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TEN YEARS AFTER NORMALIZATION WITH CUBA, TRUMP HARDLINERS TAKE CUBA
BACK IN TIME  
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Ed Augustin
December 20, 2024
Drop Site
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_ A decade after Obama’s normalization, Trump’s team looks to
ratchet up pressure on the island. _

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HAVANA — After two earthquakes, two hurricanes, and nationwide
blackouts these last few months, Cubans thought things couldn’t get
any worse.

Now, Cubans are now bracing for another Donald Trump presidency with
Marco Rubio, the Cuban American Florida senator known for his hardline
stance towards the island, his secretary of state. Other Cuban
Americans on the Trump transition team have made clear that collective
punishment of regular Cubans will be ratcheted up further.

It’s all a stark contrast to a decade ago, when President Barack
Obama and Cuban President Rául Castro surprised the world with a
historic announcement that the two countries would normalize
relations. In Havana, church bells rang out, strangers hugged each
other in the street, weeping with joy, and people partied late into
the night. Obama consummated the new marriage by taking in a Cuban
baseball game. It felt like the end of an era, the phasing out of an
historical anachronism. As the Cold War faded, so too, it seemed, must
the embargo.

Then came Trump. The first Trump administration bulldozed engagement,
returning the U.S. to its historic posture of regime change towards
the Cuban government, and cranking up the economic war against the
island. Rather than revive the normalization process, the Biden
administration, as Drop Site previously chronicled
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doubled down on Trump’s policy.

How did the two countries get from the optimistic, heady days of 2014
to the desperate situation today?

FROM BREAKTHROUGH TO OVERTHROW

In 2016, Obama became the first U.S. president to visit the island
since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. He visited the re-inaugurated
U.S. embassy in Havana, and connected so well with Cubans that people
joked that if he were to stand in free and fair elections in their
country, he'd win. Addressing Raúl Castro directly in the Grand
Theatre of Havana, in a speech broadcast on the island, he said: “I
believe my visit here demonstrates you do not need to fear a threat
from the United States.”

“Obama changed the paradigm,” said Fulton Armstrong, the former
National Intelligence Officer for Latin America, by “rejecting 60
years of failed efforts of forcing regime change in Cuba, and becoming
open to peaceful coexistence and evolutionary change based on both
countries’ interests.”

Critically, Obama went to Florida to argue the case. Though polls had
consistently found
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most Americans favored diplomatic and normal trade relations with the
island, conventional wisdom was that, in the all-important
battleground state of Florida, the hardline Cuban American diaspora
would always oppose any detente with the regime. But a younger
generation of Cuban Americans had started to break the taboo of
returning to the island. In 2016, after both Obama and former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had argued their case in Miami,
polls showed for the first time that a narrow majority of Cuban
Americans in South Florida favored the new Cuba policy.

After his election in 2016, Donald Trump started smashing
normalization to pieces. He reportedly
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there was one priority on Cuba: “Make Marco Rubio happy,” which
resulted in the Florida senator choosing the personnel who wrote
policy towards the country. Mauricio Claver-Carone, a former lobbyist
who dedicated his career to hardening the sanctions, was installed in
2018 as senior director of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the White
House’s National Security Council. He set about filling in the holes
the Obama administration had punctured in the embargo.

 
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_Marco Rubio on Twitter in 2017: “Picture of the night @MarioDB and
I hammered out the new Cuba policy.”_

Claver-Carone also penned more than 200
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“maximum pressure” sanctions, which cranked up the economic war on
the island to unprecedented heights. Title III of the 1996 Helms
Burton Act was activated. This allowed Americans and U.S. corporations
to sue companies that benefited from property they had owned before
the Cuban government’s mass nationalization campaign in the 1960s.
Cruise lines that had docked in Cuban cities after a half-century
hiatus a few years earlier were sued for hundreds of millions of
dollars in Florida courts.

The State Department returned the island, without evidence
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to its list of state sponsors of terrorism. As Drop Site News
has previously reported
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this locked the island out of the world’s banking system.

These sanctions gored the island’s foreign earnings, which today are
just a third of what they were in 2019, according to official figures.
This has disproportionately damaged the lives of the most vulnerable:
rice and beans today come late if at all; children receive less milk;
infant mortality has risen as the budget for importing medicine has
more than halved.

