Response to Jorge Dominguez

It is a bold adversary indeed who chooses to cross swords with so accomplished a scholar of Cuba as Jorge I. Dominguez. No one who has studied the island can fail to remain in his debt for the industry, lucidity, and historical imagination that he brings to all his work. And although his politics are not my own, I often find him admirably balanced. In many ways, indeed, all of these virtues (and some others besides) are present in his article, "U.S.-Cuban Relations: From the Cold War to the Colder War" (Journal of Interamerican Studies 39, 3, Fall 1997). However, I cannot help dissenting from some of the propositions contained therein.

The first has to do with Dominguez' characterization of Cuba's insertion in the international arena during the heyday of its alliance with the Soviet Union. He describes "Cuba's activist foreign policy"-that is, its penchant for intervening militarily in venues far from its own territoryas inspired both by a desire to prove itself the most valuable and enthusiastic of the Soviet Union's allies and by an effort to "protect itself from hostile U.S. policies." No one would argue with the first of these propositions, but the second? Is it really true that Cuba's efforts in Angola and elsewhere protected it from "hostile U.S. policies"? One would have thought quite the opposite. After all, by the mid-1970s, the Ford administration had begun the process of normalization, and full resumption of diplomatic relations by its successor was sidetracked only by Castro's decision to intervene in Africa. Even the Reagan administration toyed with the idea of accepting "socialism in one island," to the extent of dispatching General Vernon Walters to meet with Castro and Secretary of State Alexander Haig to sound out Cuban Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez in semisecrecy in Mexico City. The problem was that Castro didn't want normal relations with the United States. The price of the ticket-to abandon his "internationalist" mission-was simply too high. As General Walters told Castro's biographer, Georgie Anne Geyer, "it would reduce him to the status of the president of the Dominican Republic." In that sense, Cuba's activist foreign policy should be understood not as a means of protecting itself against hostile U.S. policies, but rather the opposite: ensuring that U.S. policies remained hostile, particularly when it looked as if those policies might moderate.

With regard to the domestic vectors shaping policy in both countries I have no particular argument, though I believe that Dominguez overestimates somewhat the degree to which our own Cuban policy is purely the result of a shell game played by a handful of activists who know how to exploit occasional windows of opportunity. The fact is that on this issue, the Cuban American community and its allies in both parties are operating in an extremely favorable ideological environment. Support for the lineaments of our policy is far broader than Dominguez suggests, and includes even the AFL-CIO. Concretely, repeated public opinion polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not like Castro or the Cuban government. Indeed, in a survey conducted in 1995 by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the Cuban dictator himself ended up geographically equidistant in public disesteem between Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat. It may indeed be unfair and inconsistent that Americans, whether ordinary citizens or members of Congress, are not similarly exercised about the dictatorships in North Korea, China, Vietnam, or other unpleasant places-I have heard this complaint more than once from Cuban diplomats-but Cuba is, after all, 90 miles from our shores, and it forms part of a community of nations which one could reasonably expect to conform to rather higher standards of political and human rights performance.

This leads me to the third point. I think that Dominguez is right to see our Cuban policy within the framework of our general approach to Latin America, but his resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary (that is, the precommunist sources of American "hegemonism") to explain current developments, while clever, misses an important point. During the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. policy toward the region evolved from a no-questions-asked attitude toward friendly authoritarian governments to active promotion of democracy, free elections, and the development of civil society. The result is that for the first time in memory, every country in Latin America except Cuba has an elected government, opposition parties, and the beginnings of an open society. To be sure, these happy eventualities served broader U.S. geopolitical goals, but what of it? In the end, the peoples of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, not to mention Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, unquestionably came out ahead. If the United States is so persistent in the case of Cuba, it is not merely a desire to settle old scores but to impose a minimal level of coherence on its policies for Latin America as a whole. A return to the Estrada doctrine would overturn all the progress we have made over the last 20 years in convincing potential coup makers in Latin America that we really mean business about democracy and the rule of law.

To say, as Dominguez does, that the United States has always sought to dictate the domestic political arrangements of its southern neighbors is both true and yet irrelevant. After all, there is a big difference between intervening in a country (or applying various external sanctions) to force it to dismantle authoritarian institutions and sending troops to protect friendly dictator-clients, U.S. investments, or public order. The difference consists not merely in the motivation but in the probable end result, as the most recent cases of Panama and Haiti make clear. Moreover, given the vast asymmetry of power between Cuba and the United States-or, for that matter, between the United States and any Caribbean principality-any U.S. policy is bound to be "interventionist" whether we will it or not. The task for U.S. policy is to choose the right goals, not to pretend that all states are created equal or that there is some magical juridical technique by which we can reduce our specific geostrategic weight vis-a-vis Cuba (or anyone else).

