The reason for the politics-or-policy muddle may be that Cuba occupies an odd place in the American mind. From Teddy Roosevelt to Jimmy Buffett, with contributions from Ernest Hemingway, Meyer Lansky and the U.S. officers who first mixed rum and Coke to form a cuba libre, Americans have spent nearly a century confused about whether Cuba is really a foreign country at all. But it is, and over the years America’s proprietary attitude has bred resentment. Castro’s appeals to Cuban national-ism – burnished, of course, by the memory of the Bay of Pigs – may be, more than anything else, what has secured his position on the island.
For Bill Clinton to treat Cuba as a domestic issue is an oddity in itself: Clinton couldn’t win Florida in 1992, and he hasn’t a prayer in 1996. Still, the administration is trying to “demagnetize” America and persuade potential refugees to stay at home. It won’t work. Haitians’ average annual income is about $400, Cubans’ about $2,000 and Floridians’ more than $20,000. For Caribbean islanders, Miami is like sex: even when it’s bad, it’s good, and about as hard to “demagnetize.” All this hands the initiative to Castro. As the old man made plain last week, Cuba is not Haiti. Cuba has a government that can turn the flow of refugees on and off like a spigot – as Castro has now implied he will.
The confusions in U.S. policy might be bearable if the Cuban crisis were entering its endgame – if Castro were dying, if the recent riots were to become widespread, if the regime were so close to collapse that Havana would soon replace Prague as the place that every smart twentysomething wants to visit. But few knowledgeable observers – including those within the U.S. intelligence community – think that Castro’s position is under serious threat. True, as communism collapsed in Europe, Cuba had an economic catastrophe. But independent forecasters now predict modest growth this year. Tourist arrivals are double the levels of the late 1980s, while European, Canadian and – especial-ly – Mexican investors are piling in. The Mexican company Grupo Domos recently paid $743 million for 49 percent of Cuba’s state telecommunications firm, and flights from Mexico City to Havana are loaded with entrepreneurs.
If Castro’s position is relatively secure, a policy driven by Florida and immigration won’t budge him. That is why, by the end of last week, State Department officials were arguing that the endgame needed something more to nudge it along. Clinton reiterated his unwillingness to talk to Castro about anything but immigration, but a senior State Department official says that once Clinton has “faced Castro down” on the boat people, the president is likely to set out a road map for better relations.
In all likelihood, the Clinton administration will then offer – as a second-term Bush administration would probably have done – a deal whose nub is free elections in Cuba in return for American economic assistance (Castro will never hold free elections while his economy is subject to the U.S. embargo). But for such a deal to happen, both sides need to discard some cherished myths about the other. Castro will have to stop blaming America for everything but the common cold (as he did in his interminable speech last week). And America will have to think of Cuba not in terms of romance, casinos and marlin, but as a place with the potential to be as successful as East Asia’s economic dragons. For that is what Cuba – with its high levels of health and education and an exiled business community scared of nobody – could easily be. Then, rather than calculating how many boat people equal a crisis, algebra could be put to better uses: like figuring how many tourists multiplied by how much foreign investment would buy Cubans how many new American cars. Memo to the president: sensible foreign policy can be good domestic politics, too.
