Obama in Cuba: ‘You might ask yourself; well, how did he get there?’
President Obama’s flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Cuba on Sunday will take just a matter of hours. Had the Navigator-in-Chief not charted a historic change in the course of U.S.-Cuba policy, he wouldn’t be landing in Cuba at all.
Think back ten years.
In October 2007, then-President George W. Bush delivered a speech at the U.S. State Department that encouraged the Cuban people to stand up against their government. He also warned the Cuban military, police, and government not to defend their system against dissent. Lastly, he promised the Cuban people billions in aid from the U.S. government and others, but only if they changed their country’s laws to meet a set of standards written in Washington.
His remarks were utterly predictable. In 2002, President Bush added Cuba to his list of nations in the “axis of evil.” Year after year, he tightened the noose of U.S. sanctions against the island — imposing drastic limits on the rights of Cuban Americans to visit their families; restricting remittances (financial payments of support) to their kin on the island; imposing barriers to agriculture sales to Cuba, reneging on our country’s commitment not to use food as a weapon of foreign policy; and creating a Commission whose remit included undermining the jewels of the Cuban revolution: the institutions that provide free health care and education to the Cuban people, and more.
Even more predictable was the reaction in Cuba; his “same as it ever was” speech produced not a popular revolt, but a collective yawn. Cubans had heard it all before. The two governments remained defiantly at odds. The hardline Miami exile community, regarded then as a decisive force in U.S. presidential elections, wielded their power over U.S. policy on behalf of ever-tightening economic sanctions.
Trip after trip, the Congressional delegations we took to visit Cuba glanced at the billboards outside the airport and saw images of entrenched enmity: one depicting their president as an assassin; the other demanding freedom for the five spies portrayed as heroes, who were jailed in the U.S. Yet our arrival in Havana was invariably marked by the warm welcome that citizens of our country always received from Cubans, even as it seemed the policy dividing our countries would never change.
Two months before the Bush regime change speech, then-Senator Barack Obama told a crowd in Miami’s Little Havana, “We’ve been engaged in a failed policy with Cuba for the last 50 years. And we need to change it.” Obama, as Bill LeoGrande recounts, joined this new vision of Cuba policy with substantive promises to end the Bush administration’s restrictions on Cuban American travel and remittances and people-to-people contacts, and to resume engagement with Cuba’s government on issues that affected our common interests.
Getting elected in 2008, and reelected in 2012, on a platform of normalizing contacts with what Floridians called the “Castro Regime,” was a bet against conventional political wisdom and a huge departure from fifty years of U.S. foreign policy. Converting this risky bet into round trip tickets to Cuba on Air Force One took great political courage and remarkable insight into what made this time the right time for a policy change of this magnitude.
How did the President pull this off?
First, he changed U.S. sanctions; not all at once, but by taking manageable bites, acting slowly and often without much fanfare, taking mostly safe steps first. In 2009, he began by removing the Bush-era limits on the right of Cuban Americans to visit Cuba and provide financial support for their families.
In the beginning, it seemed counterintuitive to make the community most responsible for keeping the failed Cuba policy in place the most immediate beneficiaries of that policy’s liberalization. But, as visits by Cuban Americans to the island increased 8-fold under the new policy, it helped enlarge the political space for more encompassing reforms. Two years later, President Obama reopened people-to-people non-tourist travel for all Americans, visits which are now growing exponentially and further increasing political support for additional reforms.
Second, he has managed the Congress brilliantly. After repeatedly using his executive authority to create legal exceptions to the embargo — allowing increases in travel, trade, and commercial contacts with Cuba in 2009, 2011, 2015, and 2016 — not a single reform has been reversed, defunded, or delayed by legislative actions, or by court decisions, as in the case of immigration.
Third, he never caved under controversy. Under previous presidents, Cuba policy reforms were offered, given, or taken away based on subjective and political assessments of Havana’s behavior, not on a clear-eyed vision of the U.S. national interest. This had the perverse impact of allowing Cuba’s government to determine U.S. foreign policy while also subjecting the intended beneficiaries of Cuba policy reforms, the Cuban people, to the intermittent mood swings of American politics.
During the slow, steady seven years of President Obama’s shape-shifting of U.S. policy, there have been troubling and unwelcomed developments — the long prison term of USAID subcontractor Alan Gross prominent among them — that would have been the occasion for an abrupt cut-off of a reform process less rooted in strategy. Hardline Members of the U.S. Congress — Republicans and Democrats — even told the administration not to negotiate for Alan Gross’s release, because doing so would require the U.S. to make concessions.
Today, Alan Gross walks free in Washington because the President ignored their advice and protected his policy goals while finding a formula that got Mr. Gross as well as an imprisoned CIA agent, dozens of Cuban political prisoners, and the remaining members of the Cuban Five (“the heroes” on the billboard) back to their homes. Their returns were only part of the negotiation that led to the path of normalized relations with Cuba announced on December 17, 2014.
Fourth, while the president kept his eyes on the big picture, he also kept learning. In his first term, I was often assured by a member of his National Security Council staff that Cuba was not such a big deal to the other nations of Latin America.
In 2012, our strongest allies in the region, including from conservative governments like Colombia, told the President they would boycott the next Summit of the Americas (a heads of state meeting for the nations of the region) unless Cuba was invited to attend. Four months after Presidents Obama and Castro separately addressed their nations about the coming rapprochement, they met in person at the Summit in 2015 in Panama to discuss how the new relationship was going after the U.S. dropped its objections and Cuba got its seat at the table. By the time he delivered his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Obama was challenging Congress to lift the embargo “if you want to consolidate our leadership and credibility in the hemisphere.”
Fifth, while spreading out the reforms, handling Congress and controversy so steadily, learning and making adjustments along the way, the President also created a virtuous cycle in public opinion as measured in the Cuban American community and nationally.
According to the Gallup poll, when he took office in 2009, Cuba was viewed unfavorably by 60% of Americans against just 29% who held favorable views. After seven years of reforms, increased travel, diplomacy, and visible presidential leadership, Cuba is now viewed favorably by 54% of Americans, with unfavorable views falling from 60% down to 40%.
Of perhaps greater significance, the numbers in Florida and among Cuban Americans tell similar stories. According to recent research published by Bendixen & Amandi, support within the Cuban American diaspora for normalization leapt from 44% in December 2014 to 56% in just one year. Last year’s Sunshine State Survey found that Floridians of all stripes support diplomatic relations with Cuba at exactly the same levels.
This is how President Obama got to Cuba. Now, his most fervent supporters and critics will see the result of this seven-year long unfolding story when he steps off of Air Force One and has a chance to speak directly to the Cuban people. As the Miami Herald reported this week, the President’s address will propose a vision for future relations between the people and governments of the United States and Cuba. According to Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, “He’ll be saying this not as a president who wants to impose a political system on Cuba,” rather to show the Cubans “what we believe in.”
We suspect he’ll be received with a rousing welcome, as Americans who bother to make the trip to Cuba almost always are, affirming the course he’s been taking, and strengthening the chance he’ll do more.
