those who feel Cuban.

A dialogue presupposes that there are at least two opinions sufficiently distinct, reasonable, and honorable on the same subject. A dialogue necessarily begins with respect for the other people. A dialogue comes from the perspective that all can learn from the exchange and debate among those who disagree.

The Cuban Government and the Possibility of Dialogue

During the past half century, dialogue has been uncommon among Cubans who disagree. Uninterrupted monologues have been the rhetorical norm of Cuban public expression. One laudable variant has been the instances, starting in the late 1970s and continuing from time to time to this day, in which the Cuban government has invited some people from the diaspora to participate in something that has been called a “dialogue.” Even so, with the exception of sessions in the late 1970s, invitations have been extended, principally or exclusively, to those who already agree with the Cuban government on fundamental questions, addressing an agenda also controlled by the government. Also useful are actions that have improved certain aspects of the relationship between the Cuban government and part of its diaspora, including consular services. But the purpose of these meetings has been to mobilize support for the government rather than engage in dialogue with those who hold divergent views.

The obstacles to dialogue or dialogues have existed on all sides in Cuba as well as in the diaspora. However, recent changes suggest the possibility of a different future. I am referring to publicly stated views of President Raúl Castro as well as the views of Miami Cubans interviewed in public opinion surveys.

A dialogue appears to be precisely what President Raúl Castro has in mind in several statements that deserve mention. Already in his first speech on the symbolic date, the July 26 state-of-the-nation speech in 2007, Raúl Castro spoke of the importance of avoiding the alleged unanimity that is alien to dialogue: “We do not aspire to unanimity, which is often fictitious, in this or any other subject.”^[2]

Raúl Castro broadened and deepened these criteria at the National Assembly meeting that closed 2007. The Cuban government and Communist Party should not fear, he said, when media sources, either political or governmental, in other countries use the opinions of some Cubans for their own purposes. He invited deputies—and all citizens—to disagree even with things he says himself: “I bring these ideas primarily to encourage you to think, not only you, comrade deputies, but all compatriots, the whole country. Some are personal opinions that should not be construed as immutable. These are issues that we have a duty to study and discuss in depth objectively.” Finally, in that same speech, Raúl Castro urged leaders and officials to respect free expression: “Whoever occupies a leadership position must know to listen and create the environment for others to express themselves with absolute freedom.”^[3]

Therefore, President Raúl Castro’s statement in his February 24, 2008, inauguration speech should have been no surprise: “There is no reason to fear differences in a society like ours,” adding, “From the deep interchange of divergent ideas come the best solutions.”^[4]

The Diaspora in South Florida and the Possibility of Dialogue

The Cuban diaspora can be found in Luanda, Moscow, Madrid, Caraças, and many other parts of the world, but the largest concentration of people who insist on calling themselves Cubans, outside of Cuba, resides in South Florida. This is also the leading diaspora in conflict with the Cuban government. That Floridian diaspora has been changing, and some of the changes are signaled by the results of public opinion polls conducted since 1991 by researchers associated with Florida International University (FIU) and its Cuban Research Institute.

The question most relevant to our topic is this: “Are you for or against a national dialogue among Cuban exiles, Cuban dissidents, and representatives of the Cuban government?” In March 1991, six out of ten people were opposed to such a dialogue. In March 2007, only one out of three was opposed to such a dialogue. In table 26.1, we see that the experience of the so-called Special Period in the early 1990s in Cuba had no impact on the views of the Cuban diaspora in South Florida with respect to this issue. The most important changes occur after 1995, suggesting that the reasons for these changes of opinion in the diaspora are endogenous to it.

Percentage in Favor of or Against a National Dialogue among Cubans
	1991	1995	2004	2007
In favor	39.8	40.5	55.6	65.0
Against	59.2	59.5	44.4	35.0

Source: Guillermo Grenier and Hugh Gladwin, “2007 FIU Cuba Poll,” http://www2.fiu.edu/~ipor/Cuba8/Cuba.Comp.htm.

One source of change was the political diversification of the diaspora in Miami, evident in the change of leadership in the Cuban American National Foundation, with Jorge Más Santos presiding since the death of his father, Jorge Más Canosa; the fracturing of this organization and the modification of its platform under its new leadership; and the emergence of new organizations sponsoring the debate instead of resorting to violence, such as the Cuba Study Group, headed by Carlos Saladrigas. Demographic changes in the diaspora were another source of renewal due to the new wave of immigrants that started arriving in 1995.

