Cuba, the US and Forecasts Which Did Not Come True

The following is an excerpt from the book Mad About Cuba. Paragraph breaks have been introduced to facilitate easier reading.

Cubans never use the term ‘sanctions’. For them, it is el bloqueo – ‘blockade’. Diasporic Cubans aren’t all wishing for the Caribbean nation to disappear from the face of the earth or even longing for regime change, argues Ambassador Cabañas, a legendary figure in Cuban diplomacy.

When he was named Cuba’s ambassador to the US in September 2015, Dr José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez became the first one to occupy a post that had lain vacant for more than half a century – fifty-four years precisely. He had already been posted in the US as the chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington D.C. since 30 October 2012, when he was promoted to this position. His stint as ambassador lasted until 21 December 2020.

Yet, it saw a massive shift in relations between the two countries and the visit in 2016 of President Barack Obama to Cuba, the first such event since 1928.

Indeed, the two neighbours had strained relations so intense that they not only led the world to the brink of a nuclear war in 1962 but had also earlier resulted in a failed US-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961 to engineer a regime change, and numerous assassination attempts over the decades on Cuban leaders, especially Fidel Castro. The US-sponsored and financed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, led by Cuban exiles (called the 2506 Brigade), turned out to be a humiliating defeat for the American establishment that had planned this disastrous misadventure.

Castro’s forces captured over 1,100 men, who were later released in exchange for $53 million worth of food and medicine between December 1962 and July 1965. Cuban exiles were put into action by the Americans repeatedly over the next decades to overthrow the Fidel Castro-led communist government in Cuba, but to no avail.

Obama reversed the decades-long policy – although he never lifted the sanctions or stopped the funding for ‘democracy-promotion’ or regime-change programmes and only resumed diplomatic ties with the promise of getting rid of them – of 10 previous US presidents for whom isolating Cuba was a pillar of their foreign policy.

The Obama push started with a trip to Havana by John Kerry in July 2014, the first US secretary of state to visit the country in seventy years. Obama’s logic was that American foreign policy had failed to promote democracy or improve the lives of people in Cuba. ‘It hasn’t worked for fifty years. It shuts America out of Cuba’s future, and it only makes life worse for the Cuban people,’ Obama said then, but continued to assert that it was against media control by the communist party and the silencing of dissidents. For its part, Cuba maintained that it had to take strong actions because most dissidents, its officials said, were sponsored by the US to destabilise the country.

Barack Obama and Raul Castro initiated talks in 2014, and the two nations restored diplomatic ties in 2015. Benjamin J. Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting under Obama, also played a crucial role in the parleys along with several others. In 2017, however, the newly elected US President Donald Trump stalled Obama’s historic rapprochement with Cuba and cancelled what he described as a ‘one-sided’ deal by Obama with Cuba. He did it to please one constituency, the Cuban exiles, who voted in his favour. But Trump did so in phases, allowing for normalization of relations in his first two years and then backtracking on the progress later.

Ambassador Cabañas tells me in a meeting I had with him in the afternoon of 19 June 2023 at his office in the Research Centre for International Policy (CIPI) in Havana that in Havana that the myth of the Cuban-American being rabidly antiCuba goes with a template that is popularized by those who benefit from such a narrative. So is the impression, he argues, that all Americans are supportive of the sanctions on Cuba. In fact, a Pew study published in December 2016 suggested that as much as three out of four Americans were in favour of ending the long-standing US trade embargo against Cuba.

Cabañas points out an interesting phenomenon to buttress his arguments. In Republican-majority Florida, in which Miami falls, abortion is outlawed, and therefore, if a woman of Cuban descent (whoever is born in Cuba is considered a citizen of the country by the government in Havana) needs an abortion, all she has to do is fly down 90 miles south to Havana and get an abortion for free –  thanks to the free medical care in the country – and then fly back. The process is smooth, and you have the best of both worlds.

In Havana, Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM), or the Latin American School of Medicine, admits students from as many as 110 countries, mainly from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the United States. According to officials, tuition, room and board are free and the students are offered a small stipend. These students often spread the word among Cuban-American women looking for termination of unwanted pregnancies.

