Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I couldn’t tell Scott that President Obama had created a secret back channel to try to create a new way forward with Cuba, a chance to break through the gridlock and explore a path to a more constructive relationship like those the United States had forged with other longtime enemies, and that slow progress was being made, inch by inch. In my first meeting with the president as secretary of state in 2013, he had told me that he had entrusted his longtime aide Ben Rhodes to take on that delicate assignment, and I was glad to hear it. But that channel had to remain absolutely secret, just as our channel to Iran via Oman had to remain a secret—otherwise those on either side who didn’t want to see a change happen could blow up the entire dialogue.

  It was too easy in Washington for even those with good intentions to inadvertently spill a secret. I’d learned this lesson the hard way over the years. I know exactly how it happens: you swear one person to secrecy, even tell them that they’re the only person you’re telling, and confide in them. Then they do the same to someone else. Before you know it, two dozen people all have done the same. There are no secrets in Washington—if you don’t want a piece of information to leak out, don’t share it beyond those who absolutely need to know, and when you put that rule to the test, you usually realize that very few people actually need to know something! In this case, the stakes were about as high as they get—and so was the level of secrecy.

  Cuba had been the third rail of American foreign policy for decades, foolishly so, and almost everyone knew it. Ninety miles from America, the Castro regime had outlasted American president after American president—all of whom had pledged to tighten the screws a little more to bring freedom and democracy to what I still remembered President Kennedy calling an “imprisoned island.” It had never worked. All it had succeeded in doing was giving the Castros a convenient rhetorical bogeyman in the United States to distract from the fact that, like the Soviet Union, their experiment in a state-controlled economy had failed. But if the revolution had frozen the Cuban people in time, then our response to it had frozen our freedom of action in our own hemisphere: among Latin American countries, there was always a sense that the United States’ policy on Cuba made it harder for them to work with us, the big superpower, and many took an unspoken sense of pride in the way Cuba—this tiny island—held on for so many years thumbing its nose at the United States.

  I had never been a fan of the Castros. I didn’t buy into the romanticism some attached to them or their revolution. Fidel was a brutal ruler, though I gave his brother Raúl credit for opening up some market-based reforms, if only to keep their communist experiment alive. I had no illusions about them.

  I saw Cuba much the way I’d seen Vietnam about twenty years before: as an ideological stalemate that didn’t serve any real purpose. The opportunity to perhaps break that dynamic once and for all—to try to begin a new chapter the way John McCain and I had helped presidents do on Vietnam—was promising and overdue.

  But just as we could never have moved forward on Vietnam without first investigating and creating closure on the POW/MIA question, there was no solving Cuba without bringing Alan Gross home, free and safe. Sometimes when members of Congress to whom I was quite sympathetic on Cuba policy would come to see me as secretary of state, and they’d ask why the Obama administration wouldn’t unilaterally make a policy shift and normalize relations with Cuba—a goodwill gesture—I’d remind them about the lesson we learned on Vietnam. “Just think, guys—we couldn’t normalize relations with Vietnam until we’d done the most extensive search for POWs in the history of warfare—when the government believed from day one that none were alive. You think the government’s going to change on Cuba when we know for a fact that Alan Gross is very much alive and they won’t return him?”

  That’s exactly where we were stuck in the summer of 2014, as I wrestled with whether we could do anything to help Alan Gross, now in a dark, isolated moment of his life.

  I arranged a secret phone call with Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez. He was traveling in Brazil, and I was overseas myself, but we connected for the call and I made another humanitarian appeal for Alan’s release given his mother’s rapid decline in health and the clock ticking away on Alan’s own reservoir of hope. Bruno had served as Cuba’s ambassador to the UN for many years. I was no stranger to him. He remembered my visit to the Cuban mission at the United Nations as a senator to appeal for Alan Gross’s release shortly after Alan had been arrested. He also remembered that I’d been a voice for opening up relations between our countries over the years. I told him in no uncertain terms that if Alan Gross lost hope and died in prison, the relationship between our countries would not move an inch, and that given the sensitivity, it would make an enormous difference if he could see his way to appeal for Alan to be freed to see his mother before she passed. I didn’t know whether Bruno was aware of the back channel, and I didn’t dare mention it. But my message was clear: don’t let this man die.

  Bruno called me back the next day to say that he couldn’t resolve Alan’s situation on short notice. Twenty-four hours later, Alan’s mother slipped away. I was sickened.

  I wrote a note by hand to Alan and arranged through the head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana—a savvy diplomat named Jeff DeLaurentis—to have it delivered to Alan in his cell, sealed, unopened. There weren’t a lot of words for a moment like this. I just asked him to hold on—to know that efforts were being made to set him free and to trust that we were going to get there in time for him to be back home with Judy, even if it had come too late for his mother.

  I prayed it would not come too late for Alan.

  Six months later, eight days before Christmas, I was flying back to the United States from Rome knowing that Alan Gross would soon be walking out of prison a free man, headed home.

