U.S.–Cuban Relations in the 21st Century: Introduction

Introduction

Independent Task Force Report
U.S.–Cuban Relations in the 21st Century

January 1999

In reviewing U.S. policy toward Cuba, this Task Force is well aware that we are undertaking one of the most difficult and perhaps thankless tasks in American foreign policy. Our domestic debate about Cuba has been polarized and heated for decades, but this report seeks to build new common ground and consensus with hope and confidence. What shapes our recommendations is a sense that U.S.–Cuban relations are entering a new era. We have tried to analyze the nature of this new era, understand the American national interest vis–â–vis Cuba at this time, and develop an approach to Cuba policy that avoids the polarization of the past.

We have not tackled every outstanding issue. Instead, we have elected to try to break the current logjam by proposing new steps that we hope can elicit broad bipartisan support. Some will find our recommendations too conservative; others will argue that our proposals will strengthen the current Cuban regime. We hope and trust, instead, that these proposals will promote U.S. interests and values by hastening the day when a fully democratic Cuba can reassume a friendly, normal relationship with the United States.

Too often, discussions of U.S. policy toward Cuba start from the position that the policy over the last four decades has been a failure. Both opponents and supporters of the embargo sometimes embrace this conclusion as a starting point and then urge either jettisoning the embargo because it is counterproductive and a failure, or tightening the embargo to increase its effectiveness.

We believe that U.S. policy toward Cuba throughout the Cold War sought to achieve many goals, ranging from the overthrow of the current regime to the containment of the Soviet empire. Not all these goals were achieved. Cuba remains a highly repressive regime where the basic human rights and civil liberties of the Cuban people are routinely denied and repressed. Indeed, in its annual report issued in December 1998, Human Rights Watch said that Cuba has experienced “a disheartening return to heavy–handed repression.” Still, we believe that U.S. policy toward Cuba, including the embargo, has enjoyed real, though not total, success.

The dominant goal of U.S. policy toward Cuba during the Cold War was to prevent the advance of Cuban–supported communism in this hemisphere as part of an overall global strategy of containing Soviet communism. There was a time in this hemisphere when the danger of Cuban–style communism threatened many nations in Latin America, when many young people, academics, and intellectuals looked to Cuba as a political and economic model, and when Cuban–supported violent revolutionary groups waged war on established governments from El Salvador to Uruguay.

That time is gone, and no informed observer believes it will reappear. Cuban communism is dead as a potent political force in the Western Hemisphere. Democracy is ascendant in the Western Hemisphere, however fragile and incomplete it remains in some nations. Today, electoral democracy is considered the only legitimate form of government by the member states of the Organization of American States (OAS), and they are formally committed to defend it.

A 1998 Defense Intelligence Agency analysis concluded that Cuba no longer poses a threat to our national security. Cuba’s Caribbean neighbors are normalizing their relations with Cuba not because they fear Cuban subversion, but in part because they understand that Cuban ideological imperialism no longer constitutes a regional force. The emergence of democracy throughout the hemisphere, the loss of Soviet support, sustained U.S. pressure, and Cuba’s own economic woes forced the Cuban regime to renounce its support of armed revolutionary groups. Containment has succeeded, and the era when it needed to be the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba has ended.

Throughout the Cold War the United States sought either to induce Fidel Castro to introduce democratic political reforms or to promote his replacement as head of the Cuban state. We believe support for democracy should be our central goal toward Cuba. But we also believe that the time has come for the United States to move beyond its focus on Fidel Castro, who at 72 will not be Cuba’s leader forever, and to concentrate on supporting, nurturing, and strengthening the civil society that is slowly, tentatively, but persistently beginning to emerge in Cuba beneath the shell of Cuban communism.

This is not a repudiation of our policy of containment but its natural evolution. As George F. Kennan wrote, containment was not simply a strategy to limit the influence of communism in the world. In his 1947 Foreign Affairs article, Kennan argued that communism, as an economic system, required the continuous conquest of new resources and populations to survive. Once bottled up, communist systems will decay. Its poor economic performance and its frustration of the natural human desire for freedom make communism a doomed system if it cannot expand. Communism’s collapse across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union triumphantly vindicated Kennan’s views.

The processes of decay that Kennan foresaw for the Soviet Union after containment are already far advanced in Cuba. The Cuban economy contracted significantly after Soviet subsidies ended. Cuba has legalized the dollar, tolerated modest small–business develop–ment, however limited, and sought foreign investment in tourism to attract desperately needed foreign exchange.

The Cuban government’s formidable instruments of repression keep open dissenters marginalized, but the poverty and repression of daily life for most Cubans, combined with the affluence they see among foreign tourists and Cubans with access to hard currency, are steadily eating away at the foundations of Cuba’s system. Pope John Paul II’s extraordinary visit to Cuba in January 1998 revealed a deep spiritual hunger in Cuba and massive popular support for the Cuban church. The regime has lost the struggle for the hearts and minds of Cuba’s youth, few of whom long for a future under Cuban– style “socialism.” Indeed, we believe that in both civil society and, increasingly, within middle–level elements of the Cuban elite, many Cubans understand that their nation must undergo a profound transformation to survive and succeed in the new globalized economy and in today’s democratic Western Hemisphere.

