Cuba, Latin America and the Obama illusion

Issue No. 231/232 (Nov/Dec 2009)

Barack Obama's election as president raised much hope of important shifts in US policy on Latin America. But as Tom Fawthrop shows using the case of the US embargo on Cuba, such optimism may turn out to be misplaced.

THE election of Barack Obama to the White House generated a whirlpool of hope and great expectations. Audiences everywhere have been inspired by a new president who galvanised hope, who promised change, and who pledged a new era in how the US would conduct its foreign policy.

Cuba and the Latin American nations were happy to listen to a different White House tune, and impressed by the eloquence of the US' first black president.

They were relieved to hear of President Obama's desire to discard the imperialist arrogance and demonising of the Bush years. It was good to be assured that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp would soon be closed, and torture would be banned. At the Summit of the Americas in April, Obama talked up a new relationship with Cuba - 'the United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba' - and enthused about a new respect for Latin America as 'equal partners' in the region.

If only some major part of 'Obama-speak' was actually being put into practice right now, the world would clearly be a much better place to live.

However, nearing the end of his first year as president, a mighty chasm has emerged between the 'Obama-speak' and the US government's actions. Cuba and most Latin American countries are increasingly dismayed by how little of substance has changed in US foreign policy in their region.

In Cuba the US embargo is still firmly in place, and so is the notorious detention camp in the occupied Cuban territory of Guantanamo Bay.

In Honduras Washington has treated the coup regime with kid gloves, in defiance of the Latin American consensus that insists ousted President Manuel Zelaya must be reinstated. At the very first test of Obama's 'new foreign policy', Washington has reneged on its original commitment to democratic restoration, ignored the repression of the coup regime, and recognised  the winner of the tainted 29 November election largely boycotted by Zelaya supporters, the trade unions and the poor. The same election has been rejected as a farce by Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and all of South America apart from US allies Colombia and Peru,  and will therefore lack legitimacy  in the eyes of Latin America.

In Colombia, instead of pursuing a path of peace in a country where almost 4 million poor farmers have been displaced by military operations, right-wing militias and the FARC guerillas, the new US president has embraced the same Bush policies of supporting a Colombian government in a civil war against its own people. Washington is now expanding its reach inside South America with a total of seven military bases in Colombia, all of this coming from a president who talks peace and disarmament.

Cuba, human rights and Obama

For the 47 years since Washington imposed a US trade embargo on Cuba, every US president has sought to justify this economic aggression with professed concern about human rights and the need for democracy on this Caribbean island.

Up until the 1959 revolution, Cuba was best known as a playground for US gangsters, and its domination by the US in all spheres. The new Fidel Castro-led government nationalised several strategic industries - a landmark step towards true independence, which triggered the US trade embargo that was firmly in place by 1962.  

The Obama administration promised changes but has contented itself with relaxing the additional Bush controls that blocked regular visits between Cuban-Americans and their relatives in Cuba and removing restrictions on remittances from these families.

It is a small shift restoring the status of US embargo sanctions to the provisions enforced during the Clinton administration. Obama is so cautious that he has not even backed a Congressional proposal to allow all US citizens to travel freely to Cuba.

On the positive side, talks have restarted over immigration, the postal system, counter-narcotics and natural disasters. However, Obama has done nothing to curtail the long arm of the US Treasury in disrupting dollar transactions between other countries and Cuba, which are regularly frozen on the orders of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), an Orwellian arm of the US State Department.

Major non-US banks - Lloyds Bank UK, HSBC and many others - have been bullied by the US Treasury since 2007 to close all dollar accounts connected with trade to Cuba.

Philips, the Dutch electronics company, in July 2009 agreed to settle allegations of violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations occurring between June 2004 and March 2006 by paying a fine of $128,750. OFAC alleged that an employee of Philips in North America travelled to Cuba without an OFAC licence in the course of selling medical equipment to the country.

The practical effect is that the Obama administration not only continues to do everything possible to disrupt and block Cuba's trade with the rest of the world, but also uses its extra-territorial powers to undermine the island's massive humanitarian role in sending medical teams to more than 70 countries in 2009. While Cuban doctors are saving lives, US sanctions are used to disrupt the supply of medical equipment. 

But according to President Obama, the embargo cannot be lifted until Cuba makes changes that Washington approves of. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a prominent New York-based organisation, has sadly perpetuated this kind of linkage in its latest report 'New Castro Same Cuba.'

Although HRW concedes that the embargo is clumsy and has failed, it still insists that the US government should attempt to use leverage and pressure. HRW's conclusion: 'Ending the current embargo policy by itself will not bring an end to Cuba's repression. Only a multilateral approach will have the political power and moral authority to press the Cuban government to end its repressive practices. Therefore before changing its policy, the US should work to secure commitments from the EU, Canada, and Latin American allies that they will join together to pressure Cuba.' 

President Obama in an interview with GloboTV spelled out US conditionality for ending the embargo: 'The political prisoners need to be released. Free and fair elections need to be held. So we are opening up dialogue with Cuba, but we are very clear that we want to see some fundamental changes within the Cuban regime.'

The same US president delivered a very different message to an audience in Moscow in July: 'Let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven't always done what we should have on that front.'

