William M. LeoGrande has written five books on politics in Cuba and Central America, published articles in media including The New York Times and The New Republic, and served on both the Democratic Policy Committee of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. On Monday, Nov. 5, he presented a lecture titled "Talking with Fidel: The Secret History of U.S.-Cuban Diplomacy" in the Chapel.
Government professor Shelley McConnell was pleased to introduce her former Kirkland College professor as a person who is "unfailingly kind to students and junior colleagues," but "raises his voice when necessary," and started his career in government right here at Kirkland and Hamilton Colleges in the 1970s.
LeoGrande began with a quick contextual reference to the current presidential contenders. A few months ago, Obama was lambasted for saying he would talk to Fidel Castro and others, by opponents like Clinton who called him "naïve." Setting out to prove that talking to Fidel is not a radical idea, LeoGrande noted that every president since Eisenhower has seen enough potential advantage to conduct talks with Cubans, secret or otherwise.
Flash back to 1959, and Castro was quite popular in the U.S., according to LeoGrande. The brutality of the Baptista regime had led to great American support for revolution, but the U.S. did try to kick Castro out of power near Baptista's end. When the U.S. reacted against the trial of some of Baptista's police and military for human rights abuses by victorious revolutionaries, Castro became absolutely convinced of American hostility toward his government.
While Castro was partially correct, Ambassador Philip Bonsal was among a group who saw Castro as a bit of a social radical, but still felt Cuba and the U.S. might be able to get along. Having successfully built a constructive relationship between the U.S. and the revolutionary government in Bolivia, Bonsal was appointed by Eisenhower to build a constructive relationship with Cuba. He worked diligently, constantly talking to Cuban officials, convinced the revolutionaries would realize the necessity of a good relationship with the U.S., once they sensed the closeness of our structural economic ties.
In April 1959, Castro was invited to speak to the American Society of Newspapers. He spoke on Meet the Press for a full half-hour in English, and afterward confided to Nixon that he felt he had done poorly. While Eisenhower had actually traveled to Georgia to golf in avoidance of Castro, Nixon met with him in the vice president's office. Ultimately, Nixon wasted the valuable time lecturing Castro about the dangers of Latin American communism, and left convinced that Castro had "the indefinable qualities that make him a leader of men," and was going to become a serious problem.
Following the unproductive meeting with Nixon, Castro went to the Bronx Zoo, where he teased a tiger in what LeoGrande humorously framed as a metaphor for what he was doing in the U.S. Castro traveled all around the Northeast, visiting Princeton and New York City. While the U.S. initially hoped the trip was a sign that Cuba wanted cordial relations, Castro immediately poked fun at Eisenhower upon his return, by golfing with Che Guevara.
LeoGrande showed a slide of an internal document that went to Eisenhower in 1959 that said "there is no reasonable basis to believe that Castro will adopt policies consistent with U.S. security interests." This November document was the beginning of American plans to overthrow Castro, but the U.S. waited a few months before even trying to mobilize exiles into an exile army.
In January 1960, Bonsal convinced Eisenhower to open bilateral talks with Cuba, partly through 3rd party arrangements for locations and preconditions. This process was derailed due to the explosion of Le Coubre, a French ship that was carrying Belgium munitions near Cuba. Castro gave a rousing anti-American speech at the funeral of the victims. Following this the American administration "basically threw in the towel" on negotiations, LeoGrande said, and Eisenhower advised the CIA to go ahead with derailment planning.
At the beginning of the Kennedy presidency, the Bay of Pigs failed in less than 72 hours, as almost all the soldiers who landed on Cuban shores were captured. The U.S. did not acknowledge the government was behind the operation, but secured the soldiers' freedom through a large exchange of medical supplies and tractors through negotiations led by Donovan. This success led Kennedy to think in terms of trying to win Cuba back from the Soviet Union, which had made Castro livid by negotiating the Cuban Missile Crisis over the Cubans' heads. Kennedy, rightly according LeoGrande, saw this as an opportune moment to take a "sweet approach" of trying to get Cuba to give up the Soviet Union and side with America.
