By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on December 19, 2024
The reopening of the Cuban Embassy in Washington DC on July 20, 2015, photo: Bill Hackwell
Of the thaw in relations between Cuba and the United States, which entered its tenth anniversary this December 17, only the embassies in both countries, a handful of bilateral agreements and meetings and access from the island to Netflix and Arbnb have survived. In other words, almost nothing.
The thaw, in reality, never happened. In his first term, Donald Trump dismantled the measures of his predecessor, Barack Obama, that would lead to the “normalization” of relations between the two countries, but it has been Joe Biden who has been in charge of keeping Trump’s plan afloat. He has done so by betraying the electoral promises that took him to the White House in 2020.
Although in Cuba the suspicion towards the offerings of the U.S. government is more than 200 years old, when Secretary of State John Quincy Adams said that Cuba was the “ripe fruit” that would fall into the hands of the United States by the law of universal gravitation, in the Cuban streets there was an appeal to a certain elementary logic: Obama’s vice president would surely continue the policies of his former boss.
We would soon discover how wrong we were. In the first year in office, the Biden administration devoted itself to watching with cold distance how Trump’s sanctions hit the Cuban economy and how we were faring with covid. In August 2021, when Cuba was facing a peak in cases of the epidemic, the country’s main oxygen-producing plant, OxiCuba SA, suffered a critical breakdown. Unable to quickly acquire oxygen on the international market due to the blockade, Cuba requested urgent humanitarian aid. The U.S. government looked the other way with the opportunistic calculation that bad news in Havana is very good news in Washington.
It reopened its embassy and some exchanges were maintained between the two countries, but Joe Biden deliberately maintained the sanctions regime, plus Trump’s additional measures and, to top it off, let the millions of dollars flow to the “regime change” industry, with its farms of bots and trolls from Miami and its fake news launched daily to sow discouragement, confusion and anger in a population subjected to harsh rigors.
Loyal to Trump, a few weeks away from leaving the White House, the Democrat has decided to keep the island on the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, which financially strangles Cuba and dabbles in the usual abuse of the concept of extraterritoriality, without any legal backing whatsoever. With the illusion that Florida would give the Democrats electoral votes, he courted the group of legislators of Cuban origin who in Congress have enthusiastically practiced Neanderthal Trumpism since before Trump appeared on the horizon.
We have seen these days dozens of analyses on that hopeful moment that marked December 17, 2014, when simultaneously Raul Castro and Barack Obama announced the beginning of the process of normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States, the famous “thaw”. Most approaches blame Trump for the return to the policy freeze point, but many Cubans, including myself, hold the Biden administration more responsible for its calculated inaction on Cuba.
It should not have come as a surprise. Democratic and Republican administrations have a single foreign policy toward the island, sometimes more belligerent when the former occupy the White House. John F. Kennedy was a Democrat. During his mandate, in 1961, he decreed the commercial and naval blockade of Cuba, and then launched the adventure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
In addition to Washington’s old illusion of putting an end to the government of Havana by the “good” Obama or the “bad” Trump-Biden, another historical regularity is that presidents come and go in the United States, as Biden will do in a few days, but in the Palace of the Revolution the rebels who arrived in 1959 are still there. Or as Cuban diplomat Johana Tablada told the Associated Press a few days ago, “in four years Trump will be gone and we will be here”.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano -English