Sixty years after Bay of Pigs, Biden can find opportunity in Cuba after decades of policy failures | Opinion

On the night of April 17, 1961, the CIA-backed Brigade 2506 reached the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern shore. The intention was to overthrow Fidel Castro’s socialist government and install as interim leader José Miró Cardona, a former member of Castro’s government and the head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a pro-democracy exile group.

The brigade was quickly met by 20,000 of Castro’s forces. Two days later, the operation was resoundingly quashed. In this humiliating defeat, more than 100 brigade members were killed and almost 1,200 surrendered. As Michael Bustamante writes in his newly published book, “The Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile,” “regardless of the later debates about the plan’s execution, at base, the idea that 1,500 men would be met as liberators and initiate the toppling of a government still backed by the better part of a population of 6 million remained an inherently faulty premise.”

Since then, the United States has continued its antagonism. For more than 60 years, the trade embargo has not only cut off commerce between our countries, the United States also makes it difficult for other countries to take up the slack by threatening to levy sanctions or fines against them for trading with Cuba. Isolation may have been a tactic intended to force the island’s government into submission, but it’s only led Cuba to make alliances with China, Venezuela and the USSR — and now again with Russia — that generally don’t care about American interests and, at times, work against them. In addition, the Cuban government set up a network of shell companies to further circumvent the embargo, which it relies on “based on how much pressure it is getting from Washington,” according to a recent Miami Herald story.

In the meantime, millions of Cuban citizens are caught in the crosshairs of this toxic stalemate. Although I was born in the United States after the Bay of Pigs, I’ve traveled regularly to Cuba since 1979 to visit my family there and have seen firsthand the impact of the embargo on Cubans. Our trips aren’t vacations spent on beaches sipping daiquiris. They are the only way we can bring necessities — clothing, food, medicine, mobile phones, memory sticks, appliances — to relatives who live in a country where ration cards are still used.

The economic situation in Cuba, however, is not solely the fault of the embargo. The Cuban government has a track record of corruption, inefficient distribution of food and goods and a strong distaste for dissenting viewpoints. Yet, in the not-so-recent past, it was willing to sit down at the negotiating table with the United States.

During the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, his administration struck more than a dozen agreements with the Cuban government on issues ranging from health and medical research to agriculture and environmental cooperation. More open relations also encouraged a wave of tourists who brought much-needed hard currency and supported service jobs. Cubans welcomed these Americans and the opportunities they brought. Some converted their homes to bed and breakfasts and started paladares (private restaurants). Other professionals gave up their government jobs to become taxi drivers or work in construction, earning their monthly wages of $30 (or more) in a single day. These ventures deposited cash directly to the pockets of ordinary Cubans—including $40 million from AirBnB rentals alone.

By not taking a stance on Cuba, the Biden administration, in effect, is upholding President Trump’s policy of refusing to hold talks and gutting the American embassy in Havana of personnel, curtailing remittances to family members, halting flights to cities other than Havana and ending the use of “people to people” visas for individual Americans to travel to the island. Throw in the pandemic, and Cubans now struggle harder to find food and basic goods, while their relatives on this side of the Florida Straits — like my family — have almost no means to help them.

If the Biden administration is willing to change course in Afghanistan starting on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, this anniversary of the Bay of Pigs is a clarion call to throw in the towel on 60 years of failed U.S. policy toward Cuba and resume those proven to make a positive impact.

The Biden administration should roll back Trump’s harmful (and cruel) policies and reopen discussions with the Cuban government. The Cuba Study Group, nonpartisan policy and advocacy organization, also recommends restarting the Cuban Family Reunification Program to process the backlog of 22,000 pending cases; reviewing Cuba’s re-designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism; creating a new general license to allow the American private sector to more easily support the growth of its Cuban counterpart; and developing programs to cultivate buy-in within the Cuban-American community.

Given our history with Cuba, let’s seize this opportunity and not add another failure to the long list unsuccessful U.S. policies.

Katarina Wong is the program manager of the arts administration program at Columbia University and writes about U.S.-Cuban relations. She is working on a memoir about her Cuban-Chinese heritage.