10 years after Washington’s historic deal with Havana, Cuba remains adrift

By Joyce Hackel / The World

This week marks a decade since the White House announced a back-channel deal to normalize US relations with Cuba.

In the months that followed, Havana and Washington reopened their respective embassies and expanded trade and travel.

But US President Donald Trump abruptly rolled back these changes in 2017.

Ten years after that brief, ill-fated thaw, The World’s Host Marco Werman speaks with the two officials who forged the agreement to understand how it came about and why it ultimately collapsed. Ben Rhodes was the deputy national security advisor under former US President Barack Obama. Ricardo Zúñiga was the senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

Marco Werman: I can’t imagine how you managed to keep a project like this under wraps for 18 months while you hammered out the details. Ben, take us back to the start. How did this get off the ground?

Ben Rhodes:We reached out kind of quietly and established a channel that was me and Ricardo on the American side and Alejandro Castro, who was Raul Castro’s son, Fidel Castro’s nephew, leading a Cuban delegation. And we reached out to the Canadian government. They were essentially the principal hosts. And so we would generally fly to Canada, get whisked away from the airport by Canadian security guys, taken to a pretty remote diplomatic facility by a lake and just sit there for many, many hours with the Cubans trying to see how much we could transform this relationship.

Ricardo Zúñiga, what were some of your sharpest memories of working through this back channel?

Ricardo Zúñiga: It is something that’s a hard secret to keep. So what I remember was working this project really after hours, when the rest of the team had gone off or were doing some other work.

Just personally and briefly, what motivated you to make this happen?

Ricardo Zúñiga: I lived there for two years working with human rights activists and others, and I have enormous respect for the Cuban people and I wanted to see them prosper and do well and just be a part of the region the way they should be.

So, normalization then really accelerated after the deal was struck. The State Department removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of international terrorism. Embassies reopened. Tourism picked up. There was this exuberance in Cuba during those two years of this re-engagement. President Obama and Michelle and their daughters visited in March of 2016, and took in a baseball game. Then a few days later, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones gave a free concert in Havana. Ricardo Zúñiga, what was accomplished in those two years of the thaw? How much did it really advance US interests and those of the Cuban people while it lasted?

Ricardo Zúñiga: People felt like they could travel more easily. They felt like they could connect with Americans more easily. They felt like they had much more communication with the outside world. I remember the moment that really struck me watching TV. Local news in Miami was reporting on the first time travel of a woman who was in her late 80s to visit a home that she had left decades before, and how she felt she could do that because of this change that President Obama enacted.

Well, we know how this story turned out. President Trump came into office in 2017 and shut these Obama-era initiatives down. And when President Biden took office in 2021, he did not restore the same kind of positive engagement with Cuba he promised on the campaign trail. Ben Rhodes, why didn’t Biden reengage?

Ben Rhodes: First, I just want to echo something about the two years because things were getting better. The travel that Americans were doing down there was pumping money into the hands of ordinary Cubans that was making the lives of the Cuban people better. Now Donald Trump comes in and kind of slams the door on that and re-imposes sanctions. People always ask us, how did things get better? How did things get better since Trump made that announcement? They have not. It’s been a complete catastrophe. Cuba is currently facing an acute humanitarian crisis because of American sanctions. And sure, the Cuban government’s mismanagement contributes to it. But if you compare what Cuba was like in 2016 to what it is like today, it is dire straits. This policy is not bringing about freedom. It’s not doing anything to help Cubans. It’s pushing the Cubans into the arms of the Chinese and the Russians.

And Joe Biden’s decision to continue Trump’s rollback: To me, I found that even more upsetting than Trump’s rollback because, you know, I wasn’t surprised that Donald Trump wants to come in, and do the opposite of Barack Obama. I think Joe Biden, just frankly, did not have the political courage to take on a couple of well-placed senators who are hardliners on Cuba, including Sen. Bob Menendez, who was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at the beginning of the Biden administration. He’s now been prosecuted for corruption.

And so I think Biden, on his list of things to do, he didn’t want to expend political capital on this. But the reality is, because of that, four years after he took office, we’ve seen an extraordinary migration of Cubans. It’s contributed to the pressure at our border, fleeing just desperate circumstances. And I think it’s a real stain on American foreign policy that we continue to have this policy towards Cuba that we don’t have towards any other country in the world.

