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The news that four Russian warships are in Havana for naval exercises brings to mind the old mariner's aphorism, "Any port in a storm." Cuba is in desperate need of economic help, and Russia has been providing it. The result is a deepening partnership that has geopolitical echoes of the Cold War, although the Cubans are now drawn to Moscow less by ideological affinity than economic necessity.Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cuban economy has been wracked by the gales of a perfect storm — a confluence of intensified U.S. sanctions imposed by President Trump, a pandemic that shuttered the tourism industry, and ill-conceived government policies that have made things worse rather than better. Desperately short of foreign exchange currency, the Cuban government is unable to import sufficient basic necessities like food, fuel, and medicine, let alone the requisite inputs for domestic production, which has plummeted. Shrinking production means declining foreign exchange earnings from exports and an even greater need for imports — a vicious circle that has no easy exit. Some of the economic reforms the government has undertaken may help restart the economy in the medium and long-term, but in the short run, Cuba's only hope to alleviate the immediate crisis, to put food on people's tables and, literally, keep the lights on, is foreign help. That's where Russia comes in.In the early 1960s, the assistance from the Soviet Union saved the Cuban economy from the ravages of the U.S. embargo, thwarting the plans of successive U.S. presidents to subdue the revolutionary government. The Soviets saw Cuba as a valuable ideological outpost in Latin America and Cuba saw the Soviet Union as a necessary partner in its struggles to break free of U.S. domination.Although that partnership collapsed with the end of the Cold War, Vladimir Putin has worked hard to rebuild it ever since his first term as Russian president. His principal lever has been economic assistance. Putin forgave 90 percent of Cuba's Soviet-era debt and has extended larger and larger amounts of economic assistance ever since. In 2009, the economic relationship expanded into the political and diplomatic spheres when the two countries declared a "strategic partnership."When the Cuban economy suffered an 11 percent decline as a result of the pandemic, Russia sent desperately needed food and medical supplies that saved Cuban lives — a move that rekindled the affection for Russians felt by some Cubans, especially those who studied in the Soviet Union when they were young.Russia's invasion of Ukraine strained the new partnership. Cuba had a close relationship with Ukraine dating from the 1990s, when it provided medical treatment to more than 18,000 Ukrainian children suffering from radiation sickness due to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Moreover, non-intervention and opposition to Great Power spheres of influence have been cornerstones of Cuban foreign policy and a rallying cry against U.S. policies of regime change ever since Fidel Castro rode into Havana in 1959. At first, Cuba tried to steer a middle course on Ukraine, reiterating its opposition to intervention and calling for a negotiated end to the conflict, while at the same time blaming the United States and Western Europe for provoking Moscow by expanding NATO to Russia's borders. At the United Nations, Cuba abstained on resolutions calling for Russia to withdraw, but opposed resolutions imposing sanctions on Moscow.Over the past year and half, however, Cuba's position has gradually become less equivocal and more closely aligned with Russia's. Since President Miguel Díaz-Canel visited Moscow in November 2022, and declared "Russia is not responsible" for the war, a parade of Russian and Cuban officials have travelled between the two capitals, signing more than a dozen new economic cooperation agreements. On a trip in June 2023, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev met with Raúl Castro, who, according to the Russian news agency Tass, "expressed full support for Russia in regard to the situation in Ukraine and confidence in Russia's victory."Last month, Díaz-Canel visited Moscow again and, in his meeting with Putin, repeated Cuba's condemnation of NATO expansion, declaring, "We wish you and the Russian Federation every kind of success in the special military operation."The visiting Russian warships are Putin's way of reminding President Biden that Moscow can challenge Washington in its own sphere of influence, a symbolic counterpoint to U.S. assistance to Ukraine. For the past several years, the U.S. Southern Command's annual Posture Statement has cited the growing influence of "Strategic Competitors" — especially Russia and China — as the top national security challenge to U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere.On this issue, like the issue of migration, U.S. sanctions against Cuba have proven counterproductive. By exacerbating the economic hardships Cubans face, Washington's policies have accelerated migration and left Cuba no alternative but to seek help from those same strategic competitors. As Southcom commander General Laura J. Richardson told Congress, referring to Latin America more broadly, "When you need a rope to grab, you aren't necessarily looking to see who threw it. We must be the ones throwing the rope, not our strategic competitors." That, in a nutshell, is a good explanation for Cuba's evolving relationship with Russia and sound advice for U.S. Cuba policy.

