When I started writing this memoir in 2013, I had two purposes in mind. The first was to claim that an improbable future was rising before our blinded eyes: that normalization between the United States and Cuba would take place in president Barack Obama’s second term of office and before the deaths of either president Raúl Castro or his older sibling Fidel. No one believed me at the time. Even I doubted it would happen. Then it did. On December 17, 2014, the change I had foreseen was announced by the presidents of both countries—after fifty-five years of antagonism.
The second purpose was more personal as well as historic: my quest to understand the long history of the sixties generation through the prism of the Cuban Revolution and the American response. The same turbulent times gave birth to social movements in both countries. Third world revolution was disrupting the comfortable status quo of American-backed dictators like Fulgencio Batista in Havana, just as a civil rights revolution was breaking up the segregationist order in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and Harlem. The bearded ones in the Sierra Maestra touched our bearded ones in the Haight-Ashbury. When Fidel visited the United Nations in 1960, he electrified Harlem, Harvard, and Hollywood. As a student at the University of Michigan, I went on a date to a Fair Play for Cuba meeting before the Students for a Democratic Society was born. No one could have foreseen then that the triumphs, traumas, and tribulations between our two nations would continue for another fifty-five years.
The normalization of relations could not have been more timely. President Obama and Cuban president Raúl Castro have made it part of their legacy. It preceded Fidel Castro’s passing, about which rumors circulated constantly, as either having already happened, or being imminent.1 It permitted and made much more likely that the president of the United States would be present at his funeral, a long-overdue sign of respect and one that is symbolic of this new and better chapter of US-Cuban history. (Conversely, for President Obama to have been among the only world leaders without the option of attending such an important world event would have been, in my view, shameful and embarrassing.)
While the prediction of normalization has come true, the larger story of the US-Cuban relationship is still in danger of being lost in time, or frozen in stereotypes. But at least now we can hope for a very different kind of future, all the while exploring the lessons of the past that brought us here.
I chose as my partner in developing this book Ricardo Alarcón, a Cuban who, like myself, was a radical student leader almost six decades ago, Ricardo at the University of Havana while I was at the University of Michigan and editor of the Daily, both of us philosophy graduate students who dropped our studies to immerse ourselves in causes for which we were willing to die. He became a top leader of the Cuban Revolution, foreign minister, United Nations representative, and president of the National Assembly. My own path led through forty years of social activism, ten arrests on charges of conspiracy and civil disobedience, eighteen years in the California legislature, and a long span of writing and teaching. The radical movements to which I belonged were able to change much about American culture, but failed to achieve political power because of the assassinations of national leaders, which destroyed our full potential as a movement and as a country. I stood in an honor guard besides Robert F. Kennedy’s casket, wearing an olive green Cuban army cap. It would not have bothered Bobby, who evolved from Fidel Castro’s early enemy to a strong supporter of dialogue and coexistence.
Think of this book as an archeological dig into decades of lessons worth studying and debating lest they recur. Only by understanding our common past will we understand why the normalization breakthrough happened, and where the intertwined Cuban-US relationship may go from here. This book, which began as a prediction, can be read as both a history and a prologue.
THE DAY OF LAZARUS IN CUBA
In Cuba, December 17 ends a three-day religious pilgrimage to honor Lazarus, the poor beggar afflicted with leprosy in the Gospel of Luke and in an older Afro-Cuban legend. Jesus restored Lazarus to life after arriving just after Lazarus had died. The milagro, or miracle story, is about having the power to transcend death, and is memorialized by several thousand Cubans each year who carry themselves in pain of one kind or another on a walk to Rincón, twenty-five miles from Havana. Pope John Paul II visited them in 1998 to identify with their experience. Fortunately, the Cuban Revolution’s health programs mostly wiped out leprosy, which had ravaged the island since the eighteenth century. In 1962, the old Rincón leprosorium was replaced by a dermatology hospital.2
On this December 17, 2014, a new “miracle” was proclaimed by thousands of Cubans in their homes and on street corners. Precisely at noon, in simultaneous televised press conferences, Raúl Castro and Barack Obama were announcing the end of another kind of affliction and launching the official healing of relations between the two countries.
