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USANews版 - SAIS scholar of Cuban foreign policy offers perspective on historic shift in U.S.-Cuba relations-ZT
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SAIS scholar of Cuban foreign policy offers perspective on historic shift in
U.S.-Cuba relations
http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/12/18/us-cuba-foreign-relations
Piero Gleijeses, professor of American foreign policy, is only foreigner to
conduct research in closed Cuban archives
 December 18
Posted in Voices+Opinion, Politics+Society
Tagged foreign policy, cuba
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced a historic shift in U.S.
relations with Cuba, a move to normalize diplomatic relations between the
two neighboring countries after more than five decades of hostility.
For perspective on this announcement, we reached out to Piero Gleijeses, a
professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of
Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., and a renowned scholar
of Cuban foreign policy under Fidel Castro, the revolutionary turned
politician who ruled Cuba from 1959 until 2008. Gleijeses is the author of
several essays and two books on the topic—Conflicting Missions: Havana,
Washington, and Africa,1959-1976 (Chapel Hill, 2002), which won the Robert H
. Ferrell Book Prize from the Society of Historians of American Foreign
Relations in 2003; and Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and
the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill, 2013), which won
the Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association earlier
this year.
Gleijeses first traveled to Cuba in 1980 as part of an academic exchange
between SAIS and the University of Havana. In 1994, he began conducting
research in the closed Cuban archives—the only foreigner who has been
allowed to do so in the past 55 years—and over the next two decades visited
Cuba about three times a year, on average, with each visit lasting three to
five weeks, he said.
In an email interview, Gleijeses shared his insights on the origins of the
tension between the U.S. and Cuba, what has been accomplished by the
economic embargo imposed by the U.S., and what the thawing of relations
could mean in the near-term.
What is at the root of the long-standing animosity between the U.S. and Cuba?
The animosity precedes Fidel Castro. It has a long history. President Thomas
Jefferson longed to annex the island, and his successors agreed that Cuba
would one day belong to the United States. No one understood this better
than José Martí, the father of Cuban independence. In 1895, as Cuba's
revolt against Spanish rule began, he wrote, "What I have done, and shall
continue to do, is to ... block with our [Cuban] blood ... the annexation of
the peoples of America to the turbulent and brutal North that despises them
. ... I lived in the monster [the United States] and know its entrails—and
my sling is that of David." [1]
In 1898, the United States joined the war against an exhausted Spain,
ostensibly to free Cuba. After Spain surrendered, Washington forced the
Platt Amendment on the Cubans, which granted the United States the right to
send troops to the island whenever it deemed it necessary and to establish
bases on Cuban soil. (Today, the Platt Amendment lives on in the U.S. naval
base at Guantánamo Bay.) Cuba became, more than any other Latin American
country, "an American fiefdom." [2]
Until 1959, when Fidel Castro came to power.
When Americans look back at that fateful year, they are struck by their good
intentions and by Castro's malevolence. President Dwight Eisenhower sought
a modus vivendi with Castro—as long as Cuba remained within the U.S. sphere
of influence and respected the privileges of the American companies that
dominated the island's economy. Castro, however, was not willing to bow to
the United States. "He is clearly a strong personality and a born leader of
great personal courage and conviction," U.S. officials noted in April 1959,
and, a few months later, a National Intelligence Estimate reported, "He is
inspired by a messianic sense of mission to aid his people." [3] Even though
he did not have a clear blueprint of the Cuba he wanted to create, Castro
dreamed of a sweeping revolution that would uproot his country's oppressive
socioeconomic structure. He dreamed of a Cuba free of the United States.
Eisenhower was baffled, for he believed, as most Americans still do, that
the United States had been the Cubans' truest friend, fighting Spain in 1898
to give them independence. "Here is a country," he marveled, "that you
would believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends
." As U.S. historian Nancy Mitchell has pointed out, "our selective recall
not only serves a purpose, it also has repercussions. It creates a chasm
between us and the Cubans: we share a past, but we have no shared memories."
[4]
Over the next three decades—until the end of the Cold War—Fidel Castro
became the Americans' obsession. By the 1970s, the problem was not Cuban
domestic politics; it was Castro's policy in the Third World—above all in
Africa. In 1975 Henry Kissinger had been ready to normalize relations with
Cuba, until Fidel Castro sent 36,000 soldiers to Angola. They went to repel
a South African invasion that had been abetted by the United States and to
fight for what Castro has called "the most beautiful cause," [5] the
struggle against apartheid. The Ford administration was outraged by the
Cuban soldiers in Angola and claimed that they were "proxies" of the Soviet
Union.
Some people in the Carter administration knew better. Robert Pastor, a
bright specialist on Latin America in the National Security Council, noted:
"I view the Soviet-Cuban relationship as somewhat analogous to the U.S.-
Israeli relationship. Most of the world believes that we have overpowering
influence over Israel ... but in reality, they are pulling us around a lot
more than we are pushing them. Similarly, my guess is that the Cubans are
pushing and pulling the Soviets into riskier areas than the elder Soviet
leadership would normally choose to tread. The Cubans are nobody's puppet."
[6]
U.S. policy did not change: the Carter and Reagan administrations refused to
consider normalizing relations with Havana until the Cuban troops left
Angola. Castro, however, would not bend. The Cubans stayed in Angola to
defend it from apartheid South Africa. They stayed to train the Namibian
guerrillas who were fighting to free their country from Pretoria's rule.
