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Lee Anderson A New Cuba
Lee Anderson A New Cuba
Lee Anderson A New Cuba
A NEW CUBA
President Obamas plan normalized relations. It may also transform the
nation.
By Jon Lee Anderson
ne afternoon last
O spring, President
Obama sat on a stage at La
Obamas idea isnt to take America out of the
equation but to remove it as an excuse for Cuba
feeling trapped in its past.
Cervecera, a high-ceilinged
beer hall on Havana Harbor, where he had been invited to preside
over a gathering billed as an entrepreneurship and opportunity
event. Just a few hundred feet down the harbor wall was the spot
where, in 1960, a French cargo ship full of munitions exploded, in
a lethal blast for which Fidel Castro blamed the C.I.A. But no
one at La Cervecera was in the mood to dwell on history.
Obamas visit was the culmination of fifteen months of diplomatic
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Twenty-five
Dont be shy.
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young entrepreneurs who had an idea and acted on it. And in this
global economy it can take o.
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Fidel has been ocially out of power since 2008, when he handed
over his duties to his brother Ral, who is eighty-five. But he has
remained the elder statesman of Cubas revolution and, from the
beginning of the diplomatic rengagement with the United
States, has let it be known that he distrusts Americas intentions.
Soon after Obamas visit, he wrote an open letter in Granma, the
ocial organ of the Cuban Communist Party: Nobody should
be under the illusion that the people of this dignified and selfless
country will renounce the glory, the rights, or the spiritual wealth
they have gained. Despite years of financial privation, he insisted
that isolation was better than engaging with his old enemy. We
do not need the empire to give us anything, he said.
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Even so, Obama told me, the scenario in Trinidad was daunting.
Remember, when I came into oce Hugo Chvez was the
dominant political figure in Latin America, he said. A few years
earlier, when George W. Bush came to the summit to propose a
regional free-trade agreement, Chvez proclaimed that he had
brought a gravediggers shovel to bury it, inspiring protest rallies
that drew thousands of people. In the years since, he and his allies
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The act had exacerbated the conflicts between Cuba and the U.S.
for two decades. In the mid-nineties, before it was passed, Castro
and President Bill Clinton had exchanged exploratory messages,
using the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garca Mrquez as an
envoy. Then, in 1996, the Cuban Air Force shot down two small
U.S. aircraft o the Havana coast. The planes, flown by a
Miami-based exile organization called Brothers to the Rescue,
were on a mission to drop anti-Castro leaflets; the four men on
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them the right to own computers and cell phones. At first, his
fixes seemed dident and largely cosmetic. Then, in 2010, he
rolled out a series of major initiatives, allowing hundreds of
thousands of new cuentapropistasself-employed workers, such as
restaurateurs, barbers, and cabdriversto sell their services
directly to customers. More controversially, he laid o half a
million state employees and scheduled a Communist Party
Congress, Cubas first in fourteen years; the country, he said,
needed to discuss erroneous and unsustainable concepts about
socialism, stemming from the excessively paternalistic, idealistic,
and egalitarian approach instituted by the revolution in the
interest of social justice. In 2011, Cubans were given the right to
buy and sell their own homes and cars, to start an expanded range
of businesses, and to travel freelyall of which had been allowed
only with the permission of the government.
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declared that this summit would be the last one without Cuba
present.
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Ziga recalled, All the N.S.C. directors had been told to come
up with their big objectives, so I proposed a thing on Brazilalso
Mexico and Central America, which the President was going to
visit soon. Tom Donilon, the national-security adviser, called
Rhodes to his oce and remarked that he didnt see Cuba on the
proposal. I said, Lets not put this on paper, Rhodes recalled.
I told him that we were striking out on our own.
Obama met with Rhodes and Ziga and approved the secret
project. Ricardo and I basically designed a play in which we
would send a message to the Cubans through a discreet channel,
not through the State Department, indicating that the White
House was prepared to have a dialogue with them and that the
dialogue would be initially on issues relating to counterterrorism
and prisoners, Rhodes said. Which, in our view, if this went
nowhere and it got out, was unobjectionable: Who wouldnt want
to talk about counterterrorism and getting Alan Gross home? In
turn, the Cubans agreed to reveal the talks to only a few trusted
people in their own government. It was a very small circle,
Ziga said.
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The Cubans did not greet the Americans warmly. They didnt
really trust us, Rhodes recalled. Ziga had been the human-
rights ocer at the U.S. Interests Section, so they had a file on
him, I am sure, that was a mile long. At one point, Granma had
described him as a travelling salesman, distributing the most
backward, anti-Cuban ideas wherever he lands, and noted that
he was the grandson of a former ocial in a conservative
Honduran government (a rabid anti-Communist and a great
friend of United Fruit). Rhodes, with his shorter tenure in public
service, seemed to inspire little more confidence. I was just this
guy who I think they thought was a little dierent, but they didnt
know where that was going to lead, he said.
