If you know anything about Tampa, you know its historical link to Cuba. Before there was Miami, there was Tampa. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t prep for the Spanish-American War at the Fontainebleau.
This is where Jose Martí –as well as Fidel Castro–came to raise funds and consciousness. Prior to the Castro-led revolution–more than 50 percent of all American exports into Havana came via the Port of Tampa. The cruise business meant Tampa-Havana.
If you know anything about Florida politics, you know the bottom-line reality. Well-heeled, well-organized, disproportionately-influential Cuban-American power brokers in South Florida have been wielding de facto, foreign-policy vetoes over efforts to liberalize Cuban-American relations since the Cold War. For them, it’s personal–not about what’s best for Florida and the United States.
In effect, how does Washington hit a reset button on Cuban policy–from the embargo to unfettered travel–when the mega swing-state of Florida, the one most impacted, hasn’t been applying political pressure to do just that? Florida politicians–from mayors to congressional delegations to governors have been routinely intimidated and bought off over the years. And, yes, that still includes U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who chairs the Democratic National Committee and has insider status around the White House and with certain cable-TV pundits.
If you know anything about geopolitics, you know that U.S. credibility and good will have been undermined–from the United Nations to our home hemisphere–as a result of our Cuban policy. The world’s only Super Power is unnecessarily seen as super hypocrite. And that wasn’t just the take of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales.
Cuban conference here
If you wanted an insiders’ update–including national security insight–on where this uniquely frustrating relationship is, where it seems to be going and what might be expected from “Obama The Sequel,” you were in the right place if you were fortunate enough to be at the Cuban Club in Ybor City last Saturday. That’s where the Center for International Policy and the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation jointly sponsored “Rapprochement With Cuba: Good for Tampa, Good for Florida, Good for America.” It also came with the tag line: “No Nation Was Ever Ruined By Trade.” Not exactly subtle.
Tampa’s Al Fox, the founder and president of ARCPF and long-time crusader for normalizing Cuban-American relations, was the catalyst. Frankly, we’re lucky he’s still on the case, given the toll the politics of frustration–and its practitioners–can take on a point man for a cause.
Here’s this observer’s takeaway:
*U.S. Rep. Kathy’s Castor’s pep talk Friday night underscored how far she has come on the issue. She’s no longer a House rookie and is in a district without determinative Cuban politics. She’s not intimidated by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen or anyone named Díaz-Balart. She knows the implications of improved Cuban-American relations for Tampa–from her effort to help secure charter flights to Cuba out of TIA to recognizing key port scenarios.
Her presentation remarks ranged from noting changes taking place in Cuba, including those related to travel and the economy, to decrying the economic embargo and a policy that inexplicably keeps Cuba on America’s State-Sponsors-of-Terrorism list. The Tampa Democrat has become a player on the Cuban issue and impressed out-of-towners as an effective local advocate.
*Dan Whittle, senior attorney and Cuba Program Director for the Environmental Defense Fund, pointed out that overlapping issues of fishing, oil drilling, hurricane preparing and the like have created pragmatic, although well shy of ideal, levels of cooperation. “There has been movement,” noted Whittle. “Science is a common denominator. … I think the embargo dies by a thousand cuts.”
*No such conference would be complete without Wayne Smith, the former U.S. Interests Section chief in Havana (1979-82) who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. Smith left the government when the Reagan Administration tightened the screws over Cuban involvement in Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement.
Smith hasn’t exactly been buoyed by events of the last 30 years, although he regained a measure of optimism after some travel-and-remittance easing in the first Obama Administration. “Cuba wants a meaningful dialogue with the U.S.,” said Smith. “But there’s no sign of an energetic move by the U.S. to improve relations with Cuba.
“The U.S. is now the only country in the Western Hemisphere without relations with Cuba,” added Smith. “It’s the U.S. that is isolated. It’s absurd. Thirty years later, here we still are. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that the second Obama Administration has a more rational, sensible, productive policy toward Cuba.”
*Peter Kornbluh, author and director of the Cuba Documentation Project for the National Security Archives, reminded his audience that President Barack Obama promised a “new chapter in Cuban-American relations” in his 2008 campaign. Now “we need to remind him.” It helps, underscored Kornbluh, that “(Secretary of State John) Kerry understands that Cuba is changing and so does (Defense Secretary) Chuck Hagel.”
* Col. Larry Wilkerson, former member of the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided a military insight we’re not typically privy to. There are forces “on both sides of the Straits” who don’t want rapprochement, he noted, meaning those Cubans who still value “animosity toward the U.S.as a pillar of the revolution” and American hardliners including Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz plus Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz.
“The Pentagon has absolutely no inclination in considering Cuba a threat to the U.S,” stated Wilkerson. “Quite the opposite. It thinks our policy is preposterously stupid. Hell, they’re not sponsoring revolution. They’re sponsoring health care.” Cuba, added Wilkerson, a Republican who said he voted twice for Obama, should be our counter-terrorism partner in the Caribbean.
“We’re becoming a pariah in our own hemisphere,” he said. “I hear from hemispheric sources: ‘First step is to lift the embargo.’ We really need to get our foreign policy in shape. I’ve seen so little moral courage.”
Ironically, Wilkerson knows something about moral courage. He acknowledged his own deficit when he was in the Bush White House (2003-04). He should have resigned, he admitted, rather than help enable an “illegal war” of “choice.”
*We’ll give the last word to Al Fox, who continues to fight the good fight and refuses to give up–despite decades of politically emotional ebb and flow and progress measured in increments.
What will it take, including Castro brothers’ mortality, to get rid of the embargo and open up Cuban travel for all Americans? In short: “Money.” It still talks. It still leverages. The vendetta-agenda crowd in South Florida, especially, is better financed, motivated and organized than its counterparts, for whom Cuba is still a secondary, if not tertiary, issue. Washington notices. It backs winners.
Money, explained Fox, is not a “bribe.” It’s a way “to show commitment.” And the side perceived as less committed is the side all-too-easily ignored.
Some things never change in politics. Even when it concerns the economic, geopolitical and humanitarian crucible that is America’s counterproductive, abnormal relationship with Cuba.