Why does the US have such a blind spot over Cuba?

The world’s sole is superpower still apparently trying to starve into submission a small country barely a stone’s throw away. Why? writes Mary Dejevsky

‘Cuba has never just been Cuba, but a cypher for the victory or defeat of communism’ (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

The pandemic has had many unforeseen consequences, with more doubtless to come. But one of the least foreseen was surely the recent outbreak of political protest in Cuba.

Not only have Cubans shown almost superhuman forbearance over more than half a century of accumulating deprivations, but their health service has long been seen as a model for less developed countries in terms of its universal access and expertise. Cubans, it might have seemed, were thus almost uniquely prepared to weather the pandemic storm. And that is how it may yet turn out.

Add the standard response of a repressive and threatened regime – locking people up, banning public assemblies, blocking communications – and the current beleaguered system in Cuba may yet have some time to run. Then again it may not.

It so happened that I visited Cuba, in February 2020, just before the first lockdowns hit Europe. And while there were few signs of overt discontent, at least to the outsider, some of the seeds of these first protests since 1994, when the economy was on the verge of collapse after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, can be discerned with hindsight.

Most revolutionary idealism was long gone – the inspirational inscriptions and posters were ill-maintained and unnoticed – to be replaced by a defiant national pride at having seen off would-be foreign overlords. Che Guevara had replaced Fidel Castro as the bearer of the revolutionary myth: a figure less susceptible, perhaps, to the vagaries of specifically Cuban politics.

Also apparent were the ideological concessions made for those who might otherwise have lost faith. Small businesses were permitted within more or less strict rules and not just cafes, B&Bs and galleries geared to the fluctuating presence of tourists, but mobile phone shops and smoke shops and bike and spare parts shops started filling gaps for local people too.

Even then, though there were good reasons for popular discontent. A combination of the US embargo and trouble in Venezuela meant that fuel was in desperately short supply. Bus services were grinding to a halt. Enormous queues built up the moment a petrol station obtained petrol. Horse-drawn traffic was making a comeback. Women discreetly begged for soap, shampoo and medicines for their children from foreign tourists. Even fruit and vegetable deliveries attracted an instant crowd.

Market prices were high; most staples were rationed. Perhaps the biggest source of resentment was the dual currency system that led to glaring inequalities between those who had legal access to hard currency (via tourists or exiled relatives) and those who did not. The haves could buy a decent fridge, a vacuum cleaner or a computer; the have-nots couldn’t.

But while having a dual currency system was bad, getting rid of it – as the authorities did at the start of this year – was arguably worse, or at least hugely destabilising and unfortunately timed as the pandemic raged.

One of the most important safety valves for Cuba – from the top to the bottom of the economy was tourism, with the hard currency it earned, and this virtually dried up as a result of the pandemic.

Not only did the government now lack the resources to obtain basics, such as fuel and medicine, but professionals, including doctors and teachers, had nowhere to earn the cash that allowed them to maintain an acceptable living standard without emigrating.

There are two ways in which the sudden explosion of discontent in Cuba has origins. The first is the ideological perspective. Like Venezuela, Cuba remains a touchstone in the west for old-fashioned Cold War warriors, left and right, to carry their disputes into the present day.

Those who insist that the pandemic is mainly to blame for what has happened are – consciously or not – taking a political side, as are those who insist that it is all down to the pernicious ideological hook on which Cuba’s leaders have impaled themselves. There is very little ground. There are points to prove. So those who blame the pandemic are seen as giving Cuba’s leaders an easy ride and delaying the time when a cruel and obsolete system must end.

The other school insists that Cuba represents a once-admirable system that may, yes, be failing in part because of inadequate leadership, but mainly because of the forces ranged against it that have done their utmost to bring it down. Ever since Fidel Castro defeated President Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Cuba has never just been Cuba. It has been a cypher for the victory or defeat of communism.

As such, it hardly needs to be pointed out that the country has become a relic – a relic that has largely been left to itself in recent years, except by the Cold War warriors.

I have never, ever, understood the destructive hostility with which successive US administrations, with very few exceptions, have treated Cuba – and still do. Since the end of the Second World War, US presidents have taken their country into wars in Korea, Indochina, Afghanistan, Iraq and (sort of) Libya and Syria, in efforts to prevent the spread of communism or fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.

With the exception of the failed Bay of Pigs adventure, mounted by exiles and rumoured assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, the US has preferred to strangle it by ever more vicious embargos than to take it over by force or – in a more enlightened world, perhaps – help it flourish.

Cuba has a population of 11 million and Havana is only 100 miles from Key West. There was a time when people went productively to and fro (the Ernest Hemingway documentary currently on BBC4 currently providing one illustration). Yet both the US and the USSR allowed it to become the scene of arguably the tensest superpower stand-off of the Cold War after the Berlin airlift: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Perhaps, after this, it was simply not important enough to the United States to warrant any bargaining. But one result is the extreme dissonance we have today: the world’s sole superpower still apparently trying to starve into submission a small country barely a stone’s throw away. Why?

A consideration, of course, is the sway held by anti-Castro exiles in Florida – and so in national US politics. But how far does the US have to go to gain recompense for the nationalisation of its property in Cuba six decades ago?

Is it not demeaning for a country with the size and power of the US to have a minority dictate an aspect of its foreign policy against the wider national interest, let alone ethical and humanitarian considerations? Barack Obama made a rare break with the past, normalising diplomatic relations in 2014 and even visiting Havana in 2016 – having safely waited until his last year in office. A wave of investment began.

Then, as one of his first acts, Trump reversed these tracks, leaving Cuban hopes dashed and a swathe of half-built cruise docks and hotels across the country. That is another reason why Cubans may have reached their tether’s end. How long must this go on?

It may be too much to hope that President Biden will pick up with Havana where Obama left off. He has shown scant interest in doing so thus far. But perhaps the protests will remind him about Cuba, and how one wave of a US wand alone could relieve so much suffering. He would show the world, once again, that he is not Donald Trump and show Cuba’s ageing exiles that freedom is better wrought by example than duress.