Economic crises and migration have a strange relationship. Cabañas, who speaks with the candour of a serious academic and the skill of a diplomat, notes that at the end of 2018, illegal migration from Cuba to the US touched its lowest levels – meaning zero in those months. Why and how? Because there was hope that the normalization of relations would eliminate the hardships of life that Cuban people were facing because of the sanctions. ‘When they don’t squeeze us economically, we don’t have migration,’ he says, adding that, without Cuba specifically asking for it, the US also implemented a comprehensive set of measures at the time: more regular flights to Cuba and back, and a five-year visa (basically for families), which eased the pressure to emigrate.

Under Obama, Cuba and the US signed twenty-two memoranda of understanding (MoUs) and set in motion a process for rapprochement. These agreements covered a variety of topics, including civil aviation, agriculture, search and rescue, fighting oil spills in the Caribbean Sea, and law enforcement, which incorporated different subjects from cyber-attacks to terrorism. In the initial years, President Donald Trump let the status quo continue, which is why Cabañas divides the Trump administration into two phases: 2017 to 2019 and from 2019 to 2021.

‘The first two years were a period in which no dramatic changes were introduced,’ the seasoned career diplomat says, adding that 2018 and 2019 saw the largest amount of travel on both sides, from the US to Cuba and Cuba to the US. According to World Tourism Organization figures, tourism inflow to Cuba rose steadily from 2.98 million tourists in 2014 to 4.71 million in 2018. Numbers crashed to a little over a million in 2020, the year of the pandemic. But the sector has, according to stats disclosed by Cuban tourism authorities, improved since 2022. In 2023, as of 1 August, the country’s Tourism Ministry (MINTUR) said it received more than 1.2 million tourists amid a steady increase in Russian tourist arrivals. By the end of 2023, this figure was 2.4 million.

In 2018, notwithstanding his public posturing, the Trump administration provided a licence for a joint venture (JV) between New York-based Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Cuba’s Center for Molecular Immunology, which falls under the umbrella organisation of BioCubaFarma, the Cuban organization of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries, which has scores of companies in its fold. Thanks to the JV, called The Innovative Immunotherapy Alliance SA, the American partner intended to bring to the US a Cuban lung cancer drug named CimaVax-EGF. Roswell Park said it had raised $4 million in donations to fund the clinical trials of the CimaVax EGF drug.

Again, although President Donald Trump had partially unravelled the historic US-Cuba détente, it was under his watch that Cuba tied up with health authorities for cooperation in the city of Chicago and organized in the US, between 8 and 20 May 2018, the biggest-ever Cuban cultural festival in which 400 Cuban artists took part, Cabañas recalled.

By early 2019, events in Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, plunged it into a political and economic crisis, and Trump, who accused Havana of supporting Nicolás Maduro in the South American country, imposed more sanctions on Cuba and withdrew Obama’s Cuba policy. The American policy was an act of punishment without giving the Cubans a chance to be heard. Cabañas remembers an American official telling him, ‘Venezuela will fall soon, and you will fall in a few months.

‘That is how these people speak, but then their forecasts didn’t come true,’ he told me. Even so, Cuba was dragged into an economic crisis, and with the coming of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, ‘it was like we had two embargoes on us, one by the Americans and the other by the pandemic,’ he explained.

Soon everything changed in the name of votes, stated Cabañas.

It isn’t difficult to see why. Florida was a swing state once, and it was always said that a Democrat could win the US Presidential polls even without winning in Florida, but a Republican could not do the same. Florida is now home to a brand of politics that is anti-Cuba, but it wasn’t like this in more than two decades after the Revolution. It took systematic funding by Republicans to create an antiCuba bloc among Cuban Americans. This was no organic political evolution, but part of a project worth millions of dollars to ensure that Florida went with the Republicans.

This political ploy was masterminded by Ronald Reagan, who came to power in 1981 by replacing Jimmy Carter. Even before he became president, Reagan, in 1980, had made a strong statement about Cuba as regards the potential evacuation of Cubans who did not wish to live in the archipelago. It was when he was at the helm as President that the US Government created Radio Martí to air anticommunist propaganda, targeting a regime change in that country. It was done at the request of Florida-based CubanAmerican businessman Jorge Mas Canosa. The Washington Post reported on 25 March 1984 about the political churning among Cubans in Florida: In this climate of intense anti-communism, Reagan’s policies and rhetoric have produced a groundswell of support for the GOP (Republican Party). A political realignment of the Cuban community is pushing Florida, a key swing state in presidential and senatorial elections, toward the Republican column.

