December 17, 2014. Anouncements in Havana and Washington DC. Precedents and Subsequent Negotiation Process E-Book
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez
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- Herausgeber: RUTH
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Spanisch
The book comprises how the parallel processes that converged chronologically in the presidential announcements made at noon on December 17, 2014 by Presidents Raúl Castro Ruz and Barack Hussein Obama were conceived and developed, and has a strategic dimension for Cuba's foreign policy. The author of this text proposes, among its fundamental objectives, to explain what transformations occurred from within American society, from Cuban society and in the regional context, which, in their interrelation, served as a threshold to a different era in bilateral relations.
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Original title of the work in Spanish:Anuncios del 17 de diciembre de 2014 en La Habana y Washington, D. C. Antecedentes y proceso negociador posterior, published by Social Sciences Publishing House, Havana, 2021.
English proofreading: Oscar de los Reyes Ramos
Editing and Correction: Susana Amores Torres
Cover design: Jadier I. Martínez Rodríguez
Typesetting: Idalmis Valdés Herrera
©José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez,2021
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Ruth Casa Editorial, 2024
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ISBN: 9789962740636
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Synopsis
The book describes how the parallel processes that converged chronologically in the presidential announcements made at noon on December 17, 2014 by Presidents Raúl Castro Ruz and Barack Hussein Obama were conceived and developed, and has a strategic dimension for Cuba's foreign policy. Among his fundamental objectives, the author sets out to explain what transformations occurred within American society, within Cuban society and in the regional context, which, in their interrelation, marked the threshold to a different era in bilateral relations.
About the Author
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez(Matanzas, 1961). Graduate in International Relations [“Raúl Roa García” Higher Institute for International Relations (ISRI)], PhD in Political Science (University of Havana, 2009), full professor at ISRI, official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX) since 1984.
He has held different responsibilities, both inside and outside Cuba, among them: North American Directorate (1984-1990), Cuban Embassy in Canada (1990-1993), Deputy Director of North America (1993-1994), Director of Consular Affairs and Cubans Residing Abroad (1998-2001), Cuban Ambassador to Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, Permanent Representative to International Organizations based in Vienna (2001-2005), Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2009-2012), head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. (2012-2015), Cuban ambassador to the United States of America (2015-2020).
Member of several Cuban delegations to international events and has been part of the Organizing Committee of multilateral events organized in Cuba. He has lectured at Cuban and foreign universities and published articles in academic journals, both in Cuba and abroad.
To my wife, children and granddaughter.
Author’s Note to the English Edition
The present edition of the book in its English language version comes out three years after the original Spanish text was published. The time elapsed since then has not denied, but rather confirmed, the main conclusions that were initially stated.
The year 2021 was the first of Joe Biden’s administration. Despite the fact that he rose to the presidency making promises of change, his position regarding Cuba was simply to expect that the combined effects of the COVID19 pandemic plus the intensified coercive measures implemented during Trump’s term would bring about an implosion of the Cuban revolutionary project.
However, this logic did not work and failed just as the original imposition of the blockade in 1962 and its reinforcement in 1992. The lack of success in relation to Cuba was added to the debacle of the projects against Venezuela and Nicaragua and other initiatives to intimidate or influence progressive social processes in Mexico, Bolivia and Colombia.
After resisting another onslaught from Washington, Havana not only showed signs of creativity, introducing innovative policies and new actors in its socio-economic regime, but was also able to maintain its principled attitude towards the 22 memorandums of understanding signed under the Barack Obama administration. This position has been decisive regarding the fact that, by mid-2024, the U.S. government has fully re-confirmed their validity.
The original purpose stated by the author of the book in 2021 was to offer a proposal of interpretation for Cubans and Latin Americans/Caribbeans of the events that took place immediately before and during the negotiating process between Cuba and the United States from 2015 to 2017. Since then, no alternative analysis has been published that contradicts the assumptions that were put forward at that time.
Building on that strength, the text is now presented in English for a much wider audience and, in particular, for the U.S. public that can use its content to determine how best to serve the national interests of their country either by working constructively and respectfully with a sovereign neighboring country, or by supporting the short-term agenda of a tiny political group, which promotes the anti-Cuban agenda as a means to appropriate and control vast funds from the federal budget.
Prologue to a Unique, Useful and Timely Book
Cuba’s existence as an independent country has been lacerated, first by the well-known hegemonic ambitions of the United States (intention to take over Cuban territory, imposition of the Platt Amendment, military occupation of the national territory, interference in internal affairs) and, subsequently, since 1962, by a State policy aimed at destroying Cuban revolutionary power and reestablishing domination over the island.
Much has been written on the subject, but this book has unique characteristics that make it stand out among all that has been explained on the development of U.S.-Cuba relations, at least so far this century.
The work offered by Ambassador José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez PhD is unique in that it focuses on a transcendental event at the international level: the negotiations between Cuba and the United States during the presidency of Barack H. Obama which led to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, severed for more than half a century, and created the conditions for a process of bilateral discussions and negotiations with a view to opening official and private ties in areas of common interest.
The author’s observations on the complex and intricate process of official decision-making by the United States on controversial issues, in general, and not only in the case of government policy toward Cuba, are very useful for evaluating U.S. policy toward the island.
This is a key element in addressing the issue of U.S. government policy, since it is required in the developmentof its management to build a consensus among a multiplicity of opposing official, political, social and economic factors, on what is most important for the U.S. government. The author provides enlightening and convincing facts concerning the official U.S. policy towards Cuba.
