Barack Obama fires Cuban missile

THE US President has surprised many with his move on an old foe.

p10///Cuban President Fidel Castro with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during Castro's first visit to Moscow, 04/63. Camera Press 7629-18.

FROM the beginning of his time on the national stage, President Barack Obama has positioned himself as someone willing to transform America’s long-time posture towards Cuba.

Now, with his push to ease sanctions and restore full diplomatic relations, Obama is poised to help bring about the end of a 50-year diplomatic standoff with the Cuban ruling regime — a conflict rooted in opposition to communism that has lasted since the height of the Cold War.

The changes represent the most notable shift in US policy in the western hemisphere since 1961 when president Dwight Eisen­hower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, a nation of 11 million people, just 145km off the coast of Florida.

The softening of US relations with Cuba is the latest in a series of attempts by Obama to recalibrate US foreign policy as his time in office winds down. It secures a major legacy item for the President while setting up another pitched battle with lawmakers, including Republicans who next year will control both the house and Senate.

A history of US-Cuba relations

The move, brokered with the help of Pope Francis and Canada, heightens the likelihood that world affairs will figure prominently in the 2016 presidential race. Critics, including members of Obama’s own party, blasted the changes in Cuba policy as a capitulation to an undemocratic regime with a history of hostility towards the US.

“President Obama’s actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government,” said senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and outgoing chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

But the President’s change in Cuba posture and policy has roots in changing domestic and international politics. He has also been a long-time advocate of a different approach to the island country.

During his time in the US Senate and throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama often took positions that put him at odds with a vocal segment of the powerful anti-Castro Cuban community. He angered hardliners who are mostly based in the swing state of Florida and who wanted to see the US continue to take an aggressive stance towards bringing down the ruling Castro regime.

Though Cuban-American voters have long leaned Republican, younger generations have trended Democratic in recent cycles. The conventional wisdom during the 2008 campaign was that Obama’s stances on Cuba issues would hurt him in Florida, but he carried the state in both his winning presidential campaigns. Obama narrowly lost the Cuban-American vote in 2008 by five points, but won it back in 2012. In his re-election campaign, he won 49 per cent of the Cuban-American vote, to his opponent’s 47 per cent.

Those victories came as Obama advocated for more openness with Cuba on the campaign trail and made changes to Cuba policy once in office. He split with his main 2008 rival Hillary Clinton over ongoing federal government funding of pro-democracy broadcasting network Radio y Television Marti.

TV Marti airs pro-democracy broadcasts into Cuba. Obama voted two times to cut off funding for the organisation, while Clinton supported it.

In 2007, he said he would keep most of the trade embargo in place but gave a speech calling for allowing Cuban-Americans to send more money back home. He gave the speech in the same auditorium where Ronald Reagan outlined his tough-on-the-Castro-regime stance two decades earlier.

Obama also said on the campaign trail that he would meet Cuban leader Raul Castro in person without preconditions. A bilateral meeting never happened, but Obama shook Castro’s hand last year at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa.

Both Castro brothers signalled their willingness to work with Obama once he took office. Ailing ex-president Fidel Castro reportedly called Obama an honest man in 2009, while Raul Castro said he “seems like a good man”.

Once in office, Obama made unilateral policy changes to the Cuba sanctions. In 2009, he eased restrictions on the kind of money, gifts and travel visas that applied to Cuban-Americans and their Cuban relatives.

He further eased restrictions in 2011, allowing more religious organisations, education programs and journalists to travel to the ­island despite the ongoing tourism ban.

There remained major areas of tension, including the detention of contractor Alan Gross, who had been held in a Cuban prison for five years. Gross was released on Wednesday as part of a swap. And the US Agency for International Development acknowledged that it ran a short-lived clandestine social media network designed to help undermine the Castro regime under Obama’s watch.

The policy is the latest in a series of unilateral moves by Obama since his party lost control of the Senate in the November elections. As the President tries to cement a legacy on issues including immigration and climate change, Republicans jockeying to take back the White House are pressing their attacks on his use of executive power.

Only congress can end the trade sanctions enshrined in federal law, but Obama is seeking to move the US in that direction by pursuing diplomatic ties with the island.

Obama’s action brings new prominence to two questions looming over the 2016 campaign: How large should the US footprint be in the world? And how should the foreign policy record of the President—and by extension the record of Clinton, his former secretary of state—be judged?

Clinton backed the trade embargo in her 2008 campaign before shifting her stance. In a June appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton argued that the Cuban regime used the embargo as a scapegoat, calling it “Castro’s best friend”. She said the US should “advocate normalising relations and see what they do”.

In her memoir published earlier this year, Clinton said that as secretary of state she urged Obama to consider lifting the embargo. “It wasn’t achieving our goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America,” she wrote.

Allies of Clinton rejected the idea her position would be a liability in Florida, the largest swing state and home to about 1.3 million Cuban-Americans. No anti-embargo candidate has ever won a statewide election.

“The country has been ready for quite some time to move on to normal diplomatic relations, and anti-Castro sentiment is no longer the defining focus it used to be for Cuban-American voters in Florida,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

Support for the embargo has declined among Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County, fallng to 48 per cent today from 87 per cent in 1991, according to polling by Florida International University.

US officials said they expected the two countries to continue to have strong differences, particularly on issues of democracy and human rights. But Washington and Havana could co-operate on issues such as migration, counterterrorism and battling Ebola, the officials said.

Since taking over the reins of power from his brother, Raul Castro has been stymied in the pace of reforms by Fidel, who most analysts say is still an influential conservative force. But the elder Castro is in fragile health and Cuba is in precarious economic straits.

Raul Castro has said he will step down in 2018, possibly clearing the way for Miguel Diaz-Canel, the first vice-president, who appears to be his favored successor.

The President’s detente with Cuba could shake up the international order.

US policy towards Cuba has been an increasing point of contention with other countries in the hemisphere. In Latin America, the administration said rapprochement with Cuba puts the US in alignment with its closest regional allies, who have lobbied for years for a lifting of the economic embargo on Havana.

These officials also said the US shift would counter the ability of regional leaders to cite US foreign policy as the rationale for pursuing repressive policies and keeping their economies closed.

“This takes the United States out of the equation,” said Peter Schechter, a director at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, and a Latin America expert.

The President said he was ­“convinced that through a policy of engagement, we can more effectively stand up for our values and help the Cuban people help themselves as they move into the 21st century”.

US officials and Latin American experts said normalisation with Cuba could significantly affect other regional countries traditionally hostile to the US, such as Venezuela.

Caracas is facing an economic crisis due to the recent plunge of oil prices. Analysts say the possibility of losing Venezuelan aid likely played a role in Cuba reaching agreement with the US. As a result of the deal, Venezuela could lose a major partner in its efforts to galvanise regional opposition to US policies.

Cuba has long been the Kremlin’s closest ally in the northern hemisphere, and President Vladimir Putin isn’t seen as willing to easily lose his preferential ties to the Caribbean country.

“The opening to Cuba limits Moscow’s options in the western hemisphere and further demonstrates that the United States can build relations with traditional Russia allies,” said Dimitri Simes, a Russia scholar and president of the Centre for the National Interest, a Washington think tank.

US officials also hope renewed relations with Cuba will aid the White House’s efforts to forge an agreement with Iran limiting its nuclear program by convincing Tehran that the US is serious about a deal.

Additional reporting Beth Reinhard