‘The blockade is now a shell of its former self’

Slowly smoking, as he holds a cigar under his thick, gray moustache, his eyes fixed on his interviewer, attorney José Pertierra recalled that on Dec. 17 he was attending a “high-level” conference in Havana when he learned that presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro would simultaneously announce historic measures to restore diplomatic relations after more than five decades of tension and an economic blockade by Washington against the island.

“On December 17 we saw the beginning of the end of the blockade. While in Cuba, I used a metaphor for a future foretold and said that all that’s left of the blockade is a shell of its former self — truly,” said Pertierra in an interview with El Tiempo Latino in Washington, exactly one month after the news that shook the world because the last remnant of the Cold War in Latin America was ending.

“The moment you license 12 categories of travel to Cuba, such as researchers, students, journalists, and ‘people to people,’ you’re in effect lifting the ban on travel there,” he said.

“The moment you license U.S. companies to sell products to Cuba, whether they be cars, construction material or plasma TV, you’re toppling the blockade,” Pertierra said.

We can also add to those measures authorization for Americans to use credit and debit cards in Cuba, and permits to U.S. telecommunication companies to do business on the island.

To reach that moment, however, years of efforts were required, Pertierra pointed out, some of them marred by “lamentable events” that halted the negotiations for a rapprochement between the two countries.

Attempts were made during the Clinton administration, but in 1996 Cuban Air Force jets downed two planes flown by the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue, after an allegedly illegal incursion into Cuban air space. That shooting also downed any plans for improved relations.

In 2009, during the Obama administration, efforts were held back when the Cuban authorities arrested U.S. subcontractor Alan Gross and tried him on charges of being an agent of the U.S. government tasked with the attempt of “regime change” against the Cuban government. The Alan Gross case conviction and imprisonment of five Cubans in the United States, accused of conspiracy to commit espionage.

One of them was freed in 2011, another in 2014. The other three were freed last December in an exchange that was part of the accord between Washington and Havana.

Pertierra now warns about a kind of “Trojan Horse” sent by the U.S. to fill the island with its products, so as to promote its system of “capitalist democracy” in Cuba and try and overthrow the Cuban government.

“Washington still doesn’t understand that Cuba does not belong to them, that Cuba belongs to the Cubans, not to Washington. Now they’re following a different tactic. They think that, instead of defeating Cuba by asphyxiating it, they’re going to defeat Cuba by selling it things and seducing Cubans with consumer goods,” he said.

Pertierra referred to the Torricelli Act, which hardened the embargo in 1992, and said that the new measures are part of “Track Two” of that law “but this time with Viagra.”

“Now, Cuba faces a new challenge in uncharted waters. Yesterday’s trenches are useless. Cuba has spent more than 50 years digging trenches, since the start of the Revolution.

“Now our task is to build bridges that will allow Americans to travel to Cuba and also allow Cubans to come here with their values and traditions,” he said, “to preserve the many accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution; to go farther and change what needs to be changed while preserving what needs to be preserved.”

The lawyer has been at the center of Cuba-U.S. relations in the cases of Elián González, the Cuban Five, and the trial of Luis Posada Carriles, a fugitive living now living in Miami who is considered a terrorist by Havana. Relying on that trajectory and the Cuban government’s recognition of his work, Pertierra is confident that the Cuban authorities will have the right answer to that challenge to the normalization of bilateral relations.

“Cuba’s leadership is very capable and has learned to survive the ups and downs of U.S. foreign policy. It has survived blockades, invasions and terrorist acts. It has learned to survive all that, and I think that there is sufficient prudence in Cuba to know how to handle these changes,” he said.

The first delegation of the U.S. Government, led by Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson, was on the island Jan. 21-23 to hold direct talks that will advance the dialogue between the two countries.

The next round of negotiations will be held in Washington in the next several weeks.

Both President Obama in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 20 and President Raúl Castro on Jan. 28 in Costa Rica, at the Third Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, proposed an end to the blockade.

It is a complex task, because the Republicans control the U.S. Congress. Added to this is the fact that the only three Latin senators — Republicans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Democrat Bob Menendez, all of Cuban origin — have been critical of the policy of a greater opening to Havana, for ideological reasons.

In his first public pronouncement on the subject, Cuba’s historic leader, Fidel Castro, 88, broke his silence to express his opinion of the rapprochement with the United States.

“I do not trust the policy of the United States nor have I exchanged a single word with them, without this meaning in the least a rejection to a peaceful solution to conflicts or dangers of war,” Castro said in a letter published in the official newspaper Granma.

Pertierra had harsh words regarding the Cuban exile community concentrated in Miami. In the case against the five Cubans accused of espionage, there was “a trial without the due process of law in the city of Miami, which would find Santa Claus guilty had he been Cuban.”

“And despite the hatred toward [the five Cubans], President Obama did what he had to do: he marginalized Miami and demonstrated that U.S. policy toward Cuba is made in Washington, not in Miami. Obama must respond to U.S. geopolitical interests, not to the parochial interests of a few legislators from small Congressional districts in Miami,” he said.

Pertierra experienced close up the feelings of happiness at the announcement during the conference in Havana. One of the attendees, Wayne Smith, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, burst into tears when he came to the microphone and couldn´t bring himself to speak.  All Smith could do was sob, said Pertierra.

Shortly after President Obama´s announcement, students carrying flags walked over to the so-called “Protest-O-drome,” in front of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and, unlike on countless previous occasions, cheered the Americans.

The American diplomats, who in the past had hidden behind their desks, came to the windows this time to applaud the Cubans.

“It was a beautiful thing and symbolized a historic moment,” Pertierra said.

(From the: El Tiempo Latino / Translate: Progreso Weekly)