Campaigning for president in 2020, Joe Biden promised to resume Barack Obama's policy of normalizing relations with Cuba "in large part." But Democrats lost big in Florida, partly because Cuban American voters made a sharp turn to the right. That setback made the Biden White House reluctant to reverse the draconian economic sanctions Donald Trump imposed on the island, despite a mounting humanitarian crisis.As foreign policy, the results have been counter-productive. The Trump-Biden sanctions have catalyzed the largest migration crisis since 1959, with nearly 500,000 Cubans arriving in the United States in the past two years. The sanctions have angered Latin American and European allies, driven Cuba closer to U.S. global rivals Russia and China, and done nothing to improve human rights or the prospects for a democratic opening. Such are the consequences of foreign policy becoming a domestic political football.Sixteen elections and countingAs I outline in a new brief for the Quincy Institute, few countries have figured as prominently in U.S. elections over the years as Cuba. From the first campaign after the 1959 triumph of the revolution to the 2020 contest, candidates have raised the issue either to criticize their opponent for being soft on foreign policy, or to appeal to Cuban American voters in the battleground state of Florida. In election years, sitting presidents have frequently tightened sanctions or backed away from diplomatic engagement to boost their party's electoral prospects:In 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed the first trade sanctions on Cuba, urged on by Richard Nixon;In 1964, Lyndon Johnson abandoned John F. Kennedy's incipient dialogue with Havana, and successfully pressured the Organization of American States to adopt mandatory sanctions;In 1976, Gerald Ford halted Henry Kissinger's normalization negotiations when Ronald Reagan attacked the talks as appeasement;In 1980, Jimmy Carter back away from normalization when Zbigniew Brzezinski convinced him that it made him look soft;In 1992, George H. W. Bush signed the Cuban Democracy Act after Bill Clinton endorsed it.In 1996, Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (Helms-Burton) at the urging of White House political advisers;In 2004, George W. Bush imposed limits on travel and family remittances to defuse criticism from Cuban American hard-liners;In 2020, Donald Trump did the same in hopes of mobilizing the same Cuban American constituency.In campaigns from the 1960s to the 1980s, Cuba was framed as a proxy for the Soviet Union, and a tough policy toward Cuba was seen as the hallmark of a strong foreign policy generally. No national politician wanted to be branded "soft on Cuba." The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War coincided with the emergence of Cuban Americans as a significant voting bloc, shifting how U.S. presidential candidates dealt with the issue. Instead of focusing Cuba as a national security issue, candidates from the 1990s onward appealed to Cuban American voters on issues of democracy and human rights.Before 1992, Democrats saw Florida as solidly Republican, but Bill Clinton aimed to compete there by appealing to Cuban Americans with a Cuba policy tougher than George H. W. Bush's. Although Clinton did not carry Florida in 1992, he did in 1996, establishing Florida as a battleground state. Al Gore's narrow loss in 2000 after Clinton's Justice Department returned six-year old Elián González to his father in Cuba convinced Democrats that Cuba was the third rail of Florida politics.Obama broke with this conventional wisdom in 2008 by appealing to moderate Cuban Americans with a policy of engagement. To the surprise of many, he won half the Cuban American vote in 2012, setting the stage for his dramatic decision to normalize relations with Havana in 2014. Then Trump, in a bid to mobilize Cuban American conservatives, turned back the clock, undoing most of what Obama had achieved. A shift to the right in Cuban American opinion in response to Trump's