In a world accustomed to the usual sorts of modest diplomatic tinkering, the December 17 announcement between the United States and Cuba was stunning:
Obama could not lift the rest of the embargo because that power was transferred to Congress in the 1996 Helms-Burton legislation signed by President Clinton, who would come to regret that giveaway of executive authority. Clinton’s concession enabled the small bloc of right-wing Cuban Americans in Congress and their vociferous lobby to gain a monopoly over Cuban policy. The Cuban Right’s goal, written into federal law, prohibited US recognition of any Cuban government led by a Castro, and required the establishment of a market economy and multiparty political system on the island—among other onerous conditions—before the embargo and diplomatic isolation of Cuba could end. In short, regime change would have to be imposed first, a US demand that had lasted through fifty-five years without achieving its stated goal.
A VICTORY FOR CUBA
Though it wasn’t acknowledged as such in the mainstream discourse, the December 17 agreement was a victory for the Cuban Revolution. Obama was recognizing the Castro- and Communist-led government that previous American presidents had refused to accept or had actively tried to overthrow. Obama’s easing of travel and economic restrictions would hollow out the embargo from within by allowing more dollars to flow to the island. His lifting of the terrorism designation would permit Cuba to receive loans from the International Monetary Fund. The upgrading of the Interest Section building in Havana to an American embassy would symbolize, and help normalize, the new reality. The scaffolding of the embargo would remain on the books for a time, but the content would be hugely diminished. American demands for free elections and human rights were no longer stumbling blocks to improved diplomatic relations, but could be taken up with a much reduced external threat. Overall, the agreement codified respect for and recognition of the sovereign national rights for which the Cuban revolutionaries had fought.
Of course, the world context had changed. The Cold War was over, the Soviet Union gone. The Russians were sending aid to Cuba but so were many other countries in the world, especially Brazil and Venezuela. The United States was isolated diplomatically on the Cuban question at the United Nations where Cuba enjoyed almost unanimous backing. Many of the Cuban-supported guerrillas of the sixties had become political leaders in the new Latin America. Globalization required that Cuba adjust to the market system and the Internet while still pursuing its socialist model in health care, education, and humanitarian missions abroad, as it has in the battle against Ebola. Whatever political transition is to occur in Cuba, it is likely to be cushioned and facilitated by regional diplomacy, not by American overseers.
American public opinion had changed too, with a significant majority favoring diplomatic relations and lifting of the embargo, even in states that the right-wing Cubans long have considered their strongholds, like Florida and New Jersey. The agreement was denounced by the Cuban American bloc in Congress and most of their Republican backers as a feckless sellout by Barack Obama to communism. The critics much preferred the Bush era when Cuban Americans couldn’t travel home or send remittances on the grounds that their spending was subsidizing a totalitarian state. They said Obama was bailing out a dysfunctional state that would have fallen in the near future, a prediction heard since 1960. Otherwise intelligent conservatives like the Wall Street Journal ’s Peggy Noonan became quite addled, dismissing Cuba as a “defeated foe,” a “floating prison,” with a dead economy.3 These diatribes simply ignored the fact that, despite its serious problems, Cuba is regularly ranked in the upper tier of the United Nations Human Development Index for its education, health, and welfare programs, and enjoys strong diplomatic and economic ties with most of Latin America, Europe, and Russia.
