A Slam-dunk on Softening Cuba Policy

A hard-line on Cuba has been a permanent fixture in Washington, around longer than many of the city’s monuments. Yet, come January 20th, President Obama can begin to shift foreign policy away from ideological certitude and toward constructive engagement abroad by softening U.S. policy toward the island. What a difference one election cycle can make.

Obama has such an opportunity for two key reasons: he won Florida without winning the powerful Cuban American vote that has long dictated U.S. Cuba policy, and he won the presidency without relaying on the state’s 27 electoral votes. As Dan Erikson, author of “The Cuba Wars” described it “that’s a formula for vastly reduced Cuban American influence over the executive branch.”

Soon after his inauguration, Obama is expected to lift restrictions for Cuban Americans to travel and send remittances to the island. President Bush introduced both measures five years ago “to hasten the arrival of a new, free, democratic Cuba.” The initiatives have done none of the above.

Instead they have served to galvanize support among an array of think tanks, business groups, moderate Cuban American organizations and former U.S. officials for ending a policy that in 47 years hasn’t succeeded. Among them is Arturo Valenzuela, a former Clinton official and likely nominee for the top U.S. diplomat for Western Hemisphere affairs in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Ironically, the Bush restrictions, designed to please Cuban Americans, deepened fissures between them. Polls over the last few years have revealed generational disagreement within a community once a monolith in favor of the Cuba embargo. And now, for the first time, according to a poll done after the election by Florida International University and the Brookings Institution, the majority of Cuban Americans surveyed favored lifting it.

This “historic” shift is actually consistent with the long held view among a strong majority of Cuban Americans that the embargo has been a failure. Supporting a failed policy may seem like a contradiction, but Cuban Americans feel they have no options. If there were multilateral effort to support human rights and economic development in the island, for example, even more Cuban Americans would let the embargo go.

The political dynamics in Florida now allow -- some say encourage -- Obama to explore such alternatives. Joe Garcia, who seriously challenged Republican representative and hardliner Mario Diaz Balart in a Miami-Dade congressional race this year, believes any change from Obama will be welcomed as a move “toward policies that are more consistent” with the community’s sentiment today.

But there are practical limits to what can be achieved. “ The relationship (between the U.S. and Cuba) is too complex and not urgent enough to commit the kind of time and energy” that normalization would require, Jake Colvin wrote in a new report released this week underwritten by the New Ideas Fund.

Furthermore, some of the measures that Obama is expected to reverse, such as lifting the travel ban for all Americans (as opposed to just Cuban Americans), would require approval from Congress. There Obama would bump up against the likes of Díaz Balart and other long time Cuban American hardliners including Democrats such as New Jersey Senator Bob Menéndez. As Erikson put it, “Congress is basically paralyzed when it comes to Cuba policy. There is bipartisan support for lifting the embargo and bipartisan opposition.”

Still Colvin insists that the president will have a lot of discretion to reshape the policy. Aside from reversing Bush’s restrictions, Obama could reinitiate lower-level diplomatic discussions with Cuban officials on issues of mutual interest such as immigration and drugs.

He could also lift trade restrictions to allow heavy equipment and other exports to Cuba to help rebuild from recent hurricanes and license direct banking service in order to facilitate these sales, as a coalition of U.S. business groups, including for the first time in years the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, requested in a letter sent to Obama this week.

Any of those developments will be a positive sign to Latin American countries that they may no longer have to dread the reactions from Washington or Havana over their own Cuba policy. While a more autonomous Latin America is not looking to Obama to lead on most hemispheric issues, this is one where U.S. leadership will be absolutely necessary to move toward a more collaborative approach that puts humanitarian concerns above sanctions on the regime.

President Obama will be inaugurated 19 days after the Cuban Revolution celebrates its 50th anniversary. History has presented him with an opportunity to take some practical steps toward reforming a policy nearly as old as the revolution itself and just as an ineffective in giving Cubans the freedom to choose their own destiny.