The Esquel Group’s Civil Society Task Force met on May 28 at the offices of the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to explore “The US and Cuba: A Long View of an Obsessive Relationship, 1809-2009 and Beyond.” The discussion centered on the evolution of Cuba’s apparent paranoia toward the US and the US obsession with controlling Cuba, in the belief that a clearer understanding of the history of the last two centuries might open the door to a more constructive relationship.
Anna Nelson, Distinguished Historian in Residence at American University, presented the panorama of US ambitions and attitudes toward Cuba and the Caribbean islands beginning in the early stages after US independence. US Acquisition of Cuba — Americans assumed they would enjoy eventual ownership of Cuba from the very beginning. To them it was an off-shore island (like Taiwan in relation to China). But it was all talk before 1811. Attention became focused during the Napoleonic Wars. That was when Americans just moved in to settle East & West Florida, and thought they could do same in Cuba.
The US was concerned that Britain would take over Cuba since it was Spain’s ally against Napoleon –and the US was drifting into war with Britain in 1812.
As a result, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe found it clearly desirable to keep the Spanish in Cuba instead of England. Monroe even repelled an agent who wanted support for an insurrection. But this was representative of the views in the 1820s – the era of Monroe Doctrine. To John Quincy Adams, Cuba was of vital interest. What he feared at that time was US entanglement in the European war which would lead to Cuba being transferred to Britain “in such a way that it would threaten the security of the Union.”
The US – and Jefferson – were in fact concerned about “national security.” The Floridas were essential to control of the Gulf of Mexico. Cuba would make US even more secure on southern boundary. Jefferson voiced this in 1823:
“The control [of Cuba] would give us over the Gulf of Mexico and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all whose flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political wellbeing,”
(Pratt,p.69)
What Jefferson wanted was an independent Cuba that would attach itself to the US like Floridas. Monroe, Quincy Adams and Jefferson (until his death) all wanted Spain to stay in charge of Cuba since the big threat seemed to be that England might take over.
Cuba became an issue again in the 1840s and 1850s as interest grew as part of American expansionism – the famous Manifest Destiny.
First, the Mexican War of 1846-48 turned attention to Cuba. Then, Cuban insurrectionists set up shop in NY. La Verdad newspaper and countless letters to presidents and cabinet members appealed for US help. The rebels won support from the penny press, the NY Sun in particular. John L. O’Sullivan, who coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” was an ardent supporter of the rebellion. New Orleans later served as a center for Cuban agitators.
Another side to the issue – “filibusters” from the US flourished in the 1850s when they began to advocate and occasionally carry out attacks on the Spanish. Narciso Lopez is the best known but the grip included a general from the Mexican War and countless other former soldiers who didn’t want to go back to their farms and families. The US neither sponsored nor approved of their efforts since the Neutrality Acts made such efforts illegal. But that did not prevent President James K Polk from trying to buy Cuba. He met with Spanish hostility.
Ironically, in 1854, U.S. had an excuse for war over a ship. Black Warrior pulled into Havana with 900 bales of cotton. Spanish authorities seized it on a flimsy excuse and confiscated its cargo.
Speculators and Filibusters continued to dominate the Caribbean movements. These promoters of annexation were not in the business of protecting human rights; their annexation model was Florida and Texas. The lands they accumulated for nothing was valuable only if the US took over.
However, there was a different motive on the part of the slave-state South, They feared that if England gained control of Cuba, it would free the slaves, causing havoc in the South. They were eager to have US in charge – with Cuba as a new slave state.
The Ostend Manifesto in 1854 was the high point of attempts to buy Cuba. Secretary of State Marcy directed three American ministers in Europe to develop plans for acquiring Cuba. The report of James Buchanan, Pierre Soule, and John Mason was not a manifesto but a secret dispatch – which, of course, soon leaked –which declared that US had every right to wrest Cuba from Spain, indirectly threatening war if Spain wouldn’t sell. After his party suffered in mid-term elections, Marcy told Soule, whose aim was to create another slave state, to cease efforts to buy Cuba.
