Obama's Cuba

Obama's Cuba policy gains new fans

More Cuban Americans, Republicans are getting behind the push toward normalized relations.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

The American political revolution on Cuba is already over.

Donald Trump proudly declared he was fine with the Cuba reopening at the debate in Miami, and then went on to wallop the two candidates —both Cuban-American—who strongly opposed it in the Florida primary, just five days later. (“I don't agree with President Obama, I do agree something should take place,” Trump said.) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both say they’re on board without any qualification.

The senator carrying the bill to lift the travel ban is a Republican, the congressman carrying the bill to lift the embargo is the guy who won Michele Bachmann's old seat who says he disagrees with Obama on basically everything else. Most expect both will pass comfortably when they eventually get to the floor.

Vicente Blanco, 70, who runs the small Bay of Pigs Museum in Miami, still says Obama's trip here is like visiting Hitler if he'd won World War II, but many of the other grey veterans hanging around there sigh that their children and grandchildren don't feel the same way. There's been no red scare drumbeat on cable news in the days leading up to Obama’s arrival.

Cuba is all but dead as a divisive political issue, and not just in Washington: in the over an hour deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes spent at a Cuban-American town hall in Miami on the Friday ahead of the trip, the closest he came to a rock-throwing protest was one impassioned man pleading with him in Spanish to consider what the president was doing to prop up the Castro regime. Republicans haven’t just retreated—many have found freedom and free market reasons to be actively and affirmatively for the reopening.

Meanwhile, the Cubans are watching "Scandal" and "The Good Wife" on pilfered flash drives, many—while they’re no fans of the Castros—telling people they’re less concerned fighting for democracy than getting onto Twitter, jumpstarting their economy, and finding a reason to stay in their country, unlike their many relatives who’ve left.

Not everyone is on board, but the opposition appears to be getting older and starting to literally die off.

The question that many are focused on is more about when Congress will catch up.

“The vast majority of members of Congress, if you talk to them realistically, without the rhetoric, they will acknowledge that it’s a matter of when, not if,” said Rep. Tom Emmer, the Minnesota Republican carrying the embargo bill. “Forgive the pun, that ship has already sailed.”

There’s a vocal opposition, led by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who’s on a mission to stop Obama’s Cuba policy and said he isn’t at all convinced there’s been a shift in feelings on Cuba.

“People say things. Look at the votes,” he said. “The votes are getting stronger, not weaker.”

Obama hasn’t yet convinced his own Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who’s also from Florida. But people at the forefront of the Cuba efforts all say they’re completely confident the bipartisan support is there for full normalization, if only the GOP leadership would let the bills get to the floor.

“They talk about the importance of democracy, well we ought to have a little democracy in the United States Congress,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who’s been a leader on Cuba relations since he arrived in Congress in 1997, and whose first trip to the island nation dates back to 1979. “The only way they’re maintaining the status quo is by denying members of Congress the ability to vote on these things.”

The day that Obama announced the Cuba reopening in December 2014, Bendixen & Amandi International put a poll in the field asking Cuban-Americans what they thought. They found 44 percent in favor, 48 percent against. In March 2015, they did the poll again: 51 percent in favor, 40 percent against. In December of 2015: 56 percent in favor, 36 percent against.

Raúl Castro had a 90 percent disapproval rating among that last group, which has made Obama’s trip itself somewhat unsettling to them.

“The majority were against President Obama going to Cuba as president,” said pollster Fernand Amandi. “While they’re in favor of the new policy, they understood what the symbolic image of a president of the United States going to Cuba while the Castro regime is still in power.”

Those numbers are nowhere near static. Just take Mike Fernandez, who lives in Miami now but grew up in a small town on the easternmost side of Cuba, was forced to watch a political execution at 9 and fled Cuba with his family at 12, on Christmas Eve 1964. For many years, he was a proud hardliner and is still a proud Republican. But he’s also part of the U.S.-Cuba Business Alliance and was sitting at the White House last Wednesday as one of the Cuban-American leaders invited to meet with Obama ahead of the trip.

The only other thing that Obama’s done as president which Fernandez approves of is killing Osama bin Laden. But Fernandez said he’s getting tired of people standing in Obama’s way on this.

“Here we are, it’s almost 60 years later, we cannot come through an agreement because we have three or four very vocal representatives,” Fernandez said. “They get elected by reminding my parents and old seniors of the worst days of their lives. These guys don’t trade on hope.”

Diaz-Balart is Fernandez’s congressman. He said he’s not the only one in the Miami district who’s feeling differently and wants Congress to start acting differently.

“My father’s 89, my mother’s 86. My kids will not vote for him, and neither will I,” Fernandez said. “Politicians should be very good at smelling when the wind changes.”

Most expect that this trip will only accelerate the pace of shifting sentiments in the U.S. Obama’s expressed skepticism about getting the embargo lifted during his presidency or at least before the expected lame duck session post-election. But with all the members of Congress and all the business leaders he brought with him, and all the government changes and deals being announced as part of this trip, he’s hollowed out what little obstacles are left.

American airlines are about to start flying to Cuba. New commercial licensing agreements are going to turn the embargo into a shell.

The questions start to become about how Cuba is going to have enough sugar for all the mojitos of the expected 4 million American tourists expected to start coming here annually, or how a government built on self-preservation bureaucracy is going to handle the sudden spike in its economy and connectivity to the rest of the world.

“Republican and Democratic administrations have viewed Cuba as fallen into the politics, ‘We’ll only take measures when they take measures,’” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who’s carrying the bill to lift the travel ban in the Senate and part of the delegation here too—and who says he expects he’ll get it through, but only by attaching it to other legislation in a bit of maneuvering. “We’ve been waiting forever, and it took a lot of courage for the president and the administration to say, ‘We’re going to move in our national interest and we believe that it’ll be in the Cubans interests as well.’ ”