Journalist Lisa Howard began to serve as a freelance emissary by traveling back and forth between the White House and Cuba instigating talks. She alerted the White House that Cuba was interested in talking, but Kennedy was assassinated during the time that secret meetings were being arranged. John Daniel, who had been conducting separate efforts, was actually talking with Castro when he heard that Kennedy was assassinated. Daniel witnessed Castro's immediate response that this was very bad news. Real negotiation did not resume until the presidencies of Nixon and Ford.
In 1974, Henry Kissinger saw normalization of relations with Cuba as an extension of policies toward the Soviet Union. He sent a message via Kirby Jones that the U.S. was interested in opening a dialogue, which led to a series of meetings around New York. All involved feared that the talks would become public and a problem for both sides, and LeoGrande illustrated this paranoia with an anecdotal story. During a meeting at an old cafeteria in LaGuardia airport, both Kissinger's assistant secretary for Latin America and a diplomat from Cuba were convinced a blind man who approached them selling pencils was a spy.
These secret negotiations had somewhat fruitful results. Cuba and the U.S. signed an anti-hijacking agreement, where Cubans agreed to return planes hijacked in Cuba, and America agreed to return Cuban boats hijacked near the U.S. Sanctions imposed on Cuba in 1962 were lifted, which allowed other Latin American nations to normalize trade restrictions with Cuba. LeoGrande gave the example of Argentina's General Motors, now able to freely sell trucks in Cuba.
An agenda for broad progress was again upset in late 1975, this time by Cuban involvement in Angola. There was internal strife, and South Africa was intervening to prevent a pro-Soviet group from coming out on top. Cuba kicked South Africa out of Angola, effectively making normalized relations with the U.S. impossible.
Jimmy Carter decided to normalize relations within his first few weeks of his presidency. LeoGrande showed the declassified internal document reading "we should begin direct and confidential talks," which led to very quick improvements. In 1977, Carter lifted the travel ban. Foreign Service Officer Wayne Smith, who had been the last U.S. diplomat out of the embassy when it closed in 1961, was crucial in negotiating maritime and fishing boundaries with Cuba. Carter also opened "interest sectors" of the Swiss and Czechoslovakian embassies, which were housed in the old Cuban and American embassy buildings, and performed the same functions.
The public aspect of negotiations was halted at the end of 1977 when superpowers were jockeying for power in Africa. Cuba sent 20,000 troops into Ethiopia to fight the Somalian invasion. While talks continued secretly for two years, the key issues were irreconcilable. The U.S. wanted Cuba out of Africa, but Cuba drew parallels to its lack of leverage over our troops in South Korea, and said that its policies in Africa were none of our business. After reading the transcripts from almost all of these secret meetings, LeoGrande felt he was reading the same transcript over and over again. "We lay out our position, the Cubans respond…" and "issues aren't actually being resolved." Still, Cuba released more than 3,000 political prisoners as a concession to Carter's commitment to human rights. The U.S. was supposed to give them visas, and the last year of the Carter administration was dominated by the Mariel Migration Crisis. Cuban-Americans sent boats to Mariel to pick up friends and relatives, and 150,000 Cubans arrived in little boats on American shores. Riots in Arkansas even cost Clinton re-election as governor.