But to shatter Obama’s normalization, the administration went well
beyond sanctions. According to a recent article
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investigative journalist Zach Dorfman, paramilitary experts were
consulted to work out how to sabotage Venezuelan oil deliveries to the
island, which are vital for keeping the lights on. The C.I.A. was
pressured to use a covert system to disable oil tankers shipping to
Cuba. The C.I.A. reportedly stood up to the pressure, but one imagines
that in his second term Trump will push US intelligence services even
harder.

Trump also expelled Cuban diplomats from Washington and shuttered the
newly reopened American embassy. This came after reports that
two-dozen diplomats, family members, and intelligence officers fell
ill. While the symptoms of headaches, dizziness and loss of balance
seem to have been reported in good faith, the administration said
these officials had been “attacked” by a sonic weapon. There was
never any compelling evidence to support the attacks claim, but the
Havana Syndrome narrative—hyped by hardliners and carried by
credulous media—proved decisive in scuppering normalization. Last
year an intensive review by U.S. intelligence agencies concluded
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was no evidence attacks ever took place.

On the 2020 campaign trail, Biden made many pledges to engage in a
progressive foreign policy that he never fulfilled. He said that the
Trump policies “harmed” Cubans and that he would shift back
towards the Obama policy. He never did. While the embassy was
restaffed, flights were increased, and remittances were loosened, his
administration kept the most powerful sanctions—the investment
chilling Helms Burton Title III and the evidence-free state sponsor of
terrorism label—in place.

HOW BIDEN GOT CUBA SO WRONG

From the get-go, the top brass in the Biden State Department saw the
Cuba policy they inherited as a foreign policy failure. But after poor
2020 electoral performances in south Florida, the White House
prevented them from acting, according to three Obama administration
officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Fear of Florida simmered in Biden’s inner circle. Ron Klain, the
White House chief of staff from 2020 to 2023, had been shaped by the
Elián Gonzalez scandal of 2000, in which a seven-year-old boy was
discovered in the Florida Straits and then repatriated to his father
in Cuba. That year, John Kerry lost the state, and with it the
presidency, by just 537 votes. Klain ran the Florida recount for the
Democrats: “I’ll never be over it,” he has said
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The administration said it would listen to Cuban Americans before
making policy. In practice, this meant ceding policy to hardliners,
like Cuban American New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez. At the beginning
of his political career in the ‘80s, Menendez had supported
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7, a Cuban American group, described by the FBI as America’s “most
dangerous terrorist organization” because of its bombing and
assassination campaigns in New Jersey and New York. This year,
Menendez was forced to resign as chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee after he was convicted of bribery, in which he
accepted gold and cash for political favors.

Throughout Biden’s term, so-called democracy promotion programs
(understood as regime change programs by the Cuban government) kept
pumping about $20 million dollars of federal funds a year, usually
through USAID, to organizations that try to shape Cuban politics.

In many countries USAID is fairly transparent about how money is
spent. But Cuba is one of the few countries in the world where it
operates not with the host government, but against it. Programs are
effectively covert.

Back during secret negotiations in 2014 AP revealed
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USAID had secretly been building a “Cuban Twitter” to organize
“smart mobs” on the island, as well as infiltrating
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island’s hip hop scene to spark unrest. But the Obama administration
left these programs untouched. Over the last decade, the offices of
senators like Menendez and Rubio, which hold sway over these programs,
had money channeled to conservative organizations that opposed
normalization. Dissident journalists, academics, musicians, and
artists in Cuba got some of the funds too; many were harassed by the
Cuban state.

In a recent publication, Armstrong, the former intelligence analyst,
argues these programs “influence U.S.-based audiences, think tanks,
and ultimately political deliberations.” Washington, he writes,
“is awash in information about Cuba that itself has directed. The
firewall between covert operations and policy is gone”

“The industry,” he said, “was crucial in keeping the Biden
people in the pocket of the anti-normalization crowd.”

On July 11, 2021, the state cracked down on the unprecedented
nationwide anti-government protests: hundreds of people received long
prison sentences. By this point the state could barely afford fuel to
keep the lights on, and protests started after a 12-hour power outage
in a small westerly town, and spread spontaneously throughout the
island, powered by now widely available mobile internet and amplified
by thousands of off-island Twitter bots. An ugly crackdown ensued. The
Biden administration would point to this as why moving on Cuba became
politically impossible, but the decision had been made long before.