Another outstanding feature about this book is that Ambassador Cabañas participated directly and personally in important moments of that negotiation, given his position as head of the Cuban Interests Section in the United States and, later, as Cuba’s Ambassador to Washington. This circumstance qualifies him to carry out the endeavor of “succeeding in explaining what transformations took place from within U.S. society, from Cuban society and in the regional context, which in their interaction served as a threshold to a different era in bilateral relations”.
Ambassador Cabañas uses the Introduction to explain how, even before its constitution as an independent nation, the Europeans who, representing the interests of England, settled in the northwestern central Atlantic region, showed interest and intention to take over Cuba, as part of a sequence of cycles: independence, territorial expansion, civil war,national capitalist unification, establishment of imperialism. In each of these sequences concepts and formulas in keeping with the expansionist ambitions of the dominant forces in what is now known as the United States of America were applied.
Within these cycles, Ambassador Cabañas highlights two fundamental decisions regarding U.S. policy toward Cuba. The first —when it had already reached the imperialist phase of capitalism— was the invasion of Cuba in 1898 to thwart the Cuban independence process by imposing a neocolonial republic. The second, in 1962, when it put into effect a State policy aimed at overthrowing the revolutionary power victorious on January 1, 1959 that had definitively buried the neocolonial republic established on May 20, 1902.
The Introduction and the first four chapters address issues that form the basis and pave the way for what should be a new framework for U.S. actions in its relations with Cuba.
In fact, the book’s explanation of the effect of fundamental aspects that have a significant impact on that policy, such as the Latin American and Caribbean regional perspective on U.S. policy towards Cuba (Chapter I); the role of the U.S. business community in the rapprochement towards Cuba and its influence on the Executive and Legislative branches (Chapter II), is highly relevant and useful. The same applies to the description of the role of the so-called “Cuban Americans” in the United States as instruments of that policy, since initially they were basically employed to carry out the paramilitary and political subversive actions that the U.S. government organized against Cuba and, in the last four decades, they have been acting in two opposing directions: for and against the eventual normalization of relations between the empire and revolutionary Cuba (Chapter III).
The last of the fundamental aspects identified by the author, among those that facilitated for Obama the negotiation process with the Cuban counterpart, is related to the annual assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community in the period 2009-2014 (Chapter IV) collected in the six reports submitted by the U.S. National Director of Intelligence, on behalf of the 17 agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community, to the Senate Special Committee on Intelligence.
These reports are prepared on an annual basis and reflect the consensus of the main U.S. intelligence agencies on aspects of the international situation in which the U.S. Government is involved and which, with regard to Cuba, in the six reports issued annually between February 2, 2010 and February 26, 2015, the most relevant aspects were those related to the economic situation on the island and its possible implications on the political superstructure of the country in the face of a “faded internal opposition”, without making any reference to possible “threats” that could derive from the actions of the Cuban government.
Of particular interest are chapters V, VI and VII, which narrate aspects related to the negotiation process itself. The author’s perceptions, opinions and evaluations regarding important aspects of that process play a very relevant role, precisely because of the responsibilities that Ambassador Cabañas carried out as Cuba’s highest diplomatic representative in the United States.
In Chapter V, Cabañas presents and evaluates the conditions and circumstances in which Barack Obama was becoming familiar with and forming a vision of Cuba, in which his (Obama’s) personal experiences of living in countries of the so-called Third World and himself being part of it, being the son of an immigrant from Kenya and later living in Indonesia, are decisive. But, at the same time, Cabañas stresses that Obama had assumed in the political field the Democratic conceptions and projections (meaning, of the Democratic Party) in an increasingly multipolar world, all of which placed him in a position to produce a change in the US policy towards Cuba, with the objective of promoting transformations in the political, economic and social system of the island and he incorporated that approach as a theme of his 2008 presidential campaign.
Ambassador Cabañas points out that the message Obama used in his electoral campaign was the promotion of “democracy” in Cuba through Cuban émigrés, which would have the additional advantage of taking away the electoral support of that sector from the Republicans. He also used this message at the Summit of the Americas held in April 2009 in Trinidad and Tobago, less than three months after taking office as president of the United States.
In Chapter VI, Cabañas evaluates the impact on the course of negotiations between the United States and Cuba of the arrest in Cuban territory on December 4, 2009, by Cuban authorities of Phillip Alan Gross, a U.S. agent hired to carry out subversive activities for “regime change” in Cuba under the Helms-Burton Act. Gross was sentenced on March 11, 2011 by the Chamber for Crimes against State Security of the People’s Provincial Court of Havana to 15 years in prison.
Although U.S. federal government authorities were reluctant to accept that Gross’ activities in Cuba were part of a subversion program directed by a federal agency. The contracting company itself finally acknowledged in a May 16, 2013 communiqué that “Cuban government authorities arrested Mr. Gross while he was carrying out work ordered, paid for and controlled by the U.S. Government“. In that same month of May, secret negotiations began between the governments of Cuba and the United States, which culminated in the simultaneous announcement on December 17, 2014 by Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro Ruz, which included the release of the Five Cuban Heroes and Gross.
The seventh and last chapter includes a broad overview of the agreements and progress achieved between December 17, 2014 and January 19, 2017, when the last memorandum of understanding between the two governments was signed. It is worthwhile to make a leisurely reading of it to assess the significance of that negotiation process which, as Ambassador Cabañas rightly says, not even Donald Trump was able to reverse during the four years he served as President of the United States. But it is a paradox that a new Democratic administration, presided over by the person who was vice-president during Barack Obama’s two terms in office and who repeatedly announced during his electoral campaign that, if elected, he would resume the policy adopted by Obama in relation to Cuba, has instead opted in official statements to urge and support actions of subversion against the Cuban government.