So no fundamental changes will be imposed on Russia or China or any other country - only Cuba.

The record shows that Washington's 50-year-old campaign against Cuba - which has included military invasion (the Bay of Pigs), a record number of CIA assassination plots against President Castro, economic sabotage, the blowing up of a Cuban airliner in 1976 and funding government opponents - has been a relentless attempt to overthrow the Cuban government and establish a client regime under Washington's wing.

The Human Rights Watch report does not grasp that Cuba is first of all a human rights victim. International law and the UN uphold the rights of any people or nation to live without being under constant siege from a belligerent neighbour. Amnesty International, the London-based human rights body, has adopted a far more balanced stance on Cuba by drawing attention to the suffering inflicted by the unilateral US embargo.

The embargo against Cuba is 'putting at risk the lives of millions by preventing them from accessing vital medicines and medical technologies,' said Kerrie Howard, deputy director of Amnesty International's Americas programme. 'These sanctions are immoral and should be lifted immediately.'

The conventional wisdom that Cuba is only being punished by the US because it does not conform to international standards of human rights is a lie that has been repeated countless times through mainstream media. President Obama has indulged in this same  hypocrisy in a lame attempt to justify the US sanctions, arguing that  'Cuba has to change' before the embargo is lifted.

Human rights problems exist in Cuba, as they do in most of the countries that are wagging fingers at Cuba, especially the US. However, the first human rights violation here is the embargo itself. While the embargo does not make Cuba immune from criticism, the first step to improving the rights situation in Cuba is to remove the embargo, in line with Amnesty International's position. After the embargo is lifted, Cuba will be on the same footing as the rest of the world, and it will be easier for its citizens to raise issues of rights and acountability.

During the more than four decades of the US embargo against Cuba, the Latin American region has been decimated by death squads, mass murder and military coups. The Pinochet military regime in Chile, and the equally murderous regimes in Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador, were all US-backed. The commission of crimes against humanity by some of these regimes did not prompt Washington to impose any kind of economic embargo.

Hence Washington's unique treatment of Cuba is not really about human rights at all. Even US allies in NATO and Europe don't buy this logic. Even the usually loyal and deferential UK government votes against the US every year on the UN General Assembly resolution condemning the US sanctions on Cuba.

 This year the resolution passed by a record 187 votes to 3. Washington's only supporters were predictably Israel and the tiny island of Palau. It is now Obama's embargo.

It is clear that the US is still obsessed with bringing Cuba to its knees unless it makes concessions to the growling superpower which lies only 90 miles from its Caribbean coast.

In a recent interview, Mariela Castro, President Raul Castro's daughter, told this correspondent, 'We think Obama has goodwill but there are hidden forces inside his government. And what disturbs them about Cuba is not the issue of socialism but rather the defeat of US imperialism and their loss of control over us.'   

Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, in his reply to a speech given by the US representative at the UN, has said,   'Cuba recognises absolutely no moral authority to dictate models or give advice on the matter of democracy.'

Obama's missed opportunity

Many factors favour a real change in US policy on Cuba right now. Opinion polls indicate the public favours change:

•  71% of Americans support restoration of diplomatic ties with Cuba (CNN/Opinion Research Corp., 3-5 April 2009); and
•  Obama has a 70% approval rating in Latin America (CIMA, 16 April 2009).

There is a prevalent sentiment in Cuba that Obama is the first American leader willing and able to bring change. Foreign Minister Rodriguez Parrilla told the UN that the Obama government has 'a historic opportunity' to eliminate the 'obsolete' and 'unacceptable' blockade.

Yet the president appears to be frozen in his tracks and his thinking still hostage to the past. Why? His Latin America policy cannot be separated from his general betrayal of the hope that his administration would really make a complete break with the policies of the Bush years.

An early indication that the presidency would be far from the audacity of hope was  the unprecedented decision to allow Robert Gates, Defence Secretary under the Bush administration, to continue in his post. Undoubtedly Gates, a former CIA director, and other Bush appointees in the State Department have played a major role in ensuring that the substance of US foreign policy has not changed, even if the rhetoric and its presentation have made it far more palatable to the world.

The White House has made it known that they also want to renew some of the most repressive provisions of the Patriot Act. Rendition and torture have been reviewed, reclassified, perhaps even renamed, but still not banned.

Millions had hoped that Obama would sign up to the global landmine ban treaty. Yet on the eve of  accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for his 'extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples' and his commitment to 'disarmament and arms control negotiations', Obama announced that Washington will stay with the same Bush policy - the US won't sign up. 

Obama's administration has endorsed his predecessor's unilateral repudiation of the treaty. This has outraged the anti-landmine movement, both in the US and globally.

All rather embarrassing for the Oslo awards night, which honoured a new laureate awarded the Nobel Prize before he had really achieved anything other than spreading hope and high expectations.

Obama's campaign and his rhetoric fostered the notion of a new dawn, a more liberal foreign policy based on multilateralism and respect for other nations. Latin America is waking up to the realisation that up till now it has turned out to be a false dawn festooned with grand illusions.      

Tom Fawthrop is a journalist and filmmaker covering the developing world. He directed Swimming Against the Tide, a documentary on the Cuban health system.

*Third World Resurgence No. 231/232, November-December 2009, pp 50-52