A matter of mere months before his two terms as President of the United States come to an end, Barack Obama has undertaken the most important foreign policy initiative of his tenure. In the context of relations between the United States and Cuba and the manner in which those relations have impacted on global affairs in the Cold War era, his visit to Cuba is one that will etch the name of the country’s first black President in the annals of American history in a manner that will be as unique as it will be far-reaching.
Cuba may be situated a mere ninety miles south of the Florida Keys but you have to cast your mind back almost ninety years to the last time a government in Havana had welcomed a sitting US President. In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge visited Cuba to address the Sixth Annual International Conference of American States in Havana. That visit long preceded the start of the Cold War and the collapse of what used to be the closest of relationships between Washington and Havana. Five years after Coolidge’s visit, Gerardo Machado, the Cuban President was forced into exile.
Two decades after he had left office, in 2002, President Jimmy Carter, who, arguably, made a much greater impact on hemispheric and global affairs out of office than in office, visited Cuba at the invitation of President Fidel Castro. Carter made a second visit there in 2011.
Nothing in terms of US-Cuba relations, however, compares even remotely with what President Obama has achieved and long before he set foot on the island which, for so many years, Americans were forbidden to visit, students of United States foreign policy and of international relations on the whole had begun to make an argument for Mr Obama being America’s most influential foreign policy president ever.
If there is little chance that the US trade embargo which has stifled the Cuban economy for more than half a century will be lifted before he departs office in January, President Obama is clearly banking on the likelihood that a rapprochement between Washington and Havana which his visit symbolizes has been set in an irreversible forward motion, whichever party succeeds the present Democratic administration in the White House. For surely, at this juncture, the US President has more than made the point about what he has argued for some time is the counterproductive nature of the US policy towards Cuba. Simultaneously, the current US administration has now taken its biggest step yet towards hauling away the US-Cuba political and economic cobwebs of the Cold War era.
If the events in Havana over the weekend may have drawn robust criticism from some leading Republicans including presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, there is an aura of inevitability to the long-awaited normalization of US-Cuba relations as evidenced in the pronouncement of another Republican, Senator Jeff Flake that Obama’s Havana visit “signals the beginning of a new era,” and perhaps more importantly that “any Republican administration would be hard-pressed to reverse any of this.”
Even if there are gains to be realized in terms of US-Cuba relations from President Obama’s visit to Havana, it is hard to dismiss the view that this is about history and, in the cases of both Presidents Obama and Castro, about legacy. The incremental steps that led to the landmark visit finally became apparent about a year and a half ago following Obama’s pledge to reopen diplomatic channels following a prisoner exchange and the humanitarian release of US contractor Alan Gross in December 2014. Afterwards, there was a blur of diplomatic activity that led to the 2015 reopening of embassies in the respective capitals and the more recent restoration of commercial air traffic.
Cuba notwithstanding, informed analysts of US foreign policy have tended to remain harsh judges of President Obama’s track record, pointing to developments like the implosion of Syria and Iraq, and the rise of IS as examples of global instability which US foreign policy has failed to impact upon positively. Cuba, however, coupled with the Iran nuclear deal may have clinched it for Obama, despite the altogether valid point made by the American foreign policy writer Fred Kaplan that the President’s list of foreign policy triumphs is “provisional.” Kaplan writes that “the potential for peace, prosperity and global improvement arising from his [Obama’s] diplomatic achievements, is considerable, even transformative; but the results aren’t in yet.”
That, arguably, is not an unfair statement to make in the week that President Obama was hosted by Havana. Transformed US-Cuba relations are still a work in progress. By making the trip to Cuba this week, however, the US President has still managed to leave a formidable and historic footprint in global politics.