Ramón Sánchez-Parodi PhD
Havana, October 2021
Introduction
Understanding how the parallel processes that converged chronologically in the presidential announcements made at noon on December 17, 2014, by Presidents Raúl Castro Ruz and Barack Hussein Obama were conceived and developed has a strategic dimension for Cuba’s foreign policy.
The Cuban Revolution guaranteed its survival during the 55 years prior to that moment with the full understanding of the threats that affected it, as a result of the hostile policy of the Government (eleven different administrations) of the United States,1 articulated since before January 1, 1959, transformed into State Policy on February 7, 1962 with the application of a regime of sanctions against Cuba and legally reinforced with the so-called Torricelli Act2 (1992) and Helms-Burton3 (1996).
The re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States on July 1, 2015, the previous and subsequent negotiation process and the removal of Cuba from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism on May 29, 20154plus the implementation of a set of regulations5that stimulated some interest of the U.S. business sector towards the Cuban economy, explained the beginning of a stage in the history of bilateral relations that was presented as qualitatively different. These steps, however, coexisted with the continued application of the rules of the blockade against the island.
Whether or not there is a scientifically accurate understanding of how this point in time was reached depends on the interpretation of whether this was a reversible change, whether it was a tendency movement, or whether it could have been the beginning of a new medium or long-term cycle in the bilateral relationship. The essential causes of the process must also be evaluated, and of these certainties, which are fundamental and which are secondary. The possession of this knowledge is essential to build and preserve a future in which Cuba will continue to live under the pretension of the United States to exert influence over it economically, politically and/or culturally.
This text does not attempt to chronologically arrange the events preceding the change, an important task already undertaken byseveral authors.6Nor does it attempt to describe in detail the negotiating processes immediately prior to December 17. The task is to explain what transformations took place within U.S. society, within Cuban society and in the regional context, which in their interrelation served as a threshold for a different era in bilateral relations.
The decision of the highest level of the U.S. Executive Branch to introduce changes in the way it managed its strategic objectives with respect to Cuba, was the result of the coincidence in time of at least three groups of processes, namely:
1. By the beginning of President Barack Obama’s second term in office (2012-2016), not only was the failure of the blockade policy against Cuba evident, but also that the lack of recognition of the Cuban Revolutionary Government and its role in the Latin American and Caribbean context was alienating the United States from the rest of the regional players. Cuba was being confirmed as an important regional actor after its economic recovery in the post-Soviet world and, in contrast, the United States was entering an irreversible decline as “leader of the Western world”, especially after the political-military debacles in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the consequent economic cost.2. At the same time, in the domestic U.S. electoral space, denying the existence of Cuba and trying to destroy its revolutionary process, with all the accompanying ideological baggage, ceased to guarantee per se a significant number of votes among Cuban Americans in Florida. On the contrary, for years there was a trend among the second and third generations of Cubans towards greater sympathy and alignment with the local Democratic caucuses and more widespread support for the normalization of relations with Cuba. Increasingly, it became evident that the implementation of the “family agenda”7 among Cubans on both sides of the Florida straits required a certain stability in bilateral official relations.3.At the beginning in 2010 of the process of Perfecting the Cuban Economic Model, which allowed an important space for foreign capital investment and the creation of small and medium-sized enterprises, a significant part of the U.S. business community realized that, if their government’s policy towards the island did not change, they would be excluded from a new market that was opening up to the world just 90 miles from their shores.
In the background to all of the above, the perception was maturing among the bureaucracy and experts in a group of technical areas in the United States that cooperation with Cuba was essential to the U.S. national interest. This criterion was increasingly endorsed by years of direct or indirect exchange on issues ranging from hurricane monitoring, the fight against drug trafficking, or the treatment of tropical diseases. The U.S. Intelligence Community, which discontinued its assessment of the “threats” coming from Cuba, stands out in this section.
Both the formulation of policy within the United States and the management of its foreign relations involve the participation of highly sophisticatedpolitical and administrative systems, with a multiplicity of actors and more or less stable relationships among them, which are sustained in varying units of time,8depending on the issue being debated or negotiated.
Just to describe the political subject, the United States, it should be noted, first of all, that it is a federation of 50 States, which havethe capacity to decide on matters under their jurisdiction, as do the3144 counties and 19,354 cities or towns “incorporated” into the Union. The Federal legislative branch has a bicameral Parliament made up by 100 senators and 435 representatives. Each state has its own assembly, bicameral or unicameral (Nebraska), as the case may be, while each county and city elects its own council, which decides on a daily basis on various internal matters.
Within the Executive Branch there are between 60 and 2579 independent federal agencies or organs, depending on the source consulted to obtain the data, which issue a variety of regulations on particular or common issues, often overlapping areas of responsibility. The Judicial Branch is also organized in three levels, headed by the Supreme Court, 13 Courts of Appeals and 94 federal prosecutors’ offices at the district level, to deal with felonies.
From the political point of view, there are 5 so-called “traditional” parties,10 of which 2 are represented in the federal Congress, 3 others have significant state representation (between 23 and 37 states) and 28 are registered and carry out some level of activism in at least one state of the Union.11
In addition to the aforementioned figures, we should also consider the thousands of duly legalized non-governmental organizations,12 religious denominations, the media and business associations,13 among others, which in a more or less organized manner, with a larger or smaller budget, try every day to have their points of view heard, taken into account and at some point become the country’s official policy or influence a legislative change.
The class definition of the State as an instrument created to guarantee and protect the interests of one class over others, explains how several of the actors in the political system of the United States have commonalities by nature or by preservation interests. But even so, there are conflicting interests among them which sometimes even question the existence of the conventionalism called the United States as a single whole.
