During the election, Barack Obama fielded a good deal of criticism for his avowed willingness to meet foreign hostiles (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Raúl Castro, Hugo Chávez, usually in that order) “without preconditions,” and this criticism usually came cloaked in a kind of vague, jingoistic ideology.
Just last week, he caught fire for an apparently cordial exchange he had with Chávez, the objections again coming in the name of something like national solidarity.
But the semantics, interests and histories aside, it seems the president’s opponents have inadvertently lighted yet another trail on which he will diverge from his predecessors: the issue of Cuba.
A little more than a year ago, Fidel Castro retired from the presidency in favor of his brother, Raúl, and I wrote then that we ought not to expect capitulation on the part of either government on the issue of mutual relations, confident that the stalemate would remain until Castro and company had disappeared entirely.
It seems now, however, that I needn’t have been so pessimistic; President Obama has actually endeavored to make the first move, easing the restrictions on Cuban expatriates to visit their homeland and on our telecommunications companies to invest.
He has, with a stroke of the pen, set to work undoing half a century of geopolitical pigheadedness, and now, Raúl Castro seems willing to consider a more magnanimous response, expressing an interest in discussing human rights issues and admitting that perhaps his government has made some errors after all, an admission we haven’t heard since the Revolution.
For quite some time, we have been one of the largest trading partners of Cuba and their largest supplier of foodstuffs, so we cannot give credit wholly to Obama, for the process has clearly been a gradual one.
Additionally, what might well be vast oil deposits were recently discovered in the North Cuba Basin; in a conflict as imminently critical as the energy race, Obama realizes as well as anyone else the importance of capturing resources in their elemental form. And primarily — despite its putative strengths, like health care and education systems — Cuba is not a wonderful place to live and prosper, and its people are not free to say or believe whatever they wish.
The critics of Cuban-American relations insist, as they always have, that the Cuban bureaucracy must first behave before we talk business. This would be a wonderfully noble principle to uphold if not for our other global commitments.
For instance, no reasonable person would argue that the citizens of China enjoy freedoms even symbolically greater than those of the Cubans and yet, in accordance with the gospel of neo-liberalism, the Chinese still receive from us a substantial amount of business. So should we surrender this productive international relationship just to preserve the consistency of our current ideology, even though conditions there have positively improved since the emergence of liberalism? Of course not.
But if we’re going to make policy out of following the money even when we ought to follow the ideology, we should make policy out of doing so consistently, even if that means swallowing our pride with a few more rogue states.
In truth, my column this week could have been effectively replaced with a single photograph, that iconic snapshot of Ronald Reagan chuckling with Mikhail Gorbachev.
And what exactly should we call this kind of relation, in hindsight? “Capitulation” seems inappropriate, especially in light of our eventual successes in both places.
So how about “diplomacy”?
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