Cuba’s Hotel Nacional used to host world famous artists, actors, athletes and politicians before the rise of the Castro family and strict travel restrictions put in place by the U.S. (Photo courtesy of Henryk Kotowski/Wikimedia Commons)
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“It’s very hard to say exactly how this will work,” Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson said last week after the first round of talks between the U.S. and Cuba. Cuban officials could be mulling over some important questions right now—whether or not the decades-old embargo will finally be lifted, for example, and what the fate of the detainees on Guantanamo Bay will be. It’s too soon to draw conclusions about what these talks will mean in the long run. For now, we can only hope that the Cuban people will benefit from this truly historic change of events. They’ve astoundingly made it this far.
In his address to the nation on December 17th, President Obama announced that Washington would “begin to normalize relations” with Cuba. Possibilities include opening a U.S. embassy in Havana and lifting restrictions on travel and trade. He ensured us that the move is meant to help everybody: “We intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.” Later on, he touched on the motive that is probably closer to the truth, saying that “American businesses should not be put at a disadvantage”. It’s certainly been a long time since the early 1900s, when U.S. investors owned most of Cuba’s rural land as well as its electricity and telephone systems according to Chomsky’s A History of the Cuban Revolution. American corporations have never been cozy with the trade restrictions on Cuba. They certainly don’t care about the well-being of Cubans, but they know a market when they see one.
In fact, American business and Cuban history are closely related. After the 1959 revolution against the Batista dictatorship, Fidel Castro’s reforms seemed like a big list of ways to get on America’s bad side. His regime focused on redistributing wealth, taking back resources from American corporations and advancing the country’s lower classes. Policymakers in the U.S. had hoped that the Castro regime could be persuaded to look kindly on American business and steer itself away from Communism, but they were quickly disappointed. The regime’s die was cast with the Agrarian Reform Law that redistributed land to peasants. Harry R. Turkel, a State Department official at the time, said it best: “With the signature of the Agrarian Reform Law, it seems clear that our original hope was a vain one; Castro’s Government is not the kind worth saving.”
Cuba entered a dark era of bombing raids, sabotage and exotic assassination attempts on Castro by the C.I.A. (including poisoned cigars and exploding giant clams for when he was skin-diving), according to McClintock’s Instruments of Statecraft. The U.S. invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 was just the tip of the iceberg in this campaign that Lyndon Johnson later called “a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean”. Washington was simply appalled when the U.S.S.R. deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba, setting off the Cuban Missile Crisis. Apparently only the U.S. was allowed to flex its muscles on the island.
In light of the history between our two countries, it should be no surprise that Cuban diplomats are making some demands of their own right now. Raul Castro wants Guantanamo Bay to be closed and Cuba to be taken off America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Cuba would be a very strange sponsor of terrorism, indeed. Its medical program sends more doctors to the developing world than all the G8 countries combined, and it sent more medical personnel to Sierra Leone to fight Ebola than any other foreign nation. The rest of the hemisphere, as well as President Obama, have noticed these human rights achievements. Obama made sure to mention that Cuba would be attending the Summit of the Americas for the first time in April (we’ll ignore for the moment that the U.S. voted against this inclusion in 2012).
Normalizing relations with Cuba is definitely the right thing to do. Even if it has a tiny effect on American life, a similar move greatly helped Cubans in the past. A loosening of the embargo in 2000 allowed Cuba to get much-needed food and agricultural products from the U.S. after an economic downturn in the 1990s. The effects of what we see today could be immediately beneficial. Cubans in America will soon be able to send quadruple the previous amount of money to their families on the island, for example. Changes like this should be the aim of Washington’s efforts right now. Our diplomats should also avoid picking up where their predecessors left off over fifty years ago, with relations entrenched in violence and dominated by business. As usual, we will have to hold our governments accountable to make these goals more than just rhetoric.
Contact CUIndependent Staff Writer Jared Conner at jared.conner@colorado.edu.
