Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: The future for post-Castro Cuba?
By Henry Leineweber
OSU Daily Barometer (Oregon State U.)
08/10/2006

(U-WIRE) CORVALLIS, Ore. — Last week, many of the cable news channels aired moving retrospectives on the American relationship with Cuba (in Fox's case, set to music which resembled Winger, or perhaps the Scorpions) prompted by Cuban leader Fidel Castro's mysterious illness. Leadership of the Caribbean nation, which has been ruled by Castro's Communist dictatorship since the 1959 revolution, has temporarily passed to Fidel's younger brother Raul.

The Cuban highlight reel, which was almost identical among the networks, consisted of the usual staples: a scene of pre-revolutionary Cuba, teeming with the affluence that only Batista and the American Mafia could bring; a black and white newsreel of a young Fidel rallying the people; that iconic image of Che Guevara; the missile crisis and a shot of John Kennedy (looking dashing); a visit from the pope; and finally Castro's famous fainting episode several years ago as an illustration of the leader's failing health.

Perhaps some of them also included examples of how Castro, perhaps like no other world leader, has ingrained himself in American popular culture. Caricatures of the dictator have appeared in "Seinfeld," "The Simpsons," "Spy Hard," and most recently "Mind of Mencia." This mystique surrounding Fidel Castro may have something to do with his incredibly long term in office. Castro has outlasted nine American Presidents, all while dodging repeated attempts by the CIA to kill him. He's survived everything from an attempted invasion to an exploding cigar. Quite frankly, the man's like that cartoon Roadrunner.

So perhaps it's foreign policy momentum, or maybe just plain frustration, that has caused the United States to adopt such an outdated and ineffective policy towards Cuba. During the Cold War, hostility towards Cuba was justified by the doctrine of containment, and unofficially by the embarrassment of having a communist revolution 90 miles from American shores. But with the Cold War over, this justification no longer applies. Take, for example, American policy towards China. China is a vast expanse of land, home to over 1.3 billion people, a military superpower armed with atomic weapons, and has been ruled by the Communist party since 1947. Furthermore, the Chinese have waged war against the Americans twice: fighting U.N. forces to a standstill in Korea, and contributing to the American defeat in Vietnam. Yet China today is perhaps the most important trading partner of the United States, so much so that the Americans' response to gross Chinese human rights violations has been muted. Conventional wisdom is that America and China should be openly hostile to one another, but this could not be farther from the truth.

So if America's Cuba policy can't be explained in the historic context of anticommunism, what is the best way to describe it? Domestic politics plays the biggest factor here. This country is home to a sizeable number of Cuban exiles and refugees, all of whom are vehemently anti-Castro. These Cuban immigrants are concentrated for the most part in Florida and New York and have demonstrated extraordinarily high levels of political participation. America's Cuba policy is, by and large, dictated by the influential anti-Castro lobby.

For example, many of you will remember the controversy surrounding Elian Gonzalez, the then seven-year-old Cuban boy who fled to America in 1999. His mother having died on the voyage, Elian was taken in by relatives in Miami, amidst pleas from his father in Cuba for the boy's return. What should have been a simple custody battle erupted into an international incident, with Cuban-Americans passionately insisting that it was morally wrong to deport the boy to a Communist dictatorship. The drama culminated in a raid by armed immigration officials to seize Elian and return him to Cuba, and the political fallout would have lasting repercussions. Vice President Al Gore, who was in a Presidential race against George W. Bush, lost the state of Florida (and the Presidency) by a margin of 537 votes. This margin is commonly attributed to the anger of Cuban-Americans (who would have normally voted Democrat) over Gore's, and President Clinton's, handling of the issue. The lesson here was clear.

So this begs the question: will America's Cuba policy change after Castro is gone? Because the leader has become synonymous with that era of Cuban history, it can be expected that the hard line taken against Cuba will soften with the death of Fidel. Raul Castro, the acting President and likely successor has, among other things, run the country's economy for the last several decades. Though we are not likely to see dramatic social upheaval in Cuba any time soon, Raul may just steal a page from the Chinese playbook, and begin to experiment with market reforms. More efficient economic policies within Cuba would strengthen the regime and ensure that the power vacuum left in the wake of the aging brothers would result in a smoother transition of power to a (hopefully) more reformed government.

Furthermore, an economically stronger Cuba would be in a better position to cushion itself against the inevitable end of the American trade embargo, and the shocks that free trade usually imposes on Latin America. This is perhaps the most ironic legacy of the Castro era: that the decades of American imposed isolation have caused Cuba to build its economy at a more sustainable pace and forge trade networks with other nations on its own terms. American forced modernization and free trade have been a disaster for other Caribbean nations like Haiti and Jamaica, but Cuba may yet avoid these pitfalls, and come out ahead in the post Castro era.

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