Obama answered that the previous US policies had failed, and that greater diplomatic and economic engagement would draw more Cubans into a friendlier attitude toward the United States. Obama could also point to the prospect of vastly improved relations between the United States and Central and Latin America as a direct outcome of December 17. There would never again be humiliating 188-2 votes in the United Nations against America’s Cuba policy. With a rising immigrant rights movement changing American domestic politics from within, it is becoming possible to embark on a constructive new foreign policy toward the Americas not seen since the Good Neighbor policies of president Franklin Roosevelt in the thirties. As Ricardo argues in these chapters, the third world is no longer a remote zone of Yankee exploitation but now has “penetrated” the American working class as the result of immigration trends spurred by trade policies that uproot indigenous people and send them on their journeys to the North. The new relationship will be on display at the Summit of the Americas in Panama in March 2015, where Obama and Raúl Castro will both be present.
QUESTIONS FOR THE LEFT
The December 17 agreement also jarred some on the Left, domestically and internationally, who shared the Right’s conviction that US policy would never change, it being imperialist at the core. In this cynical view, the United States still wanted regime change, but was trying a new approach. “Now they will suffocate them in their embrace,” the New York Times quoted one Russian minister.4 When I first began predicting the coming normalization in 2013, a few Cuba supporters criticized me as being either wrong or opportunistic. I repeatedly heard moaning that Cuba soon would have a Starbucks on every street corner and lose its “charm” under a flood of crass North American tourists. But as Ricardo says in our interviews, the purpose of the revolution was not to prevent Starbucks or sunbathing Yankees. There is nothing in Marxism-Leninism, he says wryly, requiring that barbershops or restaurants be state owned. And as for the flood of “decadent” tourists, he notes that Cuba received one million visitors from Canada alone last year—without causing any Cubans to bow to the Queen of England. The Western tourists come to relax, buy rum and cigars, and enjoy the beaches in winter, not to demonstrate on behalf of capitalism.
There remain heavily contested issues between the United States, Cuba, and Latin America, of course, but now these will play out along political and economic lines instead of through military confrontation or secret information wars. Chief among these is the Americans’ continuing embrace of what is called neoliberalism in Latin America, or the dismantling of New Deal-style government programs in education, health care, pensions, welfare, and environmental protection, in favor of an approach favoring privatization of markets. Starting several years ago, the Cubans began carefully to open their state-controlled economy to private investment and enterprise. But like most governments in Latin America, the Cubans believe in a leading role for the state in economic development and social programs.5 With the United States suffering from increased economic inequality, it is possible there will be growing convergence between a Renéwed American populist Left and a new Latin America, including Cuba, that considers itself much more than a sweatshop haven or a storehouse of raw materials for American corporations.
There also will be conflicts over the continued role of the US-supported dissidents on the island, a small faction numerically who are widely supported by the human rights community and the Catholic Church. The December 17 agreement released fifty-three dissidents from Cuban prisons, the number listed by Amnesty International. One reason the dissidents have been maligned in Cuba has been their alignment with the interests of the United States and funding by US agencies or foundations. Most of them are seen, correctly, as recipients of US support for regime change and the chaos that would follow. Now with relations normalizing, the dissidents’ future is in question. They are demanding formal recognition in the forthcoming Summit of the Americas, giving them status as the legitimate Cuban opposition. That institutionalized role is likely to be rejected, but a much larger space is opening up for dissent and debate among mainstream Cubans as US hostility recedes. How the traditionalists in the Communist Party and state bureaucracies respond to that larger thaw will partly determine how the drama is played out.
DECEMBER 17 IN HAVANA: GUARDED JOY
“There’s joy in the street here,” wrote José Pertierra when I emailed to ask where he was on Lazarus Day. José is a Cuban American human rights lawyer living in Washington and married to a key journalist in Havana. His son Andrés, who attended philosophy graduate school in Cuba, was my main research assistant on this book.
JOSÉ PERTIERRA: Perfect strangers hug each other with tears in their eyes. Although the [Helms-Burton] legislation is still on the books and despite Obama wanting to stick Cuba with Torricelli’s Track 2 on Viagra, the blockade is over.6 The executive is legislating travel, commerce, and banking. It’s over, Tom, it’s over. It’s up to Cuba to manage its way through these massive changes.