Based on a survey carried out in 2007, table 26.2 compares the opinions regarding the desirability of a national dialogue among Cubans organized by date of emigration. Note that a clear majority of what is sometimes called the historical exiles, that is, those who migrated between 1959 and 1964, remained opposed to a national dialogue in 2007, while four out of five people who migrated after 1995 were in favor of that dialogue.

Percentage in 2007 in Favor of or Against a National Dialogue between Cubans by Migration Period
	Emigrated 1959–1964	Emigrated 1995–2007
In favor	43.1	79.4
Against	56.9	20.6

Source: Guillermo Grenier and Hugh Gladwin, “2007 FIU Cuba Poll,” http://www2.fiu.edu/~ipor/Cuba8/Cuba.Comp.htm.

On the basis of these results, one can also observe changes in opinion about related topics. For example, in 1993, half of the respondents in Miami already agreed that companies should be able to sell pharmaceuticals to Cuba. In 2007, the proportion in favor of such sales increased to seven out of ten people. In 1993, only 23 percent favored food sales to Cuba, but in 2007, the proportion favoring food sales nearly tripled, totaling 62 percent.

The proportion of Cubans and Cuban Americans in South Florida in favor of the continuation of the U.S. embargo applied to Cuba for half a century was almost unchanged in the most difficult years of the “Special Period”; it was 87 percent in favor of its continuation in 1991 and persisted at 83 percent in 1995. However, this proportion has been declining steadily since then. It was 66 percent in 2004, 58 percent in 2007, and 45 percent in 2008.^[5]

An explanation for the changes of opinion in relation to the embargo, apparent since the mid-1990s, is the date of emigration. I used data from the survey carried out in 2008. While in that year 65 percent of those who emigrated before 1980 still supported the continuation of the U.S. embargo, only 29 percent of those who emigrated after 1998 were supportive.

This difference in migration period has direct political consequences. Most who were U.S. citizens and were registered to vote still favored the continuation of the embargo, while most of those who had not registered to vote opposed its continuation. Members of Congress who represent districts in South Florida, therefore, responded to this majority opinion among U.S. citizens of Cuban origin, who still favor the embargo. The passage of time is likely to affect these results.

It would be a mistake to think, however, that with the mere passage of time the option of dialogue will triumph over violent options, according to the opinions in Miami. The same polls have been asking whether respondents are for or against military action by the exile community to overthrow the government of Cuba. The proportion in favor of the use of force has changed little. In 1991, 76 percent of respondents supported military action by exiles against the Cuban government, and in 2007, 71 percent held the same opinion. In this case, moreover, the differences of opinion between the respondents, depending on the time of emigration, are negligible, as indicated in table 26.3. According to the survey carried out in 2007, about seven out of ten respondents who immigrated between 1959 and 1964 as well as those who emigrated since 1995 support military action by exiles against the government of Cuba.

Percentage in 2007 in Favor of or Against Military Action by Exiles to Overthrow the Cuban Government by Migration Period
	Emigrated 1959–1964	Emigrated 1995–2007
In favor	74.0	71.8
Against	26.0	28.2

Source: Guillermo Grenier and Hugh Gladwin, “2007 FIU Cuba Poll,” http://www2.fiu.edu/~ipor/Cuba8/Cuba.Comp.htm.

How can we reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable data? My interpretation is that the vast majority of the Cuban diaspora in South Florida is in favor of a fundamental change in Cuba regardless of the tools necessary to achieve that goal. That is, the end justifies the means. The same thing that justifies a national dialogue, removing the embargo and sales of medicines and food, would justify military action, an option that has existed for half a century for the Florida diaspora and remains a permissible option for them. What is seen beginning in the mid-1990s is, for the first time, an alternative option that favors peaceful dialogue as an instrument and seeks to use other means to achieve the same end.

For those who are opposed to any fundamental change in Cuba, this variation in the opinions of the diaspora in Miami is irrelevant. For those who favor some or many fundamental changes in Cuba, the political transformation within the diaspora has great importance. Even for the government of Cuba, focusing on mere tactics, it should be helpful to cultivate and promote the peaceful options more than the violent ones. In any case, the option of dialogue among the Miami diaspora is contingent; that is, it prevails only in a context in which Cuba is on a path toward change.

Who Talks to Whom and about What?

