Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Fidel’s 1988 invitation to Pope John Paul II to visit the country had gone unanswered. But after the Cuban leader delivered it in person at the Vatican in 1996, and Cuba reinstated Christmas as a national holiday, the Pope decided to make the journey in January 1998. Castro welcomed him at the airport, along with the members of the powerful Political Bureau of the PCC (see Fidel welcoming him in figure 21.2). On the street, crowds greeted the pontiff with unvarnished enthusiasm. Signs in windows of homes declared, No tengo miedo—“I am not afraid.”

  Figure 21.2. Fidel Castro greets Pope John Paul II in Havana, January 25, 1998. Photo by Ahmed Velázquez, courtesy of Granma.

  More than one million people attended a public mass that John Paul II led in Havana’s Revolution Square on January 25, 1998, his first stop of the five-day visit. His message to those assembled offered a kind of vindication for Cuba’s leaders: “For many of the political and economic systems operative today, the greatest challenge is still that of combining freedom and social justice.”2

  He continued with this theme in a series of masses across the island, during which the leader of the Roman Catholic Church found common ground with Cuba’s leader by sharply rebuking global capitalism’s “blind market forces.” He also pointedly called for an end to the US embargo, which he characterized as “oppressive economic measures imposed from outside the country.”3 Cuba reacted to the Pope’s plea for greater freedom by releasing more than three hundred political prisoners, relaxing travel restrictions on priests, and permitting more Church radio broadcasts.

  US Opponents of Rapprochement Lose Strength

  Clinton Relaxes the Embargo

  The Pope’s visit also reverberated in the United States, where the Clinton administration found itself under increasing international pressure to diminish US hostility toward Cuba. Several South American countries had signed trade pacts with Cuba, and Caribbean countries gave Castro a hero’s welcome at a summit in which the region’s leaders signed a free-trade agreement.4 Publicity generated by the pontiff’s trip and the Cuban government’s responses added to the pressure.

  Clinton responded with modest changes that did little more than reverse some earlier moves tightening the embargo. Direct charter flights between the United States and Cuba were restored, and Cuban-Americans again were allowed to send remittances up to $300 every three months to their families.

  Yet a new dynamic between opponents and advocates of a changed relationship began to emerge in 1998. The death in November 1997 of Jorge Mas Canosa, the politically sophisticated head of the vaunted CANF, led to fissures and cracks in the seemingly invincible influence of the hardline anti-Castro lobby. Its legitimacy in Washington was also eroded by detailed reports in the New York Times and Knight Ridder news service about CANF’s links to terrorist attacks in Havana and assassination attempts against Fidel Castro.5

  At the same time, the Cuban exile community was going through generational changes and shifts in leadership. Mas Canosa’s power base had been with the Republican Party, but now wealthy Cuban-American Democrats had gained greater favor with Clinton’s political advisers inside the White House.6 In addition, younger Cuban-Americans, especially those born in the United States, did not share the hope for revenge many of their parents harbored. An increasing number favored a dialogue with Cuba, and, along with business, church, and academic groups, they became more vocal in 1998.

  In October 1998, a bipartisan call for change in policy came from an unlikely group of former US officials that included Republican Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, and Lawrence Eagleburger. They asked President Clinton to establish a commission to provide a broad review of US relations with Cuba. But that was a step too far for the president. Anti-Castro Cuban-Americans warned Vice President Al Gore that his 2000 presidential bid would suffer from a Cuba policy review, especially among voters in the key swing state of Florida. Then Representative Robert Menendez (D-NJ) reportedly told Gore that if the policy review went forward, it would be known as the “Gore Commission.”7

  In rejecting the proposed bipartisan commission, Clinton also sought to mollify its advocates in January 1999 by announcing a series of new regulations that seemed to undercut the Helms-Burton law. The regulations themselves were small but nonetheless significant for two reasons. First, Clinton made the changes unilaterally, without any demand that the Cuban government meet conditions or reciprocate, and he thus abandoned the prior approach, called “calibrated response.”8 He would justify US actions toward Cuba on the basis of US interests, not Cuban behavior.

