Quaterly AMERICAS
Published by Americas Society and Council of the Americas
By Robert Muse
Normalizing relations between two nations will require a series of presidential actions.
Here is a roadmap for how that could happen…whenever
Hillary Clinton Said in a recent interview that she would like to see the United States “move toward normalizing relations” with Cuba. This remarkable statement–from quite possibly the next president–came at the end of a critique of the current U.S. policy that insists on political and other reforms in Cuba as a precondition for modifying the current sanctions the U.S. imposes on the country.
In Clinton’s view, the U.S. embargo on Cuba has “propped the Castros because they can blame everything on it.” In adopting this new position, she has diverged important from her husband’s policy of “carefully calibrated” response to “positive developments [by the government] in Cuba” Instead, she now favors an unilateralist policy that would unconditionally normalizing relations, thereby depriving the Cuban government of long-standing grievances with the U.S. that-in her view– it exploits to maintain the support of the Cuban people.
However, when she spoke of normalizing relations with Cuba, Clinton focused exclusively on the embargo. In doing so, she seemed to conflate an absence of punitive measures levied on a country with normal relations. But normalization is more than that.
A metaphor that pictures nationstates as neighbors living in the same community may be useful in illustrating what normalized relations look like. To begin with, such relations involve considerably more than refraining from active hostilities. They also include extending to one another the rights, privileges and courtesies that flow from the principle that all residents share equally in the benefits of belonging to a neighborhood.
What would that look like in the case of the U.S. and Cuba?
NORMALIZATION: A how-to
For the U.S. to have normal relations with Cuba, it must do two things: first, remove the punitive measures imposed on that country; and second, extend to Cuba the benefits all nations at peace with one another share. An example of the latter is granting equal access to one another’s markets. This means going beyond lifting the current U.S. an on Cuban imports and the corollary ban on U.S. exports to Cuba. It will require the U.S. to extend to Cuba–a member of the World Trade Organizations (WTO)–the same favorable market access that it extends to other WTO member nations’ products. (As we will see in a moment, this is much simpler than it might sound.)
First, it is necessary to dispose of any misapprehension that the president has not authority to normalize relations with Cuba. The long and close involvement of Congress in U.S.-Cuba policy fostered the mistaken belief that presidential authority with respect to Cuba had been preempted by Congress. An example of how far this mistaken belief spread is that in 2006, when the President Fidel Castro transferred head-of-state authority to his brother Raul, the U.S. State Department claimed to be unable to respond to that event with any adjustment to U.S.-Cuba policy. According to a Reuters report on a State Department briefing, there “would be no change in policy toward Cuba, whether Castro or his brother Raul were in charge, because of American Laws restricting U.S. dealings with the communist government.” According to the State Department official cited in the report, “This is one of our most regimented policies. Our hands are tied by laws.”
