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Normal Relations with Cuba Long Overdue
by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700
Copyright
December 28, 2014
All Rights Reserved.
Announcing a restoration of diplomatic relations with
Cuba after 53-years Dec. 17, President Barack Obama irked anti-Castro exiles in
South Miami, whose families fled Fidel Castro’s communist revolution for a
better life in the United States.
Losing businesses and property, the families of those exiles have little
interest in normalizing relations with Havana unless there’s a regime change. While agreeing in principle with
normalizing relations with the U.S., Cuban President Raul Castro expressed no
interest in ending Cuba’s communist government in order to establish new
diplomatic relations with the U.S.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) emphatically rejected the Obama administration’s move
to normalize relations with Cuba, unless Havana is willing to change it ways. Rubio can’t see how normalizing
relations would help ordinary Cubans living in Castro’s island prison.
When President John F. Kennedy broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba
in 1961, it was the height of the Cold War, with U.S. facing encroachment by the
Soviet Union in the Western Hemisphere.
Anti-communist paranoia had hit a fever’s pitch in the U.S. Congress with
Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) driving the government’s persecution of anyone
loosely tied with anything communist.
Breaking off relations with Cuba was only eight short years after the
June 19, 1953 executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for passing atomic
secrets to the Soviets. Moscow’s
encroachment in the Western Hemisphere led journalist George F. Kennan to write
as Mr. X ”Sources of Soviet Conduct,” becoming the cornerstone of the “Truman
Doctrine,” requiring the U.S. to fight Soviet expansionism. If was in that context that Kennedy
severed diplomatic relations with Cuba.
Rubio’s argument that the U.S. should not restore any normal relations
with Cuba unless Havana ends communist rule, releases all political prisoners
and compensates families for financial losses after the Cuban revolution doesn’t
hold water. Speaking for a
shrinking minority of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, Rubio can’t see the big picture,
especially how re-establishing diplomatic relations upends Cuba’s relationship
with Moscow. Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s has his hand in the Western Hemisphere because the U.S. forced
Cuba to turn to other financial resources. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for
Western Hemisphere affairs Robert Jacobson plans to enter discussions next month
with the Cuban government to convert the current U.S. Havana mission into a
full-fledged embassy. Rubio doesn’t
see how normalizing relations with Cuba helps keep Russia out of the Western
Hemisphere.
Conservatives fighting Obama’s plan to open diplomatic relations with
Cuba face stiff headwinds with a public largely on the president’s side. Only the old anti-Castro exile crowd
opposes opening up diplomatic relations because there’s no end in sight to
Cuba’s communist government. Years
of imperialist exploitation in Central and South America led to Cuba’s communist
revolution, led by Latin American activists like Argentine-born Che Guevara. While reviled by the U.S. anti-communist crowd, Che sought a Latin America free to
foreign exploitation, with better opportunities for education, jobs and improves
standard-of-living. Castro and his ragtag band of Cuban revolutionaries battled U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista
until driving him from the island Jan. 1, 1959, only a day before winning the
Battle of Santa Clara, Dec. 31, 1958, forcing Batista to flee to Portugal.
Holding onto the past—and the 53-year-old embargo—has done little to
improve trade relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Opening diplomatic relations enables
both countries to benefit. “Opening
an embassy is a symbolic gesture, but symbols are really important,” said John
Caulfield, who was Havan Interests Section chief from 2011 to 2014, now retired
in Jacksonville, Fl., backing Obama’s move to open relations. When you consider how close the U.S.
and Soviet Union came in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to a nuclear
confrontation, Rubio and other opponents to normalization don’t admit that the
U.S. embargo pushed Castro into the Kremlin’s orbit. Had Kennedy accepted the Cuban
revolution and worked to normalize relations with Castro, it would have most
likely avoided the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Castro had no interest in Russia other that gaining economic and military
aid for Cuba.
Opening up diplomatic relations with Havana should pay rich dividends to
Cuba and the U.S. Obama pivoted
away from old-school thinking that only a regime change in Havana should bring
about new diplomatic relations.
Seeing the advantages to both countries, Obama shifted the old paradigm, hoping
one day to help Cubans see there’s a more prosperous path for the poor Caribbean
island, moving the economy toward free markets.
Turing the Havana mission into a full-fledged embassy shouldn’t take all
that much work. “A few strokes of
the pen and that’s it,” said Wayne Smith, a U.S. former diplomat in Cuba when
relations were cut in 1961. “I
would have loved to be there to raise that flag,” said Caulfield, thrilled that
the 53-year-old cut in diplomatic relations was about to end. Changing the Havana-based U.S.
Interests Section to a full-fledged embassy is a step forward.
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