  Second, the new regulations went beyond what analysts said would be possible under the Helms-Burton Act, which seemed to limit presidential discretion in implementing the embargo. When asked whether the changes were consistent with the law, a senior National Security Council official asserted publicly that “Helms-Burton codified the embargo and at the same time, it codified the President’s licensing power. That is, it codified a process by which there was an embargo to which exceptions could be granted on a case-by-case basis by the President.”9 That interpretation opened the door virtually to any license for trade with Cuba that a president would wish to make.

  The new rules expanded who could send remittances to Cuba. For the first time, any US citizen would be allowed to send up to $300 every quarter to a Cuban family. Nongovernmental organizations, such as educational foundations, would be allowed to send larger sums to “independent” organizations in Cuba. At the same time, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was ordered to further streamline licensing procedures for US and Cuban citizens traveling between the two countries and allow group licenses for the purpose of educational, cultural, humanitarian, religious, journalistic, and athletic exchanges, or what were called “people-to-people” exchanges.

  Baseball Diplomacy

  Baseball truly is an American pastime—in Cuba and in the United States. This provided the inspiration for Scott Armstrong and Saul Landau to propose an intriguing opportunity to Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, to play a major role in a baseball diplomacy initiative with Cuba. The idea had been batted around for twenty years, ever since South Dakota Democratic Senators George McGovern and James Abourezk suggested it after traveling to Cuba in 1977 with the University of South Dakota basketball team. But Armstrong and Landau faced insurmountable obstacles in their new effort until Clinton announced the January 1999 changes.

  While the president authorized OFAC to issue a license to the Orioles to travel to Cuba as a result of Armstrong and Landau’s behind-the-scenes urging, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright added a troubling proviso to Clinton’s announcement of the decision. Any profits from the games, she said, would need to be distributed to the Cuban people through Caritas, the Cuban Catholic charitable organization. She did not want to signal that the games would lead to a warming of relations between the two countries, as so-called Ping-Pong diplomacy led to improved ties between China and the United States. Cuba viewed the secretary’s remarks to mean that the baseball games had become part of the US “people-to-people” campaign, which they well remembered Congressman Torricelli devising in 1992 as a subversive tactic to sow seeds of discontent in the country. Her demand almost scuttled the initiative. After two months of negotiations, and a last-minute 3:00 a.m. call to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, negotiators resolved the problem when they realized that the two exhibition games were unlikely to generate any profits.10 The Orioles flew to Havana for the first game on March 28, 1999, and Cuba’s All-Star team played in Baltimore on May 3.

  Elián and the Future of Cuba

  On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a fisherman found five-year-old Elián González clinging to an inner tube in the ocean near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His mother, Elizabet González, her boyfriend, and eight others had died when their makeshift raft overturned during their ill-fated trip across the Florida Straits. Rushed to
a hospital, the young boy had survived in remarkably good condition. But soon Elián was nearly torn apart as he became a symbol of who would control Cuba’s future: Florida’s anti-Castro Cuban-American community or Cubans on the island.

  By all accounts, Elián’s first five years were relatively comfortable. Though his parents had divorced, they shared custody and responsibility for Elián, who was also close to his four grandparents. Juan Miguel González, Elián’s father, had remarried, and his mother lived nearby with her boyfriend. Both parents worked in the tourist industry in Varadero, a resort area close to their small town of Cárdenas, about ninety miles east of Havana.

  When Elián was released from the hospital, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service turned him over to his father’s uncle, Lázaro, a frequently unemployed laborer whose children had a history of trouble with the police. Though Lázaro and his family had not maintained contact with Elián’s father, they quickly claimed custody of the boy and demanded the US government grant him parole as a political refugee. CANF then led a campaign to shower the family with money, to buy presents for Elián, to pay for a dazzling birthday trip to Disney World in early December, and to demand that the boy not be repatriated to Cuba. Meanwhile, at the request of Juan Miguel, the Cuban government on November 29 demanded that the United States return Elián to his father.

