Washington: US President Barack Obama’s decision to normalise relations with Cuba has put the Cold War foes on the verge of reopening embassies in their respective capitals. As a five-decade-old US policy frozen into place during the Cold War starts to thaw, analysts are optimistic about the future of the relationship between Washington and Havana, yet that optimism is tempered with realism.
“At an official level, we are seeing a warming and we will see a certain grudging respect and accommodation, but we’re not going to be allies anytime soon. There will continue to be bumps along the way,” said Christopher Sabatini, adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
The bumps he refers to include issues such as property claims — property in Cuba that belongs mostly to US corporations — and the return of Guantanamo Bay, where the US has a naval station and a controversial detention facility, to Cuba. The US has refused to discuss Guantanamo Bay with the Cubans, for now.
On these “many points of differences … the Cubans really don’t want to cede any political authority because it will be seen as returning to being a lackey to the Yankees, and the United States still has to, for reasons of its policy, speak out on human rights and concerns about democracy,” said Sabatini.
Ahead of a fourth round of talks in Washington on Thursday, US and Cuban officials suggested that conditions for restoring diplomatic relations are favourable.
Gustavo Machin, the deputy director for US affairs in the Cuban Foreign Ministry, told reporters in Havana that the meeting on Thursday could be the last round of talks before the Interests Sections in Washington and Havana are upgraded to full-fledged embassies.
In Washington, a senior State Department official, who spoke on background, said a major obstacle to restoring diplomatic ties had been removed as Cuba had found a US bank that would handle the accounts of a future Cuban Embassy. The official also hinted that the US was willing to change democracy programmes in Cuba that have been an irritant in the relationship and most recently criticised by Cuban President Raul Castro.
In 1961, the US severed diplomatic ties with Cuba and imposed a trade embargo as Fidel Castro’s communist regime ramped up trade with the Soviet Union, nationalised US-owned properties, and raised taxes on American imports.
Geoff Thale, programme director at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that after more than 50 years of estrangement it is unlikely that the US and Cuba will have what most people consider a “normal” relationship between nations anytime soon.
“Even in the best of circumstances I don’t know that the relationship between Cuba and the United States will be one of best of friends,” he said.
Obama’s December 17, 2014, announcement of his intent to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba and open embassies in Washington and Havana has been welcomed by leaders across Latin America, including Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro who himself has a strained relationship with Washington.
“The president took what most foreign policy experts would say are commonsense steps that are in the economic interests of the United States and clearly in our larger diplomatic interests in the Western Hemisphere,” said Thale.
Obama’s Cuba policy is “positive and long overdue,” he said. “If there were a justification during the Cold War for the US to put a comprehensive economic embargo on Cuba — and that’s debatable — it clearly ended when the Cold War ended.”
The period following Obama’s December announcement has been marked by a flurry of diplomatic activity and a historic meeting between the US president and his Cuban counterpart at the Summit of the Americas in Panama on April 11.
Three days after meeting Castro, Obama informed the US Congress of his intention to take Cuba off the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism.
The US Congress has 45 days — until May 29 — from the day it was notified of Obama’s intentions to muster enough votes to override a presidential veto. However, US officials say such an outcome is unlikely. “To the best of my knowledge, there are no efforts under way right now on Capitol Hill to block the removal of Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list,” said the senior State Department official.
The State Department put Cuba on its list of countries supporting terrorism in 1982. The Castro government has set Cuba’s removal from the list as a key condition to a further improvement in diplomatic relations.
Sabatini said it is very important for Cuba to be removed from the list to realise the transformation Obama seeks to bring about in the bilateral relationship. “It goes beyond just the actual facts, it also fits the policy,” he said.
“It is very important for [US] businesses not to have the threat of sanctions over their heads,” he added.
Despite the thaw in relations, the embargo, officially known as the Helms-Burton Act, remains in place barring US tourists from visiting Cuba. US firms also cannot, by and large, do business with Cuba. However, Obama has made it easier for Americans to visit Cuba for a number of reasons, and for some industries, including telecommunications companies, to do business in Cuba.
US banks and businesses are unable to do business with a country that is designated by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism. As a result, officials at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington have been forced to conduct transactions in cash. That will now change after the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control facilitated Cuba’s successful search for a bank with which to do business.
US business interest in Cuba, meanwhile, has picked up. Big US companies such as Netflix and Amazon have already announced their intentions to do business in Cuba.
Despite such enthusiasm, it will take an act of Congress to repeal the trade embargo. That process could take some time.
“The US president has called on Congress to conduct a robust debate on the travel and trade ban. I think that is likely to happen,” said Thale. But, he added, “I don’t expect the embargo is going to end in the next year.”