Despite destroying Carter's reelection campaign, according to LeoGrande, the Mariel Crisis resulted in more secret talks. In exchange for Castro closing ports, it was agreed that talks would resume if Carter won, but the focus changed at Reagan's victory. Obsessed with Central America, the Reagan administration developed an extremely harsh policy when Al Haig came to office. In 1983, George Schultz replaced Haig, and somewhat successful negotiations on migration ensued. Cuba wanted to get rid of political prisoners still stuck in Havana who had never received American visas, and the U.S. wanted to get rid of 3,000 violent criminal "excludables" who had migrated to the U.S. before, but were not citizens. Through talks led by Cuban diplomat Ricardo Alarcon, Cuba was set to take the "excludables" in exchange for the U.S. acceptance of the freed political prisoners left in Havana, as well as 20,000 migrants a year. Negotiations were again interrupted by a crisis, and Cuba cancelled the immigration agreement. Cuba thought diplomatic advances implied that the U.S. would scrap plans to broadcast American propaganda into Cuba via Radio Marti (a station named after Cuba's father of independence), but the station was on the air within a couple months. Cuba cancelled the immigration agreement.
In 1987, the agreement was restored due to efforts by Michael Kozak. While Cuba wanted the right to transmit a Cuban propaganda channel to the same proportion of the American population as the American broadcast was reaching in Cuba, the U.S. felt a fair agreement entitled Cuba to only broadcast to an area of the same geographic size that Radio Marti reached in Cuba. While there was no meeting of the minds, Kozak agreed to just keep on talking in order to keep Southern Africa on the table.
Reagan's Assistant Secretary for Africa Chester Crocker had been trying to construct an agreement to get Cuba out of Angola since 1981. Crocker saw that if Cuba got out of Angola and South Africa got out of Namibia, South Africa would be separated from Angola by Namibia, and Cuba would have no excuse to stay in Angola. According to LeoGrande, after eight years of this idea, the U.S. finally understood that it couldn't cut the deal without including Cuba. The Africa Bureau wanted this agreement badly enough to include Cubans at the table, Cubans desperate for an honorable exit wanted to be at the table, but the Latin American Department led by Abrams did not want the U.S. to talk to Cuba about anything. In 1986, Chester Crocker won this internal argument, and was authorized to invite Cuba to talk. Cuba signed the agreement in 1989, everyone cooperated, and Cuba held free elections.
While the U.S. had promised Cubans negotiation about Latin America in reward for cooperation on Africa, the first Bush administration denied that promise. Foreign Service Officer Jay Taylor even received a "negative efficiency rating" due to his criticism of this disingenuous offer by his own government, according to LeoGrande.
In 1994, 30,000 Cubans rafted north, and the U.S. agreed to take 20,000 refugees due to its failure to live up to the 1987 agreement. The U.S. needed Cuba to prevent people from getting on the rafts, and President Clinton promised to open up negotiations if they did. Cuba agreed, but negotiations never started due to yet another unfortunate occurrence. Cuba shot down two planes piloted by Cuban-Americans, claiming that they had been dropping leaflets and taunting Cuban-air defenses. This led to a breakdown in negotiations.
In November 1999, Elián González arrived. While LeoGrande pointedly spared the audience from viewing the infamous slide of federal Marshalls invading the home of Elián's Miami relatives in 2000, he noted that it was mostly a conflict within the U.S. Still, there was a led of diplomacy led by Vicki Huddleston, particularly to fulfill the U.S. obligation of finding out if Juan Miguel was a fit father before sending Elián back. While Cubans initially viewed her as a hard-liner, she earned their respect by the extreme sensitivity with which she handled the process.
From what LeoGrande can tell, the George W. Bush administration is the first not to talk with Cuba at all. Bush cut off twice-yearly talks, and turned the old Cuban embassy building into a meeting place for Cuban dissidents. Noting that most diplomacy that is going on is owed to Carter, LeoGrande showed a photo of former Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau's funeral. Carter and Castro happened to be standing next to each other, and Castro invited Carter to come to Cuba. In May 2002, Carter and a delegation that included Hamilton Professor Shelley McConnell traveled to Cuba and had a dialogue. While Carter couldn't get any real concessions as a former president, he hoped his trip might have a positive effect on bilateral negotiations.
