Biden expected to reopen talks with Cuba after Sixty years
On the night of April 17, 1961, the 2506 Brigade supported by the CIA reached the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's southern shore. The intention was to overthrow the socialist government of Fidel Castro and install as interim leader José Miró Cardona, a former member of Castro’s government and leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a pro-democracy exile group.
20,000 soldiers quickly greeted the brigade from Castro. Two days later, the operation was resoundingly canceled. In this humiliating defeat, more than 100 members of the brigade were killed and nearly 1,200 surrendered. As Michael Bustamante writes in his recently published book, “The Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile,” “regardless of subsequent debates over the execution of the plan, at the base, the idea that 1,500 men would be met as liberators and initiate the overthrow of a government still supported by the better part of a population of 6 million remained an inherently flawed premise.
Millions of Cuban citizens are caught in the sights of this toxic standoff. Although I was born in the United States after the Bay of Pigs, I have visited Cuba regularly since 1979 to visit my family and have seen with my own eyes the impact of the embargo on Cubans. Our trips are not vacations spent on the beaches sipping daiquiris. It is the only way to bring necessities – clothing, food, medicine, cell phones, USB sticks, household appliances – to parents who live in a country where ration cards are still used.
The United States has continued its antagonism. For more than 60 years, the trade embargo has not only interrupted trade between our countries, but the United States has also prevented other countries from taking over by threatening to impose sanctions or fines on them for trading with Cuba. Isolation may have been a tactic intended to force the island’s government into submission. Still, it only led Cuba to make alliances with China, Venezuela, and the USSR – and now again with Russia – who usually don’t care about American interests and sometimes. Work against them. The Cuban government has also set up a network of shell companies to circumvent further the embargo, which it relies on “depending on pressure from Washington,” according to a recent article in the Miami Herald.
In the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, his administration has entered into more than a dozen agreements with the Cuban government on issues ranging from health and medical research to agriculture and environmental cooperation. . More open relations also encouraged a wave of tourists who brought much-needed hard currency and supported service jobs. Cubans welcomed these Americans and the opportunities they brought. Some converted their houses into guesthouses and started private restaurants. Other professionals gave up their government jobs to become taxi drivers or work in construction, earning their monthly salary of $ 30 (or more) in a single day. These companies have deposited money directly into ordinary Cubans' pockets, with $40 million coming from Airbnb rentals alone.
However, the economic situation in Cuba is not solely due to the embargo. The Cuban government has a history of corruption, inefficient distribution of food and goods, and a deep loathing for dissenting views. Yet in the not-so-recent past, he was willing to sit down at the negotiating table with the United States.
By not taking a stand on Cuba, the Biden administration, in fact, is upholding President Trump’s policy of refusing to hold talks and emptying the US Embassy in Havana of staff, reducing remittances to members of the families, stop flights to cities other than Havana, and end the use of “person-to-person” visas for Americans to come to the island. Add to that the pandemic, and Cubans now have a harder time finding food and necessities, while loved ones on this side of the Florida Strait – like my family – have almost no way to help them.
If the Biden administration is ready to change course in Afghanistan from the 20th anniversary of September 11, this Bay of Pigs anniversary is a clear call to throw in the towel on 60 years of failed US policy on Cuba and resume those that have been proven to have a positive impact.
The Biden administration is expected to reverse Trump’s nefarious (and cruel) policies and reopen talks with the Cuban government. The Cuba Study Group, a non-partisan political and advocacy organization, also recommends relaunching the Cuban Family Reunification Program to address the backlog of 22,000 pending cases; review the reclassification of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism; create a new general license to make it easier for the American private sector to support the growth of its Cuban counterpart, and the development of programs to cultivate membership within the Cuban-American community.
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