Easing Cuba-America relations

Last week the United States Treasury announced the lifting of a number of travel, monetary and telecommunications restrictions on Cuba. This signalled the fulfilment of a commitment by  President Obama, made in the context of the April 2009 Summit of the Americas meeting,  indicating his willingness to progressively normalize relations between the United States and Cuba, virtually frozen since the early radicalisation of the Cuban revolution in the 1960s.

From time to time during these many years, the US and Cuba have in fact found periodic mutuality of interests in coming to agreement on specific issues to reduce damage to one or other country which found it in its interest to do so, or to harmonise policy positions where this was deemed mutually beneficial.  Towards the end of the 1970s, for example, when the Cuban leadership deliberately opened the floodgates of migration to the United States and embarrassed the American government, both governments eventually felt impelled to draw up understandings on future migration of Cubans.  And in the 1980s to the present, both sides have found it in their interest to cooperate in the interdiction of the movers of drugs through the Caribbean, using Cuban waters as a significant transit path.

The last American presidential elections seemed to confirm the predilection of then candidate Obama that particularly in the key electoral state of Florida, a sense was developing among the Cuban Americans that the tightness of the then embargo was prejudicial not only to the Cuban regime, but to themselves as well. For them the time had come to ease the harshness of the more stringent measures that were introduced by successive presidents, including President Clinton and then President Bush. And from the Cuban side the necessity to obtain agricultural commodities for both production and consumption at competitive prices, induced a certain realpolitik in negotiating deals with American farmers, to which the Americans responded with an easing of the modes of negotiation and delivery.

The presidential election had shown that a significant concern of many Cuban Americans was the difficulties of survival of their compatriots in Cuba as the Cuban economy went through various economic travails. President Bush’s limitations on transfers of money and on telecommunications were felt to be particularly frustrating, but still essentially useless as a means of placing pressure on the Cuban government. So President Obama was able to begin the fulfilment of his election promises without undue pressure, particularly as he is engaged in a policy of gradualism rather than, as many of his critics to the left would like, dramatic and large-scale measures.

We can easily surmise that these measures, lifting restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ ability to travel to Cuba and allowing them to make visits of unlimited duration, permitting the sending of  unlimited amounts of money to relatives (except government and Cuban Communist Party officials), and relaxing the restrictions on telephone communications, will have been acceptable to the Cuban government. American critics have argued for a long time that permitting the easy transfer of money would assist the foreign exchange position of the Cuban government  and therefore reduce the pressures meant to be exerted on the regime. But with the exception of a few Congressmen, Florida Senator Connie Mack for example, there has been no huge outcry against this measure. On the other hand, American supporters of the policies, in particular that relating to the easing of telephone communications, argue that they will provide Cuban citizens with more flexibility, and access to new avenues of information.

President Obama’s implementation of these “April initiatives,” as they have come to be called, reflects also the nature of the dialogue which he has been having with leaders of Latin American and the Caribbean states, including the subtle diplomacy of cooperation with them which permitted the OAS General Assembly resolution on Cuba in June of this year ensuring the abandonment of the resolution on the suspension of the Cuban government from that institution. It reflects also the view expressed by the President to hemispheric leaders at the Summit of the Americas that “if our only interaction with many of these (hemispheric) countries is drug interdiction – if our only interaction is military – then we may not be developing the connections that can over time increase our influence and have a beneficial effect.”

In that context, it is interesting that the implementation of the relaxation measures has coincided with a visit made to Cuba by the Democratic Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, himself of Latin origins, a former United States Ambassador to the UN in the Clinton administration and an experienced negotiator, originally proposed by President Obama as Secretary of Commerce. Richardson has insisted that the ground in Cuba is now fruitful for a resumption of systematic discussions between the United States and that country. And indeed governors of many US states are feeling the pressure from business interests to participate in the gradual opening of the Cuban economy.

It is now obvious to the United States also, that the economic and diplomatic evolution of Cuban relations in the hemisphere is taking place in a context in which the Cuban government feels that it has expanded options, deriving from the current flexibility of Latin American countries’ diplomacy and the determination of those countries, as evidenced at the June OAS General Assembly that Cuba itself should share in that flexibility and not be restricted by terms and conditions laid down by the United States. And the Americans too, will be aware of a determination by old Cuban allies like Russia in particular, to contribute to, and no doubt benefit from the regeneration of the Cuban economy, in the wider context of the interest of countries like China, to engage in trade and general economic cooperation with Latin America.

So Cuba, even in the present difficult economic times that it is going through, and with a certain anxiety to find new domestic and international economic options, will also have the sense that, even as relations evolve with the United States, that evolution is taking place in a more favourable regional and international environment than either the pre-Cold War days, or its days of relative isolation immediately after the collapse of the world socialist system.