Although all the actors mentioned in the preceding paragraphs would not have to show a specific consensus for a particular policy to be carried out, at least their enumeration is useful to imagine how complex the U.S. decision-making system is, plus the magnitude and stability of the endogenous alliances that must be built for an initiative to become a law or an executive decision.
However, when the U.S. Government makes a decision on an issue from the top of the Executive Branch, when its initiative or that of third parties results in legislative action, it can never be said that such an outcome represents a monolithic agreement or a sufficient balance among all or most of the components of this complex system.
The value of this assessment, in terms of foreign policy, lies in understanding that there is always room for other official or non-governmental exogenous entities to exert some influence on some of the actors in that system and try to induce changes in their behavior that will benefit the bilateral or multilateral relationship in question.
This consideration is also valid for affirming that, when a trend becomes sustainable in the internal or external performance of such a system, it is more difficult for a setback to occur in its behavior in historical terms, a drastic change or a sharp turn in its evolution. This idea leads directly to the concept of political cycles cited later in this text for the Cuban case.
Most actors in the U.S. political system do not have declared and shared values or principles, there are no partisan disciplines with adherence to clearly established platforms, so that alliances that are established to support or reject a given policy course may be short-lived and even take on a completely opposite sign to the original one, depending on the juncture.
The only “rules of the game” that are more or less shared are in the generation of profits, in the country’s legal codes to protect the wealthiest, in the interpretation of these and in the judicial praxis influenced decisively by the Executive Power with the appointment of judges.
This reality also requires to take into account, for any projection over time, the occurrence of unexpected events or the unforeseeable actions of some actors. In other words, although the U.S. political system observes certain rules in its regular conduct, an unexpected change in the behavior of one of its secondary elements can substantially alter the performance of the system as a whole.14 In U.S. domestic politics, as in its foreign policy, on many occasions a marginal factor, real or metaphorical, has contributed to deciding the election or defeat of a presidential candidate, or has played a role in the decision to attack a foreign nation.
The existence of such secondary factors and their intentional use to affect the entire decision-making system is also related to the generation of real or fictitious crises, which have the virtue of mobilizing local and international public opinion in a short period of time and at a relatively low economic cost. However, depending on the type of coalitions that have been established to bring one or another president to power, the ideological platform on which they have been elected and the economic moment the country is going through, the Executive Branch can exert more or less control over the Legislative Branch, influence the Judiciary and impose a certain measure of order on the secondary elements of the system.
The articulation of foreign policy decisions in the United States has been associated with the occurrence of crises, or the reaction to threats, and with the use of these as excuses to develop courses of action that had been previously conceived. There are enough examples to corroborate this, from the self-inflicted provocations to launch war against Mexico (1846-1848) and occupy part of its territory, to the entry into World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) and the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, which led to the beginning of the so-called war on terrorism in 2001.
For years, there has been an extensive debate in the United States regarding the concept of international crisis and its definition has included variables such as the lack of predictability of the event itself, the risk or threat to the vital interests of the imperial power, the short timeframe for decision-making by federal agencies and other components.15It is not in the interest of this Introduction to contribute to a unique understanding of the crises, but rather to point out those junctures in the most recent Cuban history in which the U.S. Government fundamentally affected the Cuban reality, in order to at least make a comparison with the chapter that began towards the end of 2014.
It must be assumed, however, that the intentions of the foreign policy actor known today as the United States to exercise domination over the island of Cuba predate even the formation of the former as a nation and date back to the time when the northern territories of America were governed by British colonists.16
The two previous moments in recent history in which strategic definitions of bilateral policywere made from the United States towards Cuba were accompanied by the supposed occurrence of “crises”, or the perception of them from the U.S. side. These moments were the invasion of Cuban territory in 1898, decided when the victory of the “mambi” forces over the Spanish colonial troops was already highly probable, and the very occurrence of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, inserted into the U.S. geopolitical vision of the global East-West confrontation.
In both cases a State Policy with respect to Cuba crystallized and was projected into the future in each subsequent period, understood as “the decisions taken by the highest level of State management, with the broad consensus of the dominant sectors of the country, which become norms to achieve over time the attainment of its fundamental objectives, beyond the junctures or long-term goals”.17
No other event generated a process within the United States that would lead its political classes to propose a progression of probable actions, socialize them and make decisions regarding Cuba, which would be reflected in executive and legislative actions -plus other components- that would be valid for a span of 50 to 60 years, that is to say, that would constitute policy cycles.
At the time of the imposition of the colonial regime on Cuba, this State policy was centered around at least six elements: military intervention and the possibility of repeating it according to convenience, protected by a constitutional amendment; the imposition of onerous conditions unfavorable to Cuban commercial and economic interests; permanent interference in Cuba’s decision-making processes; obtaining unlimited economic benefits; distorting the direction of the country’s economic and technological development; and the introduction of habits, customs and expressions that distorted the foundations of Cuban cultural traditions.18
Similarly, the confrontation with the Cuban Revolution was based from the beginning on a group of premises on which there has been consensus up to the present, with no other substitute norms having emerged. These are: commercial, economic, financial and scientific-technical blockade; attempted international, political and diplomatic isolation; internal political and ideological subversion; acts of sabotage and terrorism against the country’s economic and defense activities and the use of military force or the threat of resorting to it.19
In both cases, it could be asked whether the United States reacted to a “crisis”, in the most widely shared interpretation of current political science, or whether these were processes that were observed from the United States well in advance and their outcome was based on pre-designed actions.
