A Work in Progress

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The American re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba may prove to be outgoing President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement. So how are things progressing?

Last March, Obama visited Cuba and told its people that “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.”

His visit was the culmination of fifteen months of diplomatic engagement, which began when the U.S. and Cuba announced the restoration of relations, on December 17, 2014.

It was the first visit of an American president since the Cuban Revolution, and the first since the United States imposed more than fifty years of diplomatic and commercial isolation on the island.

In visiting Havana, Obama was hoping that his presence could accelerate an opening in Cuba’s economic and political institutions, while President Raul Castro wanted to gain international credibility and legitimacy without making too many political concessions.

The private sector has grown exponentially since Raul Castro began a program of economic reforms in 2010, allowing hundreds of thousands of self-employed workers, such as restaurateurs, barbers, and cabdrivers, to sell their services directly to customers.

A year later Cubans were given the right to buy and sell their own homes and cars, to start an expanded range of businesses, and to travel freely.

So is a reconciliation under way between the two nations? To some extent, of course. Since launching in May, Carnival Corporation’s cruise line Fathom has been running trips every other week to Cuba.

The first direct commercial flight between the U.S. and the island in over a half-century took place on Aug. 31. Soon, up to a maximum of 110 daily flights operated by U.S. carriers are due to begin flying to the island.

On Sept. 27, despite some Republican objections, Obama nominated Jeffrey DeLaurentis be the first U.S. ambassador to Cuba since the two countries broke off relations 55 years ago.

The U.S. on Oct. 26 abstained for the first time in an annual UN General Assembly condemnation of the half-century-old American trade embargo against Cuba. It was the first time Washington did not oppose the motion, proposed every year since 1991. 

But Fidel Castro, who died last week, remained suspicious of American designs on the country, and wanted to uphold the gains made since 1959.

Referring to Obama’s appeal to “forget the past and look to the future,” Castro responded, in Granma, the Communist Party’s newspaper, that no one should “succumb to the illusion that the people of this noble and self-abnegating nation will ever renounce the glory, the rights, and the spiritual bounty won with its achievements in education, the sciences, and culture”

At the seventh Communist Party Congress held in April, Fidel told the delegates that “the ideas of the Cuban communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervour and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without truce to obtain them.”

So Cuba has not become an American friend just yet. Havana’s resentment over the more than five-decade embargo, which remains in place, is still strong despite the renewal of diplomatic ties with Washington. It can be annulled only by Congress, where support for it remains.

And Donald Trump’s election victory will probably make it even harder to lift it.