(AP photo)
The new era in U.S.-Cuba engagement quietly got underway on Jan. 21, when Roberta Jacobson, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, visited Cuba. Unfortunately the diplomat, always very concerned with human rights issues, arrived on the island in a position of weakness - Jacobson's boss, U.S. President Barack Obama, had already frittered away most of the United States' negotiating leverage. Mrs. Jacobson and her colleagues will be saddled with at least five grave mistakes Obama has made as part of his new Cuban policy.
The old policy was working
Obama's first mistake was to assume that he was ending a policy that had not worked.
That's not true. The aim to liquidate Cuba's Communist regime fell into irrelevance in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson ended all subversive operations against Castro and activated a strategy of "containment" somewhat similar to the one used against the Soviet Union. Johnson's strategy centered around three basic elements: propaganda, restricted economic relations, and political isolation.
Those were Cold War measures, taken against a country that has never stopped combating the United States. Washington in the decades since never seriously tried to eliminate Castroism. In the first half of the 1990s, with the Soviet Union gone and the Castro regime lacking allies, putting an end to the Cuban dictatorship would have been easy - but Bill Clinton was not interested in eradicating the neighboring regime.
He could have done it, with the support or indifference of the Russia of Boris Yeltsin and foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, when Castro unleashed the "raft exodus" of 1994. He could have done it in 1996, when Castro downed the Brothers to the Rescue planes and authorized the murder of several American citizens over international waters. But Clinton didn't even consider Cuba an enemy country - he limited himself to signing the Helms-Burton Act into law.
To Clinton, Cuba seemed a historic anachronism - a political Jurassic Park - but he had no interest in driving its government into extinction. At the time, the idea prevailed that Cuba was a decrepit tyranny that would collapse with time.
Perhaps Obama believes he was canceling Cold War measures against a country that had moved beyond the era. But how then to explain why, in July 2013, authorities in Panama halted a ship loaded clandestinely n Cuba with 250 tons of war materiel? How to reclassify as "a normal country" a nation described as terrorist, an ally of the worst Islamic tyrannies - the ayatollahs' Iran and Ghadafi's Libya - a regime that plots with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua to articulate a major anti-U.S. campaign not unlike those seen in the worst days of the Cold War? Don't dozens of U.S. criminals, political and common, continue to live in Cuba, protected by the authorities?
Cuba was not a former enemy. It has kept its anti-American virulence intact.
No strategic vision
The second mistake was to cancel that policy of containment without offering a strategic vision to define the policy that replaces it, and the objectives being sought.
It is obvious that what should interest the United States is that on an island so close to its borders, and in a land that has caused the United States so many mishaps, there should be a democratic, peaceful, and politically stable government, so that no further migratory spasms occur - 20 percent of the Cuban population is on U.S. soil. Costa Rica is a good model for the tranquil nation that I describe.
Of benefit to all, especially to Cubans, would be for Cuba to have a prosperous, developed, and friendly society with which other nations can engage in mutually satisfactory commercial transactions. But the foolish "theory of dependency," characterized and summarized in the book The Open Veins of Latin America, lacks any sense. To the United States, a rich and tranquil Cuba is preferable to a roiling and impoverished Cuba.
Are the objectives of democracy and stability achieved by empowering a military dynasty notorious for collectivism, single-party rule, and the absence of human rights? Is it possible to promote a rich society ignoring that Raul Castro and his military staff have divided the nation's productive apparatus among themselves like mob bosses?
Isn't it obvious that, lacking institutions of law that are able to absorb changes and exercise authority in an orderly, peaceful, and democratic manner, Cuba will experience new confrontations and conflicts in the not-too-distant future?
Obama thinks that he has solved a problem by amending relations with Raul Castro. Wrong: What he has done is to postpone that problem. In the near future, other crises will come up, and the United States will now be dragged into them. It has been so since the 19th Century. That's what happens when wounds do not fully heal.
Undermining Cuba's democrats
The third mistake is the damage that Obama has done to the democratic opposition. Perhaps this is the gravest error of all. For decades, the message sent by more credible dissidents to the dictatorship was very clear: "Let us sit down to talk and, among Cubans, let us find a democratic solution. The problem is between us, not between Washington and Havana."
To that approach (which, with different shadings, was that of Gustavo Arcos, the Cuban Democratic Platform, and Oswaldo Paya), the regime has responded with repression and with accusations that such overtures are part of a CIA ploy. But that outcome - as in Eastern Europe, as in Pinochet's Chile, as in 1990 Nicaragua - would have been best for everyone, including the United States, and it was the obvious path to follow for anyone who might inherit the Castro brothers' power.
