Are We Ready for a New Policy on Cuba?

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 11:19 AM on May 20, 2008.

For a couple of generations, every major presidential candidate, from both parties, has taken the same position on U.S. policy towards Cuba: keep the status quo. The embargo needs to stay in place in order to “keep the pressure” on Castro. Any thawing in relations would be a victory for a brutal thug, and would enrage a powerful voting bloc (Cuban Americans) in a key electoral state (Florida).

With that in mind, no candidate has been willing to talk openly about a change. I distinctly remember in 2004 when Wesley Clark said in a debate he wanted a dramatic shake-up in the existing policy. “When you isolate a country, you strengthen the dictators in it,” Clark said. The next day, Clark’s campaign backpedaled, after aides heard from supporters in Miami.

This year, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama went out on a limb and said the status quo isn’t good enough, and had the audacity to point that the current policy doesn’t actually work. They no doubt expected Republicans to try to exploit this, but made the case anyway.

Dodd stepped aside in January, but Obama is poised to be the first Democratic candidate in a half-century to offer a real change when it comes to Cuba. Today, John McCain intends to smack him on it pretty hard in a speech in Miami.

In an indication that John McCain sees foreign policy as the best route to take on Barack Obama — and that he will take it frequently — McCain is set to roll out another tough attack, with a speech today to the Cuban community in Miami. At the rate things are going, the McCain camp will be hitting Obama on some new foreign policy point every day.

“Just a few years ago, Senator Obama had a very clear view on Cuba,” McCain will say, according to prepared excerpts, then quoting Obama saying that normalization of relations would improve conditions for the Cuban people.

“Now Senator Obama has shifted positions and says he only favors easing the embargo, not lifting it. He also wants to sit down unconditionally for a presidential meeting with Raul Castro. These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators — there is no need to undertake fundamental reforms, they can simply wait for a unilateral change in US policy.”

It’s obviously an off-shoot of the debate over Iran — McCain believes the silent treatment is an effective foreign policy in relation to rivals and enemies; Obama believes the opposite.

Indeed, McCain is apparently prepared to argue that Bush’s policy towards Cuba hasn’t been far enough to the right.

Bloomberg reported today:

Commemorating Cuban Independence Day, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee seeks to distance himself from President George W. Bush’s Cuba policy by taking a tougher stance while also criticizing Barack Obama’s approach as too accommodating.

The Arizona senator said the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba must remain in place until basic elements of democratic society are established.

As for Obama’s willingness to change U.S. policy and consider diplomacy with Cuba, McCain will say open discussions “would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators.”

The conventional wisdom suggests McCain’s criticism will be well received in South Florida, and Obama will face a serious push-back on this. But I’m not at all sure the conventional wisdom is right on this. Michael Tomasky noted yesterday:

[Obama] has signalled that he’d dramatically alter the US’s hard-line Cuba policy. He’s not alone in thinking it’s outdated. Brent Scowcroft, a Republican foreign-policy high priest who worked for George Bush Sr, said last week that the American embargo “makes no sense” any more.

This freaks some people out. And in electoral terms, it makes them think that Obama has thrown away Florida, home of a large, conservative Cuban-American community. But Florida’s Latino population is no longer majority-Cuban. And just this month, the news broke that more Latinos in Florida are Democrats than Republicans — a major historical shift. Could it be that Obama is on to something?

Maybe so. In fact, Obama’s willingness to break with a failed status quo may turn out to be a political winner after all.

It doesn’t get a lot of attention, but there’s a big distinction between Cuban exiles who fled to the United States and their children’s generation. The younger Cuban-Americans are far less conservative, and far more open to a policy change. Obama assumes, probably correctly, that the older generation isn’t going to vote for a Democrat anyway, so why not shake up the dynamic by reaching out with a common-sense policy that has the added benefit of appealing to younger Cuban-American voters?

Miami Democrats like Elena Freyre, a Cuban-American art gallery owner in Little Havana, say they’ve been trying to tell Democratic candidates to stop parroting the hard-line position. “Obama’s people were the first who ever said to me on the phone, ‘Wait, let me get a pen and write that down,’” says Freyre. “He’s the first to have the cojones to say Bush’s policy is wrong, and I think it’s going to wake up a lot of moderate Cuban-American voters.”

McCain assumes the rules haven’t changed in decades. We’ll see soon enough if he’s right.

Tagged as: foreign policy, barack obama, john mccain, cuba