I told him how sorry I was that two close friends, Leonard Weinglass and Saul Landau, longtime supporters of Cuba, had both passed away in the two years before this moment. Like many thousands around the world, their support for Cuba extended over many decades. Len was a close friend whom I encouraged to take on the legal challenge of the Cuban Five; Saul, a writer and filmmaker, made contributions to my research through his long association with Cuba’s leaders.
JOSÉ: When I was listening to the statements by Raúl and Obama with Cubans and Americans side by side who had been fighting for decades to end the blockade, I saw Lenny and Saul in my mind. It was Lenny who first and best brought the story of the Cuban Five to the American public, and it was Saul who introduced the Cuban people to the American people through his films and presentations. All of us there in the conference hall at noon saw their faces and heard their voices as Obama and Raúl spoke.
Ricardo would express the same sentiments in the following days, a window into the de facto closeness and solidarity developed between many Cubans and Americans over five decades in spite of the embargo and travel bans:
RICARDO ALARCÓN: How could I forget Lenny when I asked him to take on the main role in defense of the Five and he asked for nothing in exchange, and only responded by thanking me? And his visits to the comrades in the prisons and his speeches and declarations in and beyond the United States? And his tireless, meticulous, and profound work in the appellate process, all of that in spite of his gravely fragile illness?
How to forget that on his last visit to Cuba, as I was taking him in an emergency to the doctor, he demanded to return because he needed to meet with Adriana? Or when he returned to New York and needed surgery without delay, he refused to be admitted to the hospital until he could speak with Gerardo? And when he finally went, it was to the South Bronx where he felt happy together with the poor, with the immigrants, the persecuted, his “old clients” as he liked to joke when he answered those who scolded him for not being in a more sophisticated medical center.
How can I forget his last photograph, in his last stages, reviewing the Habeas Corpus papers of the Five?
Long before Len Weinglass—my closest friend for years—took up the case of the Cuban Five, many thousands of young Americans journeyed to Cuba in violation of the US travel ban to cut sugarcane and open themselves to the realities of Cuba. Thousands were harassed, searched, had their articles confiscated by customs agents enforcing the ban and blockade. Many were attacked, bombed, or threatened by Cuban exiles in America. Others, like Len and Saul Landau, were subjected to campaigns of ridicule and dismissal for their professional work in law and filmmaking. On December 17, all that pent-up frustration burst in a moment of euphoria. It all seemed worth the wait.
And what of Ricardo Alarcón, the one who played such a leading role in it all?
He was in Havana, recovering from two cataract operations. His wife, Margarita, whom he met in the romantic days of revolution, had passed away in 2008 from a long struggle with Parkinson’s. His family now consists of his daughter, Margarita, and her ten-year-old son, Ricardito, or Ricky. He lives alone in an apartment walled with books in many languages. He is retired from his many positions, though he keeps a small office at the presidential palace under the auspices of Raúl. His official entourage is gone. His closest aide, a person privy to all his meetings, is in a Cuban prison after being arrested for espionage just before these interviews began in 2012.7
Every few days Ricardo goes out with old friends for drinks and conversation. He had become the face of an old regime, sometimes the subject of snide criticism by the dissidents and American Cuba watchers like Ann Louise Bardach, whose gossipy books are considered authoritative in the American media. When I met Bardach in her Santa Barbara home a few weeks before December 17, she couldn’t figure out how Alarcón had survived so many decades and, in her account, so many purges. I told her that perhaps the problem lay in her model of Cuba, which reduced the island’s history to internecine family vendettas, bloodletting, and executions. I assume that Ricardo’s long experience is of some value. That was also the view of Cuba’s current UN representative, Rodolfo Reyes, when I interviewed him earlier in 2014. “Ricardo Alarcón is regarded as one of our few Cuban experts on the United States with a long memory. His insights are unique and valuable.”
