Is there an outside possibility that President Obama might use his second term in office to ease relations with Cuba? This is one of the intriguing questions that have begun to focus minds in European capitals.While much of Europe, and in particular those parts of the continent such as the Czech Republic, that experienced Soviet style communism, had previously been reluctant to have anything other than a strictly conditional relationship with Cuba, this approach is now in the process of flux. In part this reflects the failure of the conditionalities imposed on the relationship by its common position. This came into being in 1996. Reviewed every six months, it introduced an agenda for political change in Cuba resulting in Havana all but ignoring most EU states.
Europe’s cautious approach also responds to a number of other factors.
Firstly, there is an awareness that Cuba itself is changing – about which more later – and that Europe must prepare to relate to a new largely technocratic, generation of emerging leaders who did not participate in Cuba’s early revolutionary process.
