Drawing on their years of experience as career officers in Foreign Service, a panel of scholars recall Cuba’s past and speak of the island nation’s future.
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Transcript
Vicki Huddleston
Visiting Fellow, Brookings
Former Ambassador to Mali and Madagascar
“Today we do have the best experts to tell us about that, because these are the men—and one woman—who were in Cuba during a 25 year span of Republican and Democratic administrations, and are all career officers. But before I turn it over to them, I’d like to tell you a little story about my experience in Cuba. Toward the end of my tour in Cuba, I was driving the Principal Officer’s car. And, by the way, in Cuba they often call us ‘the Chief,’ the chief of the United States Interest Section. And they call the Interest Section ‘USINT.’ So the Chief of the USINT, which is us—and, in this case, myself—I was driving this beautiful black Crown Victoria that’s often driven by the chauffeur for the Principal Officer. But in this case, it was a sultry Saturday afternoon, and I decided that I’d go into work at USINT. And USINT, by the way, is our old embassy, as most of you here know. And it was renovated in the mid-’90s when Alan Flanigan was there. And as I drove down toward the Interest Section on Quinta Avenida, which is the most beautiful avenue in Havana, it goes through the old residential section, beautiful trees and old mansions, lots of people, as usual, were along the road trying to get a ride.
“And I saw this group of kids, and I stopped. And these kids, they just jumped in the car. There must have been six or seven of them. And they kind of leaned back in the air-conditioning, because no cars in Cuba are air-conditioned. Even the little Ladas used by the Cuban hierarchy are not air-conditioned. And the cars that the Cubans usually ride in are the old ‘50 clunkers, which we think are very romantic, from Detroit. Anyway, one of the kids said, ‘Where did you get this car?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, this car is the property of the United States government.’ And someone said, ‘And what do you do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m the Chief of USINT.’ And there was a pregnant pause there for a minute, and then this girl leaned over from the back seat and she said, ‘Be our mother. Take us to Miami.’
“Well, I think the reason that all of us are here this morning is because we would like to see a future for Cuba’s young people, for those young people, not in Miami but in Havana, Cuba. And I think we all think that this relationship that we have with Cuba, if it were the right one, might be able to influence positively that outcome.”
Jay Taylor
Fairbank Center for East Asian Research
“So I think at this time, beginning in 1987, that Castro, he was the most anxious that he’d ever been to have good relations with the Soviet Union. And I think for the first time he was really prepared, in order to achieve this, to make really substantial changes, including changes primarily in his international posture, and the international role that he played. The most important thing was going to be—was Angola. And, as John said, this had really prevented—their sending troops to Angola and Ethiopia—this had prevented the U.S. moving, in the early days under Carter, to a real formal, official, diplomatic relations. So when I got there I spent the first six or eight weeks talking with 150 or 200 people, diplomats, the usual interlocutors, in the Cuban government. But other Cubans that were students, intellectuals, professors, what have you, and the foreign diplomats that were serious Castro-watchers.
“And it was pretty obvious to me that everybody was saying pretty much the same thing: that Castro did feel he had now to get out of Angola; that he wanted to take part in the talks that were going on that had been brokered by Assistant Secretary Crocker in Angola that involved Angola, South Africa and the Soviet Union. The South Africans had some troops there. They were siding with UNITA against the Angolan government. And the Angolans and the Soviets said, ‘You should let Cuba take part.’ And in the State Department—I mean the ARA Bureau, the Latin American bureau, under Elliot Abrams—they strongly opposed this. They said that Castro would simply disrupt and destroy the negotiations on Angola.
“So after this six or eight weeks there, talking with everyone I could find, it seemed to me that Castro did need to get out, now that he had sort of had a change of heart. So in my cable back to the Department I said just this: that anyway, it appeared probably we won’t get an agreement in Angola—the Angolans had these Cubans there—unless the Cubans took part. And we could test and see whether or not they really were cooperative.
