Might we finally be ready for a new policy towards Cuba?

May 20, 2008

For a couple of generations, every major presidential candidate, from both parties, has taken the same position on U.S. policy towards Cuba: keep the status quo. The embargo needs to stay in place in order to “keep the pressure” on Castro. Any thawing in relations would be a victory for a brutal thug, and would enrage a powerful voting bloc (Cuban Americans) in a key electoral state (Florida).

With that in mind, no candidate has been willing to talk openly about a change. I distinctly remember in 2004 when Wesley Clark said in a debate he wanted a dramatic shake-up in the existing policy. “When you isolate a country, you strengthen the dictators in it,” Clark said. The next day, Clark’s campaign backpedaled, after aides heard from supporters in Miami.

This year, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama went out on a limb and said the status quo isn’t good enough, and had the audacity to point that the current policy doesn’t actually work. They no doubt expected Republicans to try to exploit this, but made the case anyway.

Dodd stepped aside in January, but Obama is poised to be the first Democratic candidate in a half-century to offer a real change when it comes to Cuba. Today, John McCain intends to smack him on it pretty hard in a speech in Miami.

In an indication that John McCain sees foreign policy as the best route to take on Barack Obama — and that he will take it frequently — McCain is set to roll out another tough attack, with a speech today to the Cuban community in Miami. At the rate things are going, the McCain camp will be hitting Obama on some new foreign policy point every day.

“Just a few years ago, Senator Obama had a very clear view on Cuba,” McCain will say, according to prepared excerpts, then quoting Obama saying that normalization of relations would improve conditions for the Cuban people.

“Now Senator Obama has shifted positions and says he only favors easing the embargo, not lifting it. He also wants to sit down unconditionally for a presidential meeting with Raul Castro. These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators — there is no need to undertake fundamental reforms, they can simply wait for a unilateral change in US policy.”

It’s obviously an off-shoot of the debate over Iran — McCain believes the silent treatment is an effective foreign policy in relation to rivals and enemies; Obama believes the opposite.

Indeed, McCain is apparently prepared to argue that Bush’s policy towards Cuba hasn’t been far enough to the right.

Bloomberg reported today:

Commemorating Cuban Independence Day, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee seeks to distance himself from President George W. Bush’s Cuba policy by taking a tougher stance while also criticizing Barack Obama’s approach as too accommodating.

The Arizona senator said the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba must remain in place until basic elements of democratic society are established.

As for Obama’s willingness to change U.S. policy and consider diplomacy with Cuba, McCain will say open discussions “would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators.”

The conventional wisdom suggests McCain’s criticism will be well received in South Florida, and Obama will face a serious push-back on this. But I’m not at all sure the conventional wisdom is right on this. Michael Tomasky noted yesterday:

[Obama] has signalled that he’d dramatically alter the US’s hard-line Cuba policy. He’s not alone in thinking it’s outdated. Brent Scowcroft, a Republican foreign-policy high priest who worked for George Bush Sr, said last week that the American embargo “makes no sense” any more.

This freaks some people out. And in electoral terms, it makes them think that Obama has thrown away Florida, home of a large, conservative Cuban-American community. But Florida’s Latino population is no longer majority-Cuban. And just this month, the news broke that more Latinos in Florida are Democrats than Republicans — a major historical shift. Could it be that Obama is on to something?

Maybe so. In fact, Obama’s willingness to break with a failed status quo may turn out to be a political winner after all.

It doesn’t get a lot of attention, but there’s a big distinction between Cuban exiles who fled to the United States and their children’s generation. The younger Cuban-Americans are far less conservative, and far more open to a policy change. Obama assumes, probably correctly, that the older generation isn’t going to vote for a Democrat anyway, so why not shake up the dynamic by reaching out with a common-sense policy that has the added benefit of appealing to younger Cuban-American voters?

Miami Democrats like Elena Freyre, a Cuban-American art gallery owner in Little Havana, say they’ve been trying to tell Democratic candidates to stop parroting the hard-line position. “Obama’s people were the first who ever said to me on the phone, ‘Wait, let me get a pen and write that down,'” says Freyre. “He’s the first to have the cojones to say Bush’s policy is wrong, and I think it’s going to wake up a lot of moderate Cuban-American voters.”

