Obama’s triumph and U.S.-Cuba relations

By Jesús Arboleya Cervera

HAVANA – Barack Obama’s victory in the recent U.S. elections has rekindled the debate about that country’s policy toward Cuba.

Predictions range from those of the skeptics, who believe nothing will happen, to those of the enthusiasts, who envision important advances in the relations between the two countries. As for me, rather than try to “guess” what will happen, I prefer to concentrate on the political environment that will condition such decisions.

For starters, I think it’s appropriate to establish the limit of expectations. When we talk of a “normalization of relations” in a conflict as antagonistic as the one that exists between the U.S. and Cuba, we should probably establish (at most) a climate of coexistence, which in itself is not easy, given the existing asymmetry and the patterns that characterize U.S. foreign policy.

However, if we look at the current situation, we can see that the factors that push toward a “normalization” are greater than in the past. Therein lies the potential for the changes.   

When Cuba became a revolutionary model for the Third World and an important factor in the balance of forces that determined the Cold War, President Kennedy understood better than everybody else the international repercussion of the Cuban revolutionary process. The destruction of that process became one of the priorities of his foreign policy.

Those premises helped determine the essential aspects of a policy that persists until today, although the international points of reference that served as a basis for them disappeared long ago. Cuba is no longer the revolutionary model of the Third World and doesn’t intend to become such, and the United States’ strategic problem is no longer determined by its competition with the Soviet Union.

After the Cold War, no effort was made to establish a unipolar order where the Cuban Revolution had no place, and everywhere one sees the relative deterioration of U.S. hegemony, to the point that only U.S. military force is capable of making a difference.

Because the application of military force is not always viable, the U.S. occasionally appears bereft of a policy that will deal with the transformation it must face. This happens in a very special way in the case of Cuba.

At this moment, perhaps the only issue of an international nature where the U.S. is totally isolated from the rest of the world, even from its own allies and dependent nations, is the issue of its policy toward Cuba.

One might think that the United States’ power allows it to ignore that reality, but that has a cost in Latin America, where the Cuban case has been one of the causes of the crisis in the pan-American structure. The U.S. could try to revert the changes it has made, alienating itself even more from the Latin American concert, but if it wants to set things right, it will have to revise its policy toward Cuba.     

Another aspect that has influenced U.S. policy toward Cuba is the domestic dimension of the Cuban topic. Although this analysis might seem antiquated, I will say that still alive in certain sectors of that country is the mentality that conceives Cuba as a territory destined to belong to the U.S. because of inexorable laws such as “political gravity” or the divine will of “manifest destiny.”

Only this vision explains the persistence of a fundamentalist obsession that ofter overpowers rationality, casting doubt on the “pragmatism” that supposedly characterizes U.S. foreign policy.

This domestic dimension was empowered by the establishment of a heavy Cuban immigration. Conceived within the U.S. plans as the social base of the counter-revolution, the predominant political trends have been characterized both by their aggressiveness against Cuba and by their adherence to the most conservative currents in the U.S. political spectrum, influencing the local politics in South Florida and the design and implementation of U.S. strategy toward the island.

Nevertheless, as shown by the results of the latest elections, that balance has been modified by the weakening of the Cuban-American far right and the ultraconservative sectors in the U.S. that nourish it. This facilitates initiatives that tend to improve U.S.-Cuba relations, which could contribute positively to the interests of the Democratic Party in South Florida and other areas of U.S. political life. This reinforces the logic of such an improvement for the current government in Washington.

Add to this the increase in economic sectors that are interested in doing business in Cuba, emboldened by the economic crisis affecting the island and by the opportunities offered by the reforms in the Cuban economic model. At the end are the forces that traditionally demand the elimination of restrictions to travel and other forms of bilateral exchanges, whether for ideological reasons or constitutional criteria.

These manifestations encompass the entire political spectrum in the U.S., from conservatives to liberal, which suggests the possibility of finding a consensus that would also benefit the government’s policy, if that were its purpose.

In summary, although the electoral result does not totally resolve the existing contradictions and important barriers remain, such as the Helms-Burton Law, Obama has the power necessary to promote changes in the bilateral relations. He also is in a better condition to achieve them than any other previous president, because – unlike as in the past, when changes would have represented more costs than benefits – they would bring him benefits on a national and international scale. Also, a change in stance would dovetail with the majority interests and criteria in the United States.

To a great degree, what happens will depend on Obama’s will and the pressure exerted by the groups that are interested in changes. Cuban initiatives can also influence those groups, as shown by the impact that the recent reforms in Cuba’s immigration laws had on the Cuban-American community.  

Cuba has officially proposed to begin a dialogue to that effect and, although the positions of both government remain too distant to imagine a radical change, halfway between those positions are innumerable points of possible coincidence that would help initiate a journey that, as the poet Antonio Machado said, can only be made by walking.

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