When the Cuban insurrection began in 1868, the US was urged to intervene but Secretary of State Hamilton Fish felt the insurrection was disorganized and not going anywhere. At his direction Grant proclaimed that the insurrection was not a civil war, so they did not recognize the belligerency.
Three years later, 1873, a Spanish gunboat captured the Virginius, a rebel ship flying an American flag. Spanish took the ship to Santiago, court-martialed and killed 53 passengers, including US and British citizens. This caused an understandable uproar. Secretary Fish then learned that the ship belonged to the Cubans and was fraudulently flying a US flag and had carried armaments and insurrectionists. But Fish pointed out that without a war there was no legal right to capture a ship. Spain then released the ship and paid indemnity.
The diplomatic way the Virginius incident was received showed that the US was still suffering from the aftermath of the Civil War, and was not yet ready to pursue foreign military adventures. However, US business interests grew ever stronger in Cuba’s profitable sugar business, and would play a role in US attitudes toward Cuba when the island again erupted in conflict in the mid-1990s.
Esquel Group President Ramon Daubon then focused on the period immediately before and after 1898 and on three premises: First, that the US had always presented Cuba as its own, seeing it as either a damsel in distress to be rescued from evildoers, a helpless child to be guided, or a rebellious youth to be disciplined. Daubon illustrated these perceptions using editorial cartoons published in the US in the early 1900s. These perceptions, he argued, are extremely irksome to Cubans, and persevere to this day.
Second, that with changes in the production technology of sugar and its profitability after the 1850s, American investors in effect took over essential ownership of Cuban production and trade from the former local landowning aristocracy which became instead partners, agents or employees of American firms and closely wedded to American political interests. The ex-landowners thus separated from the emerging nationalist bourgeoisie and from the former slave population, which had now become wage workers in the sugar industry, suffering under even worse conditions than they had as slaves. The rebellion begun in 1868 was thus not just for independence from Spanish rule but a revolution for national sovereignty, for racial and social justice, and for democratic governance. Spain’s struggle to retain control of the lucrative sugar trade, which eventually drew in the US, was therefore an overlay on top of a deeper political struggle pitting the nationalists against the “assimilationsists.”
Third, this bilateral civil struggle continued inside Cuba in the XX century until the success of Castro’s revolutionary force in 1959. At that time the defeated assimilationists found an ally in the US, with many moving to Miami and elsewhere in the US. Meanwhile the nationalists, particularly after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962, found a counter-balance in the Soviet Union. This drew the internal Cuban civil war into the global Cold War arena and placed Cuba at the center of the East-West struggle for the hearts and minds of the “third world”. Undaunted by the collapse of the socialist block in 1989-90, the struggle continues to this day with persistent US measures in support of the assimilationist exile faction and the stubborn intransigence of the Cuban nationalists which now had nearly unanimous international moral support, including Latin America.
Philip Brenner, Professor of International Relations and History, American University and Co-Editor A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, offered his assessment of the current US-Cuban situation.
There is almost a giddiness in Washington about the possibility of a rapprochement between Cuba and the United States. It is understandable because there: a) is a new US president who is not beholden to Cuban-Americans for his election; (b) is a majority of Cuban-Americans now favor rapprochement and/or at least dialogue; (c) are business interests that favor rapprochement; (d) is no longer a military threat from Cuba; (e) is broad Latin American support for a rapprochement between Cuba and the United States (all now have diplomatic relations with Cuba); (f) is new leadership in Cuba.
However, I believe the expectations are inflated unrealistically, and that there will be only minor changes in the relationship during the next two or three years. This is partly due the fifty year legacy of hostility between the two countries, which has generated mistrust and fear that pervades the relationship. There are also particular factors that influence both the Raúl Castro and Barack Obama administrations that will discourage much change.
The current Cuban situation is defined by the shake-up in the Cuban government leadership two months ago. This provides clues about what is happening in Cuba. Most notable was the removal of three men who were considered in Washington to be likely future leaders of Cuba: Felipe Pérez Roque, the foreign minister; Carlos Lage, the Cabinet Secretary and Vice President in charge of the economy; Fernando Remírez, head of the International Affairs Office of the Central Committee. At the same time, seven other ministers were replaced.