McCain assumes the rules haven’t changed in decades. We’ll see soon enough if he’s right.

When can I vacation in Cuba?!

  • Castro probably would have been gone 10 years ago if we could have treated Cuba just like we treat every other communist country in the world.

    We trade with China. We trade with Viet Nam. We trade with Russia (oopps they are no longer communist but I wish they were.)

  • Two of our most idiotic and detrimental foreign policy mistakes come from two small constituencies and as much as I’d like to see them corrected, I’m not sure this is the year to roll out the fixes.

    Another thing: I heard Dodd use Souter as an example of the kind of judges Obama would appoint. HUGE mistake. David “Imminent Domain” Souter is no hero with independents.

  • I love how the wingnuts say that doing business with China is a great idea, but doing business with Cuba is a horrible idea. You can smell the pandering to the expats, and it stinks to hell.

  • Or eminent. Maybe the domain was on the precipice. Ever think of that, Super Speller?

  • The stupidity of the American policy towards Cuba is obvious. After fifty years, how much good has it done?

    Don’t look for any fresh strategic thinking from Old Man McCain.

  • Outside of the ten gusanos who can’t read memos, from what I hear most Cuban-Americans see trying to do things with Raul Castro as a necessary step toward the end, sort of like Reagan negotiating with Gorbachev ultimately ended the Soviet Union – which was already falling apart, just as Cuba is.

  • I think one big problem with our current Cuba policy is that it’s based upon the idea that the Cuban exiles wanted Castro overthrown in order to get their property back. But at this point, is there any chance of that happening? It’s one thing to think that an anti-Castro coup in the 60’s could do that, but now? I seriously doubt it. And even worse for the exiles, if the country slowly goes to democracy without a violent overthrow, their chances of getting anything back is nil. That’s why they always advocated an overthrow, which is the whole point of an embargo, ie, to make Cuba so sucky and weak that the people revolt; as if that’s ever happened.

    But again, while that might have made sense once, it’s unlikely these people will ever get their property back. A democratic Cuba will belong to the Cubans who are still there, not the folks who came to America. So at this point, our Cuban policy is nothing but a fossil. It only exists because people haven’t bothered giving any other policy much thought, but it really doesn’t make any sense. Even the old Cuban exiles are now Americans and nothing will change that.

    It’s time we start giving the Cubans all our materialistic goods and watch as a middle-class capitalism slowly takes over the country. It’s sad to say, but greed can be good.

  • The Cuban community if Florida wants to keep its political power in the US by keeping the current Cuba policy on the table. If that policy changes, then the balance of power between Florida’s Cubans and Cuba’s Cubans will shift dramatically, and to a very detrimental degree.

    At least, that’s how Florida’s Cuban community sees it—many of whom still long for a return of the Fulgencio Batista regime. A good many of these people also long for the day when they can return to Cuba—again, a Cuba that has been returned to the pre-Castro form of dictatorship, with a wealthy elite class, an upper-middle business class that is somewhat wealthy, and a servile underclass that merely exists to wait on the other two….

  • For decades American foreign policy has been distorted by two small groups. The first is AIPAC, which controls large amounts of campaign money from the American Jewish community. The other is Cuban exiles, who are so vehement in their hatred of Castro that they become incensed if someone calls Castro the Antichrist because that suggests that there is someone above him in the pantheon of evil. Unfortunately, there are enough of these anti-Casto fanatics to control where Florida’s electoral college votes end up.

    (It’s worth noting that Castro is not nearly as bad as some of the dictators that the U.S. has supported and called “friends”. It’s also worth noting that in spite of American sanctions and crippling poverty, Cuba actually has a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S.)

    Neither of the agendas of AIPAC nor the Cuban exiles are in the best interests of the United States. Fortuantely, Barack Obama appears to have created enough of a fundraising juggernaut that he can afford not to kowtow to AIPAC. And it looks like his ability to run a 50 state election strategy may make Florida less essential to a Democratic victory.

    I think it’s a winning strategy to remind voters that Republicans have been in favor of engaging with all sorts of unsavory governments, from apartheid South Africa to Vietnam to China. Those relationships have produced good results. Yet for some reason, the same rules don’t apply to Cuba.

