US-Cuba relations

S P SETH

US-Cuba relations are under a microscope but this time it might hopefully lead to a breakthrough in their relationship. President Obama is seeking to relax the US’s tight punishing regime imposed over Cuba for the last over 50 years. Cuba’s crime was to have staged a revolution to overthrow the country’s brutal US-backed dictatorship. The Fidel Castro-led revolution got rid of the Batista regime in 1959 that was, with the collaboration and involvement of America’s rich and powerful, running the country into the ground. The island was a playground of America’s rich. The US regarded the revolution as an unfriendly act and a gross disregard of its economic and political interests by a bunch of self-described revolutionaries. Indeed, the Cuban revolution was considered a subversive act setting a terrible example for other US-imposed/supported dictatorships in Latin America that was, for all interests and purposes, its political and economic backyard. It was, therefore, considered necessary to nip it in the bud before it became a contagion.

Which led the US, in 1961, to sponsor a CIA-trained invasion force of Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro regime that failed miserably. The US hostility pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union in the ongoing Cold War. It granted base facilities for the Soviet missile stations, raising considerably the risk level for the United States to destroy the Castro revolution. Which brought about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear war. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was apparently testing United States’ new and young President Kennedy, though neither side wanted a nuclear war. Kennedy proved a determined opponent willing to take risks, with Khrushchev deciding to back off by removing missiles from its Cuban bases. But to make the deal look like a compromise, the US agreed to remove its Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM) from bases in Turkey, which had been superseded any way with the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM). The US, however, continued trying to remove Castro from the scene, seeking to assassinate or poison him. Castro, though, continued to work for improved relations between Cuba and the United States through unofficial channels. However, after the news of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, which had nothing to do with Cuba, those channels dried up and the prospects for peace evaporated.

Despite some approaches made to break the impasse under President Jimmy Carter in the seventies, nothing much came of it.  Cuba earned further US ire for its support of the struggles in Angola and Mozambique, which got identified with the Cold War. The US embargo, imposed in 1962, continued with even greater severity. And, not surprisingly, things got even worse under the Reagan presidency to the point that his then secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said that he won’t mind turning “that fucking island [Cuba] into a parking lot”— obliterating its very existence as a country.  Cuba was more than a nuisance by supporting Latin American revolutionary movements and revolutions as as far away as Africa while, at the same time, cementing its political and economic ties with the Soviet Union. In those bleak times with the US trade embargo, the Soviet Union threw a lifeline of sorts by buying sugar from Cuba at inflated prices.

Consequently, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties, Cuba’s situation became even more desperate, some of it relieved though when Venezuela’s then president helped with the concessional sale of oil to the island state. But after the death from cancer of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, and the virtual collapse of the oil price in the international market, Venezuela, under its new President Nicolas Maduro, is itself vulnerable economically and politically. Cuba’s President Raul Castro, successor to Fidel Castro who stepped aside due to illness, has been trying a mix of relatively liberal economic and political measures, but with tight control.

The prospective opening with the US is long overdue because the policy of isolating Cuba has ceased to serve any purpose, if it ever did. To even think that Cuba was ever a threat to the US is preposterous. That it drifted into the Soviet embrace was due to the constant threat and destabilization it faced ever since the 1959 revolution in that country. As a superpower, the US has always found it difficult to make adjustments to its old policies even when their time is long expired. It is regarded as an admission of weakness as a waning power. And it is this sense of entitlement as a superpower for all times that is at the root of a number of US’s strategic and foreign policy problems.

But Cuba is not a big issue, at least it shouldn’t be. It goes to Obama’s credit that, despite all his difficulties with the Congress, he is pushing ahead engaging with Cuba. The first step, of course, is the re-establishing of diplomatic relations. Such normalcy should help tourism, a welcome relief for Cuba’s strained economy. And there are signs that Cuba might be taken off the list of sponsors of terrorism. About time! Lifting the trade embargo is necessary to give much-needed economic relief, which the Congress is likely to resist. These are good preliminary signs but the way ahead will not be easy and smooth. The first and the foremost difficulty will be the role of the Congress in impeding/blocking the process of normalization.

There will be all sorts of issues about Cuba’s human rights and denial of democracy to its people. These issues shouldn’t be difficult to resolve once the Castro regime starts feeling confident that the US and its agencies are not using these and other related issues to destabilize the country’s system. The Castro regime, despite all its problems and failings, managed to keep Cuba afloat despite the hostility and enmity of its giant neighbor. And that is not a small achievement. Will it be too much to hope that now that a start is being made, the US might be magnanimous with its small neighbour? 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au