End to US-Cuba stand-off welcomed

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US SECRETARY of State John Kerry visited Cuba on Friday to ceremoniously raise the US flag over the reopened embassy there for the first time since it was lowered in 1961 when President Dwight Eisenhower severed diplomatic ties with the new communist government of President Fidel Castro.

US President Barack Obama’s bold move to end the half-a-century-old stand-off with the Caribbean island is part of a wider strategy to improve America’s relations with old foes.

The Iran nuclear deal is another key component.

Most of the world has welcomed the move, feeling that the stand-off had become an irrational obsession which no longer served America’s interests or those of its Cuban allies, if it ever did.

Even in the US itself, public sentiment, which strongly supported the US stance at the height of the Cold War, had shifted considerably.

Most Americans have come to believe that a few Cuban exiles, mainly in Florida, were an eversmaller tail wagging the US dog on Cuban policy.

The diehards remain though. As Kerry was making his historic speech in Havana, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, a CubanAmerican from Obama’s own Democratic Party, was delivering a speech back in the US criticising Obama for his shift.

“This is the embodiment of a wrong-headed policy that rewards the Castro regime’s brutality at the expense of the Cuban people’s right to freedom of expression and independence,” the senator declared.

Maybe Menendez felt he had to say that for the sake of his fellow Cuban Americans. But he reminded us at least that there once was some point to the US Cuban policy that is now fading into history.

That shift has been widely hailed, as though the scales suddenly fell from America’s eyes, enabling it to see at last, in a blinding Damascene moment of moral revelation, that over half a century of its treatment of Cuba had been completely wrong-headed.

The reality is surely a little less clear-cut than that. It was not entirely irrational for the US to regard with deep suspicion a communist government being established about 160km off the Florida coast, at the height of the Cold War.

Sympathy

According to his biographer Robert Dallek, President John Kennedy had, as a senator, been fairly sympathetic to Castro’s revolution in 1959 to overthrow the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista.

But Kennedy soon changed his mind because he believed Castro then betrayed his own democratic pretensions, by himself becoming a dictator, and a communist one at that.

And so Kennedy authorised the no doubt ill-advised and certainly disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. That may have driven Castro even further into the arms of the Soviet Union and led to his even more ill-advised decision to allow the Soviet Union to install missiles on Cuba the next year.

Whatever the justification, in Castro’s eyes, for that decision, it was a reckless one which pushed the world closer to the brink of nuclear war than it has ever been.

But, however he got there, Castro was by then certainly a dictator, suppressing all opposition. The embargo which the US imposed was designed to put pressure on him to change that.

Over the years the policy certainly became obsessive and often absurd.

But the worst part of the situation, from the US perspective, was simply that it didn’t work. As Obama pointed out when he announced the shift in policy last year, it had not only failed; it had become counter-productive.

Instead of weakening the Castro regime, it actually strengthened it. It gave Castro a terrific scapegoat – the best that the world had to offer, the world’s most powerful enemy – for all of his government’s failures and transgressions.

He could, and did, blame the US embargo for Cuba’s continuing economic failures and use the US as a pretext for his continuing repression of all political opposition.

Every opponent became an agent of the CIA. Some undoubtedly were. But most were just ordinary Cuban democrats trying to rid themselves of a dictator who was ruining their country.

So Obama’s new Cuban policy is not so much a moral shift as a strategic one, evidently designed to take a different route to the same destination; a more democratic Cuba.

By depriving the Havana government of its scapegoat, and by stimulating commerce between the two countries, he seems to be hoping that growing prosperity and a rising middle class might eventually put pressure on the Castro regime to relax its controls and allow more democracy.

A similar debate about the merits of sanctions against apartheid South Africa raged in the 1980s, you might recall.

And what is happening now between the US and Cuba also rather eerily echoes what is happening in Zimbabwe. The sanctions which the US and other Western governments imposed on President Robert Mugabe after 2002 have strengthened him, some say.

Like Castro, he has exploited them – with much less justification since they have only really targeted Mugabe and his cronies – as an excuse for what are, in truth, the self-inflicted failures of the Zimbabwean economy.

He has also quite successfully branded his political opponents as Western stooges.

But whether lifting the sanctions, either in Cuba or in Zimbabwe, will achieve what sanctions haven’t, remains a hypothesis.