‘Old’ Cuba is Gone Forever

VOICES-(Re CityWatch article “Bienvenidos a Cuba … It’s About Time”) I am a diplomat (or was, now retired) and I know Latin America well. For the first half of it post-revolution history, Cuba was a jihadist state. 

Cuban troops fought i n the Congo with Lumumba, fount in Angola with the MPLA, fought in Mozambique with FRELIMO, fought in Viet-nam against the USMC, and invaded Bolivia. It sponsored the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran FLN, and supports the Colombian FARC. And it permitted the USSR to use the island as a military and espionage base to electronically spy on us all.

That being said, we have diplomatic relations with lots of other countries that do more or less the same thing in their own regions. We also made numerous overtures for diplomatic relations over the past 40 years, which the Cubans rejected. It takes two to tango; the USA is not always to blame.

The real reason, however, is that Cuba policy was held captive by US electoral politics. In the same way as a concentration of Jews in NY determines policy towards Israel, a concentration of former Cubans in Miami determined policy towards Cuba. It is the change in the demographics of Dade County that has permitted this policy shift. (I say former Cubans, because they could not vote until they became Americans.)

There is also a more subtle reason. As the communist regimes in Eastern Europe found out, it is not the oppressed who revolt, but the formerly oppressed who experience a liberalization. It is real hard to put the genie back into the bottle. Perhaps the most subversive thing the USG could have done to guarantee future regime change in Havana was to normalize economic and political relations with Cuba. We will now see if that is what takes place. The Castro brothers have not built a regime that can tolerate an easy transition of power within their system, which, in the old Latin American tradition, is personalist, not institutional.

Whatever anyone in Miami does or wants, the "old" Cuba is gone forever. Cuba is now a literate nation, a well-educated nation, a healthy nation, and an increasingly black nation (the white upper class having moved to Florida). What it is not is a rich nation, in spite of having all the pre-requisites to be one except political will. We can all hope that this will be one of the changes ahead.

 

(Kim Stevens is a retired diplomat.)

-cw

  

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 103

Pub: Dec 23, 2014