When I caught up with Ricardo in the hours after December 17 by email, his immediate answer was typically terse and to the point:
RICARDO: I was at my office and watched the announcements as they came out. I was aware that something was going on but was not personally involved in the last talks that were kept in strict secrecy as they should have been. I was convinced [this was going to happen] because I knew that our three Cuban [prisoners] had been taken out of their American prisons.
Now a party has broken out in Cuba and far beyond that hasn’t ended yet.
He invited me back to Cuba, saying, “I think it may be useful in these days when many are involved in the rewriting of history.” About a week later, on December 26, Ricardo’s first published observations appeared:
It took courage. Obama is attempting to assure his place in history with immigration reform and now with the start of a different relationship with Cuba. Perhaps he will try other reforms as well. For that he deserves respect and support.8
I found his daughter Margarita by phone in New York City where she was intent on taking her ten-year-old ice skating for the first time. She had grown up in New York during the years that Ricardo was stationed at the United Nations, making her a cultural hybrid of sorts. I was very sorry, I told her, that her mother hadn’t lived to see this day.
MARGARITA ALARCÓN: I thought about her a lot yesterday. She would have loved to see this.
Margarita then spoke lovingly of the three Cuban prisoners released as part of the December 17 deal. Virtually every Cuban knows the Cuban Five as family after so many years’ of high-profile detention.
MARGARITA: In any event, Gerardo [Hernández] is out and free. Tony [Guererro] is spunky and so much smarter than I ever imagined, and Ramon [Labañino] is a darling.
But she also struck a more cautious note than José Pertierra.
MARGARITA: Cubans have seen this before. Well, not like this. But there are deep memories of hoping for change and those hopes being dashed. Carter promised normalization but it was stopped for Cold War reasons.9 We got an Interest Section, then came Reagan. Under Clinton there was an effort but then came Helms-Burton. Now it’s Obama, and we’ll have to see if it lasts or not.”
Over our lifetimes, Ricardo Alarcón and I both have been enthusiasts of the radical American sociologist C. Wright Mills, who visited Cuba and wrote the best-selling polemic Listen, Yankee (1960) before his death from heart failure in 1962. I have on my desk a yellowing edition of Mills’s book with an inscription by Ricardo from 1968, a time of cresting revolutionary dreams. Mills’s thesis was that the US leaders’ historic failure to listen to the voices of the original Cuban revolutionaries was at the heart of a tragic misunderstanding.
It may be that Barack Obama is the first Yankee president to listen.
HOW DECEMBER 17 HAPPENED.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE “CUBAN FIVE”
The December 17 agreement was long in preparation, but would not have occurred without a prisoner exchange that was orchestrated with extreme secrecy and care. On the one hand, the Obama administration badly wanted the Cubans to release Alan Gross, a US contractor, from the Cuban prison where he had been held for five years. If Obama couldn’t get a single American aid worker out of a Cuban jail, his critics argued, it proved his fecklessness as commander in chief. Gross, it turned out, was not your everyday handyman distributing consumer appliances to the Jewish community and Masonic lodges. His funder, the Agency for International Development (USAID), was channeling tens of millions of dollars of US funds into covert “democracy programs,” in this case highly sophisticated communications equipment that would allow Cubans to secretly work in undetectable Wi-Fi hotspots without the government’s knowledge. The program was a fiasco like many others, infiltrated by Cuban informants and intelligence agents. But Gross persisted, taking five trips in 2009 alone. He knew he was into “risky business,” according to notes he supplied his employers. He was arrested by the Cubans on December 3, 2009, not long after the US Supreme Court had refused to take up an appeal in the case of the Cuban Five. There seemed to be a connection.
