What changes in today’s U.S. policy toward Cuba?

By Ramón Sánchez-Parodi

HAVANA – To answer this question, we must define that United States policy toward Cuba means the ways, methods, mechanisms, actions and objectives of the U.S. government with respect to Cuba, meaning Cuba as a country, nation, state, government and society.

Therefore, it has a strategic, long-range character, linked to the elements of national security of the United States and transcends partisan or sectarian peculiarities because it wraps up all the state powers of the United States.

It is, therefore, the “state policy” of the United Stats toward Cuba. Although this term is more political than legal, in the case of U.S. policy toward Cuba it has always had a more-or-less broad juridical foundation. For example: the “ripe fruit” theory; the Monroe Doctrine, the theory of manifest destiny; the April 1898 Joint Resolution of Congress; the Platt Amendment; the Reciprocity Treaty; the proclamation of a blockade on Cuba; the sanctions of the Organization of American States against Cuba; the Torricelli and Helms-Burton laws, and many more.

It is “the law of the land,” reaffirmed when all the resolutions and regulations were incorporated into the U.S. Code. In other words, this state policy contains all the legal instruments that regulate the actions of the United States of America with regard to Cuba.

In the case at hand, from the beginnings of the U.S. as an independent nation, this policy has had a supreme objective: to exert domination over the territory and inhabitants of Cuba.

With the passing of years, decades and centuries, this policy has developed under different circumstances, scenarios and historical moments in which each U.S. president has had to make adjustments to preserve the strategic objective: to exert domination over Cuba.

To accept this definition implies that no president of the United States can by himself change the supreme objective of this policy, although each can modify the manner in which it is applied, according to the changing circumstances.

We can distinguish three main stages in this policy: close scrutiny (1776-1898); domination (1899-1958), and attempts at recovery (1959 until now.)

The two first stages have been overtaken by historical events. In this third stage, the U.S. has failed to regain its domination over Cuba.

We will not retell the long history of what has happened in more than 54 years but will only refer to the present circumstances.

The U.S. has failed in all the actions it has taken to reestablish its domination over Cuba: diplomatic and political isolation; economic and commercial blockade; acts of terrorism, sabotage and espionage against Cuba; promotion of domestic subversion to provoke an anti-revolutionary armed uprising; invasion of the territory of Cuba by regular armed forces of the United States.

On November 1980, when President Jimmy Carter was defeated in his quest for a second term, the only attempt made by a U.S. president to radically change U.S. policy toward Cuba came to an end.

From then on, without the U.S. government ever abandoning any of the modalities adopted since 1959, U.S. policy toward Cuba adopted the promotion of a “regime change” in Cuba that might lead to a “transition” to a capitalist society and thereby create the conditions for a restoration of U.S. domination.

This modification of U.S. policy toward Cuba happened at the dawning of the 21st Century, which brought along several circumstances that clashed with the American purposes:

• The process of updating of the Cuban socialist model, propelled by the accords of the Sixth Congress and the First National Conference of the Communist Party of Cuba.

• The political, economic and social transformations in Latin America and the Caribbean that formed a historic trajectory aimed at discarding the United States’ hegemonic domination over the region.

• The loss of the United States’ capacity for imperialist domination over the world. In the past 20 years, the U.S. has gone from being a unipolar hegemonic power to a status of omnipresence though not omnipotence.

At present, under the presidency of Barack Obama, the U.S. finds itself at a crossroads in its policy toward Cuba. Either it maintains its current policy, aimed at reestablishing its domination over Cuba (a policy that’s doomed to fail), or it changes its strategic objective, abandons its attempts to restore domination and fosters a policy of coexistence with Cuba, respecting its independence and sovereignty and the self-determination of its people.

During his first term and so far in his second term, Obama has embraced and appropriated a “lite” version of the harebrained project of “transition” in Cuba that was sponsored by George W. Bush, embellishing it with measures of a cosmetic nature to facilitate the travel of relatives on both sides of the Straits, “people-to-people exchanges,” and an easing of telecommunications, allegedly to promote “democracy” and “freedom” in Cuba, clearly showing that his purposes do not include making any substantial changes in the policy toward Cuba.

The most “daring” step taken by the government of the United States has been to unlink the demand that Cuba release the subversive mercenary agent Alan Phillip Gross as a precondition to continue bilateral talks on specific issues of mutual interest, such as immigration and postal communications.

The political time remaining to Obama in his second term, as he faces a strong Republican opposition to his acts of government and legislative initiatives; as an economic, social and political crisis persists; as he faces deep problems of an international nature that demand his attention; as he deals with the obligations imposed by the Congressional elections in 2014 and assumes the responsibility of facilitating the triumph of an unknown Democratic presidential hopeful in November 2016, does not permit him to undertake any essential changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba.

In sum, Obama has irresolutely allowed eight years of his two presidential terms to go by without taking advantage of the historical circumstances that demand a radical change in U.S. behavior toward Cuba. In that scenario, Obama will leave the presidency almost unnoticed.

Ramón Sánchez Parodi, a former Cuban diplomat, was the first chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.