Our Woman in Havana

by Vicki Huddleston

  After Castro jailed the dissidents, Bush had the excuse he needed to impose his Big Bang policy. He tightened the embargo and attempted to undermine the regime by funding projects designed to promote internal unrest and foster an uprising. On October 10, 2003, the administration established the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, whose objective was “to plan for Cuba’s transition from Stalinist rule to a free and fair society and to identify ways to hasten the arrival of that day.” USAID, which was dedicated to providing humanitarian relief and development assistance around the globe, was given the task of hastening the “transition from Stalinist rule.” Castro, believing that USAID was a new weapon in an arsenal designed to bring down his government, declared its activities in Cuba illegal.

  To some degree I blame myself for the use of USAID as a weapon against Castro. I had never liked the argument that our outreach program would hasten the downfall of the regime, despite having occasionally used it to gain support for our efforts. When Peter Corsell and I left Cuba in September 2002, the combination of rapidly escalating tensions and the curtailment of American diplomatic travel outside Havana crippled our very successful outreach program. The following year, the Bush administration tried to replicate and amplify our success by establishing the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which was loosely based on Peter’s and my philosophy of empowering the Cuban people through the provision of communications equipment and information. But there were two major differences: the USAID budget was far beyond what could be effectively deployed in Cuba, in the tens of millions of dollars per year; and Castro had explicitly declared that receiving assistance from USAID was illegal.

  In May 2004, six months before his reelection bid, President Bush announced $59 million in additional funding for TV Martí and Radio Martí, as well as for public diplomacy and USAID projects in Cuba. This level of funding meant there was now an organized and concerted campaign to denounce and destroy the Castro regime. And, Castro, by declaring USAID activities illegal, forced the agency to carry out its activities covertly in order to avoid the recipients or contractors being imprisoned. Not surprisingly, the USAID personnel were not well versed in spycraft and were naive to believe they could operate in Cuba without the government finding out. Alan Gross, who was not a spy but simply a USAID contractor working to set up a communications network for Havana’s Jewish community, was arrested, imprisoned, and charged with “acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the state.”

  In 2005, at the beginning of his second term, Bush appointed a new Cuba policy point man. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez replaced Mel Martinez, who had recently been elected to the US Senate. Secretary Gutierrez was born in Havana and came to the United States with his family during the first exodus, just after the Cuban Revolution. An intelligent and dedicated man, he worked his way through the ranks of the Kellogg Company to become its youngest president and CEO. When I interviewed him for this book, he described his role as continuing the policy enacted by President Bush and Congress, of which Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart was the principal author and advocate. By the time Gutierrez took the reins of Cuba policy, most of the administration’s punitive policies were in place. In addition to the USAID initiative to create a transition in Cuba, the American people-to-people travel had been virtually eliminated and, to the considerable consternation of the diaspora, even Cuban American visits and remittances were severely restricted.

  I asked Gutierrez if it was fair to label the Bush administration’s Cuba policy as pursuing regime change. He conceded that the label was not false, pointing to the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, whose goal was a “transition,” not a “succession.” Gutierrez discovered—like Bush did after his May 2002 speech to the diaspora—that for conservative Cuban Americans, free and fair elections in Cuba were not a viable option. He recounted that Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart became furious with him for suggesting democratic elections as a means of change. Díaz-Balart and the Cuban Liberty Council wanted nothing to do with elections—no matter how free and fair—if there was any possibility those elections would result in the Castro brothers retaining power.

  Secretary Gutierrez acknowledged that the notion of regime change contained inherent contradictions. The embargo had not succeeded in ousting the Castro brothers, but a military invasion was not an option either. In context of resolving the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy had pledged not to invade Cuba; and since then both Democratic and Republican presidents have found it prudent to uphold that pledge. The United States would obviously win a military contest, but Cuba’s professional military would extract a high cost in American lives. Consequently, US presidents, vainly hoping that they could bring down Castro with economic sanctions, have discovered again and again that the regime is too entrenched to be removed without the use of military force, which if deployed would likely result in chaos in Cuba and universal condemnation of the United States.

  According to Gutierrez the tragedy is that “the policy had likely made sense thirty or forty years ago. But if the chaos scenario were successful now, it would result in radical change, creating the conditions for another revolution in twenty-five years.” The one thing that the Bush administration’s harsh policies toward Cuba should have accomplished was to disprove the myth that a hostile policy could oust the Castro regime. Bush tightened the embargo to its maximum extent, funded an assistance program whose objective was to sow chaos, and indulged in a continuous stream of rhetoric designed to denigrate Cuba’s rulers. Yet even when Castro ceded power temporarily in 2006, and then permanently in 2008, there was no indication that the Cuban regime was weakened by the transfer of power from one Castro brother to another. And Bush wisely did not consider the use of force. Gutierrez confirmed, “I never heard anyone mention invasion.”