leadership and a new wave of disaffected immigrants reconfigured politics in south Florida, once again triggering Democrats' fear of Florida.Biden has responded with a bizarre hybrid policy, relaxing some of Trump's sanctions but leaving most in place—an impossible compromise between Obama's policy of coexistence and Trump's policy of regime change. The administration's watchword has been to be "tough on the regime" while "supporting the Cuban people" — as if it were possible to bankrupt the government without immiserating the population. The electoral landscapeMost of the electoral map of the United States is pre-determined. In 2020, there were only eight states in which the winner's margin of victory was less than 5 percentage points, totaling 123 electoral votes. Apart from these battleground states, Democrats begin the race likely to win 226 of the 270 electoral votes needed for majority; Republicans begin with 187. To win the election, Republicans have to win more than two-thirds of the electoral votes in the battlegrounds. Florida's importance is magnified by its size. If Republicans lose Florida's 29 electoral votes, they can only afford to lose one other small swing state.This is why Republicans see Florida as a must-win state and Democrats continue to contest it, despite their flagging prospects there. Ironically, despite the intensity with which both parties have focused on the state for the past 30 years, Florida has rarely been decisive in determining who wins the White House. Since 1960, Florida's electoral votes have made the difference only twice — in 2000 (the infamous Bush v. Gore contest), and 2004. Moreover, Cuban Americans have rarely decided the outcome in Florida. Prior to 1992, there were so few Cuban American voters that the margins of victory in the presidential election were frequently larger than the entire Cuban American electorate. Since then, Florida elections have been close enough that Cuban Americans could claim to have provided the decisive margin in just three contests: 1992, 2000, and 2012. In short, in 16 U.S. elections since Fidel Castro rode into Havana in 1959, there has been only a single occasion when Cuban American votes decided Florida and Florida decided the presidency: 2000.The national interestA Cuba policy that serves the national interests of the United States rather than the parochial interests of conservative Cuban Americans in Miami, or the political fortunes of would-be presidents, would start by acknowledging that the policy of hostility is not going to depose the Cuban government — something that ought to be self-evident after 65 years of trying in vain. A realist approach would identify and build on common interests, while managing areas of disagreement like human rights. In the field of national security, the United States and Cuba share a common interest in combatting transnational crime — narcotics, human trafficking, and terrorism — and on a wide range of other issues as well — transnational problems that near-neighbors have to tackle together, like environmental protection, the impacts of climate change and public health. Finally, the United States and Cuba have deep cultural ties that have grown more profound as the Cuban American diaspora has expanded.In 2024, a policy like this seems a bridge too far, but during the last two years of the Obama presidency, the United States took the first steps down this path. The progress made in just 24 months was substantial, though not without its setbacks. Asked what made Obama's dramatic break with past possible after so many decades of hostility, Ben Rhodes, who led the U.S. negotiating team, gave a surprisingly simple answer: leadership and political will. The normalization of relations with Cuba happened, he said, because it was something the president was determined to do.For a deeper dive into how the electoral ambitions of U.S. politicians have shaped policy toward Cuba from 1960 to 2024, see Professor LeoGrande's new Quincy Institute paper, Cuba's Role in U.S. Presidential Elections.

