Biden must deepen aid for Cuban people
Despite his other priorities, international crises prove they arise on their own schedule.
Ah, Cuba. If only the star-crossed Caribbean isle were merely an intoxicating mix of decaying Baroque buildings lining the crowded streets of Old Havana, vintage Chevys and Buicks from Joe Biden’s era as a young car guy in Wilmington, Del., and the alluring sounds of love and loss from the Buena Vista Social Club. The island just beyond Florida’s horizon, is, of course, so much more — for better and, unfortunately, for worse, as the largest protests in decades erupting in Havana and throughout the nation are reminding us.
Cubans have reached a breaking point. They’re fed up with food and medical shortages, frequent power outages, a cash crunch and high inflation. They’re fed up with the daily grind of a repressive regime unable to deliver the basics to a people who long for liberty as much as they do bread and milk on grocery store shelves and aspirin in the farmacias.
“Do you know what it’s like not to be able to buy my child food from the store?” a 43-year-old homemaker in Havana asked a New York Times reporter. “People are fed up with the abuse of power. We are desperate.”
Desperation drove that woman and thousands of others into the streets last weekend. Carrying flags proclaiming “Libertad!,” they defied police beatings and arrests, possible detentions of antigovernment activists and a crackdown on social media. “It is one thing to wave a flag here in the U.S., where you aren’t risking your life. They are risking imprisonment and death,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox News earlier this week. As a young man, Cruz’s father was imprisoned in Cuba before making his way to Canada.
President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, the first president not a Castro since the Cuban Revolution more than 60 years ago, reacted with predictably defiant rhetoric. “They’ll have to walk over our dead bodies if they want to take on the revolution,” he proclaimed earlier this week. “We’re willing to do everything, and we’ll be on the streets battling.”
Left unexplained by the president, however, was any notion of what precisely “the revolution” means in Cuba in 2021, nearly 65 years after Fidel Castro led an uprising that toppled the military dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista.
There was hope for the better just a few weeks ago, when 89-year-old Raul Castro, successor to his brother Fidel, surrendered his last Communist Party position and shuffled off into retirement. President since 2019, Diaz-Canel has been unable or unwilling to break in any serious way with the Castro approach, apparently is more ideologue than pragmatist.
The demonstrations and Diaz-Canel’s obstinance present the Biden administration with a dilemma. Candidate Biden wisely promised to ease the Trump-imposed sanctions and to re-establish some version of engagement with Cuba, a policy hallmark of the Obama-Biden administration. But he sure took his time in engaging. “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in March.
There is no shortage of challenges at the top of any president’s agenda, and Biden’s preference to deal with China and Russia, for instance, was reasonable. But as in the Middle East, when the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians caught the administration flat-footed, America seems to have been looking elsewhere as tensions in Cuba boiled.
Now, the Cuban demonstrations, the assassination of Haiti’s president and pre-election government repression in Nicaragua are forcing a foreign policy recommitment toward crises closer to home.
Biden is saying the right things. “We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” he said in a statement the White House issued earlier this week.
Beyond words, though, the president has three choices, all of them fraught. His first option is perhaps his worst: He can maintain the position of maximum pressure imposed by the Trump administration, the position forcefully advocated by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. A son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio is an influential voice in Congress on Cuba matters, although he conveniently ignores the fact that six decades of pressure have accomplished little if anything.
A second option might not be any easier, not politically anyway — and potentially, not any more likely to succeed in bringing change to Cuba. Biden can try to resurrect Obama’s policy of easing sanctions, promoting economic and cultural ties and hoping that involvement with the broader world will, over time, encourage Cuba’s evolution into a less repressive, capitalist-oriented nation. That’s the position many older and politically active Cuban Americans in Florida adamantly oppose — a fact that has loomed large in Florida and presidential politics for decades. That was a bold move by Obama, and a welcome break from decades of despair, but it simply wasn’t in place long enough to know whether the greater engagement was working.
For those reasons, a third option may be Biden’s best option. U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, the Cuban-American Democrat from New Jersey who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seeks to achieve a policy balance between maximum pressure on the Cuban regime and maximum assistance to the Cuban people.
Menendez, for example, would maintain sanctions, while holding out hope that an opening on the part of the Cuban government would result in aid, increased trade and various forms of assistance.
The car guy in the White House would probably rather drive a classic Pontiac along El Malecon, Havana’s beautiful boulevard beside the sea, than to recalibrate a Cuba policy in the midst of crisis. This week’s historic demonstrations, however, have forced his hand. The president has to act.