It is widely believed that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union ended when the Berlin Wall collapsed. In many ways, this is true. However, there was one battle of the Cold War which was never truly decided and that battlefield was Cuba. Although the Castro Regime seized and maintained power -- with its “glorious” leader, Fidel Castro, outlasting eleven of his American Presidential rivals -- there always was a stalemate mentality between the two sides for, America maintained a fifty-year embargo against Cuba. Now, the Obama Administration is poised to make its biggest mistake, which will have devastating long-term consequences for the Western Hemisphere: opening full diplomatic relations with Cuba, without the imposition of any enforceable preconditions or any form of regime change. This, in my opinion, is the United States surrendering what I believe to be the last battlefield of the Cold War and, if the policy is made official, will be one of the most humiliating foreign policy blunders in modern times.
The idea of opening Cuba up is nothing new. Indeed, the Europeans and Canadians only tacitly respected the embargo President Kennedy had established after the Missile Crisis in 1962 before flagrantly disavowing the policy. For over twenty years, Westerners have been traveling to Cuba from everywhere but the United States. When Europeans are called out by Americans on this errant policy, their defense is roughly the same as the Obama Administration’s: they believe greater interaction with the Cubans will cause the Cubans to see what they’re missing under Communist rule, and that realization will force them to democratize the nation in a non-antagonistic, relatively non-violent way. However, Europeans have been traveling to Cuba for over two decades and there is no proof that their greater level of interaction with the Cubans have sparked the flames of liberty there. The Castro Regime (whether under the now-nominal Fidel Castro or his brother, Raul) remains in power and, in many ways, is stronger and more stable than ever. Indeed, unlike other nations suffering under totalitarian rule, a majority of Cubans apparently truly support the Castro Regime with no indication that they seek to democratize. All that normalizing relations with Cuba will do, in my opinion, is further legitimize an otherwise illegitimate regime and further empower other rogue regimes to continue to flout American power and international law.
This concept that greater diplomatic contact can, over a prolonged period, democratize a totalitarian regime is nothing new. This is the position that the United States when endorsed President Nixon’s plan to normalize relations with Communist China. Then, however, there was a strategic imperative to setting aside our ideology and engaging China: greater contact with China would have made them temporary and tacit allies long enough to break up the all-powerful Sino-Soviet Pact and, give the United States a clear advantage in a period of the Cold War which saw the US take staggering losses (primarily the Vietnam War). However, after forty years of prolonged contact with the People’s Republic of China there has been little change in the internal power structure which makes up that nation’s political realm. In fact, I would argue that open relations between the US and the PRC has only yielded greater concessions to the PRC than the other way around. The Chinese Communist Party remains in power; they continue enacting their brutal totalitarian policies which denigrate human rights, empowers the state at the expense of the individual, and continue to build up a military force designed to displace their supposed partner, the United States. Similar arguments were also (although on a much smaller scale) made by the Clinton Administration regarding normalizing relations with Boris Yeltsin’s post-Soviet Russia. Of course, during that time, under Yeltsin, such relations would not have proved detrimental however, under Putin and Medvedev, such relations can only have empowered the imperial war machine they appear to be building there. How will opening relations with Communist Cuba yield any different results?
In his book 2008 book “Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony”, brilliant Libertarian economist Eamonn Fingleton argues that rather than increased, normalized trade between America and China converging China to an American politico-economic model, the Chinese are turning America more towards them. This is a phenomenon he dubs as “reverse convergence”. While I do not agree with all of his assertions, Fingleton’s argument is both compelling and should serve as a cautionary tale to the US when seeking to enact similar dubious foreign policy decisions elsewhere. The more we have relations with Cuba without any form of preconditions or regime change, the more our trade will only empower and legitimize that despicable regime. Indeed, it will also give the Cubans a chance to start lobbying in American foreign policy circles as so many other nations do (i.e. Saudi Arabia and China) with the intent of swaying foreign policy and trade decisions in their favor.
Many in the West look at Cuba as a minor island nation with no real clout and not a significant threat. Right now, in many respects, it is. This is thanks to the fact that American dollars are not pouring into that nation’s economy as they would under normalized diplomatic relations. Cuba’s leadership has taken a keen interest in doing everything it can to undermine America’s primacy of power in the Western Hemisphere. From its earliest moments, the Castro government reached out to enemies of the US which led to the near-apocalyptic Cuban Missile Crisis. In other words, the same Castro government which the Obama Administration seeks to have unrestricted diplomacy with, is the same government that nearly took the world into nuclear war! In fact, during a 1995 meeting in Havana, Fidel Castro remarked to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that it was he who was pushing Khrushchev for launching a preemptive nuclear strike against American targets -- even after America and Russia negotiated their way out that mess. To McNamara’s shock, Fidel was completely unapologetic for this notion, in fact, he was quite proud of it! In more recent times, the Castro Regime has been linked with rogue states like the Islamic Republic in Iran, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, and Kim Jong-Il’s brutal North Korean regime. According to recent CIA reports, there were representatives for the Castro regime in Pyongyang, North Korea for that nation’s most recent test launch of an illegal ICBM. Imagine what they would do with American dollars propping them up! And I didn’t even mention the continued presence of Chinese intelligence facilities on their soil, spying on the mainland US. Indeed, according to Washington Post columnist and celebrated author Bill Gertz, the Chinese are operating a high-powered facility which is beaming spy signals into the US, these signals are so powerful that in 1999 they interfered with Air Traffic Control operations all the way up in New York’s LaGuardia Airport! Is this a regime we should seek to legitimize and empower economically? Most certainly not.
Lastly, surrendering the Cuban Battlefield would be America’s single-greatest repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine - a hallowed policy which is one of the primary bedrocks of American Foreign Policy. By allowing such an anti-American, totalitarian regime to exist just ninety miles south of its own borders, the US is essentially telling the world that it is no longer willing to ensure its own regional supremacy and safety. Since the days of John Adams, it has been common wisdom that the only way the US will be safe is if it remains the regional hegemon of the Western Hemisphere. We cannot execute effective global operations if we’re constantly worried about the hornet’s nest that’s been stirred up in our backyard. It’s bad enough that we allowed Cuba to exist in its present form for this long, at least however, we did not legitimize it. This will tell the world that it is open season on the US in the Western Hemisphere. Already Russia and China are trying to increase their presence to our south, this will only empower them to continue and expand upon such policies. By surrendering the Cold War’s last battlefield, we may very well be surrendering future regional supremacy. Once American dollars start pouring into Cuba that nation will empower itself and then share the wealth with its anti-American neighbors (like Venezuela). Fidel Castro’s long-time dream of creating a counterbalance to American supremacy through a coalition of Communist-leaning, South American nations with ties to Havana, in the long run, may very well be reached. Now that, as President Obama is so fond of saying, would be a “game changer”!
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Fingleton, Eamonn. “Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony”. New York: St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books, 2008.
Friedman, George. "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century." New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Gaddis, John Lewis. "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience." Massachusetts: Harvard Press, 2004.
Morris, Errol., dir. The Fog of War. 2003. Sony Classics. 18 April 2009. http://www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar/indexFlash.html
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