A New Stance Toward Havana (Page 2)

Washington has been poised on earlier occasions to revamp its Cuba policy. During Bill Clinton's first term, his Administration launched a series of "people to people" initiatives to try and build unofficial bridges to Cuban society. In the aftermath of Cuba's shoot-down of two Cessnas flown by an exile group, Clinton did sign the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which tightened sanctions and codified the embargo into law, but by 1997 his Administration resumed a policy of at least partial engagement. As Pope John Paul II planned a historic visit to the island, the White House and the State Department identified loopholes in the embargo laws that allowed activities that would provide "support to the Cuban people." By 1999 the Clinton Administration had moved to expand flights and broaden communications, including mail service to and from the island. By 2000 some 200,000 Americans had made the trip to Cuba--most of them legally.

A number of those initiatives were conceived through unofficial efforts to bring together Republicans and Democrats (including longstanding supporters of the embargo) to craft a new approach. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, sponsored an independent task force, which I staffed, chaired by two former assistant secretaries of state. Efforts like this helped create a new bipartisan consensus for change in Cuba policy and a willingness to improve official and unofficial ties between the two countries.

These included: "military-to-military confidence-building measures," like counternarcotics collaboration; lifting the travel ban for all but tourist travel; allowing Americans to send financial assistance to a broad range of individuals and institutions on the island; granting visas for a wide range of Cuban professional travel to the United States; legislative proposals allowing US agricultural sales to the island; permitting US companies whose property had been nationalized in the early years of the revolution to begin the process of negotiating compensation directly with the Cuban government (through debt equity swaps, for example) and allowing "limited American commercial activity on the island" to support these activities.

In the face of forceful lobbying by industries opposed to sanctions and by a variety of anti-embargo advocacy groups, the White House and Congress adopted some measures that created new openings toward the island. In 1994 US and Cuban diplomats began to meet twice a year to discuss immigration issues. After negotiations with the Cuban military in the late 1990s, the US Coast Guard posted a counternarcotics officer at the US interest section in Havana, and the Treasury Department issued a multitude of licenses for research, educational, cultural and humanitarian travel to Cuba. In the spring of 2000, Congress passed an amendment ending the embargo on food and medicine sales.

A slew of hiccups and major crises--most notably, the Elián González affair--and domestic political pressure on both sides of the Straits of Florida exerted their predictable drag on progress. But momentum for change continued on Capitol Hill even after George W. Bush took office. Bipartisan majorities in Congress passed a handful of bills to loosen the embargo, including one lifting the travel ban. These went nowhere, as the White House issued veto threats and the House leadership under Tom DeLay stripped the bills in midnight meetings. As former President Jimmy Carter made his historic trip to Havana in May 2002, Bush hard-liners tried, unsuccessfully, to smear Cuba with the WMD charge, alleging that Cuba was developing bioweapons capacity that could be deployed against the United States or shared with rogue regimes.

But having won Florida by the slimmest of margins in 2000 (if he won it at all), Bush sacrificed a rational Cuba policy on the shrine of electoral politics as his re-election campaign heated up. For example, the White House shut down the immigration talks and moved aggressively to close off other financial flows in and out of Cuba. In mid-2004 the President's Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba announced a major rollback on travel to Cuba, including limiting Cuban-Americans to only one visit to their families on the island every three years--with no exceptions. In July 2006, just twenty-one days before Castro's announcement of the transfer of power in Cuba, the Bush commission called for "bold, decisive action and clarity of message" on US policy. The goal of its new recommendations would be to "undermine the regime's succession strategy" and "ensure a genuine democratic transition on the island." "For reasons of national security and effective implementation," it continued forebodingly, "some recommendations are contained in a separate classified annex."

Classified or not, US efforts to block a succession of power in Cuba have failed. Not even the regime's most hardened critics expect Jimmy Carter to be monitoring multiparty elections in some fantasy Havana Spring anytime soon. Changes in Cuba are in the offing, but they won't look much like earlier transitions in South America, South Africa or Eastern Europe, the most heavily referenced models in the debate over how outsiders can turn Cuba into something it has resisted becoming for almost half a century.

Nor is there any guarantee that lifting the embargo and launching talks with Cuba will cause Cuba to change. Liberals who believe that lifting the embargo will bring democracy to Cuba are just as misguided as their conservative doppelgängers about the capacity for American power to reshape countries--whether halfway around the world or ninety miles off the Florida coast. But precisely because the United States plays such a large role in Cuba's national psyche, lifting the shadow of the Goliath of the North that hangs over the island's domestic politics would increase the potential for a more open debate about what kind of country Cubans want and how to get there. Cuba is without a doubt going to change after Fidel, and the United States has a strong national interest in establishing both official and unofficial ties with Cubans on the island who have a stake in that future.

The Bush White House is unlikely to move off its current intransigence. But with the Democrats controlling Congress and Cuban-Americans trending toward favoring a new approach--and while the high season of presidential campaigning is still a year away--now is the time to lay the groundwork for the next administration in 2009. Congress is in a position to launch its own bipartisan policy review and press the issue.

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