Bush's policy didn't really change. When Raul Castro took over last year, he stated a willingness to negotiate in a "spirit of equality, reciprocity, and the fullest American respect." Despite extending this open invitation in his first public appearance, the Bush administration responded by calling him "Fidel-light." LeoGrande finds this disappointing, seeing a number of issues upon which cooperation is possible and important. Cuba has offered talks on anti-narcotics trafficking and anti-terrorism, but the Bush administration believes the Raul government will collapse and it is not worth U.S. effort to negotiate before its demise.
Even at moments of maximum tension, there have always been issues of mutual interest that drew Cuba and the U.S. to talks. While the U.S. has pummeled Cuba with a series of ever-compounding demands, Cuba has always been willing to sit down and talk. On many occasions the U.S. has missed signals when Cuba shifted its position and was willing to make new concessions. LeoGrande found this particularly true in the Reagan years, when Reagan did not allow those who truly understood Cuba to know talks were going on, because he did not want to hear those signals.
In conclusion, LeoGrande laid out a list of lessons he has learned about U.S.-Cuban dialogue. The most successful talks have been about relatively narrow topics, and the U.S. has also exercised a "tendency to move goalposts and try to exploit Cuban weakness." LeoGrande backed this claim with the example of the U.S. following up on Cuban cooperation in South Africa with demands that Cuba cooperates in Central America, and then that the country reconstitutes itself as a democracy. Cubans always seem to hope a new American administration will display a more open attitude toward their country and in a speech on July 27, Raul repeated his offer to negotiations hoping that the next U.S. president will be more willing to meet diplomatically with Cuba.
At a Camp David meeting in 1990, Bush senior asked Gorbachev to get Cuba out of Central America. LeoGrande paraphrased Gorbachev's blunt response as "I don't get to tell Castro what to do; you need to talk to the Cubans yourself." Gorbachev elaborated that the key is mutual respect, and the moment Cuba is treated as an equal partner it responds in a balanced and reasonable manner. LeoGrande strongly believes that Gorbachev has it right. Until the U.S. gets past the idea that our status as a superpower gives us the right to make demands of Cuba that we would never accept, LeoGrande foresees great difficulty in getting to the real issue of normalizing relations.
-- by Mariam Ballout '10
Government professor Shelley McConnell was pleased to introduce her former Kirkland College professor as a person who is "unfailingly kind to students and junior colleagues," but "raises his voice when necessary," and started his career in government right here at Kirkland and Hamilton Colleges in the 1970s.
LeoGrande began with a quick contextual reference to the current presidential contenders. A few months ago, Obama was lambasted for saying he would talk to Fidel Castro and others, by opponents like Clinton who called him "naïve." Setting out to prove that talking to Fidel is not a radical idea, LeoGrande noted that every president since Eisenhower has seen enough potential advantage to conduct talks with Cubans, secret or otherwise.
Flash back to 1959, and Castro was quite popular in the U.S., according to LeoGrande. The brutality of the Baptista regime had led to great American support for revolution, but the U.S. did try to kick Castro out of power near Baptista's end. When the U.S. reacted against the trial of some of Baptista's police and military for human rights abuses by victorious revolutionaries, Castro became absolutely convinced of American hostility toward his government.
While Castro was partially correct, Ambassador Philip Bonsal was among a group who saw Castro as a bit of a social radical, but still felt Cuba and the U.S. might be able to get along. Having successfully built a constructive relationship between the U.S. and the revolutionary government in Bolivia, Bonsal was appointed by Eisenhower to build a constructive relationship with Cuba. He worked diligently, constantly talking to Cuban officials, convinced the revolutionaries would realize the necessity of a good relationship with the U.S., once they sensed the closeness of our structural economic ties.
In April 1959, Castro was invited to speak to the American Society of Newspapers. He spoke on Meet the Press for a full half-hour in English, and afterward confided to Nixon that he felt he had done poorly. While Eisenhower had actually traveled to Georgia to golf in avoidance of Castro, Nixon met with him in the vice president's office. Ultimately, Nixon wasted the valuable time lecturing Castro about the dangers of Latin American communism, and left convinced that Castro had "the indefinable qualities that make him a leader of men," and was going to become a serious problem.
