Obama’s Savvy Cuba Move

The New Yorker
Jon Lee Anderson

President Obama’s moves on Cuba, which he announced on Monday, have been cleverly thought out. By removing existing restrictions on Cuban-Americans seeking to visit the island or send money to help their relatives, he satisfies several political constituencies. It’s what most Florida Cubans want, and most Cubans in Cuba, too. (An estimated one in ten Cubans on the island have relatives in Florida.) A lot of people wish Obama had gone even further, but by now it’s clear that Obama is a canny, cautious political player, unlike his predecessor. T

he White House also said that U.S. telecommunications companies would be free to offer their services in Cuba, that commercial flights between the two countries might resume (only charters are now possible), and that Americans could send humanitarian packages to whomever they liked in Cuba except to functionaries of the Cuban government. With these measures and the accompanying backhanders about “freedom and liberty,” Obama is at once showing goodwill, testing the waters for dialogue, and throwing down challenges. He has effectively kicked the ball for “change” back to los hermanos Castro; until now, the onus was on him.

Since Obama’s Inauguration, a parade of Latin American heads of state have visited Havana, met with an apparently amenable Raul Castro, and declared that it was time for Washington to end the embargo on Cuba and to normalize relations. And Fidel—in hibernation due to illness these past two and a half years—has been using his column in Granma in recent days to egg on Obama and intone about the past perfidies of American policy toward Cuba. There was not much for Obama to do, it seemed, except to listen to reason—and Fidel. By relaxing some of the more onerous aspects of the U.S.-sanctions regime in advance of the Americas Summit to be held in Trinidad this weekend—where Cuba is destined to be the main topic of discussion—Obama has deflected some of that pressure, acquired some regional respect, and given the United States a strong negotiating position. Much of that leverage will accrue from the sheer juggernaut of American wealth pouring into the island—assuming Cuba allows it to pour in.

The increased flow of remittances and visitors could transform the daily lives of many Cubans. This kind of private economy, though, has always been a double-edged sword for the Cuban regime, as I saw while living in Havana in the mid-nineties. The bottom had dropped out of the economy after the Soviet Union collapsed and its subsidies disappeared. In short order, Fidel lifted his own set of sanctions imposed on Cubans who had fled his rule. For years he had vilified them as deserters, traitors, counterrevolutionaries, or gusanos—worms. Suddenly the gusanera became la comunidad—the community—and it’s citizens were officially encouraged to visit and shop for their relatives from government-owned stores that accepted only hard currency. But these families that received food and goods bought with dollars soon became the “haves” of Havana, and were deeply resented by others.

Fidel enacted some restrictions on “material ostentation” so as to curb the growing social schism, but was unable to finesse it entirely. He was unwittingly assisted by George W. Bush, who cracked down on remittances and travel from the United States. Then Fidel’s oil-rich Venezuelan protégé, Hugo Chavez, stepped into the breech, providing subsidized oil and also money to repair Cuba’s deteriorating hospitals, schools, and electricity grid— and help cement over some of Cuba’s emerging social cracks. But Chavez may not always have pots of money to throw around, so Venezuelan aid was only going to ever be a stopgap lifeline.

Most jobs in Cuba pay about twenty dollars a month. What if, six months or a year from now, Cubans all over the island are being clothed and fed, thanks to friends and relatives—or anonymous donors—living in the United States? Where would that leave Cuba’s government?
Fidel is unaccustomed to being outdone by American Presidents; he has outlasted ten, and outsmarted most of them. On Tuesday, Fidel said, a little begrudgingly, that Obama should have gone all the way and ended the trade embargo imposed back in 1961. Doing that, of course, would have meant a symbolic victory for Fidel. In a sense, he has already won, at least in the court of international public opinion. But at the same time, Obama appears to want to reserve the right for the United States to be seen as magnanimous in defeat.