With regard to the military occupation of Cuba in 1898, there is sufficient historical evidence to indicate that the U.S. government monitored the events that took place on the island for years and that there was an intense debate within that society about whether or not to recognize the belligerence of the Cuban liberators, which extended from the way in which the insurgent emissary José Morales Lemus was received in Washington in 1869,20 to the harassment and persecution21 faced by José Martí on U.S. soil at the beginning of the last decade of the Nineteenth Century.
Morales Lemus’ experience transited between the reaction to his request by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, who favored a negotiation with Spain to buy Cuba’s independence and conceived a recognition of belligerence as a last option, and the position of Secretary of War John Rawlins, who had succeeded in August 1869, in a meeting of the federal cabinet, to put an end to negotiations with Spain in favor of Mambi recognition. Rawlins died a few days after the meeting with Morales Lemus. Fish, supported by those who wanted to avoid a direct confrontation with Spain, succeeded in overturning the cabinet decision.22
By the end of the 19th Century, however, Spain as a colonial power had bled dry its economy to maintain its possession of Cuba, the Mambi army was close to victory and within the United States there had been a process of economic expansion and an accumulation of capital that aspired to greater realization abroad. There was also a strengthening of the country’s military structure, which tipped the balance of the political debate towards interventionism to the detriment of isolationism. In José Martí’s own view, “dead here (in the United States) in politics will be anyone who dares to say that the shadow of the eagle should not cover the world”.23
The years of political interpretation of the Cuban-Spanish conflict, the balance of power between the main colonial powers of the time, plus the economic expansion of the United States as a future power, even within Cuba, had as a background the argumentation of the Ripe Fruit policy thesis (1823), or of Manifest Destiny (1845), among other foundations elaborated since the beginning of the 19th century to exercise hegemony over Cuba, the Caribbean and the rest of North America.
However, the pressure to determine a definitive course of policy toward Cuba came in Washington when one of the parties to the conflict seemed to turn the tide irreversibly. The Cuban Mambises were now clearly defeating the Spanish colonial power. It was under these circumstances that the famous phrase “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”24 by William R. Hearst who, on behalf of the supporters of intervention in Cuba, desperately sought arguments that would convince American public opinion that the United States should act militarily. In the midst of the lack of such graphic impressions to make an impact on people’s feelings, the explosion of the battleship USSMaine in the port of Havana took place on February 15, 1898, followed swiftly by the blockade of Cuban ports in April and the invasion of the east of the country in July of the same year.
Thus began four years of U.S. military occupation, which, together with the economic presence already existing on the island since the mid-nineteenth centuryand the imposition of a Constitution that accepted limits to the country’s sovereignty, initiated a sixty-year cycle of continuity in Cuban political and social life, with the only formal alteration occurring in 1933, when the popular uprising against the government of Gerardo Machado was “resolved” by peaceful means and the U.S. military intervention foreseen in the Platt Amendment to maintain thestatus quoon the island was ruled out for the first time.A transition had taken placefrom a fully colonial scheme of domination to another, which from1933 onwards would be just neocolonial.
The fact that it was the Executive Power of the United States that flouted the Joint Resolution25approved by the Federal Congress, which recognized the sovereignty that the new State that was emerging on the island of Cuba should enjoy, sheds considerable light on the hypothesis put forward in this text.
The revolutionary break with that past, which took place in January 1959, was prompted in a more accelerated way in terms of time than the “crisis” prior to 1898 but the United States was no less prepared to face the outcome, after materially supporting the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista (1952-1959), having placed intelligence agents close to the main rebel leaders26with plans to assassinate them and having tried to induce a negotiated solution that would downgrade the revolutionary triumph.27
In April 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon, after a personal meeting with Fidel Castro in Washington, declared that the Cuban should be “guided along the right path”28 and from that moment on, the White House put into practice every conceivable project to put an end to the Cuban Revolution, from the military action at the Bay of Pigs in 1961,29 the creation of the largest operational base of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in American territory (Miami), to the promotion of every type of terrorist operation against the Island.30
Based on the logic that the young revolutionary power would not endure the onslaught for long, it was not until 1962 when, with the argument of Sino-Soviet penetration in the continent and later on the presence of Russian defensive missiles in Cuban territory, a comprehensive regime of sanctions was applied against Cuba31 and the Trade with the Enemy Act of 1917 was invoked.
Thus began a 52-year cycle in which the unalterable principles of the anti-Cuban policy were built by the Executive Branch and complemented by the Legislative Branch.
The reasons for such steps were clearly established in the logic of the East-West confrontation and in the anti-communist history that had been spreading throughout the United States since the 1950s. They also responded to the emergence of the People’s Republic of China and the decolonization process generated since the end of World War II. There was no need to create a specific consensus regarding Cuba, if the confrontation with this country could be inscribed within the equation of capitalism-socialism, East and West.
However, Cuba’s survival after the demise of the Soviet Union and the so-called socialist camp in 1991 served to demonstrate that this policy cycle had deep roots in the other initiated in 1898, or that perhaps both were part of a single whole, albeit with qualitative differences. What ultimately justified the U.S. confrontation with the Cuban Revolutionary Government was not the framework of associations in its foreign policy, but the willingness of a small nation to accede to its sovereignty and demand equal treatment rather than be absorbed by the northern power.
It took another 20 years for the U.S. political class to realize that every kind of confrontation had been tried against Cuba, without any success. The explanation that the Cuban model depended on the support of the so-called Soviet bloc did not stand the test of time. When attempts were even made to reinforce the blockade with legislation passed in 1992 and 1996, Cuba still resisted, providing further evidence of the ineffectiveness of the policy structured since the early 1960s.
