The new, more balanced debate on U.S. Cuba policy
Five years ago, after President Obama restored people-to-people travel and made regulatory changes to permit virtually any airport in the U.S. to serve the Cuban market, Senators Marco Rubio (FL) and Bob Menéndez (NJ) decided to pounce.
They wrote an amendment to ground the new flights which they planned to attach to a funding bill for the Federal Aviation Administration. Had it become law, delegations filled with legally qualified educational, religious, cultural, and humanitarian delegations would have had no way to fly to the island.
Rather than having the Senators ground the flights, the Senate grounded the Senators’ amendment. It never came up for a vote. This was a surprising, seemingly solitary defeat, for the two politically powerful Cuban American legislators.
Fast-forward five years to [last] week, to the United States Senate, to Senator Rubio and, yes, to the Federal Aviation Administration’s reauthorization bill. Wednesday (April 13), he took to the Senate floor to speak on behalf of another amendment that he planned to tack on to the FAA bill to stop Cuban refugees from gaining eligibility for welfare benefits the moment they set foot on U.S. soil.
This amendment didn’t fly either. On Thursday, as the Miami Herald reported, the Republican-controlled Senate refused even to hold a vote on the Rubio proposal. Exasperated but without an apparent trace of irony, Rubio responded by saying, “This is why people are so sick of politics.”
Far from being politics as usual, Rubio’s defeat at the hands of a Senate disinterested in voting on his amendment is emblematic of a sea-change as the country reassesses our policy toward Cuba.
For decades, Cold War warriors and the Cuban-American community possessed outsized power to determine the direction of U.S.-Cuba relations. That is why, long after its strategic sell-by date, the U.S. embargo continues to impose significant restrictions on the right of Americans to visit Cuba and the ability of U.S. corporations to do business in Cuba.
The perception of the Cuban-American lock on Florida’s electoral votes outlived the reality of it, as President Obama’s victories in the 2008 and 2012 general elections demonstrated. Slowly – like during the Senate’s 2011 debate on the FAA bill – and then suddenly, since President Obama’s decisive changes in U.S. policy were announced in December 2014, perception and reality have started to merge.
It’s a different time when Cuban American legislators in both houses of the U.S. Congress, from both political parties, admit to feeling left out of the conversation on Cuba: see, for example, “Once mighty, Miami’s political guard left out of conversation on Cuba,” Miami Herald, April 8th, 2016.
Meanwhile, Cuban American moderates who were subjected to violence, marginalization, intimidation, even loss of employment opportunities by hardliners, but not silenced by them, can’t help but celebrate the agency and voice they enjoy in this more balanced time.
“I’m happy,” one such moderate, Max Castro, wrote this week, “Happy because they can no longer veto change. Happy because they can no longer dictate a policy based on allowing the Cuban people to go blind in order to poke out the eye of Fidel or Raúl.”
The big changes in Miami are not taking place in isolation. The Des Moines Register editorialized [last] week in favor of lifting the embargo. It cited a news report that with so many U.S. tourists visiting the island, Cuba risked running out of beer. It went on to say, “Cuba seems forever changed, despite Congressional resistance in lifting the 55-year-old trade embargo. Our representatives should remove the barriers, because the benefits would change Iowa, too.”
It’s a different time when a big newspaper concedes that Cuba not only has cigars (and beer, if it doesn’t run out), but also medical breakthroughs like the treatment Cuba developed to cut down on the incidence of amputations resulting from diabetic foot ulcers.
It’s a different time when a cross-section of Americans voters – Democrats, Independents, and Republicans – support diplomatic relations and ending the trade embargo, as the CBS-New York Times poll reported last month.
It’s a different time when the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities – including cultural figures like Usher, Joshua Bell, Alfre Woodard, Dave Matthews, and Smokey Robinson, as well as the leadership of the Smithsonian, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities – can announce a cultural mission to Cuba (with an itinerary planned with the help of CDA), to advance the normalization process, without worrying that a chorus of boo-birds and fanatics will shower them with press releases or threats of Congressional hearings.
It’s a different time when it’s okay for the administration to criticize Cuba vigorously for a policy that allows Cuban Americans to visit the island by air, but not by sea, and to call out the Carnival Cruise lines for not selling them tickets – while also containing the controversy to keep diplomacy on track.
The point here is that times have changed. What we celebrate is a new normal where everyone gets his or her say, no one is dispossessed, and values core to U.S. foreign policy like human rights are still represented – without all of us being trapped in Cold War time warp or a rigged debate over U.S.-Cuba relations in which only the minority wins.
Acknowledging this change in the distribution of political power is essential as we reinvigorate the debate on ending the embargo. Here, the majority finally rules.
(From Cuba Central)
