Our Woman in Havana

by Vicki Huddleston

  On December 17, 2014, due largely to the hard work of Rhodes and Zuniga, Obama was ready to inform the world that he was normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba and expanding travel, commerce, and information flows, as well as delivering the safe return of Alan Gross. Five months later, President Obama, with the support of the intelligence community, removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Over the next two years, American travel to Cuba increased exponentially and American companies began establishing business links to Cuba, especially in the tourist sector. The Obama administration increased bilateral cooperation on public health, the environment, law enforcement, and counterterrorism efforts and opened talks on settlement of official claims for expropriated property. Obama’s final action before leaving office was to end the Wet Foot–Dry Foot policy. Cubans migrating to the United States would now be treated like every other nationality. If they arrived undocumented and could not prove that they were suffering persecution, they would be sent back to Cuba.

  The final celebration of this remarkable opening was President Obama’s visit to Havana on March 22, 2016. He was the first sitting president to visit Cuba in eighty-eight years. President and Mrs. Obama and their children spent two days on the island, staying overnight at the American residence. They probably took photos beside the great bronze eagle, which might once again become a symbol of friendship between the United States and Cuba at the dawn of this new era.

  According to the media, the presidential visit began with a walking tour led by Eusebio Leal Spangler, the historian of the city of Havana, followed by a meeting with Cuba’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who had played a key role in negotiating the opening. Obama and Raúl Castro watched a baseball game between American and Cuban teams in the same ballpark where years ago I had watched Fidel’s old-timers defeat Venezuela’s national team with President Hugo Chávez pitching. Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama visited Finca Vigía (Lookout House), where Ernest Hemingway lived and worked for twenty years, and where Americans and Cubans have been working together for over a decade to preserve the writer’s home and manuscripts.

  Obama’s speech to the Cuban people was given at the Gran Teatro Nacional. It was just as courageous as former president Jimmy Carter’s speech, given some fourteen years earlier in the Aula Magna at the University of Havana. Predictably, Fidel Castro didn’t like Obama’s speech any better than Carter’s. Obama met with dissidents at the American residence, even though some of them were unhappy because they felt that Obama should have extracted more concessions from the Cuban government. Although Obama and his team had succeeded in gaining the release of fifty-three political prisoners, following the reestablishment of full diplomatic relations in December 2015, dissent remains perilous in Cuba. Those with whom Obama met included Elizardo Sánchez; Dagoberto Valdes, an activist for the Roman Catholic Church; and Jose Daniel Ferrer, an independent journalist who, along with the late Oscar Espinosa Chepe, had been arrested in the Black Spring of 2003. Mariana Leiva, a founder of Ladies in White, and Berta Solzar, its current leader, were also present, as were a younger generation of dissidents, including a gay rights activist, a rapper, and an independent blogger.

  President Obama’s visit was intended to make his opening “irreversible,” to give Cuba and its people greater opportunity and a chance to build better lives. As Obama acknowledged, it was the beginning of a process: “I do not expect the changes that I am announcing today to bring about the transformation of Cuban society overnight. But I am convinced that through a policy of engagement, we can more effectively stand up for our values and help the Cuban people help themselves as they move into the 21st century.” And it seemed likely to succeed. Cubans were joyful and Americans were seizing opportunities to travel to Cuba afforded by better relations.

  Ben Rhodes told me that President Obama’s visit was designed to bring about a generational change both in Cuba and among Cuban Americans. He said that Obama perceived his role as putting a period on a chapter in history in order to open space for young people—both those who were reaching out from the Cuban diaspora and those on the island. Rhodes said that Obama purposefully brought along his daughters so that they could experience history in the making; he also hoped that bringing his family would help him connect with Cubans. Rhodes told me that with more time Obama might have led a concerted effort to lift the sanctions, by working to convince Congress “to break the legislative wall—the embargo.” He also would have included Raúl Castro, who has considerable influence with Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in negotiations to resolve the political and economic crisis in that country.

  But Obama’s dreams were shattered—as were those of Americans and Cubans alike—when on June 16, 2017 in a speech in Miami, President Donald Trump announced that he was canceling Obama’s opening to Cuba and strictly enforcing the embargo. His speech was vintage hardline rhetoric, including listing Cuba’s past and present crimes and misdemeanors: “killed tens of thousands … tried to host nuclear weapons … fueled chaos in Venezuela, and … harbor[ed] a cop killer.” Like his predecessors, Trump promised the demise of the Cuban regime: Yet, as the failure of President Bush’s punitive policy has proven, there is little chance that Trump will succeed. Given that Cuba is now facing a succession to a non-Castro—the first in over a half century—it is more likely that Trump’s threats will result in Castro tightening his control and slowing economic reforms.