The title of this work is “dialogues within and between Cuba and its diaspora.” The utility or the possibility of dialogue is not the exclusive property of someone or some entity, official or private. I presume it is good to promote dialogue in Cuba, dialogues within the diaspora, and various dialogues between those residing inside and outside of Cuba. Family travel, now easier thanks to the measures taken by the U.S. government in 2009 and accepted by the Cuban government, has already generated multiple dialogues within many Cuban families. These valuable dialogues represent a breakthrough in communications. It is equally essential, however, that multiple dialogues not confined to members of a single family be generated.

Decades passed before the first meeting took place between priests and lay Roman Catholic Cubans living inside and outside of Cuba. The first meeting, which was only for priests, was held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1997, partly to discuss the differences of opinion that had arisen about the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba, which were heightened in the months preceding the visit of Pope John Paul II. The participation of the laity in these meetings began in 2000. These meetings, especially the first ones, have not been lacking political and ideological tension, but that is precisely the value of these dialogues—namely, that they facilitate overcoming differences.^[6]

In the diaspora, there is much to learn about Cuba. It is still common to hear the denial of the possibility that Cuba has built an educated populace, with an extensive and effective public health system of outstanding quality. There remains little recognition in Miami for the social transformations that have occurred in Cuba during the past half century and the significant achievements in Cuba not yet seen in the United States. I cite only one of these, that is, in Cuba but not yet in the United States: differences by skin pigmentation are negligible in infant mortality or primary school enrollment rates. That Cuban achievement deserves recognition and applause.^[7]

Similarly, it is reasonable that some Cuban diaspora members may wish to participate in some open, legal, and recognized way in the production of culture, society, economy, and other aspects of public life in the country. And they would also like to discuss these issues.

Some issues are unavoidable for any serious dialogue between Cuba and the United States or between Cubans from anywhere. One is the use of impermissible methods in relations between human beings. The shared history between Cuba and the United States and between Cubans living in both countries indicates that, unfortunately, there is much to discuss.

On April 14, 1966, Granma published an article on the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP). The article said that one purpose of UMAP was to “prevent [the incarcerated] tomorrow from becoming parasites, unable to produce anything, or criminals.” While the article stated that, in UMAP camps, “the goal . . . is not to punish,” we know well that the most common experience of those who were sent against their will to UMAP camps was precisely punishment, many charged with being homosexuals, others for having religious faith, and some for several reasons. Many were victims of abuse and mistreatment. I cite this Granma article because it is the only thing I found that, even though its intention was to justify UMAP camps, also notes that “some officers . . . overreacted. For these reasons, they were court-martialed, in some cases they were demoted and in others expelled from the Armed Forces.”^[8] The fact that this article is the only one that I found does not indicate, unfortunately, that it was a unique event.

An important part of the dialogue must be to recognize the necessity of including not only the experiences of the UMAP camps but also the experiences in prison, particularly in the 1960s, when in 1965 then Prime Minister Fidel Castro, in answering a journalist’s question about “political prisoners,” indicated that in Cuba there were about 20,000 people in prison who had been convicted by revolutionary tribunals.^[9] It would be desirable for the historical archives of the nation to be examined by those who wish, not only the files from the colonial era but also those relevant to the history of the past half century.

The government of Cuba and Cubans living in Cuba also have legitimate reasons to complain. Morally unacceptable methods were used by both the U.S. government and some Cuban exiles who fought, mostly though not exclusively, during the 1960s against the government of Cuba. At the beginning of that period, the U.S. government authorized a campaign against the government of Cuba that we would now call “state terrorism.” While the best-known means were the various attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and Operation Mongoose, there was indeed a vast campaign against civilian and military installations in Cuba and against other facilities that mainly generated damage to the civilian population. The Kennedy administration authorized terrorist attacks that have been documented, among others, against a railway bridge, an oil storage tank, an oil refinery, a power plant, a molasses warehouse, a sawmill, and a floating crane.^[10]

In over a thousand pages of documents declassified by the U.S. State Department Office of the Historian covering the years between 1961 and 1963, I have found only one quote from a U.S. official concerned about the immorality of such a policy. In September 1963, an official of the National Security Council, Gordon Chase, criticized this policy of the U.S. government on various grounds, including that these actions “kill innocent civilians.”^[11]

This policy of state terrorism worked precisely because many Cuban exiles were not simply agents or instruments of that policy but also the architects and shared creators.^[12] Some of these Cuban exile groups persisted in using these methods even after the U.S. government stopped sponsoring this policy of state terrorism.