  The importance of the Cuban American voting bloc on Florida’s electoral votes dictated that—until President Barack Obama’s second term—every American president pandered to the diaspora’s demands for a repressive Cuba policy. As Secretary Gutierrez put it, “The conservative diaspora doesn’t like stability in our relationship. To them it means we accept the regime.” They also had begun to imagine that the dissidents would become the agents of insurrection. But even at the height of their influence, when former President Carter recognized Project Varela during the Cuban Spring of 2002, the dissidents never posed a serious threat to the regime. They were merely a nuisance to Castro, bravely but ineffectively demanding reform. Theirs was a quixotic effort because the dissidents had no means of mobilizing the population, most of which didn’t even know they existed. I asked Gutierrez why Castro was so paranoid about the dissidents when they posed no real threat. He gave me the best answer I have heard: “La calle es de Fidel” (The street belongs to Fidel). Once immensely popular with the people, Fidel couldn’t imagine that some might willingly turn against him, even as he grew grayer and less admired. And this stubbornness is not unique to Fidel; Cuban Americans are equally tenacious. “They learn their talking points at the dinner table and stick to them,” Gutierrez said.

  By 2007, I was again working on Cuba, now as a private citizen, after having retired from the Foreign Service. I had joined former ambassador Carlos Pascual to colead a project on Cuba at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Our objective was to define a US policy toward Cuba that would promote positive change and democracy on the island. The group of nineteen leading Cuba experts—half of which were Cuban American—included scholars, diplomats, journalists, and Francisco “Pepe” Hernandez, president of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). All were open to participating in simulations designed to determine what policy would best promote peaceful change in Cuba. For example, in order to determine the impact of a leadership crisis in Cuba, we developed scenarios to illustrate how the regime might react to a hostile or a moderate approach by the United States.

  Conservative Cuban Americans and, initially, the Cuban government did not
approve of the project. Despite my reassurances, the head of the Cuban Interests Section, Ambassador Jorge Bolaños—“Ambassador” being an honorary title from his previous positions abroad—told me that he objected. He assumed our efforts were intended to perpetuate an isolationist US policy toward Cuba, but we proved him wrong. The result of numerous discussions, simulations, and talks by leading experts was that all participants agreed that the president should adopt a policy of engagement, not isolation.

  Carlos Pascual and I hoped that President Barack Obama, who had been elected just as we were finishing the project, would use our findings as a blueprint for an opening of relations with Cuba. We provided a summary of our findings to Congress as well as to the State Department. Learning to Salsa: New Steps in U.S.–Cuba Relations provided a step-by-step plan for normalizing relations. But interest in adopting a new Cuba policy was limited. Obama attended the April 2009 Summit of the Americas, where he briefly met and shook hands with Raúl Castro, but nothing more ensued. There was little momentum, because Cuban American senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) successfully blocked Obama’s effort to modify embargo rules other than fulfilling his promise to reinstate Cuban American travel and remittances. Realizing that change was unlikely in the short term, neither Carlos Pascual nor I remained at Brookings to press for a change in Cuba policy. Instead we both became political appointees in the Obama administration, Carlos as the ambassador to Mexico, and I as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa.

  The normalization of diplomatic relations has taken much too long. It should have begun in the early 1990s with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union and its alliance with Cuba. Three presidents failed to seize the opportunity: George H. W. Bush was goaded by Bill Clinton, his rival for the presidency, into tightening the embargo; Clinton’s attempted openings were quashed by Castro; and George W. Bush tried everything short of an invasion. Fidel Castro, who clearly understood the power of Cuban Americans in the formulation of US policy, allegedly quipped in 1973, “The United States will come to talk to us when they have a black president and the world has a Latin American pope.” Well, in November 2008 Americans elected a black president, and in March 2013, early in Obama’s second term, the Roman Catholic papal conclave elected a humble Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as Pope Francis.

  Finally, well into his second term, President Obama decided to make a concerted effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba. The first public indication that Obama was contemplating a change of policy occurred on December 10, 2013. Obama and Raúl Castro shook hands at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in South Africa, which was significant because it foreshadowed Obama’s commitment to engage with Cuba; yet very little was heard from the administration other than a series of editorials and articles in the New York Times advocating better relations.

  Nevertheless, on December 17, 2014, Obama surprised the American public by announcing that full diplomatic relations had been reestablished with Cuba. Eight months later, on August 14, 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry raised the American flag in front of the US Interests Section in Havana, making it once again the American embassy. It had been fifty-four years since our flag in Cuba was lowered by the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, only days before John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency.