Trying to make sense of U.S. policy toward Cuba is like trying to make sense of a play in the theater of the absurd. The rationales offered by the policy's defenders make no sense, and when they try to explain, they sound like characters in an Ionesco play. Recent legislative proposals from Cuban American members of the House of Representatives are prime examples.Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, and Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, recently proposed new sanctions locking in Cuba's groundless designation as a sponsor of international terrorism, blocking assistance to Cuba's private sector on the grounds that it doesn't exist, and punishing countries hosting Cuban medical missions for practicing "modern slavery." The last two proposals became law in the omnibus appropriations bill passed last month to avoid a government shutdown.Cuba is on the State Department's terrorism list, even though the Department's latest Country Report on Terrorism offers no evidence for Havana engaging in international terrorism. It cites Cuba's harboring of U.S. fugitives who committed politically-motivated crimes in the United States more than 40 years ago. Meanwhile, the United States for years harbored notorious Cuban exiles like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles guilty of myriad terrorist attacks against Cuba, including bombing a Cuban airline flight, killing all 73 people aboard, and bombing tourist hotels in Havana.Early in the Biden administration, the White House said it was "committed to carefully reviewing" Cuba's designation, and in October 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Colombia's President Gustavo Petro, "We will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation." But just five months later, he told Congress, "We are not planning to remove them from the list." Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Eric Jacobstein told a group of Democratic lawmakers that, contrary to what they had been told previously, there was no review of Cuba's designation underway.Asked in a 2023 press briefing why Cuba was still on the terrorism list, a State Department spokesperson replied that it was because of Cuba's "long track record of egregious human rights abuses, suppression of a free press, suppression of civil society" — which has nothing to do with international terrorism. The official also acknowledged, oblivious to the irony, that the U.S. and Cuban governments engage in regular counter-terrorism cooperation talks under the auspices of a law enforcement agreement concluded during the Obama administration.Last year, Díaz-Balart joined Salazar to sponsor a bill preventing the Biden administration from removing Cuba from the terrorism list until it becomes a multi-party democracy. Although the bill is unlikely to become law this Congress, its disregard for the statutory criteria for designating a country as a sponsor of terrorism brings to mind Humpty Dumpty's declaration in Alice in Wonderland, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean."Díaz-Balart had better luck with the omnibus appropriation. When Congress fails to do its job passing the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government, it resorts to omnibus appropriations that lump all the unfinished bills together into one must-pass bill to avoid a government shutdown. All sorts of dubious measures make their way into omnibus appropriations because there just is not time to filter them all out. As chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Díaz-Balart was perfectly positioned to insert new Cuba sanctions into the omnibus.The omnibus appropriation prohibits the Biden administration from supporting Cuba's emerging private sector of some 10,000 new businesses, despite the fact that promoting private enterprise has been U.S. policy under Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden. Rep. Salazar calls the private sector a "myth" because some of the businesses are owned by relatives of government officials, even though the vast majority are not. A year ago, Díaz-Balart forced the Biden administration to abandon plans to help the private sector by threatening to block aid for Ukraine. His appropriations language, now law, blocks U.S. funding for "business promotion, economic reform, [or] entrepreneurship" in Cuba.Another provision of the omnibus appropriation would punish countries that pay Cuba for providing medical services on the grounds that such contracts constitute "modern slavery." Since the 1960s, Cuba has sent some 400,000 medical professionals to serve in 164 countries, but in the past two decades medical service contracts have become an important source of foreign exchange earnings.In 2006, President George W. Bush began offering entry to the United States and a fast path to citizenship to entice Cuban doctors serving abroad to defect. Some of those who defected criticized the pressure placed on them to serve abroad, harsh and restrictive working conditions, and the percentage of the contract fees they received. By contrast, doctors serving in the programs report that they volunteered because the wages are significantly higher than their wages in Cuba, and out of a desire to help people in need.During the Obama administration, U.S. and Cuban medical personnel worked together in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and in west Africa fighting Ebola virus outbreak. President Obama, in his 2016 speech to the Cuban people, praised Cuba's medical