What can be expected by way of “changes” in the Cuban system ?

Obama’s Cuban Two-Step

by Juan de Onis

President Obama has launched a new approach to Cuba based not only on the failure of the United States economic embargo to bring down the Castro regime but on a larger vision of more constructive US relations with Latin America. 

Obama’s re-engagement with Cuba won immediate support from governments all across the Latin American political spectrum. 

“Fantastic,” said President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil when she heard the news, remarking that the change provided new opportunities for greater cooperation in inter-American relations. 

It remains to be seen, however, whether this will lead to solid support in the region for a transition in Cuba from a one-party dictatorship to a genuine democracy with political freedoms and guarantees for human rights. 

Dissidents in Cuba, who live under constant police repression, may have a long wait before the relaxation of US-Cuban relations produces any political liberalization.

When the rapprochement, negotiated secretly over 18 months, was announced last week simultaneously in Washington and Havana, there were distinct differences in emphasis on what to expect from the deal. 

• Obama, speaking from the White House, said the United States expected an opening in Cuban society “that will spur change among the people of Cuba, and that is our main objective.” 
• President Raúl Castro of Cuba, wearing a military uniform, told Cuba’s rubber-stamp National Assembly that the deal involved “no changes” in how Cuba is governed under the communist regime created by his ailing brother, Fidel, who aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union in 1962. 

That new alignment is what led to the suspension of Cuba’s membership in the Organization of American States as well as the break in diplomatic relations with the United States and the economic embargo. 

In the succeeding 50 years, exclusion from its major natural market to the north shrank Cuba’s economy, but subsidies kept it going, including cheap oil for sugar from the Soviet Union when Cuba was sending troops to fight in Angola as allies of the Soviet military. 

More recently, Cuba has been getting billions of dollars in oil transfusions from Venezuela’s leftist Bolivarian government under a deal arranged through the late President Hugo Chávez, a disciple of Fidel who installed Cuban advisers in Venezuela’s repressive security system.

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