Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana

5. CARTER: Close, but No Cigar

155 5. carter Close, but No Cigar I always had a high opinion of Carter as a man of honor, an ethical man. . . . Carter was a man who wanted to fix the problems between the United States and Cuba. —Fidel Castro to biographer Ignacio Ramonet, 2008 “I have concluded that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba,” President Jimmy Carter ordered in Presidential Directive NSC-6, just weeks after his inauguration. “To this end, we should begin direct and confidential talks in a measured and careful fashion with representatives of the Government of Cuba.”1 No president before or since has made as determined an effort to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations. Carter’s personal belief in civil relations with friend and foe alike, Cuba’s reduced support for Latin American revolutions, and détente between the superpowers all led Carter toward normalization. “I felt then, as I do now, that the best way to bring about a change in its Communist regime was to have open trade and commerce, and visitation, and diplomatic relations with Cuba,” he told the authors in an interview at the Carter Center.2 Despite this clear presidential directive, the road to better relations was neither straight nor smooth. From the outset, senior U.S. officials were of two minds about the value of improving relations with Havana. And for Fidel Castro, improving relations with Washington was just one of several competing foreign policy objectives. At the National Security Council, a young new Ph.D. from Harvard, Robert A. Pastor, had just taken a job as National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s director for Latin America. In a briefing paper on Carter’s decision to normalize relations, Pastor wrote that senior officials were focused on the question of how to get the process moving. “That is the easy question,” Pastor warned. “The more difficult and important one . . . is not how to start the process, but rather how to manage it and keep it from getting stuck.”3 He could not have been more prescient. 156 Presidential Directive NSC-6, signed by Jimmy Carter on March 15, 1977, directing his government to work toward normalizing relations with Cuba. (Jimmy Carter Library and Museum) carter 157 Signals During the transition, Frank Mankiewicz met with President-elect Carter at Blair House and briefed him on Kissinger’s secret talks with Havana. “He was very interested,” Mankiewicz recalled, “and sent me to brief [incoming secretary of state] Cyrus Vance.”4 Even before the inauguration, the new administration began signaling its intentions to pick up where Kissinger left off. At his confirmation hearing on January 11, Vance called the trade embargo ineffective and added, “If Cuba is willing to live within the international system , then we ought to seek ways to find whether we can eliminate the impediments which exist between us and try to move toward normalization.”5 In late January, the Cubans sent a proposal through Swiss diplomats in Havana for talks on fishing and maritime boundaries, and Washington accepted .6 Both countries had adopted a two-hundred-mile commercial fishing zone; with Cuba just ninety miles from Florida and Cuba’s large commercial fishing fleet plying the waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast, talks were imperative. The State Department also announced that it hoped to discuss other issues, including renewal of the antihijacking treaty, which Cuba had abrogated after the terrorist bombing of Cubana flight 455.7 Less than a month after inauguration, Carter suspended reconnaissance flights over Cuba by SR-71 spy planes. Halting the flights did not seriously impair U.S. intelligence gathering—technological advances made it possible keep an eye on Cuba from satellites and offshore flights—but it was an important gesture to the Cubans, whose national dignity was offended by the routine violation of their airspace.8 In March, the State Department gave permission for basketball players from the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State University to travel to Cuba for exhibition games. Shortly thereafter, Secretary Vance allowed the ban on travel to Cuba by U.S. residents to expire (along with the ban on travel to three other countries).9 “The minuet begins,” said a U.S. official.10 In an interview with journalist Bill Moyers, Castro said that Carter struck him as a man with “a sense of morals” and that Cuba and the United States did not have to “live...