Weakened, Joe Biden finally gave up running for president in November and announced on Sunday that he would support Kamala Harris. With his term ending in disaster, the assessments will follow one after the other. This editorial, written a few days before Mr. Biden’s announcement, happens to be the negative one of what the United States’ relationship with Cuba was like under his presidency.
Among the most deplorable foreign policy decisions taken by Joe Biden is his refusal to rebuild the bridges that Barack Obama had built with Cuba before him and that Donald Trump was quick to tear down when he became president in January 2017.
In a historic visit to Havana in March 2016, at the end of his second term, and in a context where the Castros were at the end of their reign, Obama declared that he wanted to “bury the last vestiges of the Cold War in the Americas.” American restrictions on air links were eased, and the two countries reopened their embassies in Washington and Havana. Cuba was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and was authorized, a capital and capitalist decision, to do business with American banks, the keystones of the international financial system. The shift was fundamental, even if the economic embargo imposed since 1962 against the authoritarian Cuban regime was not specifically lifted. The policy of strangulation supported by the American diplomat Lester D. Mallory in a memorandum dated April 6, 1960, which advocated “denying funds and supplies to Cuba in order to depress wages, create a food crisis, arouse despair and bring about the overthrow of the government” is being undermined.
Under the influence of Florida politicians like Marco Rubio and the ever-influential Cuban-American and anti-Castro lobby in Miami, Trump reinstated travel restrictions and relocked access to American banks. Just days before leaving the White House in January 2021, he rebranded Cuba as a “supporter of terrorism.” With the result that, 62 years later, “ the blockade “(the blockade) remains in place – and that the Communist Party of Cuba is still holding on, despite all the blows.
Although Cuba flies almost completely under the radar of the news, it is today in a state of economic and social deterioration even more serious than that which followed the collapse of its big Soviet brother in the early 1990s.
Endless power cuts, galloping inflation, severe shortages of gasoline, medicines and basic foods (chicken, rice, flour, etc.): everything is lacking. The state is bled dry, the agricultural sector has collapsed and the tourism sector, the island’s main source of foreign currency, has not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. A wave of migration has swept through, with some 500,000 Cubans, out of a population of 11 million, reaching the United States between 2022 and 2023, mainly by boat to the Florida coast, or on foot via Nicaragua, where they have been able to enter without a visa since 2021.
The government led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel had Parliament vote last week on a detailed action plan for “economic recovery” that necessarily amounts to magical thinking, given the lack of resources. Hunger killing fear, to use the words of a Cuban journalist in exile, popular anger is growing — and is being organized in an unprecedented way around access to the Internet — against a regime that, as a result, is stifling it through excessive repression. Demonstrations were again reported in cities in the southeast of the island in March. Three years after those of July 11, 2021, the largest to take place in thirty years, 1,000 political prisoners are still believed to be behind bars, with sentences for some of them of up to 25 years.
Havana is bound to have an easy time denouncing the United States and “the Miami mafia” for its miseries and those of its people. The embargo has a broad back, and the Cuban regime does not hesitate to exploit it. The fact remains that, if the lives of Cubans are today so impossible, the blockade is objectively responsible for it. From the embargo to mass migration, there is a cause and effect link that is obvious.
If Mr. Trump, with his anti-communist vulgate, takes power again on November 5, this will only deepen these deleterious dynamics. The reactionary high mass held last week by the Republicans in Milwaukee can only have sown fear among a large number of Cubans, as their fate remains linked to the electoral considerations operating in the key state of Florida. Long acquired by the Democrats, this state turned Republican in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, while Trump had won even in the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County. The vote of Cuban-American voters has a lot to do with this shift. The outlook is all the more bleak today because, in a context where Trumpism has normalized the far right, activists from the neo-fascist group Proud Boys, a leading player in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, now sit on the executive branch of the Republican Party in Miami-Dade.
Through irresolution and electoral calculations, Joe Biden has not followed in Obama’s footsteps. He will have done things very badly on the Cuban question.