The common speculation in Washington is that Perez Roque and Lage were removed because they were caught on a secretly recorded tape making jokes about Fidel and Raúl Castro. But my interviews in Havana last month suggest two other reasons for their dismissal.
First, the Cuban economy is in a bad state. Indeed, earlier this week Cuba announced cutbacks and austerity measures because of economic problems. One high official graphically described the situation to me by asserting that Cuba consumes less toilet tissue per capita than Haiti. Lage was responsible for the economy, and in a sense for its failings. But Perez Roque was implicated because he and Lage had an economic strategy that depended on Cuba’s continued access to subsidized oil imports from Venezuela. Neither Raúl nor Fidel Castro wanted Cuba’s future to rely so heavily on one source of support.
Second, Perez Roque and Lage had risen to prominence as members of the grupo de apoyo, a small group of people who had effectively served as Fidel Castro’s special assistants. His style of governing was relatively informal, with a kind of creative chaos engendered by competition between three centers of power: the party, the formal government, and the grupo de apoyo. This is not a governing style with which Raúl Castro was comfortable. He prefers clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and so he needed to destroy the remnants of the grupo de apoyo. It is for this reason that Fidel Castro who provided the reason for the cabinet shake-up with a scornful comment that those who were removed had lusted after the “honey pot of power”. He thus demonstrated that his small group no longer had any power, and that he endorsed his brother’s style of governing.
This suggests that Raúl’s plan is to consolidate authority in the government – in the ministries. Notably, three weeks ago there was an unheralded announcement that Miguel Díaz-Canel, the first secretary of the Communist Party in Holguin and a rising star known for his managerial competence, was appointed as the new Minister of Higher Education. I heard rumors also that the Ministry of Education would be merged with the Ministry of Higher Education, presumably under Díaz-Canel’s leadership. Raúl Castro has recently begun to promise as well that Cuba will guarantee universal higher education. His development strategy appears to be one that relies on an educated workforce and highly skilled services rather than on the sale of commodities such as nickel or on tourism.
But the strategy is in earliest stages, with great uncertainty about its success, and with new players still learning their roles. Under these circumstances, Cuba is wary about whether it might be overwhelmed by a flood of U.S. tourists and U.S. capital if relations with the United States improved too quickly. It reasonably worries, too, that the U.S. government would take advantage of any openings to destabilize the Cuban regime while it is vulnerable.
With respect to current U.S. policy, President Obama’s removal of restrictions on Cuban-American travel and on remittances was about as little as he could reasonably do. These were campaign promises he felt obliged to fulfill, and he hoped they would satisfy the clamoring by Latin American allies for a serious change in U.S. policy towards Cuba. The proposed easing of regulations on telecommunications has great hurdles to overcome, none of which the president acknowledged. There is a legacy of the United States using telecommunications for the purpose of subversion against Cuba. There also is a $95 million debt Cuba wants paid by telephone companies. Though owed to Cuba, the money was given to families of the Brothers-to-the-Rescue pilots killed in a 1996 shoot down by the Cuban air force. The President could have done much more quite easily. For example, he has the authority to lift tight restrictions on educational travel that President Bush had put in place in 2004, or to cut the budget for propaganda broadcasts by TV Martí.
But Cuba is a low priority for President Obama who does not want to create possible distractions from his focus on major issues. Moreover, he is just assembling his Latin America team. Given past efforts at détente with Cuba, the president may also be wary of a “surprise” from Cuba that could hurt him politically. Here, too, the legacy of hostility gets in the way of better relations today.
In short, both Cuba and the United States have reasons to go slow on an improved relationship. Each has gained something from the recent changes. Cuba stands to gain some short-term benefits from increased Cuban-American travel, and the United States seems to have reduced a bit the pressure from Latin America for a rapprochement. Each now calculates that more change may generate higher costs than gains. Notably, at the OAS ministerial meeting scheduled for next week, it is likely that the only two countries opposing the removal of Cuba’s 1962 suspension from the organization will be Cuba and the United States.
