President Obama broke the silence between U.S. and Cuban diplomats Friday after easing the terms of a 47-year embargo on the communist country.
‘The United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba,’ Obama said at the Americas summit in Port of Spain, Trinidad on Friday, The Associate Press reported. ‘I know there is a long journey that must be traveled in overcoming decades of mistrust, but there are critical steps we can take toward a new day.’
The embargo has been in effect since the Cold War, after Fidel Castro’s regime announced its political alignment with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
The White House announced on Monday an easing of restrictions that include sending travel limits and allowing remittance for Cuban-Americans who have family in Cuba.
The U.S. will also allow telecommunication companies to set up fiber-optic cable and satellite links with Cuba and start roaming service agreements to authorize U.S. residents to pay for telecom, satellite radio and television services provided to their families in Cuba.
At the Americas summit, Argentina President Christina Fern’aacute;ndez said the embargo is anachronistic in today’s world, AP reported.
The U.S. departure from the embargo increased allowance of gift parcel donations, ‘expanding the scope of eligible gift parcel donees to include individuals other than Cuban Communist Party officials or Cuban government officials already prohibited from receiving gift parcels, or charitable, educational or religious organizations not administered or controlled by the Cuban government,’ as stated in the White House Fact Sheet: Reaching out to the Cuban People.
It also calls for the Cuban government to lower the charges it imposes on cash remittances to ensure that family members benefit from money transfers.
Short of lifting the embargo, the measures have been received with mixed emotions by some Cuban-Americans.
A C.T. Bauer College of Business alumnus and Vice President of Goya Food Products Company’ Evelio Fern’aacute;ndez, who emigrated from Cuba in 1968, said though the U.S. measures will be good for the reunion of family members and will bring some temporary relief to the people in Cuba, they will not change the nature of the Cuban government.
‘Its tough there. You have to have money to buy things that are a necessity, like food and clothing, so in this sense, the easing of restrictions will benefit some immediate family,’ Fern’aacute;ndez said. ‘They will be able to buy food, but as far as their freedom of speech or any kind of human freedom, that’s not going to change.
If we want to lift restrictions because Americans should be able to travel wherever they want to travel – that’s an American right, and that’s fine – but if we are easing the restrictions thinking this is going to accelerate democracy in Cuba ‘hellip; we are fooling ourselves.’
Fern’aacute;ndez said the increased American tourism Cuba will experience from the embargo revision will not serve as the answer to Cuban economic hardships.
‘Let’s not fool ourselves. Cuba receives … billions of dollars a year in European and Canadian travel,’ he said. ‘That will not change. If we want to issue visas and allow American citizens to travel to Cuba freely, that’s fine, but let’s get our reasons straight and know why we are allowing that.
‘It’s not going to benefit the Cuban people. The only people that can allow improvement in Cuba are the Castro brothers.’
Fern’aacute;ndez said Fidel and Ra’uacute;l Castro, who became president after his older brother stepped down in February 2008, don’t want the embargo to be lifted.
‘The embargo is on the Cuban people from the Cuban government. They are the ones (who) can bring change; no one else can.’ Fern’aacute;ndez said.
Music junior David Ramirez is of a younger generation of Cuban immigrants.’ He said he arrived in the U.S. in 2000 with dreams of a better life.
Like Fern’aacute;ndez, Ramirez is also skeptical about any positive results coming from the lifting of the restrictions and said it is up to his generation to bring about changes.
‘(Tourism) is the only door Cubans have to the world, but even though they have some access to that information, they really do not know how it is outside,’ Ramirez said. ‘I had an idea (of life outside of Cuba), and it was not even close to how the real thing is here. Lifting the restriction would be beneficial for Cuba right now, but to be honest I don’t want a relationship to be established between Cuba and the U.S. because the Castro brothers will never leave Cuba.’
Ramirez said his experience growing up on the island leads him to believe the Cuban government’s fledgling relationship with the U.S. won’t change the way the country is governed.
‘Knowing (the Castro brothers), I know they will leave the things the way they are. I would like someone to end that some day,’ he said. ‘Having a relationship with Cuba now will never allow this (change) to happen. Change will never happen.’
Looking back on his life in Cuba, Ram’iacute;rez said his family endured a lack of basic necessities.
‘(My family members’) lives are hard there. Even eating is a problem there,’ Ramirez said. ‘To get food and those basic things’ … here you don’t have to worry about. For them, in Cuba, that is a really big problem.’
Ramirez said his family wanted to express their discontent with Cuba’s governmental system, but they could not say anything without fearing repercussion.
‘It is going to be my generation that is going to make the change because they are all waking up,’ he said. ‘They are trying to speak and protest against the system there. Young people are totally against it. They are young and they are stronger. They are going to take Cuba to another direction.’
The Kennedy administration enforced the U.S. embargo on Cuba in the context of the Cold War.
