A New Beginning

Change is in the air this spring, or at least it will be soon, as President Obama pursues “a new beginning with Cuba.” In remarks made at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Obama indicated his willingness to engage with the Cuban government in an effort to ameliorate U.S.-Cuba relations, which have remained chilly for half a century. And, prior to the summit, Obama broke with traditional policy by lifting restrictions placed on Cuban-Americans’ ability to travel to Cuba and send money to friends and relatives on the island.

Obama has acted wisely in attempting to move past the vestigial Cold War animosity that seems to perpetually guide our Cuba policy, but we hope that he will follow up his warm gestures with concrete action.

The U.S. government’s new stance on Cuba carries great potential for improving America’s relationship with Latin America as a whole, a region that felt somewhat neglected by American foreign policy during the Bush presidency. But Obama needs to go further if he is to succeed in gaining lasting credibility with many Latin American leaders.

Since being expelled in 1962 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuba has been excluded from the Organization of American States, the group of 34 nations that meets at the Summit of the Americas every five years. Obama’s conciliatory words at this very summit will ultimately ring hollow unless the U.S. ends its opposition to Cuba’s membership in the OAS. If America is truly committed to redefining its relationship with Cuba and its allies such as Venezuela and Nicaragua, then it needs to give Cuba a seat at the table.

Furthermore, Obama should take the radical but logical step of lifting the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. The harsh economic sanctions are a historical relic from past efforts to dislodge Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom several presidential administrations—beginning in the 1960s—have tried unsuccessfully to shake from power. The sanctions may have actually had the opposite of their intended effect politically, allowing Castro to blame the U.S. for Cuba’s sluggish economic development. As disagreeable as Castro’s actions toward America may have been, an embargo rooted in personal enmity against this single political leader is no longer a practical foreign policy.

In fact, hard-line policies in general have been largely ineffective in dealing with the Cuban government. The country has not yet abandoned communism, nor has it acquiesced to U.S. demands to address human-rights violations, and Castro only relinquished power to his brother Raúl due to illness, not U.S. pressure. Relentless pursuit of traditional hard-line policies would simply continue to impede the progress of mending U.S.-Cuba relations.

That being said, we would like to see Cuba respond to U.S. overtures with concessions of its own, perhaps addressing crucial issues such as human-rights violations and political prisoners, topics on which Raúl Castro has indicated a willingness to begin a dialogue. If we are truly to embark on a “new beginning,” both sides must take bold steps forward on a new path, one that hopefully leads to a better future than that projected by the hostility of the Cold War days.