Ricardo Zúñiga, would you agree with that?

Ricardo Zúñiga: I’ll say this: There were hardliners on the US side, there were hardliners on the Cuban side that Ben alluded to as well. And they have not helped one bit because they did not take full advantage of the window. And secondarily, they’re not showing a way forward. They don’t have a plan, a path forward. And I think President Obama made the right decision in saying, “Look, we’re not going to charm an authoritarian government into changing or we haven’t obviously managed to squeeze them into changing.” So alter their circumstances.

Biden not only didn’t re-engage, he also left Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Even the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, admitted publicly that Cuba did not belong there. Why not at least move to take Cuba off the list?

Ben Rhodes: That’s the most baffling, because Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism. You know, when we consider the international terrorism picture, nobody thinks Cuba is the source of any of it. We did a thorough review of their presence on that list, and they were removed on the merits. Donald Trump did not add Cuba to the list until the dying days of his administration. They rushed this in, I think, in January of 2021, to get it out the door. They just stick them on this list without any process or real explanation of why.

And that is the most punishing sanction because that essentially treats anybody that does business in Cuba as if they’re supporting terrorism. It’s had a huge impact on the Cuban people. The Biden administration knows that the process by which Trump put Cuba back on the list was not the normal process. It was wrong and there’s no substantive reason for it to be there.

I’ll just name the awkward reality. There’s no ideological reason for it. I don’t think that the Joe Biden’s administration sits around and has it out for the Cubans in the way that some other players do. It’s just pure political cowardice, to be blunt, because they know it’d be controversial.

Ben Rhodes, Ricardo Zúñiga, looking back, are there steps you could have taken that might have made the rapprochement less reversible?

Ben Rhodes: The one thing we could have done is to legislate it. But look, I mean, at the end of the day, we’ve seen Congress is relatively dysfunctional on a lot of things and therefore, a lot of policy in both administrations, Republican and Democrat, gets made by the executive branch. And that’s the most easily reversible. But Ricardo, you may have other thoughts.

Ricardo Zúñiga: No, I completely agree. I mean, it’s foreign policy that rests in the hands of the president for the most part. And the truth is, in the case of Cuba, with so many accumulated sanctions and policy decisions, it would take acts of Congress to really, truly reverse the relationship.

Ricardo, looking ahead, President elect Trump has nominated Sen. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. What do you expect his appointment could mean for US-Cuban relations?

Ricardo Zúñiga: Certainly, the policy will remain quite strong against the Cuban government. That won’t change and may even at least rhetorically, get tougher. But the country is in ashes at this stage. There is real hunger. It’s hard to make the conditions worse, even through sanctions. The question is: How do you deal with the practical reality of basically a broken society 90 miles off the US coast?

Ben Rhodes, ultimately, the thaw that you and Ricardo engineered came to naught. But could this brief historic rapprochement provide a kind of model or blueprint for diplomats down the line? What’s your takeaway on that?

Ben Rhodes: I think so. There are two things I take away. First of all, this is going to have to happen again at some point. Either that or you’re just going to try to break this country into a failed state, which is not a good outcome either. So, I think the lesson that I take is that if you can kind of put a complicated history aside, identify areas of common space and common ground and build from that foundation, you can turn the page on things like this.

It was political choices that led the US and Cuba to be at odds. It was political choices that were getting us out of that hole, and it was political choices to put us back into it. And there’s no reason we couldn’t resume that work.

The other thing that I take away from it on a positive side, is a lot of people in those two years made new connections, had new experiences. A lot of Americans went to Cuba and remained interested and engaged. And those ultimately are the people that I’d like to see determining this relationship. But I take an actually very traditionally conservative view:  Get governments out of the way and let these people make connections.

Ricardo Zúñiga, what’s your take away?

Ricardo Zúñiga: So, my takeaway is that this really is about the Cuban people. They deserve democracy. They deserve human rights. They deserve better lives. They deserve normality. It is an amazing society with a rich history very closely connected to the United States and our own history. And I want to see them flourish.