Joe Garcia feels that it’s time for evolution
“There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt
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I’m not sure who told me once that we’ve already had the revolution; it’s now time to remove the R and evolve. It’s true. Evolution is the only way to resolve a problem that has lasted too long. Evolution also involves respect for the real sense of loss, despair and yearning that all sides feel for the Cuba issue. It is a sharp pang to the emotions, and Cubans specialize in emotion.
My daughter’s grandma, a Brooklynite who lives in Havana, has told me more than once in a kind of respect for this thing inside us we call Cuban, that she has a hard time understanding the passion Cubans possess for being Cuban. There’s something magical about the Island, she says, that doesn’t allow you to forget it and draws you in like a magnet — even when you live a million miles away. The million miles a metaphorical reference to so many Cubans who live in Miami.
She came to mind recently after a telephone conversation I had with former member of Congress from Miami, Joe Garcia. Joe was born in Miami Beach of Cuban parents who left Cuba for the same reason so many of us did back in the 1960s. I take the liberty of calling him Joe because that’s how most people refer to him.
Our call had to do with Cuba and the new Biden administration. Having served in the Obama administration, and later in Congress while Obama was president and Biden vice president, I wanted to know how Joe felt about the possibilities of re-engaging with Cuba and stepping back (in my opinion, forward) to the Obama rapprochement begun in 2014.
I started by telling him that many, especially here in Miami, warn against the Obama approach. His response was quick: “They lack courage.” He then referred to an allusion that he’s used numerous times recently. He said that Obama had cut the Gordian Knot with Cuba. What many had considered impossible to achieve Obama did so brilliantly while side-stepping “the thorniest” problem representing the ‘knot’ — Cuban Americans.
Joe Garcia is a classical case of evolution on the Cuba issue. Joe’s attitude and actions toward Cuba and the Island government, I have no doubt, have evolved. Or lest we forget that Joe Garcia became a Jorge Mas Canosa mentee and later ran the Cuban American National Foundation, with Jorge Mas’ son, after the untimely death of the older Mas. It was also Joe who steered CANF in what many considered a diametrically opposite direction of what that organization was perceived to be at one time.
And since the Obama years, Garcia has visited Cuba several times. Although not born on the Island he appears to have found roots that are deeper than he might have thought he had. It’s, I believe, that invisible magnet my daughter’s grandmother refers to. He’s found his polar north, or south… and it drives him to stay involved and express thoughts and ideas not easily heard in Miami after the Trump years.
“I think what Biden is going to do is to continue at pace [with a rapprochement]. I don’t think the edicts of a [former] lawless president will get in the way of what makes sense for American foreign policy,” he recently said to one of the many news outlets that seek his opinions on the future of Cuban under the new U.S. president.
During a TV interview with Miami journalist Jim DeFede, who brought up what some consider Obama’s failure with Cuba, Garcia defended the former president, stating that the Obama policy “was not a failure no matter what they’re saying.” During the Obama years there were “less people in jail, more civil society, more exchange, more economic opportunity…” He added that there was a “flourishing of discussion and debate” on both sides. There are more “dissidents in the streets of Miami than I saw in Cuba,” he added.
Joe Garcia doubles down on his belief that to say that the Obama policy was a failure “is simply to avoid the facts” and points to what he refers to as a fervent dialogue going on at the time on all issues: human rights, journalism, free expression… stating what should be obvious: “Things were better four years ago than they are today.”
He finishes with DeFede, saying: “To embrace the Trumpian mindset — it produced nothing but misery and suffering in Venezuela, and it’s only made the lot of the Cuban people worse with absolutely no movement to what we all want — a more equitable, more prosperous Latin America.”
Let me make something clear, Joe Garcia has not suddenly become pro-Cuban government or anything of the sort, but, and this is important, Joe has come to the realization that the U.S.-Cuba dilemma will never be solved the way it’s been handled over the past more than 60 years. Like Garcia himself told me, “It makes no sense… economically, humanistically, and as a nation.”
He has opened his eyes to Cuba’s reality. And that reality, he understands, has many hues. He speaks of the pain he knows his parents felt and feel, he also mentions his grandfather and that anguish. But at the same time he refers to the pain and anguish that Cubans on the Island must feel and have felt.
We cannot look at this as a one-sided issue, he tells me. That attitude has offered no solutions for decades. Let us agree to disagree and seek what unites us, he says. Take that as a starting point and work outward from there.
Garcia says that President Biden will “lean in” aggressively to restart the Cuba rapprochement because, as he says, “it makes sense.” At the same time he insists that Cuba must also do its part, last time around they were timid. “They have to be willing to embrace change also,” said Garcia.
Joe feels that there are many here who should visit the Island if they’re really serious about offering solutions. At that point he said something I found terribly interesting, and goes to the heart of what he’s trying to accomplish. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, If we can solve some of the problems — a better standard of living, the end of long lines to purchase products needed for daily living, and others — initially, that’s more important than trying to undo what is already there and in the process create chaos and anarchy that nobody knows where it might lead…
Before hanging up, Joe insisted on one last thing. Over the years the U.S.-Cuba situations has always focused on Washington and Havana. “The solution,” he stressed, “goes through Miami.”