Another issue of importance for dialogue, both internally and transnationally, is the matter of property ownership and U.S. economic sanctions against the government of Cuba. Some economists in Cuba, as well as the Cuban government, have attempted to estimate the extraordinary damage caused by the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. government during the past half century. The U.S. government has done the same in relation to the expropriations carried out by the government of Cuba, mainly between 1959 and 1961. The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission determined that the value of such expropriated property in the late 1960s was U.S.$1.8 billion, of which 90 percent was for the property of companies. In 2004, the U.S. government recalculated the value of these properties, adding accrued interest, and determined that the figure was more than U.S.$7 billion.^[13]

The resolution of these claims has not been discussed by the two governments. Economic disputes of this kind, however, have been a normal part of negotiations during the past century between countries located on various continents. Those differences have been resolved in multiple and complex cases. It does not seem impossible, therefore, that reasonable negotiations in the future would succeed in resolving these claims between Cuba and the United States.

Property claims that directly affect people are more complex, and among all of them, none are more painful than those affecting residences. Many have lived or live in buildings that once belonged to another person whose property was involuntarily expropriated and who now lives in the United States. It is not easy to proceed in these cases. It is not merely an economic or a property matter but also something intimately personal in which the rights of current and former residents should be taken into account.

My guide—and the conclusion of my presentation, not only on this issue—is a comment from my now deceased maternal grandmother. In honor of the end of the wars of the nineteenth century, her parents, my great-grandparents, in January 1899 gave her the name of Clara Star of Peace, and she lived in accordance with her name. Eighty years later, in January 1979, I visited Havana for the first time in nearly nineteen years, and in a spare moment I walked to the house that had been hers. At that time, the house belonged to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). Now I quote what I included in the first chapter of my book Cuba Today about the conversation with my grandmother the next time I saw her:

“My grandmother never complained when, on my return to the United States, after a kiss, I told her who occupied her house and showed her a photograph that identified it as belonging to the FMC. On the contrary, with a sigh she said she would have preferred it to remain her home but, after a third slower sigh, she told me that since it could not be so, it was not bad that it was occupied by the Federation of Cuban Women.” My grandmother, “in expressing her generosity, with sweetness and elegance, had tears streaming down her face, tears that were also mine.”^[14]

The issues are unavoidable. The dialogues within and between Cuba and its diaspora are not impossible. They are already unpostponable. They will develop with great success if all behave with the generosity of my grandmother. And a better future for Cuba—and to all who consider themselves Cuban—depends on that success.

Notes

From Espacio Laical (Havana), March 2010 [Translation from the Spanish by the editors with the assistance of Uri Lerner.] Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Raúl Castro Ruz, “Trabajar con sentido crítico, creador, sin anquilosamientos ni esquematismos, Discurso en el acto central por el LIV aniversario del asalto al Cuartel Moncada, Camagüey, 26 July 2007,” Granma, July 27, 2007.

Raúl Castro Ruz, “¡Y a trabajar duro!, Intervención ante la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, 28 December 2007,” Granma, December 29, 2007.

Raúl Castro Ruz, “Discurso en la sesión constitutiva de la VII Legislatura de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular,” La Habana, February 24, 2008, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/rauldiscursos/index2.html

Guillermo Grenier and Hugh Gladwin, “2007 FIU Cuba Poll,” http://www2.fiu.edu/~ipor/Cuba8/Cuba.Comp.htm; Institute for Public Opinion Research, Florida International University, Brookings Institution, and Cuba Study Group, “2008 Cuba/US Transition Poll,” http://www2.fiu.edu/~ipor/Cuba8/Cuba.Comp.htm (accessed April 19, 2010).

See Orlando Márquez, “10 años de encuentros eclesiales,” Palabra Nueva 16, no. 167 (October 2007): 25–26.

Jacob Meerman, “Poverty and Mobility in Low-Status Minorities: The Cuban Case in International Perspective,” World Development 29, no. 9 (2001): 1457–75.

Granma, April 14, 1966, 8.

Lee Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 230.

10.

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 11, 1961–1963 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), 761, 846, 887.

11.

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 11, 1961–1963, 864.

12.

An analysis of the documentation on the full relationship between the U.S. government and the Cuban exile groups can be found in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, comps., Politics of Illusion (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

13.

U.S. Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, Report to the President, May 2004, http://www.cafc.gov/documents/organization/67963.pdf, 208.