However, this conclusion alone did not bring about the necessary consensus in Washington to try to achieve the same objectives by other means. The United States was imposing its agenda in an almost unipolar world and its government did not feel that it was time to make corrections or adjustments to its foreign policy.
It was after a longer period of time (55 years) that there was a vacuum of effectiveness, a fatigue in arguing the validity of surrendering Cuba by the most extreme methods and, above all, in explaining that repeated failure would bring some benefit to the United States, particularly in the hemispheric arena. However, this “crisis” alone would not explain the transformation that had begun to take place. The conditions for change had been created by other factors as a whole, which are explained as follows.
1 The name of this country itself is a conventionalism. The magnitude of its state machinery, the diversity of local issues and political practices, plus the division (real or supposed) of powers makes inaccurate the statement that would present the country as a monolithic and functional whole.
2 The official abbreviated name is Cuban Democratic Act. It takes its name from its main sponsor, Robert Torricelli (D-NJ).
3 The official abbreviated name is The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act. It takes its name from its principal sponsors, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Congressman Dan Burton (R-IN).
4 Cuba had been added to such a list for purely electoral purposes by the Ronald Reagan administration on March 1, 1982, an action that justified new sanctions against the country, beyond those foreseen under the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act.
5 The first regulatory packages were announced in January and September 2015 and January 2016.
6 Among the authors who have dealt with the subject are Peter Kornbluh and William Leogrande:Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations BetweenWashington and Havana, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2014, and Elier Ramírez Cañedo and Esteban Morales Domínguez: De la confrontacióna los intentos de “Normalización”. La Política de los Estados Unidos hacia Cuba, Social Sciences Publishing House, La Habana, 2011.
7 Although there is no agreed definition of this, Cuban-American groups usually define as part of the agenda telephone and other communications with their relatives on the island, travel to and from their country of origin, mail and package delivery, stable consular service in both capitals, as well as the remittance of remittances and the receipt of certain payments from Cuba. Some add the possibility of guaranteeing exceptional medical treatment for family members on the island, as well as receiving routine medical care in Cuba, in the case of more than 60% of Cuban Americans who do not have public health coverage in the United States.
8 For a better understanding of Complexity Theory as applied to International Relations see James Ladyman, James Lambert, Karoline Wiesner. “What is a Complex System?”,European Journal for Philosophy of Science III, pp. 33-67, 2013, and M. M. Waldrop:Complexity: the emerging science at the edge of orderand chaos, Simon and Schuster, 2013.
9 The Agenda for Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions in 2015 places the total at 60 agencies, while the Federal Register Index records that same year 257 institutions.
10 Republican, Democratic, Independent, Libertarian and Green Parties.
11 See https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_States, accessed November 2017.
12 They are estimated to be around 1.5 million according to the official site https: //www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2017/266904.htm, accessed November 2017.
13 The US Chamber of Commerce alone groups more than 3 million companies.
14For a better understanding of the precepts of the Theory of Chaos see L. Douglas Kiel y Euel Elliott (edit.):Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences, chapter 2, The University of Michigan Press, 1997.
15 See Gilbert R. Windham (ed.): New Issues in International Crisis Management, Westview Press, 1988; Michael Brecherl and Jonathan Wilkenfeld: A study of Crisis, University of Michigan, 1997; Henry Kissinger: Crisis: the Anatomy of two major Foreign Policy Crises, Simon and Schuster, 2004.
16 Dr. Ramón Sánchez-Parodi Montoto offers abundant data in this regard in his work Cuba – USADiez tiempos de una relación (Ten Times of a Relationship), published by Editorial Ocean Sur in 2010.
17 Ramón Sánchez-Parodi Montoto: Los diferentes tiempos de la política official de Estados Unidos hacia Cuba. Paper presented at the Scientific Session of the “Raúl Roa García” Higher Institute for International Relations, Havana, 2017.
18 Idem.
19 Idem.
20 After great efforts Morales Lemus was received by President Ulysses Grant, who upon hearing the demand for the recognition of the belligerence in favor of the Cuban Mambises expressed: “Hold on for some time (...) and you will probably achieve even more than you expect”.
21 See Nydia Sarabia: Noticias confidenciales sobre Cuba, Editora Política, La Habana, 1985.
22See Enrique Piñeyro:Morales Lemus and the Cuban Revolution. Historical study, M. M. Zarzamendi, New York, 1871.
23 Letter to the editor of La Nación, October 30, 1889, Obras completas, t. XII, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, p. 359.
24 William Randolph Hearst, the mass media magnate of the time and supporter of interventionism, sent artist Frederic Remington to the island to produce prints (photography was not yet in use) depicting the damage caused by the Spanish occupiers and justifying the American intervention. When Remington explained that nothing he saw was enough to satisfy Hearst’s interests, Hearst responded with this phrase, indicating the need to create a sense of crisis to support a decision that had already been worked out. In the end, it was the sinking of the battleship Maine that served as a pretext for the intervention of the United States in the conflict.
25 Approved by Congress on April 20, 1898, it stated in its first paragraph “That the people of Cuba are, and by right should be free and independent”.
26 On December 28, 1958, Allen Robert Nye, an FBI agent whose mission was to assassinate Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, was discovered and arrested.
27The U.S. Embassy in Havana implemented, among others, a plan that foresaw the flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista and the proclamation of Carlos Manuel Piedra as the new president. See José Cantón Navarro and Martín DuarteHurtado:Cuba 42 años de Revolución. Cronología histórica 1959-1982,t. I, Social Sciences Publishing House, Havana, 2006.
28 See Nixon’s redacted summary of his meeting with Fidel on April 25, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/bayofpigs/19590425.pdf, accessed November 2017.
