President Obama’s
announcement of the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba was front
page news for about two days before being eclipsed by the North Korean computer
hack of Sony Entertainment and the internet threats to theaters scheduled to show
the movie “The Interview” by an anonymous group or individual calling
themselves The Guardians of Peace. But
the Cuba initiative is an important issue.
While it has been difficult over the last six years to find much
positive in the disorganized, and generally inept Obama Administration’s
foreign policy, the Cuba initiative is a long overdue acknowledgment of the
high level of change in the world order and power configurations since the 1961
annulment of diplomatic relations and the 1963 imposition of the U.S. economic
embargo on the island nation.
The
isolation of Cuba during the Cold war decades of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s made sense.
The Castro brother’s founded a communist state in 1959 and found a
patron in the Soviet Union who subsidized their economy in return for basing of
Soviet military assets. In the face of this intrusion into the Western
hemisphere by the Soviet Union and the security implications of having a Soviet
proxy operating in the affairs of the Latin American nations, Eisenhower broke
off diplomatic relations with the Castro regime. After the Kennedy Administration’s failed Bay
of Pigs invasion using American trained anti-Castro forces in 1961, Kennedy
imposed the economic embargo. The
installation of nuclear warhead capable missiles within easy reach of the
continental U.S. in 1962 and the resulting “Cuban Missile Crisis, brought U.S./Cuban
relations to a new low. Armed with Russian weapons and benefitting from Russian
training of their growing military, Castro developed regional ambitions and
sought global Left wing revolutionary credibility by encouraging and supporting
such movements in Latin America and intervening militarily in conflicts in and
across northeastern and southern Africa.
But much has changed since
the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Soviet aid
actually started to unravel in 1989 with Gorbachev’s “reforms” of the Soviet
economy. This aid in the form of under-priced
exports of oil and over-priced imports of Cuban sugar which along with other
components amounted to 3.5 to 4.5 billion dollars a year dried up. This led
Castro to experiment with concessions to foreign investors to attract hard
currency. A deal with a Spanish hotel
company created three resorts and a shopping center and brought in tourists
from Canada and Europe. This 1991
venture has been followed by the largest project so far to “internationalize” a
sector of the Cuban economy. Starting in
2013, in the port city of Mariel, thirty miles from Havana, a 900 million
dollar port expansion is underway in another of Cuba’s “free trade zones”. The goal is to attract more foreign
investment. The project, being built by a Brazilian company is scheduled to be operated by a Singapore
company. The FTZ in its entirety is meant to
attract international companies to Cuba by offering them a low-tax, low-regulation
environment in which to manufacture goods.
To accomplish this, the government is instituting reforms to decrease
its control over many of the financial and commercial operations of these
private companies. The importance of this capitalist outreach in the overall
socialist economy is that the reforms are having a spill-over effect on the
rest of the economy as the Cuban labor and commercial sectors themselves
interact with the foreign enterprises.
Hopefully, should Diaz-Canel
actually succeed Raul Castro he will possess a more ideological and modernist
eclecticism that will recognize the need for economic and political reforms to
bring Cuba into the 21st Century.
The U.S. need not wait and can commence a cautious but serious process
of engagement.