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while the Cubans insisted that the work he had been doing in
their country amounted to espionage.
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something done.
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Around that time, the C.I.A. told Ziga that one of its agents,
Rolando Sarra Trujillo, was imprisoned in Cuba, and it wanted
him back; Sarra, a senior Cuban Interior Ministry ocial, had
provided valuable intelligence to the agency before he was caught,
in 1995. Now that Ziga and Rhodes had a confirmed spy, they
could propose a direct exchange: Sarra for Gerardo Hernndez.
The Cubans indicated that they would consult in Havana, but, at
the next meeting, in January, 2014, they refused the oer. They
said they werent prepared to let him go, Ziga said. So at that
point we made a much bigger play. The Americans oered to
release Hernndez and several other intelligence agents, in a swap
that would also allow Gross to be freed. They didnt bite,
Ziga told me. We decided wed wait for them to come back
with a better answer. The wait lasted half a year.
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After the Vatican meeting, all that remained was cordination and
logistics. As Ziga and Rhodes finalized details, they were
obliged to let a few more people in the U.S. government know
what they were doing, and they were terrified, Ziga said, that
the news would leak at the last minute. It seemed too big to keep
under wraps, he told me. And we had peoples lives at stake. To
their astonishment, the secret held.
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change. You can show warmth and vitality; they are more used to
an authoritarian style from their leaders.
As it turned out, the Gran Teatro speech was the only event of
Obamas visit that was broadcast on Cuban television, and it was
not rebroadcast later. But Cuban-Americans had been pursuing a
similar outreach in Havana for years, advancing the idea that, as
Saladrigas said, economic rights are also human rights. With
funding from Miami, Cardinal Ortega and the Church set up an
N.G.O. called Cuba Emprende, which held workshops for
budding entrepreneurs in Havana and in the provincial cities of
Cienfuegos and Camagey. The workshops, which address
everything from marketing and management techniques to
applying for bank loans, have trained more than twenty-five
hundred Cubans, the majority of them women; about two-thirds
have gone on to run businesses. Saladrigas gave a guest lecture in
Havana as part of an international M.B.A. programthe first
public speech in Cuba by a Cuban exile. In an unmistakable signal
that the initiative had Rals blessing, he was asked to expand his
class to accommodate five Castro grandchildren. Afterward,
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Obama said, I suspect that the model that appeals to him most is
a China, Vietnam type of shift, where, slowly, market elements
are introduced but an authoritarian political system remains. He
suggested that such a strategy would be inherently short-lived.
China may be able to pull that o for a whilefor a pretty long
while, given the culture and the size of the country and its ability
to isolate itself from outside forces. Its very hard for a small
country to pull that o. Once you start being part of the global
economy and the global supply chain, things happen quickly.
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Would you like to see where the McDonalds will go? Morales
asked me. He pulled out his laptop and opened up a program; a
map of Cuba appeared, with a welter of little red tacks all over the
island.
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Perhaps the most persistent eort has been to fix the present by
symbolic attempts to mend the past. Obamas 2009 speech in
Cairo oered the Muslim world a new beginning, and he later
made similar gestures in other places where the U.S. has been at
war: Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam. This summer, he became the first
U.S. President to visit Hiroshima, seventy-one years after an
American plane dropped an atomic bomb there.
The opening with Cuba has been a victory for the Obama White
House, achieved at little cost. But even those who worked on it
speak of it as an incremental change. I dont think anyone
involved ever thought there would be a magic moment of change
in Cuba, Dan Restrepo told me. These guys have been playing
the same game for the past fifty-five years, and theyre good at it.
For the past year and a half, though, theyve been forced to play a
dierent kind of game.
Rhodes says that the eects of the opening have rippled through
the region: he points to the recent peace deal between the
Colombian government and the rebel group , which was
negotiated with help from both the U.S. and Cuba. But, even
though he believes that the opening with Cuba is in the first tier
of Obamas foreign-policy achievements, he says that its greatest
importance is symbolica belated reckoning with the outsized
role in historic events and the global imagination that Cuba
played in the Cold War.
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And so the intention here is not, as the Republicans like to call it,
engaging in apology tours. It is dignifying these countries
memories and their culture, and saying to them, We understand
your experience and your culture, and that is valid. And, once you
do that, if people think, he sees me, even if they disagree with
you, there is an openness to having a conversation.
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This article appears in other versions of the October 3, 2016, issue, with the
headline The Cuba Play.
WATCH: Nassar Shaikh searches for answers about his brother's murder in
a Sri Lankan hotel.
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