internationalism, saying "No one should deny the service that thousands of Cuban doctors have delivered for the poor and suffering." But Cuban American Republicans do deny it.The original House version of the foreign operations appropriation that came out of Díaz-Balart's subcommittee and passed the House would have cut off U.S. assistance to the Pan American Health Organization and all countries and international organizations that have medical contracts with Cuba. Those provisions did not make it into the final omnibus legislation. But the bill that passed denies entry to the United States and threatens financial sanctions against "officials of foreign governments and their immediate family members" whose governments have medical service contracts with Cuba.Cuba has medical personnel serving abroad in dozens of countries, including Mexico, Italy, Qatar, Jamaica, several smaller Caribbean states, and Northern Ireland. Is it really in the U.S. national interest to ban their government officials from the United States? Would Mexico's indispensable cooperation on migration and narcotics trafficking survive such a ban? Luckily, during the negotiations over the final omnibus bill, cooler heads prevailed and made these sanctions subject to a presidential waiver. But they are still the law of the land, with Washington once again arrogating to itself the right to sanction other countries for their relations with Cuba, as if neither their sovereignty nor Cuba's counts for anything in Washington.That is the final absurdity of U.S. Cuba policy. It's not just that so much of it is built on false premises and distorted facts. It's that a small group of conservative Cuban American legislators, obsessed with reducing Cuba to penury, have been able to dictate policies that damage broader U.S. interests in Latin America, Europe, and the Global South. They get away with it because no issue is more important to them than Cuba, and Cuba is not important enough to Biden for him to stand up to them.These policies are not cost free. Like water dripping on a stone they gradually erode the good will of other countries, diminishing Washington's "soft power." The accretion of damage is chronicled by the annual vote at the United Nations General Assembly on Cuba's resolution condemning the U.S. embargo. When the resolution was first introduced in 1992, it passed with 59 countries in favor, 3 against (the United State, Israel, and Romania), and a majority, 71 abstaining. Last year 187 countries voted for the resolution. Ukraine abstained and only Israel joined the United States in voting no.When American patriots declared their independence from the British crown, they detailed their reasons in the Declaration of Independence out of a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind." That respect is not a virtue Washington policymakers should abandon just because the United States has become a superpower.

Every year, the State Department issues its new "Country Reports on Terrorism," and each year, the rationale for Cuba's listing among the state sponsors of international terrorism gets thinner. The 2022 report, issued just last month, justifies the inclusion of the other countries on the list — North Korea, Iran, and Syria — by citing specific acts of state terrorism or ongoing support for terrorist groups. The report on Cuba, however, is simply an historical account of how Cuba ended up on the list in the first place rather than a rationale for keeping it there.In 1982, President Ronald Reagan designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism for supporting revolutionary movements in Central America. In 2015, President Obama determined, based on an intelligence review, that Cuba was not a state sponsor of terrorism and took it off the list. In January 2021, just days before leaving office, President Trump put Cuba back on the terrorism list in a transparent political pay-off to conservative Cuban American supporters in south Florida, and a last-ditch attempt to complicate Joe Biden's stated intention to resume normalizing relations with Havana. Trump's rationale was that Cuba, which had been hosting peace talks between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrilla movement, refused to extradite the ELN negotiators to Colombia's new conservative government after it broke off the talks — despite the fact that Colombia had previously signed a protocol specifying that if talks collapsed, the ELN negotiators would be guaranteed safe passage back to Colombia. Norway, co-guarantor of the talks along with Cuba, sided with Havana. (Norway was not designated a state sponsor of terrorism.)Even that thin rationale disappeared when Gustavo Petro was elected president of Colombia in 2022, restarted the peace talks, and demanded that Washington remove Cuba from the terrorism list, calling its inclusion "an injustice."Not until its final sentence does the 2022 Terrorism Report offer any rationale for Cuba remaining on the list: "Cuba also continues to harbor several U.S. fugitives from justice wanted on charges related to political violence, many of whom have resided in Cuba for decades."Cuba has, in fact, given political asylum to a handful of U.S. political exiles accused or convicted of politically motivated acts of violence in the 1970s. The United States, of course, has given political asylum to many more Cubans who engaged in politically-motivated violent attacks in Cuba — some of them trained by the CIA as soldiers in its secret war against Cuba in the 1960s. But does