14.

Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba hoy: Analizando su pasado, imaginando su futuro (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2006), 13. In the original version, there was an error: the second “no” was omitted from the second quote.

Chapter 27

Cuba, a Country with a Broken Heart

Leonardo Padura Fuentes

For Cubans, baseball is not a sport, much less a game: it is almost a religion, and taken very seriously. Baseball was brought to Cuba around the mid-nineteenth century by young men whose families had sent them to study in cities in the United States. Back then, “el juego de pelota,” as it was called in Cuba, had crucial importance in different areas of the national spirituality: as a non-conformist social activity that indicated a desire for progress (United States’ modernity in contrast with the backwardness of Spain—the former colonial power); as a manifestation of national unity, because very soon it was played all over the island; and as a means of bringing together social classes and ethnic groups (because Afro-Cubans and peasants soon became devotees of the game). It was also a performance in which sport and culture came together, thanks to the entertainment provided by “orquestas de danzones” (bands playing the Cuban national dance), the design of baseball teams’ uniforms, modernist pennants and graphics, and the artistic and journalistic literature devoted to commentating on and promoting the sport. For Cubans, baseball has been the most played and most beloved of sports, the one that has given rise to the most legends and has carried the greatest social weight. In recent years it has also been (as it could not avoid being) a battleground for some of the most critical political, social, and economic conflicts taking place in Cuban society. Several dozen Cuban players have taken the risk of being branded “deserters” or “traitors” by official rhetoric, deciding to depart the island to try their fortunes in other leagues (especially in U.S. Major League Baseball). This has caused a commotion in Cuban society and sport, which cling to the models and politics of amateur sports followed in the socialist countries. The departure of these players from the country has had three basic consequences. One, for sport: a drain on regional and national teams, since a “deserter” is banned from returning to represent his or her club or country at any official event. Another, economic: while athletes on the island earn the salaries of “amateurs,” those doing well abroad can sign contracts worth (many) millions of dollars, and even those whose performance is less outstanding can earn at least several hundred thousand dollars a year. And third, political: the Cuban government, without essentially modifying its sports policy, has begun to allow baseball players to be contracted for professional tournaments abroad (although not for the Major Leagues). The perpetual tension of baseball politics allows this sport to express, in a quantitative way, the distance between Cubans living on the island and those who have left it in search of new horizons. Its overwhelming influence in Cuban society and spirituality transform it, together with its cultural expressions, into one of the facets of Cuban life where any moves toward reconciliation and communication have special connotations, capable of influencing every order of life, including politics. Recently a Cuban businessman living in Miami had the bold idea of holding two or three baseball games in the southern U.S. state of Florida among retired players of Cuba’s most emblematic club of the last 50 years, the Havana Industriales. The novelty was that they would play on the other side of the Florida Strait and the intended participants would be former players living both within Cuba and outside the country—that is, the so-called deserters. The first step would be obtaining permission from the Cuban authorities for the players to meet and play against their former teammates. Without official confirmation, it was understood that permission had been granted, but silently, as if nothing were going on. The second step was up to the other side of the Strait: would Cuban exiles accept the presence of Cubans living in Cuba at a public event? From the outset, former players living outside of the country were favorably disposed to the idea, to the satisfaction of most of the Cuban exiles, who looked forward to seeing their old idols again. However, a small but powerful minority of the exiles were against the proposal. That is when the event promoters’ tortuous ordeal began, as in addition to receiving threats of all kinds, they have had to wander the city of Miami looking for a baseball field to hold the matches in. But the promoters vow that the event will be held, “even if it is in a cane field.” To lack the capacity to see the momentous social and political significance for Cuba and its future of having émigré players and those who have remained in the country fraternize on a baseball field is an attitude of political blindness. But I believe, above all, it is an expression of a fracture of the Cuban national soul that is so deep, so charged with resentment, that not even something as sacred as baseball can easily mend it. Too many years of deadlock, hatred, desire for revenge, and exchanges of insults and abuse (those who left the country are “gusanos” or worms, turncoats, traitors; those who stayed behind are communists, oppressors, Castro accomplices, etc.) have accumulated and still muddy the present and future of the different fragments of the broken heart of this Caribbean island nation. [Editors’ note: The teams ultimately played each other in Tampa and Ft. Lauderdale at the end of August 2013.]

Note

From “Cuba, a Country with a Broken Heart,” InterPress Service, August 5, 2013.