  International covenants favored the claims of the father, but the Clinton administration moved slowly to recover the boy from the custody of his Miami relatives. On the island, his case became a cause célèbre. Regular demonstrations were held across Cuba, billboards demanded that the United States “send Elián home,” and schoolchildren wrote heartfelt letters appealing to President Clinton, such as the one that opens this chapter.

  In March 2000, a federal judge ruled that Elián should live with his father, who had come to the United States to retrieve him while they waited for a court to decide whether the boy should be repatriated to Cuba. But the Miami relatives refused to give him up, until federal agents—in a dramatic break-in at Lázaro’s home in April—seized Elián at gunpoint (see Elián reunited with his father in figure 21.3). Even then, court battles and delays kept the boy from returning to Cuba with his father until June 28, 2000.

  Figure 21.3. Elián González is reunited with his father, April 22, 2000. Photo by David Burnett.

  The case put a human face on the abstract debates about US policy toward Cuba. US public sentiment overwhelmingly viewed the boy’s father sympathetically, believed Elián should be reunited with his family in Cuba, and opposed the Miami zealots. As a result, the saga further discredited the anti-Castro lobby and made legislators even less wary about voting to ease sanctions against Cuba.11 And they were being given several opportunities to do so.

  Puentes Cubanos

  Founded in 1999 by Silvia Wilhelm, Puentes Cubanos (Cuban Bridges) is a nongovernmental organization that has been dedicated to promoting normal relations between Cuba and the United States by breaking down barriers—political, cultural, linguistic, economic, and psychological—between Cubans on the island and in the United States. It was a major voice that opposed the severe restrictions President George W. Bush placed on Cuban-American travel in 2004.

  Figure 21.4. Silvia Wilhelm

  Missouri’s archconservative Republican senator, John Ashcroft, was facing a tough reelection fight. In a move to support his state’s agriculture industry, he sponsored a farm bill amendment that would have lifted sanctions on the sale of food and medicine to Cuba. The Ashcroft amendment also blocked future presidential decisions from imposing unilateral agricultural or medical sanctions against any foreign country. But despite considerable support from other Republican senators, the measure failed in a House-Senate conference committee.

  This led Representative George R. Nethercutt (R-WA) to offer a less ambitious version of the Ashcroft amendment in the House Appropriations Committee, which approved it in the spring of 2000. Nethercutt, who represented a farm district, expressed the rationale of other Republicans in supporting the legislation: “I need to stand up for the farmers in my district,” he declared.12 With US policy toward Cuba reframed to focus on trade instead of national security or ethnic politics, legislators had found a noncontroversial way to chip away at the embargo that Helms-Burton had codified.

  The final version of the Nethercutt amendment required Cuba to pay for any products in advance and in cash, and it prohibited US entities from extending credit to Cuba for the sale of food and medicine. But it did permit food exporters to travel to Cuba under a general license. The measure was approved as part of the 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act (TSRA).

  Thus as the new millennium began, Congress appeared to have liberated itself from the hardline anti-Castro lobby. It seemed that US-Cuban relations might finally be headed toward a modus vivendi that would end forty years of hostile relations between the two neighbors.

  Notes

  1. Betto, Fidel and Religion, 317–18.

  2. Larry Rohter, “Pope Asks Cubans to Seek New Path toward Freedom,” New York Times, January 26, 1998.

  3. S. Fainaru, “In Cuba, Awe and Exhilaration,” Boston Globe, January 26, 1998, A1.

  4. Philip Brenner, Patrick J. Haney, and Walt Vanderbush, “The Confluence of Domestic and International Interests: US Policy Toward Cuba, 1998–2001,” International Studies Perspectives, no. 3 (2002): 202.

