The Embargo on Change

Every year around this time since 1992, the U.N. General Assembly has voted to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba. And every year, the U.S. government ignores the resolution. Last year Israel and Palau joined the United States in opposing the measure, which sailed through with 185 votes. Promises to pay greater attention to international institutions, embrace multilateralism, and begin a "new partnership" with the Americas notwithstanding, it appears that U.S. President Barack Obama will continue the tradition of spurning the U.N. resolution.

The Obama administration’s reaction to the U.N.’s futile ritual provides the first clear indication that normalized U.S.-Cuban relations will not resume any time soon, for two reasons. The first is that no amount of international opprobrium can budge the cornerstone of U.S. policy toward Cuba — the trade embargo — until domestic pressure prompts Congress to act. Second, Obama’s good-guy image (who doesn’t like a Nobel Peace Prize winner?) obscures the fact that, despite the change in administrations, ending communism in Cuba remains official U.S. policy.

Obama’s election sparked hopes throughout the hemisphere that the United States would finally loosen its Cold War-era hard line against Cuba. Those hopes were quickly dashed. In the days leading up to Obama’s first summit meeting with the heads of state of the hemisphere in Trinidad and Tobago last April, he put an end to Bush-era travel prohibitions for Cuban Americans as well as restrictions on sending remittances. He stopped short of criticizing the embargo itself, and it became clear that he would stick to his plan of "holding back important incentives such as relaxation of the trade embargo" in order to "encourage change in a post-Fidel government."

Obama’s announcement of the United States’ new Cuba policy — which bore a striking resemblance to the United States’ old Cuba policy — disappointed practically every leader in Latin America. The Cuba issue hijacked the Summit of the Americas’ agenda, with regional leaders publicly demanding the United States end its trade embargo against Cuba unilaterally. Even the conservative president of war-torn Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, joined the chorus, saying, "Colombia today feels that Cuba helps efforts toward peace."

Wednesday’s U.N. vote will again remind the Obama administration that its Cuba policy is woefully out of psynch with world opinion. Wayne Smith, the former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and current director of the Center for International Policy’s Cuba Program told me that U.S. Cuba policy is "so totally counterproductive that it’s embarrassing." While Smith believes that "we do want to see Cuba move in the direction of a more open society and all that," he says the "best way to accomplish that is by reducing tensions, beginning a dialogue, and engaging."

Obama has pledged to do precisely that, but his conditions make his olive branch look more like poison ivy. After the Summit of the Americas, Cuba’s acting head of state Raúl Castro gave a speech in which he offered to "talk about everything with the United States," but said that he would not "negotiate our sovereignty, nor our political and social system, the right to self-determination, nor our internal affairs." He called upon the Obama administration to overturn the blockade unilaterally, since "Cuba has not imposed sanctions against the United States." Until the U.S. government moderates its position against one-party rule in Cuba, the Castro government will continue to view an opening of relations with trepidation.

Even if Obama were to aggressively pursue normalized relations with Cuba, however, there are limits to his power as president, since only Congress can overturn the embargo. Some legislators are ready to do just that. The Government Accountability Office released a report this month, requested Congressmembers Charles Rangel, Barbara Lee, and Jeff Flake, which outlines the steps that the Obama administration and Congress would have to take to deconstruct 50 years of economic warfare and diplomatic isolation. Rangel has filed legislation to revoke the trade embargo in its entirety.

Rangel will have a hard time pushing the bill through Congress, however. Even as the traditional pillar of anti-Castro lobbying, the Cuban American National Foundation, has splintered and moderated in recent years, no progressive lobbying group in the mold of J Street has emerged to change Washington’s entrenched, anti-Cuba policies. That leaves legislators few options other than waiting for historically conservative Cuban-American constituencies in south Florida to pass through a generational metamorphosis and vote out the fierce anti-Castroites that influence Cuba policy so greatly.

Given the unlikelihood of the trade embargo bill passing, Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, an NGO that promotes human rights in the region, says the legislation to watch is the travel bill. Rep. William Delahunt has garnered 179 signatures on a bill to end travel restrictions to Cuba for all Americans. If it passes, Thale says it "will open a floodgate that will be pretty hard to close." If Cuban American generational change is truly producing palpable political results, the travel issue may a winner. A poll by Bendixen and Associates released last week found that 59 percent of Cuban Americans favored allowing all Americans to travel to Cuba, up from 46 percent in 2002.

But Delahunt’s bill may not make it through the Senate, where Democrat Bob Menéndez, a Cuban American, is expected to go to the mat to oppose it. And if the travel bill does pass, it could still take several years — and several more fruitless U.N. resolutions –before the impetus pushes Congress to seriously consider putting an end to the embargo. For those still committed to the time-honored U.S. policy of economically and politically isolating Cuba, this is all good news. But those who would like to see change should consider pinning their hopes on someone other than Obama.