  • McCain just finished his speech on CNN. As he moved back and forth to find the proper teleprompter, his small audience was applauding as if on cue cards. But when he said that he won’t let special interests determine policy, there was a rather odd “huh?” moment. I was almost expecting someone to yell out, “Hey, aren’t we special enough?”

  • Our Cuba foreign policy was so successful that we finally got Fidel out of power as we had hoped — we waited until he got so old and ill that he became a retired dictator! Castro’s communism is a dinosaur, Cuba is the last of the Mohicans. Raul wants to reform and we can either help him do so and create a new ally in the region or we can continue to isolate him so his best buddy is Hugo Chavez.

    Republican foreign policy revolves around creating enemies that we can love to hate. Besides being absolutely childish it polarizes the world as being for or against us. We seem to create enough enemies as it is without actively trying to create more.

  • “But when he said that he won’t let special interests determine policy”

    My friends, I will just let them control my campaign.”

  • Another reason to change our current Cuba policy: Putin’s Russia. That little twirp has surrounded himself with his old KGB cronies, and he’s put others in the top jobs of all Russia’s new “capitalist” corporations—the ultimate blending of government and business. Remind me again—what was that called? Starts with an “F,” I think….

    I’d like to know that we had Cuba on our side this time, when the next “Cold War” with Putin’s Russia begins….

  • Oh come on, Steve @14. How can Putin possibly restore Russia to their position of dominance when we’ve got tough talkers like Bush, Cheney, and McCain on the scene? Not a chance. Putie will back down, don’t you worry. All that’s needed is a little more talking to call his bluff.

    And if tough talk doesn’t work, we’ll just give them the old silent treatment, which has worked sooooo well with Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. Trust me, the neo-cons have a full arsenal of tough gestures at their disposal, and it’s simply a matter of time until one of them finally works.

  • Please Obama, show some backbone here and back a sensible policy towards Cuba. Even though I could not stand Ronald Reagan, I understood why some (many) people liked him . He let you know what he stood for.

    Obama – stand up for what you know is the right thing to do. (Even though I think you missed an opportunity to do just that with your vote for the recent Farm Bill – but I will let you off the hook this time.)

  • I think we should welcome Cuba with open arms as long as they go through a lie detector test and a metal detector. Castro has been as big an obstacle as the US. Imagine if they had gotten those Soviet missiles they wanted so bad.

  • Dale? The Cuban Missile Crisis happened over forty-five years ago. I’m not sure why people are still so obsessed with events that happened since the 60’s, but I have a hard time imagining that people in 1968 were basing their decisions on events that happened in 1922.

    Don’t get me wrong, I understand why this stuff is important. I just think we need to get a better understanding of when an event stops being current and starts being history.

  • The best way to drive a repressive regime into the ground is not to starve its people and ignore it, it is to eat away at it from the inside like a cancer with the truth and exposure to the good life that the rest of the world is living.

  • It’s time to trade talk and visit Cuba. Mexico, Columbia and Venezuela are more corrupt and oppressive but then McCain is pandering to those Miami Cubans who will vote for him if he says the right things. When will Americans wake up and get a clue that our froreign policy is an appeasement to Israelis, Cubans, Mexicans, Pakistanis etc… who have gained citizenship in this country and want wage their personal vendettas against their counties of origin. Remember Chalibi????

  • Two of our most idiotic and detrimental foreign policy mistakes come from two small constituencies and as much as I’d like to see them corrected, I’m not sure this is the year to roll out the fixes. — Bobzim, @3

    I disagree; I think now is precisely the right time, and Obama is precisely the right person to do it. He’s been talking about a future that’s different than the past and a clean break with past policies — *which have not worked as had been hoped for* — is exactly what what’s needed.

    […] the Cuban exiles wanted Castro overthrown in order to get their property back. But at this point, is there any chance of that happening? — Doctor Biobrain, @8

    Actually, it’s hard to tell; Raoul Castro might agree to re-privatising some of the property, in exchange for a more normalised political situation with US. Poland, when it was aspiring to join the European Union, agreed to do just that. Not all the properties were returned (all the historical landmarks were taken out f the equation up-front). And the original owners didn’t get them back for free; they had to buy them back. But they bought for pennies on the dollar.

    The whole thing was — and still is, in many cases – an almighty mess, but it’s being teased out and untangled little by little. There’s no telling that something similar wouldn’t happen in Cuba.

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