Perspective: Why President Trump’s hard-line approach to Cuba is a mistake
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks about the Trump administration's Cuba policy Wednesday at the State Department. By John Ermer John Ermer is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at Florida International University in Miami, FL.
There is good reason to worry. Over the past 60 years, hard-line policies, along with Cuban attempts to break free of dependence upon the United States, have repeatedly driven Cuba to seek closer relations first with the Soviet Union, then with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
On the heels of that defeat, Castro leaned closer to the Soviet Union. While Havana never stopped exhibiting streaks of independence, Cuba scholars regard the 1970s and 1980s as a period of greater Sovietization of the island’s government, economy and society. In 1976, Cuba ratified a new constitution, modeled on the 1936 “Stalin Constitution,” that explicitly mentioned the Soviet Union in its preamble. As ties between Cuba and the U.S.S.R.
In 2009, President Raúl Castro visited Moscow, a first for a Cuban leader since the end of the Cold War. The meeting ushered in a renewal of intimate cooperation between the nations and culminated in agreements in 2015 to work together on education, health, aeronautics, energy and infrastructure. Perhaps most significantly for Cuba, Russia agreed to forgive 90 percent of the island’s Cold War debt.
By the end of the decade, however, Moscow began reversing course, docking a high-tech spy ship in Havana. In 2017, Russian officials announced the reopening of the listening station and pursuit of an increased military presence on the island. More recently, Putin has mused about Moscow reestablishing missile bases in Cuba and intimated his military is ready for its own Cuban missile crisis.
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