- Diplomatic relations: the path of Cuba and the US towards the thaw
The US embassy on the Havana boardwalk, an ugly Soviet-style concrete mass six stories high, always spied on by the neighboring police station and surrounded by a sea of masts and flags of the so-called Anti-imperialist Tribune, was reopened on the 20th July 2015 to the delight of Cubans and before the watchful eye of the world. Half a century of hostility between the two countries and a cold war a few miles from the United States, which so many chapters with crooked lines left written for history, ended (momentary).
Analysts then said that it was the staging at the diplomatic altar of something akin to a wedding, with a happy life ahead of it. But they were wrong: the boyfriend changed and they divorced again. The first effects (restoration of commercial flights, relaxation of the trade embargo, a fashionable destination for US tourism and the landing of the giants Google, Marriot or Airbnb) were pulverized after the emergence of Donald Trump.
Five years later, the great symbol of the thaw set in motion by Barack Obama has frozen in the middle of the Caribbean heat and its remains drown the Cuban economy as if it were another Special Period. The situation is so extreme that the Minister of Economy, Alejandro Gil, has announced by surprise this week an opening turn that seemed, with all the questions, "a second moment of Raúl's reforms, a second phase giving continuity to many of the things that were pending ", reveals for EL MUNDO the Cuban economist Pavel Vidal.
Preceded by fundamentalist messages from President Miguel Díaz-Canel, aimed at calming the most conservative forces, Minister Gil, of Canary origin, recognized the importance of the market, announced the end of the cooperatives experiment, criticized the administrative methods of regulation of the economy, opened new horizons for small and medium-sized companies and self-employed, in addition to betting on the partial dollarization of the economy.
The reactivation of US sanctions plus the paralysis of economic reforms on the island, added to the collapse of the Chavista revolution and the impact of the coronacrisis (an 8% drop in GDP is expected) have led the island to a "severe crisis economic and there seem to be very few policies (internal or external) capable of generating a reactivation. There is a consensus among most economists that the only way out is to resume interrupted structural reforms and accelerate and deepen them, "said economist Carmelo Mesa. -Lake in one of his studies for the Elcano Royal Institute.
"Cuba lost these years the opportunity to tie up the change and Trump, with his efforts at all costs to erase anything that sounded like Obama, did the rest. Today Trump is functional for a Cuba in distress , which has no more left remedy that rescue the private ", sentence for this newspaper Carlos Malamud, researcher of the Real Instituto Elcano.
Diplomatic relations are still in force and the legations are open, but copying the uses and customs of the past. Nothing to do with the road map drawn between the former US President and Raúl Castro. The great victim is the island's economy , which suffers from a situation similar to the Special Period of the 1990s.
The Obama Plan was about economically empowering Cubans, converting their self-employed, embryos of capitalism within the failed planned economy, into the engine of change. The new ideas would come online and on planes loaded with tourists. The virus of democracy would grow and multiply in a mixture of hope and ingenuity already criticized at the time by the toughest activists and opponents.
A plan after half a century of blockades and an iron fist that had only strengthened and perpetuated the Castro regime in power and when it was also forced to change its leaders because of the passage of time. Fidel, who from his watchtower showed reluctance to a thaw that was his brother's work and not his, died a year and a half later. Raúl gave the presidential command to Miguel Díaz-Canel almost three years later.
What was also clear from the beginning is that the plan of the one was not the same as the plan of the other, consisting of staying in power at all costs. "There were not even serious initiatives to take advantage of openness in the economic sphere, while the repression intensified . All of this before the arrival of Trump," says historian Armando Chaguaceda.
Joe Biden: Second Thaw?
"If the Democratic candidate manages to soften the relationship with Cuba, it would help create conditions to improve the situation of the Cuban people, who are having a very difficult time with food shortages," says María Puerta, professor of American Government and International Politics in Valencia. Florida College. The November elections will radically mark relations with Cuba, just as those of 2016 did. If Trump is reelected, "he will continue his line with Cuba because Cuban-American exile is very strong," concludes the Venezuelan political scientist. For his part, Pavel Vidal hints at a wink to Biden with the announcement of new reforms: "It is very positive that they are reactivated before the elections, because if Biden wins, it is easier to promote an approach, even a lifting of the embargo." / DL
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