  By abandoning engagement, Trump has returned to the failed policy of punishment and isolation. In Miami he signed a national security presidential memorandum that replaced Obama’s presidential directive, which had directed executive branch agencies to work toward the normalization of relations. Additionally, the new policy strictly enforces and restricts travel and remittances, and bans “direct” transactions with entities that would benefit the Cuban military “disproportionately.” Trump retained some of Obama’s positive initiatives by leaving in place people-to-people travel, which permits group visits for educational, religious, cultural, and humanitarian purposes. He continued Cuban American travel, the possibility of obtaining licenses for trade and investment, and bilateral agreements to safeguard the environment, improve health, and cooperate to reduce crime and narcotics trafficking. Importantly, he did not downgrade the status of the American embassy, he endorsed Obama’s change in migration policy that treats Cubans the same as other foreign nations, and said nothing about putting Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

  The tragedy of Trump’s Cuba policy is that it is a lie. Trump’s reasons for blocking further momentum toward normalization are purely political. The deep-rooted divisions in age, wealth, and citizenship among the Cuban diaspora provided Trump with an opportunity to undo Obama’s opening, which he has undertaken despite having once sought personally to do business in Cuba. Older, wealthier, Republican Cuban Americans who arrived in Florida in the 1980s and 1990s used their money and influence to convince candidate Trump to curtail Obama’s opening, which most Cuban Americans had desired. According to a 2016 Florida International University poll of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County, 69 percent approved of Obama’s policy shift and 63 percent opposed continuing the embargo. Those sentiments notwithstanding, Florida’s conservative Republican Cuban American congressional delegation, consisting of Senator Marco Rubio and Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Díaz-Balart, had demanded and expected President Trump to return to a punitive policy. A recent remark by Senator Rubio made it clear that he would be on the front lines in pressing Trump to impose a stricter and crueler approach to Cuba. He said, “It’s absurd and it’s part of a long record of coddling dictators and tyrants that this [the Obama] administration has established.” For Rubio, as it had been in the past for Fidel Castro, the other side must change first.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE FUTURE IS HAVANA, NOT MIAMI

  IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 2002, DURING THE WANING DAYS OF MY TENURE in Cuba, I was driving my official, black armored sedan down tree-l
ined Quinta Avenida (Fifth Avenue), sometimes called Avenida de las Americas. Seeing a group of teenagers looking for a ride, I stopped the car. Five or six youngsters happily squeezed into the back seat. Suddenly, realizing that this ride was something special, one of them asked what type of car it was. I replied, “It’s a Ford Crown Victoria.” In Havana, there were generally three types of cars: clunky 1950s American cars, which are mostly used as private taxis; little white Ladas used by government officials, and a fleet of black Mercedes-Benz sedans for use by Fidel Castro’s inner circle and foreign VIPs. This meant that no one except foreign diplomats drove new American vehicles, which prompted one young lady to ask, “Who are you?”

  I replied, “Soy la jefa de la SINA” (I am the chief of the North American Interests Section). For a minute, there was silence. I wondered if my passengers would ask that I stop and let them out. Then the young woman said, “Be our mother, take us to Miami!” We all laughed. After a few miles, I dropped them off near Coppelia Park, where they would likely join a long line queuing to buy Cuba’s famous ice cream.

  The point of this anecdote can be found in the words, “Take us to Miami.” Those words left me with the realization—which has never really left me—that Cuba’s youth deserve a future in Havana, not Miami. I believed that the opening crafted by Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro would offer that possibility. Obama was clearly looking toward a different and brighter future when he said during his speech at Havana’s Grand Teatro Nacional, “I believe that our grandchildren will look back on this period of isolation as an aberration, as just one chapter in a longer story of family and of friendship.” After over a half century of isolation and bitterness, there was finally a chance that these teens and their peers might enjoy better and fuller lives in Cuba. But those hopes were dashed by President Donald Trump’s decision to roll back Obama’s opening of relations with Cuba.

  For almost sixty years, the overarching trajectory of US policy toward Cuba has been, with only brief exceptions, to increasingly isolate and punish the island. In 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had hoped to force Fidel Castro to return expropriated American property by banning the export of American products to the island. From that point forward, bilateral relations continued to deteriorate. In October 1962, eighteen months after the aborted CIA-organized invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the verge of nuclear Armageddon. The US-Cuba relationship did not improve until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter briefly lifted the travel ban and approved partial diplomatic relations via the US and Cuban Interests Sections in Havana and Washington, DC.

  After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was no longer any plausible justification for continuing the embargo and a hostile policy toward Cuba. But Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—during his first term—dared not lift the embargo for fear of losing the support of Florida’s powerful Cuban American community. In 1992, at the behest of the Cuban National Foundation, George H. W. Bush signed a law that prohibited trade with Cuba in American products produced abroad. Only four years later, Bill Clinton signed yet another law tightening the embargo. But then Clinton slowly began easing the embargo by permitting limited people-to-people travel and family remittances to Cuba. George W. Bush continued these moderate Clinton policies, until eighteen months into his administration when—at the behest of conservative Cuban Americans and the Cuban Liberty Council, who supported his brother Jeb Bush’s reelection campaign for governor of Florida—he reverted to a hostile policy. Nine months later, in the spring of 2003, Fidel Castro jailed seventy-five prominent dissidents, and bilateral relations deteriorated to their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  President Obama optimistically stated that the years of alienation between our countries would be viewed in hindsight as an aberration, but his attempt to restore normal relations only lasted two years. President Trump’s reversion to a hostile policy may have set back hopes for a normal relationship between our countries by at least a generation. By the time we have a new American president who might again engage with Cuba, the island’s revolutionary-era leaders will have been replaced by a new generation of leaders, one that has been raised with and accepts that the United States is their enemy. Thus, it will be even harder to overcome the historical mistrust and begin a process of reconciliation that is acceptable to both governments. The sad truth is that unless Trump reverses course, Obama’s opening may be viewed as the aberration amid our long history of antagonistic relations with Cuba.