harboring U.S. fugitives qualify as sponsoring international terrorism? Although the fugitives have been in Cuba since the 1970s, they were not cited as a rationale for Cuba's designation as a state sponsor until 1988, by which time, the annual reports admitted, there was no longer any evidence of Cuba supporting any foreign revolutionary groups. The law requiring the annual State Department terrorism report defines international terrorism as "terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country." That does not fit the U.S. fugitives, whose violent acts were committed in the United States before they sought asylum in Cuba. Some of their actions might qualify as domestic terrorism, but not international terrorism. Nor does giving alleged terrorists political asylum constitute providing them with a terrorist sanctuary, which the law defines as territory from which terrorists are allowed "to carry out terrorist activities… or as a transit point." None of the U.S. fugitives have planned or plotted terrorist attacks against the United States since arriving in Cuba half a century ago. In 2015, when President Obama took Cuba off the list, Secretary of State John Kerry implicitly acknowledged that the U.S. fugitives were not a valid reason to keep Cuba on the list.In short, there is no longer any legitimate rationale whatsoever for Cuba being designated a state sponsor of terrorism. Cuba stays on the list because the Biden administration does not have the political courage to remove it — even though Cuba and the United States have a Memorandum of Agreement and active dialogue on counter-terrorism cooperation! Various U.S. officials have offered different stories about whether the Biden administration is reviewing Cuba's designation. Shortly after Biden's inauguration, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it was under review, along with the rest of Trump's Cuba policies. More recently, in March 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was browbeaten by Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) into declaring it was not being reviewed. A number of Democratic members of Congress who have been pushing the administration to take Cuba off the list were given the impression by Biden officials that the policy was being reviewed — until Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Eric Jacobstein told them last week that it was not. They were livid, according to a report in The Intercept.Treating Cuba's listing like a political poker chip has real costs, not only to Cuba but to the United States as well. Most obviously, it delegitimizes the list itself, reducing it to little more than an arbitrary political cudgel. Cuba's designation has alienated important U.S. allies in Latin America and Europe. For Latin Americans, it is a symbol of Washington's broader policy of regime change, a policy universally opposed in the region. Colombia has taken the lead in organizing Latin American governments to pressure the Biden administration to take Cuba off the list. When Secretary Blinken visited President Petro in Bogotá in October 2022, Petro made a point of publicly calling for Cuba to be removed from the list. Blinken replied, "We have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements, and we will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation." But since the administration refuses to actually "revisit" Cuba's designation, the clear laws, criteria, and requirements never come into play. Most Europeans are able to visit the United States without seeking a visa under the ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) visa waiver program — unless they have recently traveled to a country on the state sponsors of terrorism list. The impact of this sanction on European travel to Cuba has been significant. The number of visitors from the major European countries (Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany) remains significantly depressed from pre-COVID levels while the number from Canada, which is not part of the ESTA program, has returned to pre-pandemic levels. European governments regard this restriction on their citizens as utterly unjustified and their representatives in Havana are as vocal as the Latin American diplomats in complaining about it to U.S. officials. But thus far, to no avail.As campaign 2024 kicks off, the chances that the Biden administration will admit the obvious and take Cuba off the terrorism list appear increasingly remote. There have been 16 U.S. presidential elections since Fidel Castro rode into Havana in 1959, and only once has the incumbent U.S. president relaxed sanctions during an election year — Obama in 2016 as part of his normalization policy. No president running for re-election has ever relaxed sanctions during a campaign.Cuba is living through its worst economic crisis since the 1990s, unable to access the international financial system because of the terrorism designation. But apparently, Cubans will be condemned to suffer for at least another year, branded with the Scarlett Letter T for terrorist, while the Dimmesdales of Biden's campaign try to curry favor with Cuban Americans in south Florida who are not going to vote for him anyway.

While scrutinizing the principle pressures and influences of Cuba's key international relationships and issues, Cuban International Relations at 60 examines the island's global engagement and foreign policy since January 1959 by bringing together the perspectives of leading experts and personal accounts of two ambassadors.