Sober lessons from relations with Mexico
By Marifeli Pérez-Stable
The Miami Herald, July 17, 2008
Great powers have rarely tempered their actions out of respect for their weaker neighbors. U.S.-Mexican relations are a case in point. By 1850, Mexico had lost half of its territory to U.S. expansionism, a loss that suffused Mexican political culture with a mistrust of the United States that lingers still.
Then, in 1938, Mexico nationalized Standard Oil. Instead of deploying the Marines, FDR showed restraint under the Good Neighbor Policy and handed Mexican nationalism a crucial psychological victory. After 1940, Mexico and the United States slowly crafted a mutually beneficial relationship. Along the way, the United States gained a consideration for Mexican sensibilities.
In contrast, Cuba and the United States never found a stable path toward a mutually beneficial relationship before 1959. Even more so than in the U.S.-Mexican case, glaring disparities of power marked U.S.-Cuba relations. Cuba, moreover, had a long-standing expectation of equality vis-à-vis great powers that was unusual in the Caribbean Basin.
Cubans, for example, proposed three alternatives to Spanish colonialism based on parity: joining the United States as a state, gaining autonomy as a province of Spain and establishing an independent republic. After the Civil War, U.S. interest in annexing Cuba waned. Spain never seriously minded autonomism’s claim.
Platt Amendment didn’t help
When independence finally arrived in 1902, the republic was saddled with the Platt Amendment, a U.S.-imposed addendum to the Cuban Constitution of 1901 that gave the United States the right to intervene if order and property were threatened. Even Cuban annexationists decried the amendment for placing Cuba in the subservient position of a protectorate. In 1934, the Roosevelt administration abrogated the amendment.
By 1940, Cubans had forged a governing consensus under a new constitution that kept the United States at bay. The Auténtico administrations of Ramón Grau (1944-1948) and Carlos Prío (1948-1952) laid an incipient foundation for normalizing relations with the United States: socioeconomic reforms at home and pursuit of the nation’s economic interests abroad.
In March 1952, however, Fulgencio Batista deposed Prío and, therefore, derailed the fledgling effort at normalization. Had democracy not been interrupted, Cuba and the United States might have found a groove like Mexico and the United States did after 1940.
In the early 1960s, the United States sought to bring about regime change in Cuba. After landing on April 17, 1961, the Bay of Pigs invaders were routed two days later. Cuba defied the United States and won. At last, Cuban nationalism had a psychological victory but — unlike Mexico’s in 1938 — at the cost of an enmity that has lasted half a century. The revolution reached out to the old Soviet Union to fend off the United States, which for a while put Cuba at the center of the Cold War. It was a pernicious Catch-22: Cuba wanted the Soviets as a shield against the United States, but the closer the ties between Havana and Moscow became, the more set Washington was on regime change.
In 1962, an emboldened USSR emplaced ballistic missiles on the island, which set off the Missile Crisis, the most dangerous moment in the Cold War. Afterward, the superpower conflict actually offered an umbrella for U.S.-Cuba normalization. Two moments are especially noteworthy.
In my next column, I’ll take up these two moments, the role of Cuban Miami and how the end of the Cold War put regime change back on the U.S. agenda.
When all is said and done, Cuba and the United States will have normal relations when Havana turns nearness into an asset and Washington gains a consideration for Cuban expectations.
In other words, Cuban nationalism is in need of a psychological victory more akin to Mexico’s of 1938.