To achieve the December 17 agreement, Cuba and the United States first had to negotiate a de facto swap of Alan Gross for the Cuban Five, three of whom remained in US prisons, a resolution which the United States government, both political parties, and the mainstream media initially and unanimously denounced as absurd.10 The Five, whose story will be recounted at length in this book and whose defense was led for years by Ricardo Alarcón, were charged with conspiring to spy on Cuban exile forces who were training in Florida swamps and flying on provocative missions into Cuban airspace on harassment maneuvers. After numerous warnings from Cuba which the Clinton administration failed to act on, the Cuban government ordered a shoot-down on February 24, 1996, killing four pilots. That affair ended any possibility of rapprochement and led directly to the draconian Helms-Burton law. In researching this book, I interviewed the lead official in the Clinton administration during those days, Morton Halperin, who told me that the Miami-based Cuban exiles actually wanted to provoke the shooting down of their own planes in order to provoke the crisis that followed. There exists plenty of evidence that Halperin was right.
Three of the Cuban Five, as they came to be known, had served as soldiers in Cuba’s seventies’ African wars against Portuguese colonialism and South African apartheid, during a time when liberation struggles elsewhere in the world were considered by Havana to be a rebirth of the Cuban Revolution. After their arrest, the Cuban Five were subjected to a hostile Miami courtroom and a mainstream press that was fed false information by the US government, and were put behind bars, often in solitary confinement, in 2001. It would take the miracle of December 17 for them to be released. Two of them had been sent home under “supervised probation” with the consent of Obama’s Justice Department while I was writing this book. I met one of those men, René González, with Ricardo in Havana in June 2013 and found him animated by a passion typical of so many Cubans. He was reunited with his wife and dedicated to fighting for the release of the other three. He refused to believe that Obama was interested in their release. That suspicion was pervasive on the island as the secret talks were unfolding.
During the past two years, I talked on condition of anonymity with a central participant in the talks that led to the December 17 agreement. That anonymity ended on December 17, when that contact was revealed to be Tim Rieser, longtime aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Leahy, a respected senior senator, plunged into the Cuba debate as long ago as the nineties. He took multiple trips to Cuba where he spoke with senior officials, often bringing Rieser with him. Their continuous, many-sided approach to diplomatic conflict resolution was kept top secret for fear of backlash. The continuous dialogues were frustrating and time consuming, but eventually resulted in the White House and Cuban governments embracing the detailed policies announced on December 17.
TIM RIESER: It was a long saga. Secrecy was the only way by which I could [obtain] information from the White House. People like Senator Leahy had been working on Cuba issues since the nineties, twenty-five years. He, like many others, wanted to change the policy that had failed to achieve any of its objectives. We knew early on that it would be impossible to change US policy toward Cuba without getting Gross home and that was impossible without resolving the case of the Cuban Five. The administration did not even want to consider that initially. But either Gross would die in a Cuban prison and the president would lose the chance to change the policy, or we would have to resolve the case of the Cuban prisoners. I told the Cubans that if they didn’t release Gross the whole project was over and it would be many years before it could be restarted. I didn’t want the Cubans to think that if they just waited us out everything would be fine.
But the administration was going about it wrong by simply demanding that the Cubans release Gross and refusing to negotiate. That had accomplished nothing and we needed to approach the problem differently.
I talked to Alan every two or three days but I could not tell him everything I knew. I only told him that we were making progress, that he should feel positive, and that if things changed for the worse I would tell him. So instead we talked about a lot of other things, like food, movies, places he or I had been, books, etc.
Rieser’s cover was blown shortly after December 17 when the New York Times answered the riddle of “How a Cuban Spy and His Wife Came to Be Expectant Parents,” in a December 22 exposé. Gerardo Hernández, who was sentenced to a double-life term, was photographed in Havana touching the pregnant stomach of his wife Adriana Pérez. How could this miracle of life have happened? It turned out that Rieser had practiced “sperm diplomacy” as a humanitarian gesture. Gerardo’s wife in Havana asked Leahy in February 2013 to help her become pregnant with her husband. Rieser discovered that while US prisons ban conjugal visits, artificial insemination was permissible. The Cubans obtained sperm samples on two occasions from Gerardo, and finally Adriana became pregnant in early 2014. In exchange, Rieser got the Cubans to improve the humanitarian situation of Alan Gross.
