The Embargo on Change

Every year around this time since 1992, the U.N. General Assembly has voted to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba. And every year, the U.S. government ignores the resolution. Last year Israel and Palau joined the United States in opposing the measure, which sailed through with 185 votes. Promises to pay greater attention to international institutions, embrace multilateralism, and begin a "new partnership" with the Americas notwithstanding, it appears that U.S. President Barack Obama will continue the tradition of spurning the U.N. resolution.

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The Obama administration's reaction to the U.N.'s futile ritual provides the first clear indication that normalized U.S.-Cuban relations will not resume any time soon, for two reasons. The first is that no amount of international opprobrium can budge the cornerstone of U.S. policy toward Cuba -- the trade embargo -- until domestic pressure prompts Congress to act. Second, Obama's good-guy image (who doesn't like a Nobel Peace Prize winner?) obscures the fact that, despite the change in administrations, ending communism in Cuba remains official U.S. policy.

Obama's election sparked hopes throughout the hemisphere that the United States would finally loosen its Cold War-era hard line against Cuba. Those hopes were quickly dashed. In the days leading up to Obama's first summit meeting with the heads of state of the hemisphere in Trinidad and Tobago last April, he put an end to Bush-era travel prohibitions for Cuban Americans as well as restrictions on sending remittances. He stopped short of criticizing the embargo itself, and it became clear that he would stick to his plan of "holding back important incentives such as relaxation of the trade embargo" in order to "encourage change in a post-Fidel government."

Obama's announcement of the United States' new Cuba policy -- which bore a striking resemblance to the United States' old Cuba policy -- disappointed practically every leader in Latin America. The Cuba issue hijacked the Summit of the Americas' agenda, with regional leaders publicly demanding the United States end its trade embargo against Cuba unilaterally. Even the conservative president of war-torn Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, joined the chorus, saying, "Colombia today feels that Cuba helps efforts toward peace."

Wednesday's U.N. vote will again remind the Obama administration that its Cuba policy is woefully out of psynch with world opinion. Wayne Smith, the former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and current director of the Center for International Policy's Cuba Program told me that U.S. Cuba policy is "so totally counterproductive that it's embarrassing." While Smith believes that "we do want to see Cuba move in the direction of a more open society and all that," he says the "best way to accomplish that is by reducing tensions, beginning a dialogue, and engaging."

Obama has pledged to do precisely that, but his conditions make his olive branch look more like poison ivy. After the Summit of the Americas, Cuba's acting head of state Raúl Castro gave a speech in which he offered to "talk about everything with the United States," but said that he would not "negotiate our sovereignty, nor our political and social system, the right to self-determination, nor our internal affairs." He called upon the Obama administration to overturn the blockade unilaterally, since "Cuba has not imposed sanctions against the United States." Until the U.S. government moderates its position against one-party rule in Cuba, the Castro government will continue to view an opening of relations with trepidation.

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