The virtually unprecedented protests in Cuba’s major cities last month underscored both the depth of Cubans’ woes and the strength of the government security forces in suppressing any threat to the ruling Communist regime. Hopes of a softening of Cuba’s generations-long political and economic self-strangulation were quickly extinguished by president Diaz-Canel’s police and military.
- President Biden would clearly like to reverse at least some of his predecessor’s economic tightening on the island nation, moves that in turn reversed the modest openings initiated by President Obama in 2015. But the reality of U.S. domestic politics, especially the votes of Cuban-Americans in Florida, will sharply constrain the sitting U.S. President in any moves to open up to Cuba. Indeed, in the days following the brutal suppression, arrests, and sham trials throughout Cuba, Biden further tightened Trump’s sanctions by levying more on Cuba’s defense and police leaders and calling Cuba a “failed state.”
- But don’t expect these actions, or more serious steps urged by Cuban-Americans and members of Congress from both parties, to change the behavior of Cuba’s leaders. This reality should come as no surprise given the failure of U.S. sanctions over the last 60 years to budge the Castros. And of course, Cuban leaders throughout these decades always blamed the abject failures of their Marxist system on the U.S. embargo, not the systemic issues embedded in the economy; Fidel in particular was fond of using the term “el bloqueo” to blame every domestic travail on the U.S.
What has been a surprise over the last month, however, has been the failure of the Biden foreign policy team to secure outside help in its push-back against the Cuban regime. Brazil Ecuador and Colombia each issued statements condemning Cuba’s mass arrests and supporting the Biden push-back; yet, as Reuters highlighted last week, only 20 foreign ministers worldwide joined Washington, and the OAS had to cancel a meeting scheduled to discuss Cuba’s human rights violations because of objections by more than a dozen OAS member states.
- Even more disturbing is the shift to the political left in the region. The so-called “pink-tide” of left-leaning governments of the early 2000’s appears to be returning: beyond the “usual suspects” on the left - Nicaragua and Venezuela - have been added Mexico (with the election of Lopez Obrador in 2018), Argentina (President Alberto Fernandez replacing the pro-business Mauricio Macri late in 2019), and Bolivia (with Luis Arce of the “Movement to Socialism” party now in power). Further, last month Peru elected Pedro Castillo as president, a teacher and farmer described as a “socially conservative leftist;” and both Chile and Brazil are likely to elect left-leaning leaders in elections over the next 18 months. If Biden is looking to broaden his push against the ruling Cuban regime, he won’t get it from this group!
Despite the disappointments surrounding support for his Cuba response, Present Biden has dispatched key members of his foreign policy team to the region, to address broader cooperation on security and climate. Especially in Brazil, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan tried last week to steer President Bolsonaro away from his current path that threatens to undermine the integrity of next year’s national election; Bolsonaro is already posturing not to accept the election results because of alleged defects in Brazil’s electronic voting system. Clearly Brazil’s president – and other leaders in the hemisphere – are looking in the neighborhood for clues on how to perpetuate self-rule!
Finally, on the business front, there is one stark reality that sharply constrains any effort inside Cuba to privatize elements of the economy or to attract foreign investment: the Cuban military. This key institution of Cuban society is only too eager to harvest profits and revenue from foreign ventures to underwrite their stifling omnipresence. It was this justifiable worry of supporting even indirectly the Cuban military that sharply limited the sweep of President Obama’s short-lived détente and business openings with Havana; and it will remain a constraint on any infusion of foreign capital for as long as the security regime imposed by the Castros remains intact.
- As any visitor can quickly observe (I traveled there in 2017 as a tourist but met while in Havana with Cuban commercial officials), the need for foreign investment is enormous – in virtually every sector: tourism, infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing. Besides the concerns about the siphoning of funds by the Cuban military, the protests and harsh crackdown have removed any notion of “island stability” that is a sine qua non for attracting foreign capital.
Bottom Line: unlike the challenges posed by Iran (with a new hard-line cleric as president) or China (with a president positioning himself for “reelection” in 15 months), or an imploding Iran, the Cuba unrest represents little geopolitical risk for the U.S. But developments on the island have always unsettled U.S. strategists since Fidel waved triumphantly from a balcony in Santiago on January 2nd, 1959.
- And Cuba has also intrigued U.S. adversaries. Whatever Biden may intend for the region - and except for Cuba and Central America, he has said very little - Russia and China will make every effort to undermine. Both Moscow and Beijing have it clear: if the U.S. wants to interfere in what they consider their “back yards” of the Black and South China Seas, it’s open season in the Caribbean. Their antics won’t equal the nuclear drama of the “13 days” in October 1962; but neither Cuba nor the region are off the geostrategic chessboard, as Jake Sullivan’s trip and Huawei’s gains attest.
- U.S. Presidents for six decades have been right to urge democratic and market reforms in Cuba and in the broader Latin American region. But more sanctions applied unilaterally - we are the only major country to embargo Cuba - will get us no closer in the coming years to the goal of democratic rule in Havana than when sanctions were first applied by President Eisenhower in 1960.
- President Biden has made energized U.S. diplomacy a centerpiece of his foreign policy; he needs to use that renewed diplomatic energy in the hemisphere, as he has already done in Europe, if he expects to see change in Havana and in the leanings of governments in the region, too many of which still retain shopworn nostalgia for the “Cuban Revolution.”
