Cuba and Joe Biden’s Tragic Mistake

A weakened Joe Biden finally withdrew his candidacy for November’s presidential election and announced that he would back Vice President Kamala Harris. His term having ended disastrously, assessments will roll out over time. This editorial, written a few days before Biden’s announcement, is a negative appraisal of the United States’ relationship with Cuba under his presidency.

Among Joe Biden’s most regrettable foreign policy decisions is his refusal to reestablish the bridges that Barack Obama built with Cuba and that Donald Trump was quick to demolish when he took office in January 2017.

On a historic visit to Havana in March 2016, at the end of his second term and when the Castros’ reign was nearing an end, Obama stated his desire to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.” America eased its restrictions on air travel and the two nations reopened their embassies in Washington and Havana. The U.S. removed Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism, and in a momentous and capitalist decision, the U.S. allowed Cuba to do business with American banks, the cornerstone of the international financial system. It was a fundamental shift — even if the economic embargo in place since 1962 on the authoritarian Cuban regime was not expressly lifted — that undercut the policy of strangulation advocated by American diplomat Lester D. Mallory in a memorandum from April 6, 1960, pushing to “deny Cuba money and supplies, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Under the influence of Florida politicians like Marco Rubio, and the still influential Cuban-American and anti-Castro lobby in Miami, Trump reinstated travel restrictions and reclosed access to American banks. A few days before leaving the White House in January 2021, Trump restored Cuba’s designation as a state “sponsor of terrorism.” As a result, 62 years later, “el bloqueo” (the blockade) remains in place, and the Communist Party of Cuba is still standing, despite all the blows.

If Cuba passes more or less completely under the news radar, it is now in an even worse state of economic and social decline than the one following the collapse of the Soviet big brother in the early 1990s.

Endless power cuts, runaway inflation, severe shortages of gasoline, medicines and food staples (chicken, rice, flour, etc.) — there is a lack of everything. The state is bled dry, the agricultural sector has collapsed, and tourism, the main source of cash on the island, has not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. A wave of migration has swept the island, and it is every man for himself. Some 500,000 Cubans out of a total population of 11 million reached the U.S. between 2022 and 2023, primarily by boat to the Florida coast; others, on foot via Nicaragua where they have been allowed to enter without a visa since 2021.

Last week, the Cuban government, led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel, delivered a detailed action plan for economic recovery to Parliament for a vote, based essentially on magical thinking, given the lack of resources. As hunger kills fear, to quote an exiled Cuban journalist, popular discontent is rising — and organizing in an unprecedented fashion around internet access — against a regime that is consequently stifling it by means of excessive repression. In March, protests were reported in cities in the southeast of the island. Three years after the protest of July 11, 2021, the largest to take place in 30 years, 1,000 political prisoners are still being held behind bars, with some serving sentences of up to 25 years.

Havana has every right to denounce the U.S. and the “Miami mafia” for its miseries and those of its people. Cubans blame the embargo for everything, and the Cuban regime readily exploits this. But, if life in Cuba is so impossible today, the blockade is objectively responsible for it. There is an obvious causal link from the embargo to massive migration.

Should Trump, with his anticommunist, uninformed, low-level lexicon, retake the presidency on Nov. 5, these deleterious dynamics would only deepen. The reactionary Republican spectacle held last week in Milwaukee could only have struck fear in the hearts of many Cubans, given how much their fate remains tied to the election process at work in the key state of Florida. Long held by the Democrats, the state turned Republican during the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, when Trump won even the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade county. The outlook is all the more grim now, in a context where Trumpism has normalized the far right and where militants from the neofascist group Proud Boys, key players in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, have seats on the Republican Executive Committee in Miami-Dade.

Out of irresolution and electoral calculus, Biden did not follow in Obama’s footsteps. He has failed on the Cuban question.