Cuba’s time

The United States has begun a liberalization of its Cuba policy. The omnibus spending bill that President Obama signed this week not only loosens restrictions on travel to Cuba, it opens the door for more exports from the U.S. despite the 47-year-old trade embargo.

At the same time, Cuban President Raul Castro has just launched the biggest Cabinet shake-up there in decades, signaling not only that he is firmly in control a year after officially taking over from his brother, Fidel Castro, but that no one should expect radical political and economic change from his communist government.

Why Raul moved just at this moment is anyone’s guess; even longtime Cuba watchers are merely reading tea leaves when it comes to politics on the other side of the Florida Straits. But there is a view gaining ground in Washington that it shouldn’t matter because it is in our interest to change the policy.

In Cuba, Raul removed the two most internationally prominent ministers and half a dozen other holdovers from his brother’s government, replacing them with his own loyalists from the army and the Communist Party.

Felipe Perez Roque, who had served as foreign minister for a decade, and Cabinet chief Carlos Lage were dismissed in what Raul said was a streamlining of the government. But the main reason for the dismissals may have been explained best by the retired and ailing Fidel. “The honey of power, for which they had made no sacrifice, awoke in them ambitions that led to an undignified role,” he wrote in a column published on the Internet.

Open ambition has always been a career-killer in Cuba. The “undignified role,” according to Cuba analysts, was becoming too visible and seemingly accommodating to the U.S., hinting at the possibility of improved relations under Obama. “The external enemy was filled with illusions for them,” Fidel wrote. He seemed to be suggesting that U.S. officials had pinned their hopes for Cuban economic liberalization on the familiar pair, particularly Lage.

Once Fidel had spoken, his former proteges had no choice but to fall on their party swords and admit to having “committed errors,” for which they accepted full responsibility, just as the previous foreign minister, Roberto Robaina, did in the 1990s. He is now a painter.

Newly named Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez is a career diplomat and former U.N. ambassador who speaks fluent English, but his appointment offers few policy insights. For that, it is best to look at Raul’s swearing-in a year ago, when he spoke of implementing salary and currency reforms, improvements in productivity and efficiency and a streamlined bureaucracy. He also raised hopes for other changes, such as a resumption of private agricultural markets and the lifting of travel restrictions.

Although some of these reforms may well take place, the president is making it clear that they will not be accompanied by sweeping market reforms or a loosening of political control. In the same speech last year, Raul said the Communist Party was a “sure guarantee of the unity of the Cuban nation.”

Some Cuba analysts suspect that last week’s Cabinet changes were an effort to prevent an easing of the U.S. trade embargo, which the Castro brothers blame for most of the country’s economic ills and use as fodder for anti-American tirades. Previous U.S. overtures were stymied when Havana sent Cuban troops to Ethiopia during the Carter administration and when, under President Clinton, it shot down a plane piloted by anti-Castro Cuban Americans that had violated Cuban airspace.

Cuba hard-liners in the U.S. don’t want a significant easing of the embargo without political reforms in Cuba. The most notable of these hard-liners is Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), a member of the Democratic leadership who held up the spending bill until Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner issued written assurances that the Cuba provisions would be interpreted narrowly.

Still, the embargo is increasingly unpopular in the U.S., even among Cuban Americans, and there is a growing belief in Washington that it has not worked. Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, issued a report last month arguing that the embargo had “failed to achieve its stated purpose of ‘bringing democracy to the Cuban people.’ ” Now, he said, the U.S. must “deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.”

Cuba has diplomatic and economic relations with an array of European and Latin American countries that do not share its politics. The Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue issued a report this week branding the U.S. Cuba policy an “anachronism that serves mainly to isolate the United States from the rest of the hemisphere.”

Change is in the U.S. interest, the report says, “because it will open the way to cooperation with Latin America on many other issues.”