The report also carried stereotypical perceptions lapped up for convenient reasons by the Cuban community in the US: that they were political dissidents who had great prosperity back home in Cuba before Castro came in. Wen Wang writes in a 2022 paper titled ‘Reagan and Cuba: an analysis of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s’: In the mid-1970s, President Jimmy Carter made several conciliatory gestures almost immediately after his inauguration, conveying the message that efforts to improve relations with Cuba would be one of the administration’s top priorities. Compared to the 1970s, the economic embargo was significantly stricter in the Reagan years. In July 1986, the Reagan administration tightened the embargo again to force Cuba back to the negotiation table over radio broadcasts and the renewal of the immigration accord.

Wang says that Reagan’s antagonistic attitude and Castro’s unwillingness to play a helpful role in getting Reagan re-elected, as the American leader had hoped, delayed the negotiations. For most of Reagan’s time in power, US-Cuban relations fell to new lows compared with the previous two presidencies. Cabañas and I met at his office at the Research Centre for International Policy (CIPI) where he is currently the director. The institute falls under the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I was late from a previous meeting and so I was glad that he too was late. He walked in apologizing profusely for being late, although his secretary had alerted me in advance.

Cabañas possesses the aura of a diplomat who knows you the moment he looks at you, like some kind of a mind reader. It took me several minutes to regain my composure under his knowing gaze. Cabañas, who rarely gives interviews, is trained to listen to questions attentively. He doesn’t jump to respond until you are fully done with your questions. In fact, he waits close to ten seconds even if you have finished your question to allow for a pause or for the impact of your question to sink in. This quality of his as a top-notch diplomat – to not only listen but also to assess the person raising the question – is widely known among other Cuban officials who are familiar with his style.

I asked him about western Miami where Cuban exiles – and politicians from among them – form the most stringent critics of the Cuban experiment. He busts the perversely counter-intuitive declarations by Cuban Americans in their early years in the US, having fled Cuba after the Revolution: that they were hounded out because they were bourgeoisie who owned sugar mills and big businesses. Cabañas joked, ‘If so many people had sugar mills, then Cuba was a land full of sugar mills and the archipelago wouldn’t have had the space to accommodate them.’

He also argued that whenever you look for a job in the US, what sells is the story of victimhood. And when you are asked to fill out forms asking whether you stand for or against Cuba, the exiles, who know well the inimical relations between Cuba and the US, would never hesitate to choose which side of the bread is buttered. ‘Many naïve journalists have made a living selling the so-called misery of Cuban Americans without realizing that political game plans also had a role in perpetuating this myth, although it cannot be said that there weren’t genuine cases among Cuban emigres. But one-sided narratives of the Cuban Americans’ plight are rampant in the US and, as far as I could gather, among foreign correspondents who are forever ready to buy this story,’ he said in his deep baritone.

He went on to add that people ‘lying to impress their constituency’ have been caught in the act. For instance, Senator Marco Rubio was called out by The Washington Post for ‘embellishing’ his family’s story by saying his parents left came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover’. He had also campaigned in 2010 stating that, ‘As the son of exiles, I understand what it means to lose the gift of freedom.’ According to The Post report, Rubio’s parents had left Cuba in 1956 during Batista’s period for economic reasons. Rubio’s website now makes no such claims and instead says the following: ‘Marco Rubio was born in 1971 in Miami, Florida, as the son of two Cuban immigrants pursuing the American Dream. His father worked as a banquet bartender, while his mother split time as a stay-at-home mom and hotel maid. From an early age, Rubio learned the importance of faith, family, community and dignified work to the good life. Rubio was drawn to public service in large part because of conversations with his grandfather, who saw his homeland destroyed by communism.’

Similarly, Rafael Cruz, father of American politician Ted Cruz, a trenchant critic of any rapprochement between Cuba and the United States, was an opponent of the Batista regime and migrated from Cuba to the US in 1957.

Ullekh N.P. is a journalist and political commentator.