29 See Juan Carlos Rodríguez: Girón. La batalla inevitable, Editorial Capitán San Luis, 2005.
30See Fabián Escalante Font:Cuba, la guerra secreta de la CIA: agresiones de EstadosUnidos contra Cuba, 1959-1962, Editorial Capitán San Luis, 1993.
31 John F. Kennedy Presidential Directive 3447 of February 3, 1962.
- I -
The Latin American and Caribbean Regional Views on the United States Policy Toward Cuba
The Cuban Revolution took place in the context of a geographic region in which the United States had been building a network of institutions of the so-called Inter-American system that served the sole purpose of guaranteeing U.S. hegemony.
The Inter-American Defense Board (IADB) was created in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the Third Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the 21 American Republics, then members of the Pan American Union, by Resolution No. XXXIX of January 28, 1942.32
The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR),33 also called the Rio Treaty, as an inter-American mutual defense pact, was signed on September 2, 1947, two years before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and was invoked 20 times just between 1950 and 1960.
Finally, as a successor to the International Union of American Nations (1890) and the Pan American Union (1910), the Organization of American States (OAS) was created on April 30, 1948.
An even more complex system of inter-American organizations was formed before and after these three pillars, from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO, 1902) to the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA, 1942) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB, 1950).
The Cuban revolutionary event, by its nature, constituted a questioning of the essence of that Pan-American order. Cuba’s bilateral and multilateral relations with the Caribbean States and Latin America went through several qualitative periods after January 1, 1959, to which different authors have given different periodizations. For the purposes of the present research, these stages are divided according to the milestones recorded in the U.S. attempts to isolate Cuba at the regional level and in the success of the latter in confronting such policy.
Therefore, a first period would extend throughout the entire decade of the 1960s, when the United States imposed the economic, commercial and financial blockade on Cuba34and got most of the governments of the hemisphere35to support the view that Cuba was an “extracontinental agent”, which could not be considered part of the Inter-American system embodied in the OAS.36
At the same time, the United States offered Latin America the Alliance for Progress (1961), curiously called a “revolution for the Americas”,37with promises of economic growth, reduction of illiteracy, democratic stability, steadiness of prices and fairness in consumption plus the assurance of investing US$ 80 billion in 10 years. But history has recorded that this never happened.
Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS in 1962 did not mean a break with the political forces of the area, especially those of the center-left, quite the contrary. Precisely because of the reinforcement of anti-Cuban isolationist policy, many political parties, social groups and emerging progressive movements found in the island the obligatory point of meeting, exchange and learning.
The Organization of Solidarity for Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL)38emerged, at Cuba’s request, as an extension to the region of African and Asian solidarity mechanisms that had been in place since 1961. The exchanges that took place in that space and the political theories published in the magazineTricontinentalby Latin American and Caribbean leaders, who over the years became government or legislative leaders in their respective countries of origin, or executives of multilateral organizations, are memorable and irreplaceable in time.
Specifically, the First Conference of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS) was held in Havana between July 31 and August 10, 1967. Its origin stemmed from the decision of the revolutionary leaders of the 27 countries that represented the region at the Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, to achieve greater strength and better hemispheric coordination capacity.
From these interactions and others, relationships of identity, solidarity, and respect for leaders and organizations in the region started to emerge, emulating the example of the Cuban Revolution, took the path of armed struggle as a method for gaining access to power and henceforth to produce the necessary social and economic transformations.
In that context, which coincided in time with the direct military aggression against Cuba at Bay of Pigs, the dirty war39and the fiercest application of the economic blockade, the revolutionary authorities felt completely free to support the national liberation movements in the countries that supported the extermination against Cuba. The most paradigmatic example was the Bolivian guerrilla led by Commander Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, assassinated in 1967. This support served to fan the flames of the theory of the “exportation of the revolution”. However, such accusationsdid not take into account at least three factors:
1.Mutual support among revolutionary movements in the region long predates the Cuban Revolution. The difference established by the Cuban Revolution is that it achieved the success that previous attempts in other countries failed to obtain.402.The main support provided by the Cuban Revolution was not in men, means or financial resources, but in achieving the recognition and unity of these forces, both within each specific country and with respect to the European and Asian references of traditional, classical, scientific socialism, or whatever it might be called.413.As Fidel Castro explained on more than one occasion, the main reason for the existence of such organizations and movements and their attempts to gain access to power were the domination schemes established by the United States since the end of the nineteenth century to ensure hegemony in the region.42
A second moment in Cuba’s official relations with the region began in 1972,43when four Caribbean nations that had recently gained their independence from the colonial metropolis established diplomatic relations with Havana. It was the Caribbean nations who presented to the OAS (1975), and won its approval, the proposal to allow members to re-establish relations with the island. A new stage was beginning in which nationalist movements that had come to power in the late 1960s also re-established ties with Cuba in the 1970s, as in the case of the Panamanian government of General Omar Torrijos (1974), as well as General Juan Domingo Perón on his return to power in Argentina in 1973 and President Jaime Roldós, elected in Ecuador in 1979. Additionally, the socialist victory at the ballot box of Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), as well as the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, both in 1979, favored a new type of relationship with Havana, or even considered the Cuban Revolution as a paradigm of the social changes that should take place in the region. The 1970s would also see continuity in the expansion of ties with the Caribbean, in the cases of the establishment of relations with the Bahamas (1974) and St. Lucia (1979).
