U.S. policy toward Cuba will change slowly
WASHINGTON – Those hoping for a new U.S. policy toward Cuba have waited nearly 50 years for Fidel Castro to voluntarily step down. But they will have to wait at least one more year, after President Bush leaves office, to see any possibility of change in the hard-line U.S. position that has outlasted nine administrations.
Bush and his top advisers made clear Tuesday that they do not intend to relax the trade sanctions and other policies aimed at isolating the Cuban government. The president called on Cuba to transition to democracy and seemed to belittle those advocating a new “stability” that would leave political prisoners behind bars.
“This transition ought to lead to free and fair elections – and I mean free and I mean fair, not these kind of staged elections that the Castro brothers try to foist off as being true democracy,” Bush said at a news conference in Kigali, Rwanda, where he was traveling Tuesday.
Perhaps a bigger question, in the wake of Castro’s announcement Tuesday that he is retiring from government, is whether Bush’s confrontational approach will outlast his presidency, which will end next January. Substantial doubts in Congress about the efficacy of the U.S. approach continue to collide with domestic politics that give a heavy influence to the fiercely anti-Castro emigres in South Florida, New Jersey and elsewhere.
In their comments Tuesday, each of the top three remaining presidential contenders offered little sign that they will break with the pillars of existing policy, which conditions any substantial relaxing of sanctions and other carrots on steps toward political freedoms and democracy.
Speaking to reporters during a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said there is no need to change U.S. policy toward Cuba unless Cuba takes dramatic steps toward establishing greater freedoms. Otherwise, he said, a shift in policy could merely keep the old guard in power.
“I worry that we would extend aid assistance that would prop up Raul (Castro) or any of his friends and comrades who repressed the people of Cuba for too long,” McCain said.
On the Democratic side, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois both held out the possibility of the United States offering incentives, but only if Cuba adopts democratic changes, something most independent analysts deem unlikely in the short term.
Obama offered the biggest potential break with the status quo on Cuba. Even before Castro’s announcement Tuesday, the candidate had already endorsed lifting restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling to the island or sending money to relatives, while also indicating that he would be willing to meet with the leaders of the country without preconditions. But his aides caution that there are limits to how far Obama would go in overhauling policy short of Cuba’s release of political prisoners or some sign of democratic change.
Brian Latell, a former top CIA expert on Cuba now at the University of Miami, said in an interview Tuesday that while “all of the major candidates are unwilling to go out far on a limb with respect to policy on Cuba … that doesn’t mean that in 2009, depending on who is in the White House, there might not be change” in the U.S. position.
Yet even if change is not emerging from Washington, it may come from Cuba.
Latell, who wrote “After Fidel,” a recent biography of the Castro brothers, said Raul Castro has indicated on at least three occasions since temporarily assuming power more than a year and half ago – because of Fidel’s illness – that he would be open to engaging the United States. “There is a greater likelihood that a new Cuban leadership that is emerging may provide more inducements to officials in Washington,” he said.