  5. Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rohter, “A Plot on Castro Spotlights a Powerful Group of Exiles,” New York Times, May 5, 1998; Tamayo, “Exiles Directed Blasts That Rocked Island’s Tourism, Investigation Reveals”; Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rohter, “A Bomber’s Tale: A Cuban Exile Details the ‘Horrendous Matter’ of a Bombing Campaign,” New York Times, July 12, 1998.

  6. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 498–500.

  7. R. Ferreira and R. Fabricio, “Graham y Gore Convencieron al Presidente,” El Nuevo Herald, January 10, 1999.

  8. Philip Brenner, “Washington Loosens the Knot (a Little Bit),” NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April 1999.

  9. James Dobbins, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs, NSC, “On-the-record briefing on Cuba,” Released by the Office of the Spokesman, US Department of State, January 5, 1999.

  10. Paula Pettavino and Philip Brenner, “More Than Just a Game: The Dual Developmental Aspects of Cuban Sports,” Peace Review 11, no. 4 (December 1999).

  11. Karen DeYoung, “Can Elián Case Alter US-Cuban Dynamic? Custody Fight Renews Debate on Relations,” Washington Post, May 2, 2000, A4.

  12. Quoted in Karen DeYoung and Eric Pianin, “Congressional Mood Shifts on Cuba Trade Ban,” Washington Post, May 23, 2000, A1.

  Chapter 22

  The Search for a Viable Strategy, 2001–2006

  The loss of values is something very common today in the world, not only in Cuba, and I didn’t want my film to be a story of degradation of marginal characters. They are two college students who love each other, had a house, a workplace and were not in discrepancy with the law. Supposedly, they had it all, but they were living in a place where that was not enough, and were compelled to become the most wanted, as Bonnie and Clyde, but without actually killing anyone, or steal big things. That is, to have a full life, they must find some solutions not entirely positive. My main intention was to say that in this place, to survive, to be an exemplary family they had to lie and do certain prosecutable things because the sugar mill, what gave them a spiritual and material life, had been stopped.

  —Carlos Lechuga, discussing Melaza, a 2012 film he directed1

  Hopes and Realities in the New Millennium

  Hope Rests on Weak Pillars

  As the new millennium opened, Cuban leaders were more hopeful about the future than they had been for some time. They had weathered the collapse of the Soviet Union a
nd its socialist trading bloc, which had accounted for more than 85 percent of Cuba’s foreign commerce in the 1980s. Economic reforms had enabled the country’s gross domestic output to register steady growth, though it was not yet back to its 1989 level. Relations with the United States had improved, despite Helms-Burton, and the US Congress had passed legislation in 2000 that could allow more trade. A new generation of leaders, who took inspiration from the Cuban revolution, was emerging in Latin America.

  But the reality was not nearly as bright as their hopes. Food production and distribution remained a serious concern. From 2001 to 2005, a series of hurricanes menaced the island. Food crops and poultry production were hit especially hard by Hurricane Dennis in July 2005. But the real problem, as economist Jorge Mario Sánchez emphasizes, was that a country with 40 percent of its arable land left idle was importing an unsustainable $1.5 billion worth of food annually, due to a “lack of incentives” and “bureaucratic restraints.”2

  The economic turnaround in the 1990s had rested on three problematic pillars: tourism, remittances, and two export commodities, nickel and sugar.3 Leading Cuban economists had been advocating, instead, that the country needed to focus its resources on the Revolution’s two major achievements, health care and education. They urged Cuba’s leaders to make the country more hospitable to foreign investment, especially in knowledge-based sectors such as pharmaceuticals and computer software, which would enable Cuba to build lucrative niches in the global economy, generate surplus capital, and diversify itself for sustainable growth.4 In 2003, services made up two-thirds of the country’s GDP, which meant that Cuba increasingly depended on imports for many goods.