Almost nobody benefits from the current policy. It’s hard to see how
even the U.S. national interest is advanced. The majority view of
people who work on Latin America within the national security and
intelligence agencies has long been that engagement is best for
American interests (Drop Site News has seen a letter calling for more
engagement sent to President Biden today by officials who led U.S.
diplomacy in Havana, crafted Obama's Cuba policy in the White House,
and determined terrorism designations at the State Department). The
current policy has driven the island further into the orbit of
adversaries Russia and China. This year a Russian submarine pulled
into exactly the same place American cruise liners used to dock.

Democrats haven’t benefited either. The policy has driven a
humanitarian crisis leading to historic migration out of the country.
The population has reduced
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more than a million since the pandemic, according to the Cuban
government, with more than than 670,000 Cubans making it to the U.S.,
according to Customs and Border Protection. This played into the
Republican’s hands by fueling the border crisis narrative. The
Democrats ended up getting trounced in Florida last month, losing by a
wider margin than in 2020 (two-thirds of Cuban Americans said they
would vote for Trump, according
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this year’s authoritative Florida International University poll).
For the foreseeable future, Florida has shifted from a battleground to
a red state.

The Trump-Biden policy has demonstrably undermined the human rights of
the Cuban people.

The last eight years have made a mockery of Obama’s entreaty for
Cuba to open up as it had “nothing to fear from the United
States”—allowing hardliners in Havana to say, “We told you so”
and making those who believed better relations with the U.S. were
possible look naive. Today, according to human rights organizations
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hundreds of Cubans are in jail for exercising their political and
civil rights—perhaps an order of magnitude more than a decade ago.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM RUBIO

Last month’s presidential election and the choice of Marco Rubio as
secretary of state was a double whammy for Cubans. But for hardliners
in Washington it heightened feelings of triumphalism. Carlos Trujillo,
ambassador to the Organization of American States during the first
Trump administration and now on the Trump transition team and jostling
for a post again, has bragged, “If you look at what happened in
Cuba, the total collapse of their economy was caused by the pressure
that President Trump implemented.”

Claver-Carone, who is also on the transition team, told the _Miami
Herald_ last month that “focus should be on modernizing Cuba
sanctions so that they can have third-party effects.”

Experts agree sanctions can be ramped up the even further. For
example, secondary sanctions could be implemented, in which the U.S.
could sanction foreign companies for doing business in Cuba even when
their business has no relation to the U.S. Hotels that run resorts in
Cuba and the U.S. or airlines that fly to both countries could be put
out of business unless they cease all business on the island.

But not everybody in the incoming administration has visceral feelings
against the island. Trump himself may be the wildcard. On the campaign
trail in 2015, the consummate wheeler-dealer whose foreign policy was
governed more by the last person he spoke to than by principle, said
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years is enough—the concept of opening with Cuba is fine. I think we
should have made a stronger deal.” The Trump trademark had even
been registered
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the island in 2008 to develop hotels, casinos and golf courses.

His own team has expressed openness to the island. Sergio Gor,
Trump’s incoming director of the Office of Personnel Management,
holidayed in Cuba in June 2017, memorializing the trip in a series of
Facebook posts.

 
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If Cuban American hardliners do get to control policy towards the
island, one area where it will jar with Trump pledges is migration.
The sanctions have already driven the biggest wave of Cubans to the
U.S.’s southern border in history. More sanctions continue this
trend. It’s unlikely Cuba will accept mass deportations. Cuban
Deputy Foreign Minister Fernando de Cossio said earlier this month
that plans to deport tens of thousands of Cubans living illegally to
the U.S. were “unrealistic” and “unfair.” It remains to be
seen whether the drive to reduce migration or the drive to further
hammer the island will win out. Marco Rubio will have far bigger
issues to deal with and by radically shifting his position on Ukraine
he has shown he is willing to volte face.

For Hal Klepak, professor emeritus of history and strategy at the
Royal Military College of Canada and Cuba expert, the situation on the
island today is “exactly the opposite” of the palpable joy and
belief that things could get better a decade ago. “People are quite
literally hopeless and see no possibility of light at the end of the
tunnel,” he said. The current situation “stimulates a lethargy and
an unwillingness to do anything other than flee.”

_Ed Augustin is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in
Havana._

_At a time when the world desperately needs hard-hitting journalism,
establishment and corporate media outlets are failing the public and
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