They stayed to help the guerrillas of Nelson Mandela's African National
Congress. By 1991, the Cuban troops had humiliated Pretoria's army, which
changed the course of southern African history.
While this earned Washington's wrath, it won the gratitude of Africans. In
July 1991, Nelson Mandela visited Havana. "We come here with a sense of the
great debt that is owed the people of Cuba," he said. "What other country
can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its
relations to Africa?" [7]
What has the U.S. gained from its near 55-year embargo of Cuba?
As President Obama bluntly acknowledged, the embargo failed. The Castro
brothers are still in power, and they did not succumb at any point to
Washington's threats and blandishments. This compounded the frustration in
Washington.
The most important example of the failure of U.S. efforts is in Africa.
Although Jimmy Carter claimed, early in his presidency, that he wanted to
normalize relations with Havana, he added a proviso: Castro had first to
withdraw his troops from Angola. But Castro did not budge. "We are deeply
irritated, offended and indignant that for nearly 20 years the blockade [the
embargo] has been used as an element of pressure in making demands on us,"
he told U.S. officials in December 1978. "Perhaps I should add something
more. There should be no mistake—we cannot be pressured, impressed, bribed
or bought ... Perhaps because the U.S. is a great power, it feels it can do
what it wants and what is good for it. It seems to be saying that there are
two laws, two sets of rules and two kinds of logic, one for the U.S. and one
for other countries. Perhaps it is idealistic of me, but I never accepted
the universal prerogatives of the U.S.—I never accepted and never will
accept the existence of a different law and different rules. ... I hope
history will bear witness to the shame of the United States which for twenty
years has not allowed sales of medicine needed to save lives. ... History
will bear witness to your shame." [8]
Even after the Cold War ended, there was no thaw. Leycester Coltman, a
former British ambassador to Cuba, wrote in 2003 that Fidel Castro was "
still a bone ... stuck in American throats. He had defied and mocked the
world's only superpower, and would not be forgiven." [9] U.S. officials and
pundits pondered what to demand of the errant Cubans before Washington would
lift the embargo, forgetting that it is the United States that tried to
assassinate Castro, carried out terrorist actions against Cuba, and
continues to occupy Cuban territory—Guantanamo, the filthy lucre of 1898.
Their selective recall allowed them to transform Cuba into the aggressor and
the United States into the victim. It was not love of democracy or concern
for the welfare of the Cuban people that motivated the Americans. The vote
of the Cuban Americans and the desire for revenge—nothing more—explained
the continuation of the embargo.
President Obama has taken a long overdue step. It serves the material
interests of the United States and it will enhance the prestige of the
United States, whose Cuban policy has been repeatedly condemned at the
General Assembly of the United Nations; it will ease relations with the
Latin American countries, which were beginning to challenge openly the
constraints that the embargo imposed on their own dealings with Cuba. But,
above all, Obama's decision marks the beginning of the end of a sordid
chapter in U.S. foreign policy.
1 Martí to Manuel Mercado, May 18, 1895, in Martí, Epistolario, Havana,
1993, 5: 250. ↩
2 Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait, New York, 1987, p. 13.↩
3 "Unofficial Visit of Prime Minister Castro of Cuba to Washington—A
Tentative Evaluation," enclosed in Herter to Eisenhower, Apr. 23, 1959, U.S.
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-60,
Washington DC, 1991, 6:483; CIA, Special National Intelligence Estimate, "
The Situation in the Caribbean through 1959," June 30, 1959, p. 3, National
Security Archive, Washington D.C.↩
4 Eisenhower press conference, Oct. 28, 1959, in United States, General
Services Administration, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United
States, 1959, Washington DC, 1960, p. 271; Nancy Mitchell, "Remember the
Myth," News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), Nov. 1, 1998, G5.↩
5 Castro, in "Indicaciones concretas del Comandante en Jefe que guiarán la
actuación de la delegación cubana a las conversaciones de Luanda y las
negociaciones de Londres (23-4-88)," p. 5, Archive of the Cuban Armed Forces
, Havana.↩
6 Pastor to Brzezinski, July 19, 1979, NLC-24-13-5-7-9, Jimmy Carter Library
, Atlanta.↩
7 Mandela, quoted in The Washington Post, July 28, 1991, p. 32.↩
8 Memcon (Tarnoff, Pastor, Castro), Dec. 3-4, 1978, 10 p.m.-3 a.m., pp. 2, 5
, 9-10, 25, Vertical File: Cuba, Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta.↩
9 Coltman, The Real Fidel Castro, New Haven, 2003, p. 289.↩
Comments
Albert Garcia • 4 days ago
Great piece that puts the embargo and American foreign policy toward Cuba in
historical perspective. However, I feel it is disingenuous to omit any
mention of the Castro regime's totalitarianism and egregious civil rights
violations.

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Nedotykomka > Albert Garcia • 3 days ago
The "Castro regime's totalitarianism and egregious civil rights violations"
that you wish had been mentioned in the article are in fact part of the
selective memory that the article itself criticizes. There is no such thing
as 'totalitarian' vs. 'non-totalitarian' governments in the actual world.
All governments have their own unique style of being totalitarian or
oppressive in relation to the people they are supposed to keep in order and
welfare. I do not think it's necessarily a hard argument to claim that the
style of oppression experienced in the US is actually less preferable than
the style lived in Castro's Cuba (but like all issues of style, there is no
appeal to universal standards but simply that of varying taste). In any case
, what is in fact disingenuous is to expect some kind of token
acknowledgement of Cuba's totalitarianism as if it were something
exceptional.
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