Cubans on the island also know well that while they remain citizens of an impoverished nation, struggling to meet the daily necessities of life more than 40 years after the revolution, Cubans and Cuban Americans one hundred miles to the north are realizing great economic and professional achievements. This peaceful majority of Cuban Americans in the United States, by demonstrating that freedom, capitalism, and respect for human dignity can allow ordinary people to achieve their full potential, is helping erode the Cuban regime’s domestic credibility.

Almost every person in Cuba knows someone who lives in the United States. Increased contact between Cubans on the island and their friends and relations in the United States—a central goal of U.S. policy since the 1992 passage of the Cuban Democracy Act—may have done more to weaken the Cuban government than any other single factor since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While it is by no means clear how fast change will come in Cuba, there is no doubt that change will come. The regime has two choices. Both lead to change. On the one hand, it can open up to market forces, allowing more Cubans to open small businesses and inviting more foreign investment to build up the economy. This will relieve Cuba’s economic problems to some extent—with or without a change in U.S. policy—but at the cost of undermining the ideological basis of the Cuban system.

The alternative—to throttle Cuban small business and keep foreign investment to a minimum—also will not preserve the status quo in Cuba. If Cuba refuses to accept further economic reforms, its economy will continue to decay, and popular dissatisfaction with the system will increase. Just as Kennan predicted 50 years ago in the Soviet case, a communist system forced to live on its own resources faces inevitable change.

U.S. opposition to Cuban–supported revolution and U.S. support for democracy and development in this hemisphere played critical roles in frustrating Cuba’s ambitions to extend its economic model and political influence. With this success in hand, the United States can now turn to the second stage of its long–term policy on Cuba: working to create the best possible conditions for a peaceful transition in Cuba and the emergence of a democratic, prosperous, and free Cuba in the 21st century.

A look at postcommunist Europe shows us that the end of communism can lead to many different results—some favorable, others not so favorable. In Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, the end of communism started a process of democratic and economic development. In contrast, new governments in much of the former Soviet Union are ineffective and corrupt. Criminal syndicates dominate some of these new economies, and ordinary people have suffered catastrophic declines in living standards. In Nicaragua, free elections ended Sandinista rule, but the successor governments have not yet put the country on the path to prosperity.

Furthermore, there are many different ways in which communist regimes can change. In the former Czechoslovakia, the “Velvet Revolution” led to a peaceful transfer of power. In Romania, the former ruler and his wife died in a bloody internal struggle.

In Poland, civil society developed within the shell of communism, enabling Solidarity to strike a bargain with the Communist Party that provided for a limited period of power–sharing prior to truly free and fair elections. During this transition, the United States—both the government and many nongovernmental organizations—actively engaged with and supported Poland’s emerging civil society, from the Catholic Church and human rights groups to the Polish trade union movement. Simultaneously, while the U.S. government directly supported Poland’s emerging civil society, it also offered the carrot of relaxing existing sanctions to persuade the military regime to release political prisoners and open space for free expression of ideas and political activity.

As a unique society with its own history and social dynamics, Cuba will find its own solution to the problem posed by its current government. The United States cannot ordain how Cuba will make this change, but U.S. policy should create conditions that encourage and support a rapid, peaceful, democratic transition.

The United States has learned something else about transitions. Some who formerly served the old regimes, whether through conviction, opportunism, or necessity, have become credible and constructive members of the newly emerging democratic governments and societies. The Polish armed forces—which enforced martial law against Solidarity in the early 1980s—are now a trusted NATO partner. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, officials who once served the communist system became valuable, democratic–minded members of new, free societies. Some former communist parties reorganized themselves on democratic lines in Italy as well as in Eastern and Central Europe—and now play key roles as center–left parties in constitutional democracies.

This experience allows the United States to approach Cuba today with more flexibility than in the past. Some who today serve the Cuban government as officials may well form part of a democratic transition tomorrow. Indeed, enabling and encouraging supporters of the current system to embrace a peaceful democratic transition would significantly advance both U.S. and Cuban interests in the region.

The American national interest would be poorly served if Cuba’s transition led to widespread chaos, internal violence, divisive struggles over property rights, increased poverty, and social unrest on the island. An additional danger for the United States would arise if chaos and instability led to uncontrolled mass migration into the United States. Having tens or hundreds of thousands of desperate Cubans fleeing across the Florida Straits would create both humanitarian and political emergencies for the United States. Civil strife in Cuba would also have serious consequences for the United States, including potential pressures for the United States to intervene militarily.

On the other hand, the benefits to the United States of a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous Cuba would be substantial. A democratic Cuba has the potential to be a regional leader in the Caribbean in the fight against drug trafficking and money laundering. As a trading partner, Cuba would be a significant market for U.S. agricultural, industrial, and high–tech goods and services. A reviving tourist industry in Cuba will create tens of thousands of jobs in the United States. Working together, the United States, Cuba, and other countries in the region can protect endangered ecosystems such as the Caribbean’s coral reefs, cooperate on air/sea rescues and hurricane prediction, and develop new plans for regional integration and economic growth.

Finally, the growth of a stable democratic system in Cuba will permit the resumption of the friendship between Cubans and U.S. citizens, a friendship that has immeasurably enriched the culture of both countries. The estrangement between Cuba and the United States is painful for both countries; a return to close, friendly, and cooperative relations is something that people of goodwill in both countries very much want to see.