  Unfortunately, Obama did not have sufficient time to make his new Cuba policy “irrevocable,” as he had wished. He likely hoped that since a slight majority of Cuban Americans supported the opening, conservative Cuban Americans would be unable to force our government to revert to a punitive policy. But he didn’t count on them finding in Donald Trump a champion willing to defy the majority of Americans, including Republicans, who support normal relations with Cuba. Trump apparently believes that a punitive, isolationist policy toward Cuba will supply him with money and votes from the older, wealthier Republican Cuban Americans who would likely support his reelection should he run again in 2020. And so, once again, domestic politics trump foreign policy.

  If there is to be, as Obama indicated, “a longer story of family and friendship,” the American people will have to make Cuba policy a priority issue, something they have never done in the past. They will have to lobby Congress to repeal sanctions and elect a president who at the beginning of his first term will reinstate the Obama regulations and press Congress to end the embargo. Although there are currently two bipartisan bills in the Senate that would end the travel ban and allow American companies to do business in Cuba, they are unlikely to pass. And if they did, President Trump would likely veto them.

  Economic embargos hurt people more than they hurt governments. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cuba, where those who suffer are ordinary citizens, not the Cuban government elite. A case in point: in chapter 1, I described the sumptuous banquet offered by Castro to delegates celebrating the conclusion of the Tripartite Accords in 1991, while hungry Cubans were unable to buy shellfish because it was reserved for the government and for export. Another example: ordinary Cubans’ access to food and medicines was drastically reduced after our Congress, to please the Cuban American community, passed the Cuban Democracy Act, which tightened the embargo just as Cuba lost five billion dollars in annual Soviet subsidies. Fidel Castro labeled the ensuing seven years of poverty, 1991–98, as the Special Period in Time of Peace. Cubans lacked essentials like milk, meat, and oil, and the elderly were left in the streets to be picked up by Cuban social service agencies, which took them to asylums often run by the Catholic Church. Yet Fidel Castro and the government elite did not suffer. When Cubans began to protest, Castro unleashed the 1994 mass migration, proving that even if our Big Bang strategy of pushing desperate Cubans to the breaking point succeeded, it would not topple the Cuban hierarchy but would rather lead to another mass exodus. Cubans have always preferred flight to fight. Throughout the Special Period, the Cuban government told its citizens that the United States was responsible for their suffering. Every night, state television and radio announcers blamed the US embargo for the island’s misery. We were partially responsible, but so was the fall of the Soviet Union and—most of all—the Cuban government itself, for its absolute, centralized control of the Cuban economy.

  Even during hard times, Cubans have had benefits that most people in other poor countries do not enjoy. They have access to free education, decent health care, shelter, and a ration book that provides at least a bare minimum of food. What Cubans lack is any meaningful personal freedom, either political or economic, and the opportunity to improve the conditions of their own lives. My friend Ana Maria González was sent to Moscow to receive advanced training in computers. But she, like most Cubans, was unable to progress in her field. There were very few employment opportunities and, even as a super
visor, she earned the equivalent of less than twenty dollars per month. This meant she could never buy a better house (she still lived with her mother in one of Havana’s poorest barrios) or purchase nice clothes, a car, or any of the consumer goods that most people aspire to own and enjoy. Ana Maria had no possibility of buying any of these things as long as she was paid in nonconvertible Cuban pesos by the Cuban government. When she began working as a dog trainer for foreigners, she earned US dollars but was harassed for working outside the official system. Eventually Ana Maria became a target of state security and, like so many other Cubans, fled to the United States. Yet, like most Cubans who have emigrated during the past fifty years, Ana Maria would tell you that she would have remained on the island if she could have found economic opportunity there.

  Cuba has never been truly independent. And this to some degree accounts for the long-standing difficulties between our countries. The United States still wants to be the preeminent foreign power in Cuba. After winning the war with Spain we assumed control of its “ever faithful isle,” becoming the dominant political and economic force until the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959. Fidel Castro quickly consolidated power and managed to steer the revolution into the orbit of the Soviet Union, ending the American era in Cuba and replacing our people and investments with Soviet patronage. Once the Soviets withdrew, Cuba was on its own until Fidel persuaded Hugo Chávez to support Cuba with Venezuela’s oil largess. After the death of Chávez, Obama’s policy shift, though late in coming, provided the United States with an opportunity to reestablish its dominance in the Caribbean by bringing Cuba into our sphere of interest. A seemingly logically outcome due to our geographic proximity, the large Cuban diaspora in the United States, and our former influence over the island. But a minority of aging, conservative Cuban Americans—shortsighted and rooted in the distant past—have shattered that possibility and, in so doing, may now push Cuba into the arms of our competitors and rivals like China and Russia.