Sure, it’s a gimmick.
Former Republican governor and current Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist has announced plans to visit Cuba this summer. Should it happen, there will be optics to dominate a news cycle, even if not to rival the Beyoncé and Jay-Z coverage. More than just the Florida media will take note. And no PAC has to pay for the ad hoc ad.
But it can be so much more than a political-business-as-usual gambit.
A Cuba visit would actually be a logical, attention-riveting extension of Crist’s stand–OK, recent conversion–on the Cuban embargo and normalized relations. Expedient, circuitous path notwithstanding, Crist now finds himself on the right side of an issue that matters mightily to Florida, especially Tampa.
Before there was Miami and ever-ratcheting, exile leverage, there was Tampa and proud, Cuban roots. Prior to the 1959 revolution, more than 50 percent of all American exports into Havana came via the Port of Tampa. The cruise business meant Tampa-Havana.
It matters because unfettered trade and travel have obvious economic upsides for this state, as well as for Tampa International Airport and the Port of Tampa. It matters because doing the humane thing is always right. It matters geopolitically that the U.S. is no longer the only country in the Western Hemisphere without formal relations with Cuba.
And it should matter that we acknowledge foreign-policy hypocrisy and act accordingly–finally. We have normalized relations with authoritarian trade partners such as China and blatantly undemocratic allies such as Saudi Arabia. Cuba is not in their league. But it’s personal.
And it matters because the upshot of a Cold War-policy relic that has had more than half a century to prove itself a manifest failure is this: Everybody loses. Everybody, that is, except the increasingly marginalized vendetta-agenda crowd still in lockstep with the Brothers Díaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
Finally, it matters because Cuba can no longer remain a glaring exception to a geopolitical strategy that the U.S. typically exercises, if not venerates. In short, having free-flowing travel and trade is the best approach for promoting democracy and human rights in places where they are lacking. But Havana doesn’t count?
Crist’s Cuban-policy epiphany makes him the highest-profile politician in Florida to embrace normalization of relations with Cuba. Should he regain the governor’s mansion, he would be in a position to influence public opinion. If he turns his Tallahassee forum into a bully pulpit.
Put it this way: If the CEO of the state with the most skin in the game doesn’t prioritize making the case for a sensible, Florida-benefiting, Cuban policy, then why should other key pols go where he won’t tread?
Gov. Rick Scott, who’s already whoring out for Little Havana, definitely won’t make that case. It will be up to Crist–but it won’t be easy.
Keep in mind that U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also chairs the Democratic National Committee, remains cowed by exile politics. U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson is still an embargo appeaser. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn won’t touch the Cuban issue out of deference to those he knows who lost too much in the revolution. And President Barack Obama, as we’ve seen, has proven no more than a tentative incrementalist so far.
It will be up to Florida’s next governor to remind Floridians–and polls show most now agree with Crist on Cuba–and those in positions of leverage and policy-change about what’s at stake for the state of Florida and the United States of America. It will be up to Florida’s next governor to make the case that the Cuban embargo–and all its counterproductive ripple effects–is a foreign-policy gimmick that has to end.
And if it matters enough, it will be up to Floridians to vote accordingly. They now, for the first time, have a choice on this, heretofore, third-rail political issue.