Following the unproductive meeting with Nixon, Castro went to the Bronx Zoo, where he teased a tiger in what LeoGrande humorously framed as a metaphor for what he was doing in the U.S. Castro traveled all around the Northeast, visiting Princeton and New York City. While the U.S. initially hoped the trip was a sign that Cuba wanted cordial relations, Castro immediately poked fun at Eisenhower upon his return, by golfing with Che Guevara.
LeoGrande showed a slide of an internal document that went to Eisenhower in 1959 that said "there is no reasonable basis to believe that Castro will adopt policies consistent with U.S. security interests." This November document was the beginning of American plans to overthrow Castro, but the U.S. waited a few months before even trying to mobilize exiles into an exile army.
In January 1960, Bonsal convinced Eisenhower to open bilateral talks with Cuba, partly through 3rd party arrangements for locations and preconditions. This process was derailed due to the explosion of Le Coubre, a French ship that was carrying Belgium munitions near Cuba. Castro gave a rousing anti-American speech at the funeral of the victims. Following this the American administration "basically threw in the towel" on negotiations, LeoGrande said, and Eisenhower advised the CIA to go ahead with derailment planning.
At the beginning of the Kennedy presidency, the Bay of Pigs failed in less than 72 hours, as almost all the soldiers who landed on Cuban shores were captured. The U.S. did not acknowledge the government was behind the operation, but secured the soldiers' freedom through a large exchange of medical supplies and tractors through negotiations led by Donovan. This success led Kennedy to think in terms of trying to win Cuba back from the Soviet Union, which had made Castro livid by negotiating the Cuban Missile Crisis over the Cubans' heads. Kennedy, rightly according LeoGrande, saw this as an opportune moment to take a "sweet approach" of trying to get Cuba to give up the Soviet Union and side with America.
Journalist Lisa Howard began to serve as a freelance emissary by traveling back and forth between the White House and Cuba instigating talks. She alerted the White House that Cuba was interested in talking, but Kennedy was assassinated during the time that secret meetings were being arranged. John Daniel, who had been conducting separate efforts, was actually talking with Castro when he heard that Kennedy was assassinated. Daniel witnessed Castro's immediate response that this was very bad news. Real negotiation did not resume until the presidencies of Nixon and Ford.
In 1974, Henry Kissinger saw normalization of relations with Cuba as an extension of policies toward the Soviet Union. He sent a message via Kirby Jones that the U.S. was interested in opening a dialogue, which led to a series of meetings around New York. All involved feared that the talks would become public and a problem for both sides, and LeoGrande illustrated this paranoia with an anecdotal story. During a meeting at an old cafeteria in LaGuardia airport, both Kissinger's assistant secretary for Latin America and a diplomat from Cuba were convinced a blind man who approached them selling pencils was a spy.
These secret negotiations had somewhat fruitful results. Cuba and the U.S. signed an anti-hijacking agreement, where Cubans agreed to return planes hijacked in Cuba, and America agreed to return Cuban boats hijacked near the U.S. Sanctions imposed on Cuba in 1962 were lifted, which allowed other Latin American nations to normalize trade restrictions with Cuba. LeoGrande gave the example of Argentina's General Motors, now able to freely sell trucks in Cuba.
An agenda for broad progress was again upset in late 1975, this time by Cuban involvement in Angola. There was internal strife, and South Africa was intervening to prevent a pro-Soviet group from coming out on top. Cuba kicked South Africa out of Angola, effectively making normalized relations with the U.S. impossible.