TIM RIESER: It was a purely humanitarian gesture on the part of Senator and Mrs. Leahy. Adriana Pérez was forty-three and believed that her husband would never be released from prison. Senator Leahy had also asked the Cubans to do several things to improve their treatment of Alan Gross, and to permit American doctors to travel to Cuba to examine him, which had never happened before and the Cubans ultimately agreed. Senator Leahy believed it was in the US interest to try to improve the tone of the relationship between the United States and Cuba, and one way to help do that was to respond positively to humanitarian concerns.
When I asked him about Rolando Sarraf, the pivotal CIA spy held in a Cuban prison who was exchanged in the deal for Gross, Rieser’s answer was discreet:
TIM RIESER: This is best discussed with the White House.
I had no luck asking the White House to reveal its hand. When I emailed Ricardo, he replied that he’d never heard of Sarraf, who was in a Cuban prison for twenty years. I heard from René González by email that Sarraf was “just a traitor with some technical knowledge who was able to pass on some good information to the CIA, some related to [our] arrests.” Obama might be inflating his importance to justify the swap in his opponents’ eyes.
If we take Obama at his word, Sarraf was an informant hidden within Cuban intelligence who played a role in cracking open the secrets of the Cuban Five. Assuming so, the swap could be considered spy-for-spy, leaving Alan Gross defined as an innocent contractor.
The truth may not be known until classified documents are released by both sides. It should be clear, however, that the Cubans were spying on the operations of Cuban American exiles bent on overthrowing the Castro government from a Florida base. They were not “spying” on the US government at all; indeed, their files on the exiles were provided to the FBI at one point, in a secret conference in Havana. Alan Gross, on the other hand, was engaged in trying to subvert the Cuban government by supplying sophisticated communications technology to dissidents on the island. In all probability Gross was taken in when the Cubans realized that there was no hope for appeals in the US courts. Obama was under pressure to obtain Gross’s release or be accused of superpower weakness, while the Cubans were unwilling to leave their five behind. The larger desire for a new relationship made the swap an imperative.
TIM RIESER: There were a number of meetings between Leahy and other members of Congress, including Jim [McGovern], and the president, the secretary, the attorney general, and White House staff. But in terms of meetings with Cuban officials in Canada, those secret negotiations had nothing to do with Congress. I was informed months after those talks began. I was not part of the process directly. The White House privately kept me informed of the progress.
We had meetings with Josefina Vidal,11 the Cuban foreign minister, and Raúl Castro—Leahy bought Flake, McGovern, and others to Cuba. In New York City, Leahy met with the Cuban foreign minister and Josefina Vidal, or I met with them alone in Havana. We were confident that Leahy’s views expressed in those meetings were being passed on to other Cuban officials.
We told the Cubans there was a finite window in which to conclude agreement, and that the Cubans needed to reciprocate. I urged them to make it as easy as possible for President Obama to make the right decision.
RICARDO: I was following Carter’s release of the Puerto Rican nationalists in the seventies, reading classified documents by Brzezinski, etc. For the Americans it was important not to appear as swapping. It was better to appear as a humanitarian act facilitating family reunion. Their main consideration was that it was in their best interest not to continue having the nationalists incarcerated, including a woman, Lolita Lebrón, who at the time was serving the longest sentence ever for a woman. There was an international campaign for their freedom and Carter was supposed to be a human rights champion. Finally, a group of Americans [associated with the] CIA being held in Cuban prisons were freed and went back to the United States. The Puerto Ricans were released separately.
TIM: I told the White House staff, and they shared this same view, that getting Alan Gross home was an essential step, but the larger goal was to transform the policy itself.
We met with Kerry, conversed with his staff, he was informed, but the negotiations were not conducted through the State Department nor the Cuban Foreign Ministry.