To achieve this scenario, Washington needed to remain firm and refer the dictatorship to its own opposition whenever, directly or indirectly, the possibility of reconciliation was insinuated. The problem was among Cubans and the solution should have been found among Cubans. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the two U.S. presidents of the post-Soviet era, both understood this notion, which Obama irresponsibly invalidated, denying the opposition any chance to be an important actor in shaping the island's future.
Why engage in democratic reforms, Castro's heirs will say, if we have been accepted as we are? Didn't Roberta Jacobson say, on behalf of the U.S. government, that Washington held no hopes that the Castros would permit freedoms? On Dec. 30, 2014, exactly 13 days after the reconciliation was announced, Cuban political police detained several dozen intellectuals and artists who attempted to carry out a performance on Revolution Square. What room is left for Washington to induce respect for human rights if Washington has made most of the concessions unilaterally?
This was expressed clearly by a high-ranking intelligence officer, Jesus Arboleya, a Cuban diplomat and an expert in Cuba's relations with the United States and Canada, in an interview with El Nuevo Dia of Puerto Rico, also on Dec. 30. The newspaper asked Arboleya if he feared Obama's new policy.
"If in the past, when they had all the power to impose their values, [that policy] didn't work, why should it work beginning now?" was his answer.
The dictatorship is euphoric. It feels that it has carte blanche to crush the democrats without paying any price. Lacking all sensitivity, Obama has contributed to weakening the opposition.
A moral failure
The fourth mistake is a moral mistake. Beginning with the Jimmy Carter administration, the United States gradually generated a democratic doctrine for Latin America. The region was deemed exceptional for the purpose of defending democracy and freedom.
Either for strategic reasons or out of realpolitik, the United States could not order China to behave democratically. But in the same way that Latin America could be declared a region free of nuclear weapons, it was possible to declare that Latin America ought to be free of dictatorships and human rights abuses.
That spirit culminated with the Inter-American Democratic Charter, signed by all hemispheric nations in Lima on Sept.11, 2001, the same day that the Islamist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., took place. That document described the features and behaviors of the nations fit to participate in the Organization of American States. Cuba met none of those requirements. It was a despicable dictatorship, a carbon copy of the Soviet-Stalinist model.
Somehow, the text of that charter, on which U.S. diplomats ardously labored, put an end to the shameful succession of permanent deals signed between Washington and the worst Latin American dictatorships throughout the 20th Century: Trujillo, Stroessner, Somoza, Batista, and a long, long et cetera. No longer valid was the cynical dictum: "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch."
After the reconciliation between Obama and Raul Castro, the United States is back to its old habits. At home, its president delivers a great speech about freedom, yet negates its very text with its diplomatic behavior. True, that's what many Latin American countries desired, but it remains a pity that, in inter-American relations, there is no space for moral considerations. The United States has needlessly sacrificed its position as an ethical leader and has returned to the worst moral relativism. A great pity.
Going against the legal grain
Obama's fifth mistake is of a legal nature. The United States is a republic directed by the delegates of society, selected through democratic elections. Among them, the president is the principal representative of the popular will, but not the only one. There is a legislative entity that shares many functions with the White House, and there is a Constitution, interpreted by the judiciary power, by which everyone must abide. As we all know, the essence of the republic is the division of power, to avoid a dictatorship and to force the leadership to find formulas for consensus.
It is possible that the surveys will reflect that a majority in U.S. society circumstantially support a reconciliation with the Cuban dictatorship - as in 1939 a majority supported a neutral stance toward the Nazis - but that has only relative importance. The United States is a republic, observant of the law, and a representative democracy. That's what matters, and it has little to do with surveys or with the decisions made by an assembly of citizens.
Well, then; it's very likely that Obama will spend a substantial portion of the two years remaining in his term explaining to the House and Senate why he deceived the public and the other powers of the state by telling them, even up to the eve of his joint announcement with Raul Castro on Dec. 17, 2014, that he would make no unilateral concessions until the Cuban dictatorship took steps toward freedom and opening. It was not a silent diplomatic maneuver. It was deceitful.
In the two chambers of Congress there are five Cuban-American representatives and three Cuban-American senators, Republicans and Democrats, who have enormous expertise on the subject. Shouldn't the president have briefed them on his Cuban policy and sought their opinions and advice? Is there no civic cordiality in the White House? Didn't Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, deserve that consideration?
It is true that foreign policy is a presidential prerogative, but legislators have a clear role to play, and they all feel that the president tricked them. In fact, some legislators believe that the president broke the law, and they will try to prove that contention.
What Obama thinks will be part of his legacy - full and cordial relations with a military dictatorship - might turn into a nightmare. For now, it is a terrible mistake, one that none of the 10 presidents who preceded him ever made. There must have been a reason they didn't.