Jimmy Carter decided to normalize relations within his first few weeks of his presidency. LeoGrande showed the declassified internal document reading "we should begin direct and confidential talks," which led to very quick improvements. In 1977, Carter lifted the travel ban. Foreign Service Officer Wayne Smith, who had been the last U.S. diplomat out of the embassy when it closed in 1961, was crucial in negotiating maritime and fishing boundaries with Cuba. Carter also opened "interest sectors" of the Swiss and Czechoslovakian embassies, which were housed in the old Cuban and American embassy buildings, and performed the same functions.
The public aspect of negotiations was halted at the end of 1977 when superpowers were jockeying for power in Africa. Cuba sent 20,000 troops into Ethiopia to fight the Somalian invasion. While talks continued secretly for two years, the key issues were irreconcilable. The U.S. wanted Cuba out of Africa, but Cuba drew parallels to its lack of leverage over our troops in South Korea, and said that its policies in Africa were none of our business. After reading the transcripts from almost all of these secret meetings, LeoGrande felt he was reading the same transcript over and over again. "We lay out our position, the Cubans respond…" and "issues aren't actually being resolved." Still, Cuba released more than 3,000 political prisoners as a concession to Carter's commitment to human rights. The U.S. was supposed to give them visas, and the last year of the Carter administration was dominated by the Mariel Migration Crisis. Cuban-Americans sent boats to Mariel to pick up friends and relatives, and 150,000 Cubans arrived in little boats on American shores. Riots in Arkansas even cost Clinton re-election as governor.
Despite destroying Carter's reelection campaign, according to LeoGrande, the Mariel Crisis resulted in more secret talks. In exchange for Castro closing ports, it was agreed that talks would resume if Carter won, but the focus changed at Reagan's victory. Obsessed with Central America, the Reagan administration developed an extremely harsh policy when Al Haig came to office. In 1983, George Schultz replaced Haig, and somewhat successful negotiations on migration ensued. Cuba wanted to get rid of political prisoners still stuck in Havana who had never received American visas, and the U.S. wanted to get rid of 3,000 violent criminal "excludables" who had migrated to the U.S. before, but were not citizens. Through talks led by Cuban diplomat Ricardo Alarcon, Cuba was set to take the "excludables" in exchange for the U.S. acceptance of the freed political prisoners left in Havana, as well as 20,000 migrants a year. Negotiations were again interrupted by a crisis, and Cuba cancelled the immigration agreement. Cuba thought diplomatic advances implied that the U.S. would scrap plans to broadcast American propaganda into Cuba via Radio Marti (a station named after Cuba's father of independence), but the station was on the air within a couple months. Cuba cancelled the immigration agreement.
In 1987, the agreement was restored due to efforts by Michael Kozak. While Cuba wanted the right to transmit a Cuban propaganda channel to the same proportion of the American population as the American broadcast was reaching in Cuba, the U.S. felt a fair agreement entitled Cuba to only broadcast to an area of the same geographic size that Radio Marti reached in Cuba. While there was no meeting of the minds, Kozak agreed to just keep on talking in order to keep Southern Africa on the table.
Reagan's Assistant Secretary for Africa Chester Crocker had been trying to construct an agreement to get Cuba out of Angola since 1981. Crocker saw that if Cuba got out of Angola and South Africa got out of Namibia, South Africa would be separated from Angola by Namibia, and Cuba would have no excuse to stay in Angola. According to LeoGrande, after eight years of this idea, the U.S. finally understood that it couldn't cut the deal without including Cuba. The Africa Bureau wanted this agreement badly enough to include Cubans at the table, Cubans desperate for an honorable exit wanted to be at the table, but the Latin American Department led by Abrams did not want the U.S. to talk to Cuba about anything. In 1986, Chester Crocker won this internal argument, and was authorized to invite Cuba to talk. Cuba signed the agreement in 1989, everyone cooperated, and Cuba held free elections.
While the U.S. had promised Cubans negotiation about Latin America in reward for cooperation on Africa, the first Bush administration denied that promise. Foreign Service Officer Jay Taylor even received a "negative efficiency rating" due to his criticism of this disingenuous offer by his own government, according to LeoGrande.
