As the horrors in Mumbai unfold, while the crises in Zimbabwe and Thailand continue and while arguably the greatest wrong, that of Palestine, endures, there is evidence that one decades-old standoff that between Cuba and the United States, may at last be approaching a resolution.
As early as this May, before he won the Democrat nomination, President-elect Barack Obama declared he would seek a diplomatic solution to the rift with Cuba that has lasted almost 50 years since Fidel Castro overthrew the US-backed Batista regime. He offered then to meet Raul Castro, Fidel’s successor as president, without preconditions. He also vowed he would lift all restrictions on family visits by Cuban Americans and allow them to send money to relatives on the island.
Now as Obama prepares to move into the White House, Raul Castro has responded by suggesting they meet on neutral ground, perhaps the Guantanamo Bay base that the US leases from Cuba. In the welter of other pressing global issues, the new president’s foreign policy advisers may not consider this rapprochement a priority. Were that the case they would be wrong.
The Guantanamo Bay venue might, however, not be a good idea. Obama is committed to closing the detention camp but his people are still working out how this can be done, not least what will happen to its remaining 255 inmates. It would be tricky to meet Castro at the base while the detainees were still there. He could not ignore the camp but in paying it any attention, he would undermine the impact of the Castro encounter. It is important Obama makes talks with Cuba an early issue on his foreign policy agenda. It will help enormously to set the tone for the far bigger challenges he faces elsewhere in the world. Obama needs to be seen to be both fair and businesslike in his Cuban dealings, as well as being sufficiently imaginative to ditch long-held US foreign policy shibboleths. This does not mean that he should be open-armed in his approach to the Cuban regime. The fundamentally decent Jimmy Carter misguidedly and naively imagined face-to-face encounters with fellow world leaders could generate entirely reasonable solutions based on mutual trust. Obama needs to be tough and firm even while working for reconciliation.
The shape of any settlement he achieves with Castro and its subsequent success will inform the way Obama will be regarded by other parties to far more intractable conflicts elsewhere, not least in the Middle East. The key will be to abandon the pretence that the US is or has ever been an “honest-broker”. It has interests like any other sovereign state. The power to resolve deep-rooted conflicts rests with all players being prepared to compromise and sometimes maybe even sacrifice those interests in return for a greater gain in the long-term.
Obama deftly negotiated a daunting political gauntlet en route to the presidency. He now needs to deploy those same hardheaded diplomatic skills in foreign affairs, starting with Cuba.