  On the flight, I called the foreign ministers from our hemisphere and key players in Europe to share the news before it broke officially—to tell them that the president was going to announce not just Alan’s release and the return of an actual American intelligence asset in exchange for Cubans convicted in the United States, but also the normalization of relations with Cuba and the start of a new policy. Germany’s foreign minister chuckled. “What took you so long?” was all he could say. Our close ally in Colombia was ecstatic—negotiations with the FARC on a peace process were at a critical moment; the Cubans were pivotal players in that engagement, and now we might be welcome to become more involved as well. The sense that we’d restored our own freedom of action in our hemisphere was itself a victory.

  But nothing could compare to the sense of closure as our plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base and I saw, not far off on the runway, the plane that had brought Alan Gross home after all these years, home for Hanukkah with Judy and their grown children. I walked inside to the waiting area and standing in front of me was Alan. We embraced. I’ve never felt more humbled to be able to say to someone, “Welcome home.” His sense of peacefulness, the absence of rancor, the lack of any anger about years of indignities and years lost—it was remarkable to be there in his presence.

  There has always been something that has fascinated me about those who have been through such struggles and come out the other end with a kind of serenity about life. I’d seen it in Nelson Mandela and his astonishing ability to forgive his captors, seen it in Xanana Gusmão, the Timorese political prisoner and resistance fighter imprisoned by Indonesia during the occupation of East Timor, and I’d seen it most closely of course in John McCain: despite the intensity and the pain of having been unjustly deprived of their freedom for so long, every one of them walked out with a sense of higher purpose and a determination to let go of their anger.

  Alan Gross was the same way. Together, we shared one of those surreal, only-in-America kind of moments: we watched from a well-worn airport couch on a big-screen television as the networks interrupted the normally scheduled programming so that President Obama could announce to the American people a new policy—while Presiden
t Raúl Castro simultaneously did the same in his country. I’d seen so many Americans held in other countries killed. But December 17, 2014—for Alan Gross, and for America, this was a very good day.

  Eight months later, I went to Havana to raise the flag above our embassy, the first time the Stars and Stripes would fly there since 1961. I was joined at the flag raising by three men: Larry Morris, Francis “Mike” East and Jim Tracy. They had been Marine guards at our embassy in Havana when we closed it in January 1961. They had lowered Old Glory but they also made a bold promise—that one day they would return to Havana and raise the flag again. And return they did. We brought Larry, Mike and Jim down to Havana for the reopening of the embassy and their presence was a stark reminder of the distance we’d traveled. I invited the three of them to fulfill their pledge by presenting the Stars and Stripes to our current military attachment. It completed a circle that must have been unimaginable when they were last on the island.

  Later that day, I met again with Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez. We remembered our conversations about Alan Gross the summer before and talked about just how much had changed in a year’s time. Bruno was extremely disciplined and loyal to the Cuban hard-liners. I spent a lot of time on the phone with Bruno between December 2014 and my first trip to Havana as secretary in August 2015. During those eight months, we had had tough negotiations on how the embassy would function, the freedom of movement for our diplomats, the kind of protection they’d have, and other details. Bruno clearly was not prepared to push the bureaucracy on the issues. He was a man of the system and he saw what happened to colleagues who were less cautious. It was a reminder why the back channel had to be done at the chief executive level, not through the complicated, slow Cuban bureaucracy, in order to succeed.

  Nonetheless, I was determined to put diplomacy to the test. I presented Bruno and the Cuban government with a four-stage road map, an attempt to apply lessons learned from past efforts to normalize relations between adversaries to the serious and hard work we needed to do with the Cubans. The road map touched on areas where I thought cooperation was possible, such as law enforcement, the environment and natural disasters. It also tackled more sensitive issues, such as human rights, property claims and fugitive criminals. Establishing diplomatic relations didn’t mean that we suddenly agreed on all these issues—quite the contrary. But it created formal channels to communicate and make progress, even if it was slow. Engagement made it easier—not harder—to advance our interests and build support throughout the region for our policies.

  The Cuba policy shift was done differently from that with Vietnam and it will proceed differently. We’d begun changing course on Vietnam by lifting the trade embargo, which soon flooded Vietnam with American entrepreneurial energy, which in turn ultimately pressured the regime to embrace greater openness. Congress wasn’t about to lift the Cuba embargo; the politics of our institutions forbade it, and that meant we couldn’t flood Cuba with American innovation and capitalist spirit. And the Cuban hard-liners were in no hurry for major change; that change may begin on their terms with the post-Castro governments. Change will be more incremental. But change will come. And one thing I’ve learned in all these years in international affairs remains true: all forms of change are easier when diplomats can pick up the phone to connect, or sit face-to-face, and talk to each other openly on behalf of their two countries.

  • • •

  COLOMBIA IS ANOTHER example proving change is possible when leaders take risks to bring it to pass. It is a lesson that should be taught to aspiring diplomats and might be studied in the Middle East when leaders say change there is impossible because they don’t have a partner for peace across the table. Above all, it reflects what Colombians decided they wanted for themselves and their future.

