TYREE: A new look at Cuba

COMMENTARY:

Whether John McCain or Barack Obama is elected president, a new administration next year will provide an opportunity to reboot America’s relationships with a number of foreign nations, including our near neighbor Cuba.

Mr. Obama has favored engagement with foreign nations, even those with whom we profoundly disagree. Mr. McCain, despite his personal mistreatment by Vietnamese communists as a prisoner of war, was a leader in re-establishing and normalizing our relations with Vietnam. In this, he showed remarkable forbearance and a forward-looking attitude that could serve him well with regard to Cuba.

We doubtless will continue to have profound philosophical and policy differences with the Castro government. But the island nation 90 miles away from Florida seems in a state of flux both because of the altered world climate and the long and serious illness of Fidel Castro and his replacement as president by his brother Raul. These changes may not portend a near-term or sudden collapse of the communist regime but they do provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to re-evaluate and reset our modus vivendi with regard to Cuba.

Tied as the Cuban government is in economics and political sentiment with other radical Latin American regimes and with communist China, the Castro regime has not lost all opportunity to sow mischief in the Western Hemisphere. But thus far we are in a position to seek a new understanding with our provocative neighbors.

Why should we do so, when we can afford to simply cold-shoulder this small country - with a population and land mass about the size of Pennsylvania? What would make us bend our intransigent attitude toward Cuba as we have in the past toward the vaster and much more formidable and potentially problematic Russia and Communist China?

The lessons of the last eight or more years should have instructed us that it is better to have nontoxic rather than hateful relations with other nations, especially those nearby. It is better still to have good relations. It is also better to have a relationship and a dialogue rather than minimal or no contact at all. This is basic to a rational working of the international system.

It also follows that as much as many of us might wish otherwise, we have not materially weakened the grip of Cuba’s rulers but only deepened the economic difficulties of its population. These, after all, are the relatives and friends of the Cuban-American community. And this stiffened policy has split opinion within that community as never before.

Next, the potentially significant development of oil resources in the Cuban straits poses another question for us: Why are we leaving the economic opportunities in Cuba as an open field to other state actors, such as China, when as Cuba’s next-door neighbor we are the logical market and source of capital investment and even agricultural exports? We may already have missed the bus in important ways. Canada and Spain are working there on tourism and retirement opportunities. Venezuela and China have replaced the Soviets as sources of economic support.

A step toward normalized relations places America in a better position to mentor political and economic development on the island in the post-Castro era. Such a step would fit seamlessly into an effort to establish more positive relations within our Hemisphere, especially with states to our south that have often bridled at the overshadowing power of their northern neighbor.

What should we do? This writer agrees with comments made in recent years by our former U.S. representative in Cuba, Vicki Huddleston, that the first positive step should be to walk the cat back in our relations with Cuba to the relatively more permissive regime followed by President Clinton in the latter half of his administration (when some sanctions were imposed following the 1996 downing, with four fatalities, over Cuba of two civilian anti-Castro aircraft out of Florida).

And as Mrs. Huddleston wrote in the Miami Herald this spring: “Removing the barriers to communications and to normal diplomatic relations are not concessions as some would claim. Rather, they are practical initiatives that will reduce the dependence of the Cuban people on the Cuban state by providing them with alternative sources of information and resources to improve their daily lives.”

The Bush administration took the regrettable steps of tightening further still any contacts between the United States and Cuba, of making exchanges between scholars and cultural groups more difficult, of reducing the frequency of permitted visits even of American citizens of Cuban origin or ancestry with their relatives on the island, and of restricting, at least putatively, the flow of remittances from Cuban-Americans to their relatives on the island. All this has wreaked hardship on the ordinary people of Cuba without a noticeable diminution of the Castro government’s control in Cuba.

As we seek to roll back to where we were prior to 2001, and perhaps further still eventually, we should expect reciprocity from Cuba’s government. We should proceed softly and slowly and from a position of strength but with positive intentions and a desire to find the most constructive possible relationship.

We should further quietly urge that the Cuban government reconsider some basic internal policies of its own. Obviously, there is the matter of measures taken against internal dissidents. A more permissive attitude on the part of the authorities, taken at their own initiative and without tub-thumping demands from us, should be met with reciprocal relaxations of restrictions on our part.

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