U.S.-Cuba relations are ‘a mess’ because Obama ignored the pitfalls of reopening | Opinion
Jeffrey DeLaurentis’ June 30 op-ed bears the headline, “Five years later, diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba are a mess.” DeLaurentis, former U.S. chargé d’affaires in Havana, is right, but those relations aren’t a mess for the reasons he claims.
The United States has diplomatic relations with almost 200 countries, and many are governed by brutal dictatorships that suppress human rights, support terrorism, undermine democracy or impoverish their citizens through corruption and destructive economic policies. U.S. relations with those countries are messy, for good reason.
The reason of why U.S.-Cuba relations are a mess is because Cuba’s government does all of the above, and that the Obama administration, in its outreach to Raul Castro, decided to overlook it all in pursuit of a legacy achievement.
The resulting appeasement succeeded only in encouraging the regime to increase its malign behavior at home and abroad, to the detriment of U.S. interests and those of Cubans, not to mention Venezuelans.
The seeds of Obama’s failure on Cuba were planted during the secret negotiations in which the White House kept most senior officials in the dark and entrusted negotiations to a mid-level official with no prior foreign-policy experience.
The result was a series of unilateral concessions with no reciprocity of any consequence from Havana. None of the positive objectives that Obama promised was achieved. Instead of improving human rights in Cuba, repression increased, according to foreign and Cuban human-rights defenders. Even as Air Force One landed in Havana in March 2016, dozens of Ladies in White were savagely beaten on their way to church services.
Instead of opening markets for U.S. exporters, Cuba drastically reduced U.S. imports in order to extract even greater concessions, such as credits, which are prohibited by U.S. law because Cuba does not pay its creditors. Rather than helping moderate Cuba’s foreign policy, Havana intensified the assistance of its military and secret police given to Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela.
Instead of favoring the small private sector in Cuba, the massive new inflow of dollars from U.S. tourism and remittances was mostly captured by the military-commercial conglomerate GAESA, run by Castro’s former son-in-law. GAESA expelled private entrepreneurs, who had been increasing in numbers prior to the opening, from profitable tourist areas and replaced them with pro-government establishments.
If Obama’s negotiators had considered Cuba’s 60-year record of duplicity, they may have avoided fatal mistakes. For example, in July 2013, as negotiations began, a North Korean ship was stopped in the Panama Canal carrying offensive weapons provided by Cuba in violation of U.N. and U.S. sanctions against Pyongyang. The weapons had been loaded at the Cuban port of Mariel and hidden under thousands of sacks marked “Sugar.”
The administration sanctioned North Korea, but did not even mention Cuba’s complicity in that and other arms trafficking. This was a signal to Havana that Obama was so eager for a deal that he would ignore Cuba’s felonious behavior, leading up to his announcement of the “Cuban Thaw” in 2014.
The next year, Cuban dissidents said that U.S. diplomats in Havana, in an inexcusable moral retreat, told them to “make a deal” with Castro because the United States was going in “another direction.” It disheartened the opposition.
Cuban dissidents were not invited to the opening ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in 2015, allegedly because of space limitations. In reality, however, it was because the Cuban Foreign Ministry objected. A video showed many empty seats, even though our Embassy had tried to fill the seats with pro-engagement Cuban Americans flown in from Miami to take the place of the marginalized dissidents.
All of this emboldened the Cuban regime to commit an unprecedented and egregious act:
In late 2016, just months after Obama shook hands with Castro in Cuba, U.S. diplomats in Havana began to complain of headaches and more serious ailments. Some U.S. personnel reportedly suffered permanent brain damage. Cuban electronic eavesdropping is suspected.
The regime’s response was familiar: stonewall and deny. Inexplicably, some State Department officials covered up the injuries for months, until a whistleblower made them public. Once alerted, President Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recalled most U.S. personnel from Havana and expelled Cuban Embassy officials.
Obama’s diplomatic opening to Cuba may have been a public relations success, but, ultimately, it was a betrayal of U.S. values and a major blow to U.S. interests in the region. If bilateral relations are a mess, demand Havana change its behavior, don’t appease them.
Otto J. Reich is a former U.S. ambassador and assistant secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere.