With regard to Helms-Burton, I agree with Dominguez that some of the requirements it lays down for Cuba to gain U.S. recognition and an end to the embargo do, in fact, "go well beyond any internationally recognized criteria for the determination of democratic or transitional democratizing governments under the charter of the United Nations or the Organization of American States." I would even concede that several of them, such as the one dealing with the restoration of property to Cuban Americans who were not U.S. citizens at the time of the expropriation, may contravene international law; it is certainly imprudent from a practical policy standpoint, inasmuch as it frightens ordinary Cubans into thinking that they will lose what little they have in the event that "Miami" seizes control of the island after Castro's demise.

However, I would not want to depend too heavily on criteria "for the determination of democratic ... governments" as promulgated either by the United Nations or the Organization of American States. The latter, it will be recalled, could not even decide whether a de facto government in Panama loyal to General Noriega was or was not the legal successor of the civilian regime it overthrew. Certainly insofar as regimes of the left are concerned, the record of insensitivity, blindness, and disingenuousness of almost all international organizations is such as to provide no useful standard for U.S. policy on Cuba.

I would not want to take the list of requirements too literally, however. Once there is a definite sign of genuine liberalization in Cuba, the political coalition in the United States behind Helms-Burton will immediately begin to break up, as individual elements seek to position themselves favorably in the new context. Stated another way, in practical political terms, no Cuban government need fulfill all of the requirements of Helms-Burton to begin a thawing of relations with the United States, because once the process of liberalization has begun, it will assume its own momentum; and such is the nature of these processes that once begun there will be no turning back.

The authors of Helms-Burton drafted their bill with such maddening specificity because at the time, the Castro lobby and its friends in the media were putting it about that Castro's limited opening to foreign investment "proved" that a genuine political transition was already under way. Jorge Dominguez may even recall a remarkable article to this effect by Wayne Smith in Foreign Affairs, which likened Castro's Cuba to-of all places!Franco's Spain. The authors of Helms-Burton therefore felt it necessary to sketch out in some detail what an ideal transition might look like. Perhaps the list in its entirety is too much for Dominguez (or even myself), but even he would agree, I'm sure, that there is not a single item on it that the Cubans have achieved to date.

At the end of his article, Dominguez asks why, given the unremitting hostility of the United States toward the Castro regime, we have not invaded Cuba. He offers three explanations: the Cuban army would put up a costly resistance; other powers have succeeded in restraining the United States; a series of "confidence-building" measures between the two governments and military establishments has somewhat defused the potential for conflict.

I would not want to hazard a definitive judgment on the fighting qualities of the Cuban army or its willingness to protect its homeland, and I would urge others to exercise similar caution. I can recall similar comments made about the potential to exact a high human cost in casualties in the cases of Panama and even Haiti, both of which, in the event, turned out to be false. Cuba is not, of course, either of those countries, but neither is it Germany, Iraq, or even Afghanistan. Nor are the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to be compared with the forces the Cubans have become used to fighting in Africa. May I even advance the heretical thought that it is not impossible that, given the demoralization of the Cuban people after nearly 40 years of shortages, repression, and an endless monologue from Beloved Leader, they might well hail an invading U.S. army as saviors and liberators. Even if they were willing to put up serious resistance, however, the prospect of casualties would not effectively deter a U.S. invasion, provided that some U.S. administration thought there was a compelling reason to enter Cuba by force. The recent case of the Gulf War establishes that without difficulty.

I am totally unconvinced that the active participation of other international actors-whether it be the OAS, the European Union, Canada, Mexico, or anyone else-constitutes a serious restraining factor with regard to a potential U.S. invasion of Cuba. Such bodies were unable to prevent Washington from going into Grenada or Panama when it judged both to be appropriate venues of conflict, and even an administration as apparently solicitous of international organizations as the present one would, I am certain, overrule their objections if it felt a genuine case of U.S. national interest was at stake.

The third proposition-"confidence-building measures"-is valid insofar as the migration accords are concerned, but trivial in other respects.

