-
1. U.S. Policy toward Latin America since 1959: How Exceptional Is Cuba?
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 U.S. Policy toward Latin America since 1959 How Exceptional Is Cuba? Lars Schoultz U.S. policy toward revolutionary Cuba has differed from its policy toward the rest of Latin America. The United States suspended normal diplomatic relations with the island’s revolutionary government on January 3, 1961, and when President Eisenhower handed the White House over to John Kennedy three weeks later, he also passed along an admonition: “We cannot let the present government there go on.”1 That was eleven presidents ago. In contrast, the U.S. refusal to recognize the Soviet Union lasted only sixteen years, and nonrecognition of the People’s Republic of China lasted only twenty-two. And Washington has not simply declined to have normal diplomatic relations with Havana for half a century; it has also spent most of the past five decades trying to overthrow the island’s government. There is no situation even remotely like this in the two-century history of U.S. policy toward the rest of Latin America. But despite this unprecedented half-century estrangement and Washington ’s early history of sabotaging Cuban power plants, torching Cuban sugar fields, and arming anti-Castro assassins, the United States has a typical-looking six-story glass building in Havana packed with what appear to be normal Foreign Service officers. Until 1961 it was called the U.S. embassy; it reopened in 1977 as the United States Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland, and although the chief of this interests section is a U.S. Foreign Service officer, formally he or she is a “counselor” of the government of Switzerland. The Cubans have the same arrangement in their “embassy” building on Sixteenth Street in Washington, a few blocks from the White House. 14 · Lars Schoultz The human contacts between Cuban and U.S. nationals are equally unusual : since January 16, 1961, the U.S. government has banned its nationals (citizens and legal permanent residents) from stepping foot in Cuba without first obtaining permission. But this travel ban is open to legal challenge, so Washington has used instead the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act to prohibit unlicensed U.S. nationals from spending money in Cuba. Even if U.S. citizens have a legal right to go to Cuba—the courts have not yet issued an unambiguous ruling on this matter—they cannot legally pay for a Cuban visa, a Cuban taxi ride from the airport, a Cuban hotel, a Cuban meal, a Cuban telephone call, a Cuban anything. Everyone understands that this is simple legal legerdemain—the use of an obscure law to achieve an end (a travel ban) that the courts might not otherwise permit under the Constitution—but it has worked. Or has it? Since the 1970s, regularly scheduled (but nominally “chartered ”) flights have carried U.S. nationals from Miami to Havana, albeit with more difficulty at some times than others. One of the less difficult times came at the very end of the twentieth century, when the Clinton administration granted general travel licenses to members of almost any nonprofit organization that submitted its request on letterhead stationery, and individuals without an organizational affiliation could obtain a specific license for almost any type of educational, cultural, or humanitarian purpose—even to examine seashell diversity on Cuban beaches or to write an article about Cuban rum for the hometown newspaper. Only formal tourism remained prohibited, but the tourist industry quickly overcame that obstacle by arranging “educational” travel packages for alumni clubs, horticultural societies, and local Friends of the Zoo chapters. In late 1999 the first direct flight from New York City in nearly four decades landed in Havana, where arriving passengers found that the week’s entertainment options included a concert series by the Milwaukee Symphony. Although President George W. Bush sharply curtailed this Clinton-era travel, on a typical day in early 2008 the flight monitors at Miami International Airport displayed the departure times of four morning “charter” flights to Havana, one of them a 175-passenger Boeing 737, and every seat was taken by a licensed traveler. The Obama administration returned to the lax Clinton policy, permitting everything short of tourism and allowing nonstop, regularly scheduled “charter” flights from an expanded list of U.S. airports. In no other Latin American country has the United States ever had an embassy that is not an embassy, or regularly scheduled flights that should not exist (but do—so long as everyone agrees not to call them “regularly [3.80...