  Although these events seemed to develop almost effortlessly, a series of complex negotiations had privately taken place between the two long-term adversaries. Obama entrusted the responsibility for his Cuba opening to two close allies: Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs Ricardo Zuniga. Rhodes, once an aspiring writer pursuing an MFA at New York University, had moved from writing fiction to speech writing for former Congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN), and then joined Obama’s campaign for president. Observers said that Rhodes was the critical link to Obama because he could anticipate the president’s political inclinations and concerns. Zuniga, a career diplomat, provided the substantive knowledge, language skills, and patience that were essential to keeping the discussions moving forward, even when it seemed they might never reach a successful conclusion. A scion of a prominent political family in Honduras that had immigrated to the US, Zuniga had a ready smile and a good sense of humor. When Obama asked him to join the National Security Council as senior adviser for the Western Hemisphere, he was political counselor at our embassy in Brazil. Prior to that Ricardo was acting director of the Office of Cuban Affairs and had served as the human rights officer at the US Interests Section in Havana—invaluable background for dealing with the prickly Cubans.

  The fact that the United States no longer had national security concerns about Cuba made negotiations between Obama and Castro both easier and harder; easier because an opening to Cuba did not endanger the United States, but harder because Cuba’s relative lack of importance pushed it to the background as Obama and his senior advisers dealt with crises in Asia and the Middle East. But according to Ben Rhodes, the president was personally committed because he believed that for too long the Cuban people had been forced to live behind a wall constructed in the 1960s by American fears, enhanced in the 1990s by a diaspora intent on payback, and maintained since then by hard-liners on both sides of the Florida Straits.

  Before there could be any hope of improved relations, the negotiators had to arrange for the exchange of spies imprisoned in Cuba and the United States. Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who had a reputation for negotiating the release of Americans imprisoned abroad, had been unable to obtain the release of Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned in Cuba for attempting to set up a communications network for the Jewish community in Havana. The Cuban government considered Gross as leverage for getting back the Cuban Five, who had been imprisoned in the US for spying. The Cuban Five formed La Red Avispa (the Wasp Network), which was responsible for reporting on the activities of Cuban American groups in Florida that might carry out attacks against Cuba or Fidel Castro. They were arrested in 1998, shortly after the Clinton administration and Castro agreed to an exchange of information between the FBI and Cuban state security. Castro believed that the information Cuba had shared with the FBI led to their discovery and incarceration. He thought Clinton had misled him, which only heightened his desire to gain their release. The arrest of the Cuban Five came two years after Cuban MiGs shot down two civilian aircraft belonging to Brothers to the Rescue. Predictably, a Miami court convicted them of conspiracy to commit espionage and murder, and sentenced all five of them to long prison sentences.

  There were divisions in both the US and Cuban governments over the wisdom of an opening, and Raúl Castro had the greatest challenge because he had to overcome Fidel’s concerns. The imperative of bringing home the five spies—or “heroes,” as the Cubans called them—gave Raúl the excuse he needed to engage, but Fidel still hesitated. The American negotiators had a problem as well. They knew that there would be no deal unless they released the Cuban spies, but in the espionage world spies are exchanged for spies. Gross was a USAID contractor, not a spy, and neither Obama nor the intelligence community wanted to make the exchange because it would validate Cuba’s claim that Gross was a spy. This conundrum was unexpectedly resolved when the intelligence community admitted that they, too, had a spy they would like to bring home. He was a Cuban American intelligence agent who had been wasting away in Cuban jails for the past twenty years. By including this agent in the trade, Rhodes and Zuniga had a deal that the intelligence community could get behind—the administration would release the Cuban spies in exchange for the American spy, while Alan Gross would be released on “humanitarian” grounds.

  As talks moved into the critical stage, an impartial third party was found in Pope Francis who made it difficult for either side to lie or back away from commitments made to him. A July 2014 meeting at the Vatican sealed the deal. On December 17, 2014, all the logistics were in place and the prisoner swap was confirmed. An American aircraft carrying Alan and J
udy Gross, along with Senators Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)—who had all lobbied hard for Gross’s release—headed from Havana to Washington, DC. At about the same time, an aircraft carrying three of the Cuban Five headed to Havana; the other two had already completed their prison terms and were back in Cuba. The American agent’s return was not recorded. He was later identified as Rolando Sarraff, and was said to have been instrumental in warning the United States about the Cuban Five (for whom he was exchanged) and the US intelligence officer Ana Belén Montes, who had been spying for Cuba until she was exposed and arrested in 2001.

  While arranging the exchange, Rhodes and Zuniga had to come up with a strategy to improve relations. It included upgrading the Interests Section to an embassy; proposing an ambassador; and modifying the sanctions to permit more travel, trade, and communications. Zuniga led an interagency review to determine which sanctions could be modified and which could not be touched because they were law. For years, Cuban Americans have claimed that since the embargo was codified by the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, it could not be changed by the executive branch. But this claim was misleading, as Carlos Pascual and I pointed out in Learning to Salsa. Although the embargo had become law, so too had the provision that allowed the secretary of the Treasury to change sanctions regulations. Both Presidents Clinton and Bush had already modified the sanctions without congressional approval. This meant that Obama could propose a series of measures that would allow more travel—but not tourism, which was embedded in the 2000 law that allowed agricultural sales to Cuba—as well as permit licensing for trade and investment. However, full normalization would only come when the US Congress repealed the several laws that mandate the embargo.