305 - Turning the Lights of Cuba Back On: A Very Radical Idea

            Here is a radical foreign policy idea that could transform our relations with Cuba and Cubans, as well as with Russia and the entire BRICS community. But Washington is very unlikely, in these two weeks before the presidential election, to embrace it in any way, shape, or form.  Even after the election, no matter who wins, this radical idea would be a tough sell. But a President Kamala Harris could reset relations with entire world by altering the way in which we help Cuba in its time of deep need.

            The 11 million Cubans who remain on the island are immensely poor, jobless, less well educated than they might be, and oppressed by a totalitarian regime that lives off archaic Marxism and echoes of brutal Castroism. Whatever is left of the island nation's fervor for Soviet-style state control and state-controlled industrial and agricultural management is maintained by police-enforced repression and bureaucratic bungling.

            Last week Cuba lost electricity. Its aging oil-fired plants have been starved of maintenance, investment, and improvements for decades. The main generating plant that failed last week and plunged the 777-mile-long island into darkness not once, but twice on successive days, had been starved of fundamental repairs for many years; Cuba long ago went effectively bankrupt in terms of foreign exchange availability and cash for the upkeep of its state-owned and run essential infrastructure.

            Immediately after all of Cuba lost power and the government scrambled to make patch-work repairs, a category 1 hurricane called Oscar hit the island, causing more disruption to the electrical grid, to the transportation network, and to the already compromised lives of most Cubans. Water supplies, always short, were also cut.

            Trump during his presidency cancelled most of the tourist visitations to Cuba that had been permitted during President Obama's administration. That deprived Cuba of foreign exchange and made it more difficult for remittances from Cubans in Miami, say, to be sent back to relatives in Cuba.

            Almost simultaneously, Cuba lost much of the subsidized petroleum that it had received from Venezuela during the regimes of Presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro. Shipments of petroleum from Russia could not make up the millions of barrels no longer arriving from Venezuela.  Nor could Mexico produce enough fuel at the right price for Cuba. Hence, last week's collapse of Cuba's entire electrical generating machinery for lack of both fuel and repairs.

            Almost continually since Fidel Castro stormed Havana in 1959 and turned the Mafia run island into a hard-nosed autocracy bankrolled by the Soviet Union, Cuban communism has depended on vilifying the United States to mobilize its people to endure abundant food and material shortages.  American sanctions, the Castro brothers said, were the cause of whatever deprivations their constituents suffered, year after year, and decade after decade.  This was a repetitive calumny despite the flight over the years (continuing now) of at least a full fifth of all Cubans.  The United States now has a prosperous and politically significant Cuban diaspora (successful teachers, doctors, politicians, officials, baseball players, popular singers, and movie stars). Cuba has hunger, scarcity of technological goods, and -- now -- no electricity.

            Washington, for political reasons, has always kept Cuba under tight sanctions, limiting trade with the island severely. Angering the Cuban diaspora by helping the Castro regime that still controls the island, with Miguel Dias-Canel Bermudez as president, is guaranteed to lose votes in Miami and other diasporic centers.

            But it would be a masterstroke of diplomacy if, in Cuba's time of dire need, the U.S. supplied fuel (of which we now have abundant supplies) sufficient to restore power to the Cuban island.  We would be supporting communism, yes, but we would also be creating a new Cuba dependent on our largesse. We would be turning the lights back on in a major way and ensuring that the lights stayed on throughout the island by becoming a fuel supplier of last resort  (even at reduced rates).

            Yes, we would be reversing a foreign policy stance of decades.  But we would also telegraph to the leaders of the developing world that we cared more for the people of Cuba than for ideological rigidity. Doing so would boost our soft power and our generosity for persons in need. Our actions would be contrasted everywhere to Putin's Russian war mongering and to Xi Jinping's tight and uncompromising hold on his own people, not to mention his saber rattling in the South China Sea and his encirclement of Taiwan.

            Admittedly, the Cuban diaspora would howl. It prefers that we isolate Cuba as much as possible and give no assistance to the regime that they fled. But our gain in global esteem and good feeling would or should compensate for such acute loss of favor among a diaspora that enjoys our much higher standards of living and all of our basic freedoms.

            Could such unparalleled and unexpected generosity from what Iran calls the "Great Satan" (the Castros have long used similar words to describe the U.S.) alter world affairs for the better?  Just possibly.  A President Harris could be just the leader to make such an unprecedented move.  Just as President Nixon went to China, Harris could go metaphorically to Havana.

            We would gain, as I have indicated. Cubans would live better, and -- just conceivably -- the Marxist government in Havana would transition, gradually, to a less rigid and less Soviet -inspired model.  After all, the U. S. has little to lose, and tight sanctions and animosity have hardly destroyed the hold of Castroism (little is left of Communism) across the island.