The pope did play an important role. In one of the meetings with the White House staff early on, the issue of the prisoners came up and they dismissed the idea of an exchange for Gross. Senator Durbin said maybe we can get the pope involved. I thought we might as well try anything. So I drafted a letter for Senator Leahy to send to the cardinal12 in Havana whom we knew from years before, and asked him to urge the pope to raise the issue of Gross and the Cuban prisoners when he met Obama. The letter suggested that this was the way for the two countries to get to a different relationship, and the Cuban people would benefit. The pope did discuss it with the president, and he then wrote to both Castro and Obama, and we later learned that the Vatican played a key role at the end of the negotiations.
It was a collective [achievement]. Senator Leahy helped focus the administration’s attention early on the opportunity to change the policy. It was something the president wanted to do. But there was this obstacle, Alan Gross, and they were going about it ineffectively. The Cuban government insisted they wanted a different relationship, and an end to the embargo. The Cubans had the primary responsibility for the Gross problem. We made it clear the White House needed to negotiate with the Cubans and deal with the Five. At first the idea of clemency was dismissed out of hand, as if we were suggesting the impossible. I told them that then Gross will die in Cuba and that will be the end of any chance for this administration to change the policy. Eventually they did start talking to the Cubans [about Gross and the Five]. Senator Leahy pushed the Cubans to meet the White House halfway, and we had to keep Gross from losing hope because he had lost confidence in both governments.
We studied the history of the case of the Cuban Five, the legal and political precedents, and provided a lengthy memorandum to the White House.
Senator Leahy felt that their trial had suffered from serious inadequacies, the sentences were excessive, and the case was not a good example of American justice. Apart from that, they had served a long time and if we wanted to obtain Gross’s freedom we needed to talk with them about the Cuban prisoners.
We believe that Gross was arrested in part to be used by the Cubans as a bargaining chip. They also felt that the Five had been subjected to a miscarriage of justice.
We were trying to change the ways we were dealing with each other, from acrimony to a more constructive and respectful manner, despite our strong disagreements, and to act where there were opportunities. We felt, “Why not change the way that we talk to each other?
It was very important for the atmosphere to improve. Both sides expressed appreciation that it became more positive. We still disagreed but made more progress. That was a key reason why Senator Leahy helped Adriana Pérez. If there was something we could do that could improve the relationship, that did not require major costs on our part, then he felt we should do it. Why be unresponsive or vindictive?
I remember one conversation in Cuba with the foreign ministry, planning what to do with some visiting members of Congress. I was the go-between, and asked why can’t you and the US Interest Section give each other your cell phone numbers, but realized they couldn’t. These were diplomats who believe in communication, I realized, it wasn’t their fault, it wasn’t their decision, they were diplomats but their hands were tied. Sometimes the State Department would say unhelpful things. I told them sometimes it’s best to say nothing.”
I asked Rieser whether there was a “winner” in the December 17 agreement.
TIM RIESER: It’s impossible to quantify. This is a process that will unfold over many years. I don’t see it as a win or lose situation. The question is whether this is a better approach to help achieve a more open, freer society in Cuba.
I think it’s going to be determined by the next generation. There is a lot about Americans they love.
The agreement does not include the $20 million for democracy programs.13 The appropriations committee is responsible for 2015. The administration request was for $20 million, but the appropriations act for the first time doesn’t specify an amount and instead says, “Funds should be made available for programs in Cuba.”
I think if you asked most Americans if they think we should have an embassy in Cuba, they would respond, “There isn’t one?” A half million Americans travel to Cuba each year so of course we need an embassy, but for a whole lot of other reasons as well. If Republicans block an ambassador, then there will be a chargé d’affaires. But it is too soon to tell how things will evolve.
I asked about lifting the terrorism designation, an action recommended by the secretary of state, carried out by the president, and reversible by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
TIM RIESER: It will not be easy to overrule the president.