US quiet as Cuban government quashes dissidents
Administration waits for Havana response before establishing policy
The pounding, suspenseful music warned of something dangerous. A man in a white lab coat appeared on screen to recount his participation, along with Cuban dissidents, in training seminars on how to subvert the Cuban military.
He is a doctor, he explained, an oncologist who also has served for the past 25 years as a secret agent of Cuban security. His assignment as “Agent Leonardo”: to infiltrate the counterrevolutionary movement he charged is directed and paid for by the “great enemy of the north.”
The doctor was the star of one of a crescendo of televised exposés by the Cuban government in recent weeks, designed to discourage participation in the islandwide “Civic March for Change” that Cuba’s blossoming opposition movement has called for on Monday. Demonstrations in support of the march are planned in Miami and many world capitals.
The villain of the television piece was Yunior Garcia Aguilera, the bespectacled, 30-something actor and playwright who has become the most prominent current face of the dissident movement, in which Cuban artists have played a major role. He participated in a 2019 university seminar in Spain — which Agent Leonardo apparently also attended — at which two academics discussed their work on the Cuban armed forces.
The Biden administration has described the movement as the tip of a turning point in Cuba. It sparked unprecedented peaceful demonstrations by thousands on July 11 that were violently put down by Cuban security and led to hundreds of arrests.
Because “circumstances have changed” on the island, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last Sunday, President Joe Biden has held off on unveiling his long-awaited policy toward Cuba as he considers “the best way forward.” The Cuban government’s response to the Monday march, he and other officials have indicated, will play a role in how the administration proceeds.
Sullivan dismissed suggestions that U.S. politics was also driving the delay in implementing promised reversals of at least some of the Trump administration’s harsh policies toward Cuba.
But as the administration struggles to pass a broad domestic agenda with a razor-thin congressional majority, officials readily acknowledge they cannot afford to offend. An economic embargo and isolation of Cuba’s communist government have enjoyed bipartisan support for decades, led by Cuban American lawmakers and interrupted only by President Barack Obama’s brief diplomatic outreach.
Cuba is “complicated,” a senior administration official said recently. “The ongoing policy review is one where the President of the United States has asked us to find a third way . . . that allows us to transcend what has been a pendulum between Republican and Democratic administrations that have no consistency.”
“That third way is very elusive on Cuba, particularly after what happened on July 11,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The Cuban government’s behavior, showing “that they’re in survival mode, and that the way to survive is cracking down . . . is making it difficult for us.”
Measures already drafted, which the administration hopes to announce before the end of the year, include a reauthorization of remittances and U.S. citizen travel to Cuba — in both cases more than the paltry amount Trump allowed but less than were authorized under Obama. A Biden promise to guarantee Internet connectivity on the island, avoiding government shutdowns of social media, which has played a major role in opposition mobilization, has run into technological and legal problems.
More sanctions, along the lines of those imposed by Biden on the Cuban security services and their leaders after July 11, are also expected. A number of Cuba experts and some Democrats believe that the “open hand” Obama extended toward Havana showed results in expanding economic and civic, if not political, freedoms. They argue that the administration’s attempts to calibrate the policy are doomed to failure, as is its desire to woo the powerful Cuban American voting bloc in Florida, lost last year to Trump, in next year’s midterm elections. Biden, said American University professor and administrator William Leogrande, is “making excuses for not having the political courage to do anything.”
“Democrats who think they can outflank the Republicans in Florida on the Cuba issue are kidding themselves,” Leogrande said.