When Cuba announced its allegiance to the Soviet Communist Bloc, the U.S. sought to destabilize Castro’s communist dictatorship by imposing one of the longest economic, commercial and financial embargos in history.
One of the purposes of the embargo was to force the Cuban regime into moving toward a democratic government with laws that respect basic human rights.
With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1992, Cuba suffered economically and found support from remittances sent by Cuban-Americans.
In 1992, the U.S. approved the Cuban Democracy Act, which prohibited foreign-based subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba, travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens and family remittances to Cuba.
After the 47-year embargo, Cuba remains a communist country and growing international and domestic criticism calls for a change in U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba.
UH Political Science assistant professor Eduardo Alem’aacute;n said the embargo is contrary to U.S. foreign relations practices with countries with similar governments to Cuba.
‘The U.S. has historically requested, since the embargo was put in place, certain changes in Cuban policy in order to lift the embargo – for instance, some regarding political competition and respect for human rights. That in itself is a very peculiar policy for the U.S.’ Alem’aacute;n said.
‘Over the last 50 years, the U.S. has had very good relationships with plenty of countries that violate human rights as much or worse than the Cuban government. The U.S. has never imposed such a demand in order to continue to have trade relations or increase economic exchanges.’
Despite the foreign relations anomaly, Alem’aacute;n said the U.S. strategy is worth considering.
‘This is strategy – a strategy of conditional trade – that is, lifting the embargo if Cuba would change its policy,’ he said. ‘Although it may be based on a lofty idea – increasing political competition and respect of human rights in Cuba is a very good cause. The question is the strategy. Is the strategy of an embargo the right strategy to achie
ve this goal? There is consensus at least among specialists on the subject that this has been a failed strategy.’
The embargo has been in place for decades with no effect on improving the human rights in Cuba, Alem’aacute;n said.
He said Western democracies should certainly do something to pressure the human rights situation in Cuba, but that the strategy employed so far has been ineffective.
‘There are different alternatives that may be considered, but certainly the embargo as it has been in place in the last decades has clearly shown to be a poor strategy to achieve that,’ Alem’aacute;n said.
The close proximity of the communist country – 90 miles away from the southern coast of the U.S. – is an additional factor in U.S. relations with Cuba.
UH Latin American History associate professor Philip Howard said the island nation’s policy of exporting its revolution to countries in Africa and Latin America has changed because of economic hardships.
Those hardships have worsened with the global economic crisis, which has caused a decline in tourism and a decrease in market price of nickel, its most lucrative export.
‘The island no longer poses a threat to American security, and the reason for that state of affairs is simply because when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early ’90s, (head of state Mikhail) Gorbachev terminated the subvention,’ Howard said. ‘The result was catastrophic for the economy and the people of Cuba. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, one of the more important domestic threat in the Island was obesity. The average Cuban before 1991-92 was consuming 3,000 to 3,500 calories a day. Within weeks of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the daily caloric intake of most Cubans dropped below 1,500 calories.
‘At the same time the economy, according to many scholars who study the revolutionary Cuban economy, lost 90 percent of its economic imports – oil being the most important.’
Howard said since the early ’90s, Fidel Castro and his colleagues have spent their time and energy trying to resolve the economic hardship the majority of Cubans faced.
‘To do this, they’ve had to abandon their aggressive foreign policy, which sought to challenge American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. It hasn’t been since the late ’80s early ’90s since (Fidel) Castro attempted to export revolution throughout the Western Hemisphere,’ Howard said.
‘It’s impossible to do because of the mismanagement of the economy by Castro, the termination of the Soviet Intervention and the embargo.’
Howard said lifting the restrictions wouldn’t encourage or cause the Cuban government to abandon the principles that the Castro brothers fought for in the ’50s and sought to apply the principles of economic justice and equality.
‘What lifting of the embargo will do is to allow the Cuban government to obtain the credit and capital to enhance the state’s ability to provide its citizens with what they believe to be fundamental human rights,’ Howard said.
Howard has been traveling to Cuba to perform archival research on the history of people of African descent in Cuba during the 19th and early 20th centuries since 1999 on a general license issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department.
He said U.S. Custom and Immigration officials who did not know the rules and regulations governing travel to Cuba since 1999 have interrogated him.
Howard said this miscommunication is a consequence of Bush’s aggressive rhetoric toward Cuba. He said customs and immigrations officials in Cuba became suspicious of non-Cuban-Americans who landed in Havana, resulting in him being detained, searched and interrogated in Santiago, Cuba.
‘I was followed by Cuba’s internal security police, usually at night when I went to visit friends and colleagues at their homes,’ Howard said. ‘When I left Santiago de Cuba, I was detained by the same custom officials who I had met upon my arrival. They thought I was a spy, undoubtedly, because some researchers are working for the CIA.’
Howard said these are consequences of the Cold War policy the U.S. has imposed on Cuba for 47 years.
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