In 1994, 30,000 Cubans rafted north, and the U.S. agreed to take 20,000 refugees due to its failure to live up to the 1987 agreement. The U.S. needed Cuba to prevent people from getting on the rafts, and President Clinton promised to open up negotiations if they did. Cuba agreed, but negotiations never started due to yet another unfortunate occurrence. Cuba shot down two planes piloted by Cuban-Americans, claiming that they had been dropping leaflets and taunting Cuban-air defenses. This led to a breakdown in negotiations.
In November 1999, Elián González arrived. While LeoGrande pointedly spared the audience from viewing the infamous slide of federal Marshalls invading the home of Elián's Miami relatives in 2000, he noted that it was mostly a conflict within the U.S. Still, there was a led of diplomacy led by Vicki Huddleston, particularly to fulfill the U.S. obligation of finding out if Juan Miguel was a fit father before sending Elián back. While Cubans initially viewed her as a hard-liner, she earned their respect by the extreme sensitivity with which she handled the process.
From what LeoGrande can tell, the George W. Bush administration is the first not to talk with Cuba at all. Bush cut off twice-yearly talks, and turned the old Cuban embassy building into a meeting place for Cuban dissidents. Noting that most diplomacy that is going on is owed to Carter, LeoGrande showed a photo of former Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau's funeral. Carter and Castro happened to be standing next to each other, and Castro invited Carter to come to Cuba. In May 2002, Carter and a delegation that included Hamilton Professor Shelley McConnell traveled to Cuba and had a dialogue. While Carter couldn't get any real concessions as a former president, he hoped his trip might have a positive effect on bilateral negotiations.
Bush's policy didn't really change. When Raul Castro took over last year, he stated a willingness to negotiate in a "spirit of equality, reciprocity, and the fullest American respect." Despite extending this open invitation in his first public appearance, the Bush administration responded by calling him "Fidel-light." LeoGrande finds this disappointing, seeing a number of issues upon which cooperation is possible and important. Cuba has offered talks on anti-narcotics trafficking and anti-terrorism, but the Bush administration believes the Raul government will collapse and it is not worth U.S. effort to negotiate before its demise.
Even at moments of maximum tension, there have always been issues of mutual interest that drew Cuba and the U.S. to talks. While the U.S. has pummeled Cuba with a series of ever-compounding demands, Cuba has always been willing to sit down and talk. On many occasions the U.S. has missed signals when Cuba shifted its position and was willing to make new concessions. LeoGrande found this particularly true in the Reagan years, when Reagan did not allow those who truly understood Cuba to know talks were going on, because he did not want to hear those signals.
In conclusion, LeoGrande laid out a list of lessons he has learned about U.S.-Cuban dialogue. The most successful talks have been about relatively narrow topics, and the U.S. has also exercised a "tendency to move goalposts and try to exploit Cuban weakness." LeoGrande backed this claim with the example of the U.S. following up on Cuban cooperation in South Africa with demands that Cuba cooperates in Central America, and then that the country reconstitutes itself as a democracy. Cubans always seem to hope a new American administration will display a more open attitude toward their country and in a speech on July 27, Raul repeated his offer to negotiations hoping that the next U.S. president will be more willing to meet diplomatically with Cuba.
At a Camp David meeting in 1990, Bush senior asked Gorbachev to get Cuba out of Central America. LeoGrande paraphrased Gorbachev's blunt response as "I don't get to tell Castro what to do; you need to talk to the Cubans yourself." Gorbachev elaborated that the key is mutual respect, and the moment Cuba is treated as an equal partner it responds in a balanced and reasonable manner. LeoGrande strongly believes that Gorbachev has it right. Until the U.S. gets past the idea that our status as a superpower gives us the right to make demands of Cuba that we would never accept, LeoGrande foresees great difficulty in getting to the real issue of normalizing relations.
-- by Mariam Ballout '10
