April 2009

     
      Like six American presidents before him, Democrats and Republicans, Barack Obama has sought to improve relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In warm and conciliatory language during the recent summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago the president, and Secretary of State Clinton, dramatized their desire to begin a bilateral process of rapprochement with Havana.

      Their hopes were elevated because since assuming Cuba’s presidency early last year Raul Castro has repeatedly signaled interest in a constructive dialogue. But within days of the American overtures, Fidel Castro, Cuba’s ex-president and still presiding potentate, all but conclusively rejected them.

      In two lengthy commentaries disseminated by Cuba’s media this week, the elder Castro was scornful and abusive. He described president Obama as “looking conceited” in Trinidad. Quoting extensively from Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega’s fifty minute anti-American jeremiad in Port-of-Spain, Castro echoed the theme that it is the United States, not Cuba, that must change. He gave no ground whatever, intimating that, as far as he is concerned, Cuba can wait another four or eight years until after President Obama leaves office without progress in alleviating bilateral tensions.

      Castro’s intransigence is scarcely any different than it has been since the first months of his revolutionary regime. Dwight Eisenhower was the first American president to deal with him, and the first earnestly to seek a constructive relationship. He dispatched Philip Bonsal, a veteran diplomat, fluent in Spanish and sympathetic to many of the Cuban revolution’s initial objectives, as ambassador. But Bonsal was shunned by Fidel. In his memoirs he concluded that “as long as Castro remains in power there will be no change: (he) needs the United States as a whipping boy and relentless enemy.”

      In the fall of 1963 John Kennedy entered into exploratory diplomatic contacts with Cuba, long after the embassy on Havana’s Malecon had been shuttered. Those contacts expired following the assassination in Dallas, but undoubtedly were doomed to fail for the same reasons that Bonsal came to appreciate.

      Later, before his resignation in 1974, Richard Nixon authorized high-level diplomatic contacts with Cuba. They were undertaken by his successor Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975. And again, soon after his inauguration in 1977, Jimmy Carter launched a similar effort. The three presidents and their advisers believed erroneously that Castro would see critical advantages in reducing bilateral tensions and that he would be willing to make important concessions toward that end.

      Those efforts foundered, however, when it became clear that Castro placed a higher priority on supporting revolutionary internationalism in Africa, and on retaining the American enemy to berate, than on achieving rapprochement.

      Bill Clinton’s White House tried yet again, exploring means of improving relations behind the scenes and through intermediaries. He was deterred too, when in February 1996 Cuban MIG fighters shot down civilian aircraft over international waters, killing American civilians. The fallout for Fidel was enactment of the tough Helms-Burton legislation that had been languishing in Congress, but that only provided yet more “anti-imperialist” ammunition for the Cuban propaganda machine.

      The latest effort, undertaken by President Obama with considerable fanfare and the best of intentions is possibly the most ambitious of all seven of these presidential efforts to reduce or end the deadlock in relations with Cuba. But it appears that it is already suffering the same fate as all of the earlier attempts.

      This time, however, Castro has new and compelling reasons for rejecting virtually all compromise with Washington. He is in a triumphant, unyielding mood. Believing that the correlation of international forces --a term revived from classic Marxist lexicon-- is working overwhelmingly in Cuba’s favor, he feels no need to compromise. With just a little more patience, perhaps even in his lifetime, Cuba, he believes, can win most of its goals in the stand-off with Washington through unilateral concessions.

      And as usual, his calculus is derived from convincing evidence. Cuba’s legitimacy with governments in this hemisphere has never been higher. Soon every country except the United States will have full diplomatic relations with Havana. A rump group of presidents led and fueled by Venezuelan President Chavez have raised the volume and intensity of pro-Castro and anti-American rhetoric to unprecedented levels. President Obama endured insulting public doses of it in Trinidad from both Chavez and Ortega.

      Castro’s new world view has been reinforced by many other fawning regional leaders. Following the Rio Summit late last year, with Cuba for the first time participating as a full member, ten Latin American and Caribbean presidents and prime ministers have paid their respects to one or both Castro brothers in Havana. So did an important American congressional delegation. None of those visitors bothered to meet with, or even to acknowledge the suffering of Cuban human rights and pro-democracy dissidents.

      Regional demands for the end of the U.S. economic embargo, readmission of Cuba to the OAS, and an end to the years of hostility have become deafening. Innumerable calls have also been heard from leading members of Congress, influential Washington think tanks, and commentators of many stripes who argue that the time finally has come for the impasse with Cuba to end. From Castro’s perspective at least, unilateral concessions by Washington, such as lifting the travel ban or all of the embargo, now seem within the realm of the possible. With so much now converging in Cuba’s and his favor, Fidel sees no need to make significant compromises.

      But his rejection of the most promising American overtures ever offered is likely to generate severe tensions within the Cuban leadership. Fidel’s intransigence will be unsettling to the many civilian and military leaders who genuinely had hoped for a better relationship with Washington. Most had come to believe that Raúl Castro, Cuba’s president after all, was intent on moving in that direction.

      But Fidel’s snide commentary published on April 21 chastens and humiliates his brother. Now issuing almost one of these reflections daily, there can be no doubt that it is the infirm, cosseted, all-but-invisible Fidel, angry but triumphant, who is again the ultimate arbiter of Cuban foreign policy.