President Joe Biden has finally learned his lesson, as each of his 11 predecessors grudgingly had to do in dealing with Cuba: some US interests can only be advanced if there is a commitment to Havana. After a fifteen-month policy review that maintained former President Donald Trump’s draconian economic sanctions, the State Department recently announced that it will ease the measures that have had the greatest impact on the Cuban people.
The move comes at a time when irregular migration from Cuba is deepening the crisis on the United States’ southern border and Latin American leaders are threatening to boycott the next Americas Summit if Cuba is excluded.
Biden’s new measures do not mean a return to ex-President Barack Obama’s normalization policy. They represent a limited, unilateral relaxation of targeted sanctions that collectively resemble Obama’s first-term Cuba policy rather than the historic move announced in December 2014 to restore full diplomatic ties to the lives of millions of Cubans and reduce triggers for irregular migration.
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Biden will lift restrictions on cash transfers, which totaled about $3.5 billion annually before Trump blocked them, and restore person-to-person educational travel, used by more than 638,000 US visitors annually until Trump she cancels. The new policy also promises financial measures to ease trade between US companies and Cuba’s burgeoning private sector, although the devil will be in the details of the final regulations.
Biden’s new actions appear to be driven by the confluence of the migration crisis and the rebellion in Latin America against US policy.
As the Cuban economy has shrunk under the parallel blows of US sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic, migration has surged. But since Trump reduced US embassy staff (2017), including ending consular services, immigrant visa issuance has plummeted by 90%. After safe and legal migration ended, tens of thousands of Cubans have crossed the Latin American continent and headed north to the US border: more than 35,000 in April alone and 115,000 since last September. That’s already more people than during the rafter migration crisis of 1994 and almost as many as in the Mariel of 1980, and there’s no end in sight.
In April, the United States invited Cuba to resume talks on regular migration, as stipulated in the bilateral migration deals that emerged from the 1994 crisis — consultations Trump had suspended. Biden’s new actions reiterate earlier commitments to gradually increase the staff of the consular section of the United States Embassy and to resume issuance of immigrant visas under Cuba’s family reunification program. Additionally, Biden’s restoration of remittances and travel will alleviate economic hardship, the main reason Cubans are leaving the country.
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Another key factor in Biden’s new policy is the objections by Latin American leaders to claims by senior US officials that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua will not be invited to the ninth Summit of the Americas, which Biden will host in Los Angeles next month. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador rebuked the US government, warning: “If you don’t invite everyone, I won’t go.” Other dubious participants include the leaders of Bolivia, Honduras and the twenty islands of the Caribbean Community. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has indicated that he cannot attend either, albeit for reasons unrelated to Cuba. A boycott would be a great embarrassment for Biden. Even at this late point in time, the invitations have not yet gone out, so that Cuba may still be offered a seat at the table.
Migration and hemisphere policies are not new issues in US-Cuba relations. Three other presidents had previously faced migration crises: Lyndon Johnson in 1965, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Bill Clinton in 1994. Each of them pledged himself to Cuba diplomatically because it was the only way to solve the crisis at hand. Furthermore, on all three occasions, the domestic political cost of the headline-grabbing crises far outweighed the risk of offending Cuban-Americans in South Florida by compromising with the Castro regime.
Two of Biden’s predecessors faced similar challenges in Latin America over their Cuban policies. In the early 1970s, Latin American countries began to move away from the economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed on Cuba by the Organization of American States in 1964. Then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger complained that the Cuban issue dominated meetings with his Latin American counterparts. Removing Cuba from the inter-American agenda was one of Kissinger’s motives for opening secret talks to normalize relations with Havana in 1975, but they came to nothing.
The President of Bolivia will also not attend the Americas Summit if he excludes countries from the region
Obama’s 2014 decision to normalize relations was heavily influenced by the public rebuke he received from Latin American leaders at the Sixth America Summit (2012). Even close US allies warned that they would not attend unless Cuba was invited to the 2015 summit. In the words of Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser, Ben Rhodes, Washington’s policy of perpetual hostility has become “a burden on the United States’ neck in the hemisphere and around the world.”
And it stays that way. The odd parallel between the embarrassment Obama suffered at the Sixth Summit and the risk of even greater embarrassment for Biden at the Ninth eventually forced the White House to accept a limited reopening to Cuba. It’s a good first step that will benefit many Cuban families, but unilateral action alone is not enough.
In the past two years, the Obama administration signed 22 bilateral agreements with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues of mutual interest, from environmental protection to law enforcement. The State Department also opened talks with Havana on highly contentious issues such as human rights and compensation for damage to property nationalized in Cuba. By reversing Obama’s policies, Trump froze the implementation of those agreements and broke off all substantive diplomatic dialogue with Cuba.
Biden’s next step in developing his own Cuban policy should be to pick up where Obama left off and build closer cooperation with Havana on issues of mutual interest – not as a favor to the Cuban government, but because it’s the only way forward is the United States can make Progress on transnational issues is made by working with its neighbors.
The experience of other presidents shows that diplomatic cooperation with the Cuban government on issues of common interest, primarily migration, has been an effective means of advancing US interests. Cuban diplomat Ricardo Alarcón, who led Cuba’s negotiations with Washington for two decades, summed up the logic of the compromise succinctly: “We’re two neighbors who had vile relationships,” he said, but “unlike humans, we can’t drag another place”.
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*This article was originally published in English on the WRP website. The Spanish version is published with the express permission of the author.