In her March 30 column “Reprehensible Rapprochement,” Sarah Perez ’17 wrote that President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba came despite continued abuses by the Cuban government and an overall United States policy of weakness and appeasement. She accurately highlights the challenges facing Cuba’s more than 11 million people, including severe economic stagnation, crumbling infrastructure and the arrests of political protestors even as Obama arrived on the island. Perez voices an understandable frustration with the pace of meaningful change since December 2014, when the two nations first moved to normalize relations. However, concerns over the visible progress of rapprochement today miss the long-term advantages that engagement provides in the post-Castro era.
As part of Dartmouth’s first cohort of students to study abroad in Cuba, I entirely share Perez’s skepticism towards the Castro regime and am just as concerned with “rewarding” the Castros. The world’s last remaining Soviet-style economy doesn’t exactly impress, and I met the dissident Damas de Blanco that Perez references one Sunday morning before watching police unceremoniously detain them for protesting outside Havana’s Santa Rita church. Despite this reality, the Castro brothers will soon follow the rest of the 20th century’s dictators into the recesses of history. When they finally do — when Raúl Castro, now 84, sips his last daiquiri — do we really want to still be in the same position we were in at the end of George Bush’s administration, when all non-essential communications between the U.S. and Cuba completely ceased? We can and should still push for an end to Cuba’s criminalized dissent and single-party politics — and now we’re in a better position to do so.
Perez first notes Castro’s failure to receive Obama at the airport as a symbol of unwillingness to move forward. I, however, wouldn’t read too much into this, considering Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri also sent his foreign minister to welcome Obama following his visit to Cuba. More importantly, last week’s exchange saw Castro address a free press for the first time ever. Repressive regimes fear open dialogue, an active citizenry and widespread internet access, but normalization — which the American people heavily favor — fosters all three. In stark contrast, absolute disengagement both lacks tact and contradicts existing U.S. policy towards nations with equally nefarious human rights records, such as China and Saudi Arabia.
Critics are likewise concerned that lifting the economic embargo follows naturally in a policy of engagement. On the contrary, the economic embargo remains as powerful leverage for change in this time of normalization. Indeed, lifting the economic embargo should be the ultimate goal of rapprochement — but one that Congress should not act on until exiled families receive compensation for property seized during nationalization after the revolutionaries triumphed in 1959.
Engaging now also best serves to restore credibility in Latin America writ large. Early in Obama’s tenure, continued exclusion of Cuba from the U.S.-led Organization of American States provoked anti-American rhetoric in Latin America and the creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in 2011 which excluded Canada and the U.S. As a result of such measures, the U.S. holds a severely diminished negotiating position — a fact that opponents of rapprochement too often overlook. Perez also indicates that engagement so far has not resulted in “getting much in return.” This quickly brings to mind a favorite Cuban aphorism: “La real política no se ve,” or, “You can’t see the real politics.” A frustrating picture of continued abuses and weak appeasement often hides signs of progress, especially in a government not prone to Washington’s hawkish press.
In the long term, Cuban citizens will now be able to look inwardly to their own government to respond to grievances. Engagement removes the Castro regime’s favorite scapegoat that even the most mundane power outage occurs because of American ill will towards the island. In my experience, Cuban citizens today harbor no nefarious Communist agenda focused on derailing the American way of life, but rather show a genuine appreciation and curiosity for American culture, music and politics. Indeed, they even share many Americans’ incredulity at the Donald Trump spectacle. While I agree with Perez that much of last week’s historical visit adopted a synthetic pageantry wholly underserved for the dictators of the island, Cubans — 70 percent of whom were born after the revolution — will move on without the Castros. To withhold persuasion, advocacy and diplomacy at this stage because of the aging duo only serves to aggrandize their influence into a new era that’s not their own.
Diplomacy, especially in the context of murky Cuban politics, comes down to a frustrating process of give-and-take compromises. I’m afraid Perez mistakes the current lack of progress for a weak long-term strategy, but it is within U.S. strategic interests to take this opportunity for engagement after more than 50 years of brinkmanship. In the words of Mick Jagger, “You can’t always get what you want,” at least at the outset. As The Rolling Stones, who were once banned from the island, played in front of half a million Cubans last week, his next words seemed to capture the spirit of arduous diplomacy in this era of cautious optimism — “But if you try sometimes, you just might find/You get what you need.”