“In the meanwhile, during those first couple of months, during a reception Castro had called me into the inner sanctum that John mentioned, and he had said that Cuba would like to take part in the talks, and Cuba would be cooperative. So this was the cable that I sent off. I said I think they probably will be cooperative, because they need to be. The Soviets want to settle this problem, and they want to get the Cubans out of there. And the Cubans can’t stay very long if the Soviets don’t say okay. But I got a zinger back from ARA, the Latin American bureau, that said I didn't know what I was talking about, I’d only been there two months, and that Castro would not get out of Angola until South Africa became communist.
“Well, there was a battle going on at that time in the State Department between the African Bureau, under Chet Crocker, who very much wanted the Cubans to take part. Anyway, my cable was very useful in that debate, I think. And during my exchanges—further discussions before we really opened serious talks with the Cubans on this—I said: it’s evident from my talks that Castro also, he wants to see what is the benefit for him of getting out of this. I think he does need badly to get out of Angola. But if we want to then move on to other issues, that we have to let him understand that there will be some payoff for him, there will be an improvement in relations.
“So this became another issue, whether or not we actually ever wanted to say that to them, that if they were cooperative on this issue, there would be an improvement in relations. But finally on Christmas Day in 1987, I received a cable from the State Department telling me to go in and talk to the Cubans, and say this is an official approach to them on the Angolan issue—our first official approach. And give him our position and tell him what we hope to achieve, and what the goals were, and wanting to know what they were willing to do in the negotiations.”
Wayne Smith
Cuba Program, Center for International Policy
“Okay. That’s November. The end of December, one of Haig’s assistants who’s a good friend of mine visits me for Christmas in Havana. The Cubans know who he is, of course, and they suggest a lunch. We get together for lunch, and they say, ‘Look, we’re talking about dialog. We want you to know’—this obviously is in response to Haig’s suggestion that they want actions, we want actions and not words—‘We want you to know that we have suspended all arms shipments to Central America.’ That was one of our major complaints. And I laughed and said, ‘Well, you always say that, but as it turns out all you mean is that you have suspended arms shipments to El Salvador. And of course you have, because it doesn't’t have a Caribbean coastline. But you are still sending arms to Nicaragua, and some of those arms are finding their way in.’
“And he said, ‘No. I said we had suspended arms shipments to Central America. We are no longer sending arms to Nicaragua.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of that.’ And they said, ‘Well, it may be, but it’s true, and you can check on it. And, given that, we hope that this can lead to negotiations, to a dialog, between the United States and Cuba.’
“So I sent in a cable, of course, reporting this, and wait for my friend to report to Haig—asking if we have any evidence to the contrary. Do we have evidence of a continuing flow of arms to Central America? It takes me two months or so, and about a dozen cables, before I finally get an answer. And the answer is: ‘No we don’t have any concrete evidence to the contrary. But it really doesn't’t make any difference, in effect, because we’re not interested in a dialog with the Cubans.’ So I went back and said, ‘Well, that’s unfortunate. But if that’s the decision, of course I must live with it.’
“But then they get into taking new measures against Cuba, and the reasons given are because of ‘increasing Cuban arms shipments,’ increasing Cuban trouble-making in Central America. And because the Cubans refuse to address our agenda of concerns. In other words, they won’t talk. Both are an outright lie. It’s quite the other way around. It’s we who won’t talk. And they’ve said they don’t have evidence of continuing arms flow.
“As we saw later—remember that whole mess in Central America where there was lie after lie, Oliver North and Iran-Contra and all that—this was simply the early stages. It became clear that the U.S. government had not the slightest interest in negotiating this—and I think anything else—with the Cubans.
“What Haig wanted was to take it to the source. But that would have been very dangerous. And so rather than that, we sort of focused on Nicaragua. But I then did leave the Foreign Service and turned to professoring and working in think-tanks trying to bring about a more sensible relationship between the United States and Cuba. We have disagreements, we have conflicts of interest. We may not like their system. We’d like to see Cuba move towards a more open society, of course.”
