The Cuba-US rapprochement, after the Trump era, runs aground again with Biden

There is no escaping in Cuba-US relations.

After a timid and discreet rapprochement between the two countries during the first two years of the Biden Administration, and when it was predicted that Washington could take more decisive steps in 2023 to return to Obama's "constructive engagement" policy -which Donald Trump blew up through the air―, something happens again that cools things off and returns to the old rhetoric of confrontation.

Last week, the granting of political asylum in the US to a Cuban who stole a plane to flee to Miami and the maintenance of Cuba on the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, provoked an angry response from Havana.

Thus, he accused Washington of promoting "air piracy" and encouraging illegal emigration,

in addition to lying "blatantly" on the issue of terrorism with the aim of justifying its policy of economic suffocation against the island.

According to the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel, with Biden little progress has been made.

"Bilateral ties continue to be marked by the policies of Donald Trump," said Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío.

During his presidency (2017-2021), Trump deactivated the normalization process with Cuba designed by Obama - who unsuccessfully asked Congress to end the embargo - and adopted more than 240 new sanctions against the island.

Among them, he imposed restrictions on the sending of remittances and dismantled the Western Union offices in Cuba;

suspended high-level exchanges between officials from both countries;

allowed lawsuits to be filed in US courts against foreign companies that “trafficked” expropriated assets in Cuba (under the Helms-Burton law);

eliminated most direct flights to the island, cruise ships, and made personal travel more difficult for Americans;

he drew up blacklists of hotels where his citizens could not stay;

deactivated the Consulate in Havana for alleged "sonic attacks" against its diplomats;

and, before leaving, he included the Caribbean island in the list of countries sponsoring terrorism (from which Obama had removed it in 2015), which implies various financial sanctions.

Biden came to the White House with the promise of returning to the policies of Obama, who openly bet on normalization, but already in power he was very careful and limited in his initiatives towards Cuba, especially after the massive protest demonstrations of the July 11, 2021, in which hundreds of Cubans were detained.

In these two years, at a very leisurely pace, it ended the restrictions on remittances, authorized direct flights and group trips (not personal ones), reactivated the Consulate and reinitiated high-level contacts on migration issues and collaboration on matters of safety and environmental.

After the elections last November, when the Democrats lost the state of Florida resoundingly and it became clear that they could not count on the Cuban-American vote,

many analysts believed that Biden would now have a free hand to change policy towards Cuba.

But that doesn't seem to be the case.

"Once again, the predictions that Cuban-American relations would definitely begin to improve at the beginning of 2023 have been disappointed by reality," said Cuban academic Carlos Alzugaray.

“Three or four events in the last week have shown that the Biden Administration has very little intention of clearly distancing itself from Trump's cold war policies, which revolve around applying maximum pressure to achieve 'regime change,'” this statement states. analyst.

And he points out the American silence regarding his intelligence report on the so-called

, and which concludes that there was no mediation by a “foreign adversary”.

Since his appearance, Cuba assured that it had nothing to do with those sonic incidents that Trump cited this ailment to harden his policy towards the island.

By virtue of those accusations that were made, "the country suffered coercive measures applied by the United States, and up to now no official statement has been made to say that these provisions were unfounded," says Fernández de Cossío.

The alleged ill-health was first reported in 2016 among diplomats from the United States embassy in Havana and since then at least 1,500 cases have been reported in different countries.

Regarding the decision to grant political asylum to the pilot who fled Cuba months ago in a fumigation plane, Cossío considered that "the United States Government becomes an accomplice and participant in an act of kidnapping."

“Slander the island”

For Havana, however, the most hurtful of all is the measure to keep Cuba on the list of terrorist countries under the argument, among others, that Cuba gave "refuge" in 2021 to a group of Colombian ELN guerrillas, that they were claimed at that time by Bogotá, and this despite the fact that the current president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, as soon as he came to power, revoked the extradition order and asked the US to remove Cuba from the famous black list.

“The Joe Biden Administration kept the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism on the spurious list.

The true purpose of slandering the island as a terrorist is to justify the illegal blockade of the United States against Cuba, ”said the Cuban president on his Twitter account.

The Joe Biden administration maintained, on the spurious list, the designation of #Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The true purpose of slandering the Island as a terrorist is to justify the illegal blockade of the United States against #Cuba.

#MejorSinBloqueo pic.twitter.com/4JP0y6kAqP

— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) March 1, 2023

“Apparently, the logic of this policy is the one explained by the Director of Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Security Council in the White House, Juan González, which is more or less the following: we are going to change the policy, but the one that adopt will not resemble either Trump's or Obama's," said academic Alzugaray.

“Many previous Democratic administrations have tried this formula of a kind of third way that does not essentially change the intention of bringing about the overthrow of the Cuban government through a combination of economic pressure and political subversion.

If that objective is not clearly repudiated, as Obama did, any Administration will succumb to pressure from the right in Congress”, points out this analyst.

On the possible release of the prisoners for the demonstrations of 11-J (about 700, according to various NGOs), as a precondition for the United States to move and take measures in the direction of the thaw, Cossio was blunt.

It is, he said, "an absolutely unreasonable demand or claim."

“All of these are excuses that the United States has historically used when it doesn't want to act.

They make unreasonable claims, claims that they know have no support, when they have no will to act to improve relations with a country, in this case Cuba," said the official, who acknowledges that in these two years the Biden Administration has taken “positive” steps and taken steps in the right direction.

But, in essence, he indicates, Trump's policies continue to prevail.

He “has introduced two or three cosmetic changes”,

indicates the academic Alzugaray.

Everything seems to indicate that the long-awaited rapprochement runs aground again.

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