  I’d been secretary of state several months when I traveled down to Bogotá in August 2013. My meetings with President Juan Manuel Santos and Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín were warm and constructive. I’d been a longtime friend to Colombia and an advocate for bilateral trade with the United States. More than that, I had been a veteran of Colombia’s struggle in the bad old days when the country teetered on the brink of becoming a narco-state. In the late 1990s, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I had teamed up with Joe Biden and Chris Dodd to work with the Clinton administration in helping to put together what became known as Plan Colombia. I still remember one day in the Senate reacting to the news that most of the supreme court, if not the entire supreme court, had been assassinated. If a democracy fell this way, it would be a dangerous bellwether for the future of democracy in the hemisphere. The insurgency there was one of the longest running in the world. Drug cartels, corruption and surging demand for cocaine in the United States made this not just a foreign policy challenge, but a domestic challenge of the first order. Plan Colombia took the fight to the cartels and, over time, brought Colombia back from the edge of oblivion.

  But in 2013, the FARC insurgency was still alive in parts of Colombia. I pledged American support for their peace process, and Santos indicated to me privately that, given the politics of his country at the moment, it wasn’t yet time for the United States to play a higher-profile role. But he would come back to me down the road.

  Before I left Colombia that day, our embassy organized a game of pickup volleyball with Colombians that would remain fresh in my memory a long, long time. It was a game of wheelchair volleyball with some of the toughest guys I’d ever met. Most were amputees who had lost limbs to FARC booby traps; others had been shot and were paralyzed from the waist down. They were veterans of Colombia’s brutal drug wars, and they were on a mission not just to mend their wounds, but their country’s as well. They gave me a yellow numero uno shirt to wear. I quickly donned the jersey and we played a few rounds. But that day, they taught me a lesson or two in grit and determination, not just on the court but in life. Every single one of them was moving forward in life, not looking backward. They wanted to live with a sense of purpose and drive, and they wanted peace; it was a powerful reminder of the stakes in Colombia’s decades-long search for peace, but it was also a reminder of how people who have suffered the most can say most clearly the reasons healing and closure are important.

  In December 2014, I went back to Bogotá and met with President Santos again. Four previous attempts to negotiate peace with the FARC had failed. He worried that the process was stalling again and that some of the big issues on security, justice and political participation remained unresolved. He signaled that the time was right for the United States to be more engaged in the peace process. I asked him whether he could welcome a special envoy from our side to help him along. It was something I’d kicked around as an idea in my conversations with Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson and Counselor of the U.S. Department of State Tom Shannon, who had held Roberta’s job years before. But it would work only if Santos wanted it to happen. He said he was positively disposed to the idea, but that he needed to think more. I suspected I knew why he didn’t jump at the opportunity: it was December 12, five days before the world would learn that we were making a fresh start with Cuba. Santos was in the dark. He knew that Cuba had brought the FARC to the table, and he no doubt wondered whether Cuba would balk at the United States—its sworn adversary—suddenly bigfooting the process. Five days later, that would no longer be an obstacle.

  When I got back to Washington before Christmas, after the hoopla over Cuba had died down a bit, President Santos sent official word: yes, he welcomed an American envoy. Bernie Aronson had served as President George H. W. Bush’s assistant secretary of state for the western hemisphere even though he was a Democrat. He was respected by both political parties and was respected in the region. He had time to give back again through public service. Some in the White House worried: With Cuba, Iran, and so many other issues in the world, did this mean the United States was going to own another crisis? I said, why wouldn’t we take advantage
of the opportunity that the Cuba opening had created for us in our own neighborhood? The president agreed to give it a shot.

  The negotiations weren’t easy, but Bernie handled them with patience and diligence. President Santos was understandably concerned whether it was possible to close a deal with the FARC amid so much opposition at home. Two hundred thousand Colombians in a country of forty-eight million had been killed in the conflict. That meant that if your family hadn’t lost someone to the violence, you knew a family that had. Making peace was no easy feat.

  But President Santos persisted—and he kept in close coordination with Bernie and our team at the State Department. Santos had promised not to ask me to intervene unless he had no other choice; likewise, I promised him that if he asked, I would do my best to say yes. The request came in March 2016. I was headed to Havana with President Obama for his historic trip and quietly peeled off from the presidential delegation because President Santos had asked me to meet with the FARC negotiators. This was the first meeting between a U.S. secretary of state and the FARC, and I intended to put the full weight of American diplomacy behind the push to arrive at a settlement. For decades, the United States had regarded the FARC as a terrorist organization. They had kidnapped several U.S. contractors and held them under brutal conditions. For their part, the FARC regarded the United States as an enemy that had provided matériel, training and intelligence to support the Colombian government’s counterinsurgency against them. There was obviously a lot of mistrust on both sides. They weren’t good guys. I’d voted to provide the funding over multiple administrations that helped decimate their leadership and dropped pesticides on the coca fields funding their cocaine-backed rebellion. It had once seemed unlikely that we’d ever be looking across a table from each other.