John Ferch
Former Ambassador to Honduras
“Larry Eagleburger, who was then the Deputy Secretary of State, called me in just before going down and he said something to this effect: ‘I can’t let you go down empty-handed.’ He said, ‘When you get down there, I want you to tell them that if they put MIGs …’—and this is a paraphrase, but a pretty good paraphrase—‘if they put MIGs into Central America, into Sandinista, there will be bad consequences.’ How, you might think, how does that equip Ferch with some useful information that’s going to make his job easier?
“But, anyway, that was how he was—he filled my hand. So I go down there, and I, within days, I got an appointment with Ricardo Alarcon, who was then Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, and I gave this message. And he said, of course, ‘Why don’t you talk to the Nicaraguans?’ We went around on that.
“But, anyway, I wondered what was this all about? Well, I think, in retrospect, that Eagleburger really did equip me. He was saying: we’re going to deal with you, but we’re going to deal through Ferch, not through Cuba here in Washington, but through Ferch. And he was also saying—and this wasn't’t said, but it’s implicit in here: we’re going to negotiate, or at least we’re going to talk about your foreign policy. It may be negative, but we’re recognizing that you have an independent foreign policy, that this is not something that you’re simply doing because the Soviets said it. So, we’re dealing with you directly.”
Alan Flanigan
Former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador
"You know, making a change in policy in Cuba, or toward Cuba, just falls into the too-hard category politically most of the time. There are very few opportunities that we have had over the years to make real progress in that area. One of them might have occurred while I was there, but it didn't. After all, we had an election here in the United States. We had a new administration come in which at least had some people in it that were sympathetic to the idea of making a more–or opening the relationship up a little bit. But in the end--or not in the end but even in the beginning, during the campaign–I think the people who wanted the president elected made the choice that they would make the statements, do the necessary things to commit themselves to a continuation of the old policy. And that’s what happened. Inertia is an important thing in foreign policy and in diplomacy. And inertia took hold. For the three years I was there, not much happened. Cuba itself struggled and did survive.
"By the time I left, they were beginning–just beginning–to pull out of the tailspin. But it was a different country. When I arrived, I remember distinctly, it looked very poor. It looked shabby. And it was. But three years later it was much worse. There were perhaps–statistics are always difficult–but there were perhaps 50,000 bicycles in Cuba when I arrived. By the time I left, there were somewhere in the range of 800,000 bicycles–these heavy iron flying pigeons made in China. And there were no fat people left in Cuba. Literally. Or animals, as Vicki said. It was a very difficult time for the Cuban people.
"And we, of course, sat and watched. There were people who thought that the end was near. When I stopped in Miami on my way to Havana in 1990 there were bumper stickers on the cars that said, 'Christmas in Havana.' And there were actually people that believed it. And most of it was wishful thinking, but certainly the country was in crisis. But what most people seem to forget was that this was a country that was under the control of a very rigid bureaucratic Ministry of the Interior and Army. They controlled all of the communications, they controlled all the weapons. And there was no desire on the part of Fidel Castro to commit anything to open up, that might allow the people to begin to rise up and challenge his leadership.
"Sure there were dissidents–a handful of dissidents. But, as Jay said, they were allowed to live, they were allowed to meet with us–and we met with them regularly. But they were also, from time to time, arrested and taken in and put in prison, sometimes for short sentences, sometimes for long sentences. But they were certainly under control. I’d like to leave some time for questions, because I know there are some questions.
"And so I’ll just turn this over to Vicki now. But it was a sad time to be there. We missed some opportunities. But I’m not sure they were real. By that time, Fidel Castro needed us more as the enemy than he needed us as a friend. And I don’t think that he would have been prepared to reciprocate in any solid way to anything that we did. We could have–one thing we could have done then, and we can do now–is take steps that are in our interest alone and begin to open up. But they have to be in our interest, and they have to be justified purely on national–U.S. national interest. Because I don’t think we can expect reciprocity, especially in the current situation in Havana. After Fidel goes, we’ll have a different situation, and we’ll see if we can make some advances then."