In 1975, Cuba became a founding member of the Latin American Economic System (SELA), being the first Latin American and Caribbean intergovernmental organization to which the island was invited as a full member.44
As a backdrop to this process, it should be recalled that secret talks between the United States and Cuba had begun in 1974, as a result of which, in 1975, Washington allowed an agreement to be approved within the framework of the OAS, letting member countries define the nature of their bilateral relations with Cuba. In this way, the United States tried to prevent news of its rapprochement with Havana from leaking out and to make it seem that it was acting on the sidelines of the continental organization.45At the end of the 1970s, based on the well-earned prestige of Cuba and its revolutionary foreign policy in the international arena, the country was elected to preside over the Non-Aligned Movement and Havana hosted the Sixth Summit in 1979. These were moments of clear questioning of the regional isolation designed from Washington and, at the same time, of a gradual and ascending growth of official bilateral ties of Cuba with the region.
Among the bilateral and multilateral links reconstructed with Latin America and the Caribbean, special mention should be made of the still incipient bilateral cooperation programs developed by Cuba, which in all cases benefited the poorest sectors of the resilient societies, went farbeyond the traditional partisan support and became over time initiatives that were difficult to dismantle even when center or center-right governments came to power in the capitals of the beneficiary countries.
In the 1980s, with the accession to power of the New American Right,46based on the Republican aspiration of Ronald Reagan, Washington’s relations with the region were marked more than ever before by the Cold War and the so-called East-West confrontation. It is worth recalling that the first sentence of the Republican platform for the 1980 elections offered in the so-called Santa Fe Report47was that “America is under attack” and the second: “Latin America, the traditional partner and ally of the United States, is being penetrated by Soviet power”.
Moreover, in this context Cuba was considered “the source” of the revolutionary changes in Latin America and, therefore, military options were prepared in Washington for its confrontation, according to the geopolitics designed by the then Secretary of State Alexander Haig.48
Although the United States managed to halt and reverse the revolutionary advance of the most progressive forces in Central America in the 1980s, as part of the strategy of the so-called “low intensity conflicts”,49the forces that had previously wielded arms to achieve their objectives became integrated into the political life of theirrespective countries, progressively occupying significant spaces of the popular vote.
At the same time, military dictatorships began to come to an end in South America [Argentina (1983), Uruguay (1984), Brazil (1985), Paraguay (1989), Chile (1990)], which gave room for the establishment of new political forces that, regardless of their position in the spectrum, were committed to the search for a new alternative economic integration and began to see their immediate environment as an indissoluble whole from a cultural, economic and political point of view.
In order to confront the “extra-continental forces” in the Caribbean, the Reagan administration designed the so-called Caribbean Basin Initiative (1983),50 which failed economically because it was essentially a political project aimed at exterminating left-wing political forces in the fragile nations of the Antilles and, once again, isolating Cuba.
The invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989) and the support in resources and advice to the counterrevolutionary armed forces in Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala) were just examples of how far the U.S. New Right was willing to go to annihilate the recurrent questioning of the most orthodox Pan-Americanism, a position in which Cuba was a leader.
The harshness of Reaganomics51within the United States and the design of neoliberal principles of induced application for the less developed economies of the Western Hemisphere had a severe impact during the rest of the 1980s and created in the medium term a scenario for the early 1990s that, paradoxically, hindered the “triumphal advance” of the U.S. model in Latin America and the Caribbean even after the strategic victory over European socialism.52
These were the years, however, in which Cuba and the United States had a relative diplomatic rapprochement both in negotiatingpeace agreements in Angola, the independence of Namibia and the end ofapartheidin South Africa, as well as constructively bringing about the peace agreements in El Salvador (1992) and Guatemala (1996).53
The disappearance of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the so-called Socialist Camp and the consequent need for Cuba to insert itself even more in the Latin American and Caribbean space, together with Washington’s first proposals related to the so-called Western Free Trade Zone (1991) and the “new Pan-American order”,54gave way to a third stage in Havana’s relations with the countries of the region.
The main initiative for the institutionalization of this process, and for the creation of a single economic space under the aegis ofthe United States, was the initiation of the so-called Summits ofthe Americas in 1994 in Miami, with the well-known absence ofCuba. The Summits brought with them reforms to the Organization of American States and the approval of several Inter-American Conventions, which resulted in commitments by the signatories in various spheres.55In the political sphere, these actions were accompanied by military decisions by the United States on the areas of attention of the so-called Northern and Southern Commands, using the argument of the war against drug trafficking as the main reason for strengthening the presence of U.S. military units and advisors in the region.
Successive documents approved at the Summits of the Americas, ranging from the so-called Santiago de Chile Commitment (1998) to the Inter-American Democratic Charter (2001), reconfigured a region that was to be “in the image and likeness” of the Inter-American U.S. pattern, with the consequent exclusion of the Cuban “dissident” model.
In parallel with that scenario, Cuba had successfully initiated since 1992 a series of annual condemnations of the U.S. blockade in the United Nations, an offensive that was also permanentlytransferred to the Ibero-Latin American Summits (See AnnexI), and subsequently to other regional forums with important qualitative changes in the texts that were subsequently approved. These annual or biannual exercises, as the case might be, gradually shaped a regional consensus on the issue that became monolithic and permanent, regardless of the balance of political forces in the region at anygiven time.
In terms of the Caribbean, a space for Cuba emerged in 199456 with the creation of the Association of Caribbean States and as of 2002 the Cuba-CARICOM summits began to be held in Havana,57 which offered a limited but important accompaniment to the aspirations of the largest of the Antilles to integrate with its close geographic partners. Similarly, Cuba’s incorporation into the Latin American Integration Association (ALADI) in 1998 facilitated the island’s economic relations with important Latin American actors beyond its immediate surroundings. Cuba signed economic complementation agreements with each of the eleven members of ALADI.