I agree with Dominguez that a U.S. invasion of Cuba is unlikely, but for different reasons. The first is that the United States made a firm commitment not to do so in the Kennedy-Khrushchev accords in 1962. True, the party with which we made the agreement no longer exists, and Cuba was not a signatory. Nonetheless, the way the United States rigorously observed those obligations during a period of maximum Cuban provocation suggests, I think, that we are even less likely to break our commitments now that Cuba no longer constitutes a serious geopolitical threat. At a minimum, I think Dominguez should give the United States more credit for its forbearance and remarkable restraint in the face of a small country that has made hatred of us, our values, our way of life, our most essential interests its only national creed. If we were really the country that Radio Havana says we are, its transmitters would have been shut down by the Marines a long time ago.

The second reason is that the United States does not want to have to administer Cuba as an occupied territory. That would be a nasty, unpleasant, and expensive business. Given the shattered state of the Cuban economy and its civil society, postwar reconstruction would be extremely costly and could conceivably stretch out for many years to come, obligating the United States to feed, clothe, house, and provide medical treatment for 11 million people. The bill for such a project would be frankly incalculable. And, as the recent case of Haiti illustrates, once in, we might never find our way out.

The third reason is perhaps the most important. U.S. policy proceeds on the assumption that the Castro regime is a rotten fruit that, in time, will fall from the tree of its own accord. I still believe that this is fundamentally the case, if for no other reason than that Fidel Castro is as mortal as the rest of us, and I do not believe that his regime can survive his person; indeed, I am not even certain that it will not expire before him. Whatever the case, only a post-Castro regime that emerges from within Cuba, with leadership that has spent virtually the entire period on the island, has any hope of establishing a new legitimacy. For the United States to intervene militarily and select Castro's successors would condemn them to impotence, as the case of Panama's Guillermo Endara illustrates (and, let us remember, Endara was elected).

To wait upon Castro's demise is a gamble, to be sure, but it is one that the United States, at least, can easily afford. We are not going to experience national bankruptcy because a few Spanish or Mexican hoteliers get the jump on Radisson or Holiday Inn, and our national libido will not go into remission just because superannuated Italian gigolos have replaced U.S. sailors as the principal clientele for Cuban jineteras. Indeed, we may actually reap some advantage from our restraint later on, when Cubans are fully able to come to terms with those countries that took unfair advantage of extreme poverty and desperation by striking a deal with a heartless tyranny.

I should like to conclude with a remark about Cuban sovereignty. Like many commentators on Cuba, Jorge Dominguez has a tendency to conflate the country and its government. In some ways this is understandable, because Castro has all but destroyed civil society; his government is therefore the only visible interlocutor at this time. However, just because Castro confuses his own needs and those of his immediate entourage with Cuba's national interests, there is no particular reason why we should do so as well. Throughout the twentieth century, terms like "sovereignty," "independence," "mutual respect," and "nonintervention" have more often than not been conscripted in the service of Latin American governments that were not only illegitimate but deeply unpopular, and U.S. diplomacy has been ill counseled to accept such claims at face value. Cuba may not be an exception. As the emigre Cuban writer Norberto Fuentes remarked to me, Castro has exploited the icons of Cuban nationalism so cynically and relentlessly as to devalue their ultimate meaning for generations to come.

To be sure, not everyone who visits Cuba these days agrees with that judgment. A number of returning U.S. visitors-some of them conservatives-have assured me that they found Cubans deeply proud of their defiance of the United States and of the independence they have wonan independence even more evident since the disappearance of the Soviet Union. If these people are right, and independence and sovereignty are in fact the highest operative values in Cuba, then surely they are best served by the status quo, not by a rapprochement with the United States. Whether those values best serve the welfare of the Cuban people is quite another matter. As Marifeli Perez-Stable has written, "if at present Cuba enjoys unlimited sovereignty, it is well worth asking if independence is such a lofty ideal that it is worth maintaining at any price." Cubans, she says, ought to ask themselves "if it would not in fact be worthwhile to sacrifice a few degrees of sovereignty to achieve a higher standard of living and a less tense domestic political environment." That is indeed an interesting question, and one cannot help feeling that nowadays many Cubans, including even functionaries of the Castro regime, must be pondering it.

REFERENCES

Geyer, Georgie Anne. 1991. Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro. Boston: Little, Brown.

Perez-Stable, Marifeli. 1997. Cuba en los albores del siglo XXI. In La isla al fin del

siglo: Cuba y el futuro de su libertad, ed. Julian A. Torrente. n.p. 44. Smith, Wayne S. 1996. Cuba's Long Reform. Foreign Affairs 75, 2 (March-April): 99-112.

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