Moreover, even if Biden’s measures survive long enough to take effect, no company, U.S. or foreign, is going to invest the time and resources necessary to take advantage of reduced sanctions when there is a better than even chance that President Trump will reverse them sooner or later, just as he reversed Obama’s in 2017.
So why would the Biden administration bother to take such ineffectual and probably ephemeral steps to reduce sanctions, and why would the Cuban government release more than five hundred prisoners in response?
Winning freedom for the prisoners was obviously the main motivation for Biden, but for years the administration was loathe to engage Cuba in negotiations to free them. However, after Bob Menendez’s departure from the Senate, the Democrats’ loss in November, and the ruby red hue of Florida politics, Biden no longer had any reason to subordinate Cuba policy to domestic politics.
Perhaps entreaties from both Congressional Democrats and the Vatican that Biden do something to alleviate the deepening humanitarian crisis on the island finally broke through. Or perhaps there was some guilty pleasure in complicating Trump’s forthcoming Cuba policy — poetic justice for Trump putting Cuba on the terrorism list as a parting shot just days before Biden’s inauguration in 2020.
Cuban officials were equally resistant to freeing the protestors, whose tough prison sentences served as a warning and deterrent against future protests. Yet they agreed, despite there being slim chance that Cuba will gain any economic relief from Biden’s measures. But even in the worst case — that Trump scuttles all of Biden’s measures immediately — Cuba would still reap some political benefit. By releasing so many political prisoners — the most since the 1970s — Havana addresses a major point of friction in its relations with the European Union, an important source of desperately needed humanitarian assistance.
Havana’s prisoner release demonstrates to the international community at large its willingness to compromise and desire to reduce conflict with Washington. It puts the United States government on record acknowledging that Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism. And it puts the Trump administration in the awkward position of having to choose between leaving the new measures in place or reneging on an agreement to release 553 people from jail.
President Biden’s four years in the White House were a colossal missed opportunity in U.S.-Cuban relations — four years in which domestic political aspirations overrode foreign policy interests, advancing neither. And the Cuban people paid the price as Washington stood idly by while their standard of living plummeted, partly as a result of sanctions Trump imposed and Biden left in place.
Barack Obama took bold action to normalize relations with Cuba. Donald Trump took bold action to destabilize it. Nothing about Joe Biden’s Cuba policy was bold, and it accomplished nothing. Cuba is poorer and less open today than it was four years ago, China’s and Russia’s influence there is greater, a million more Cuban migrants have fled to the United States, and Democrats are less politically popular than ever in Florida.
