Strange things are afoot in America’s backyard

Strange things are afoot in America’s backyard

There’s big trouble in the little Caribbean

Cuban exiles rally in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood on Monday in support of protesters. (Marta Lavandier/AP)

By Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

July 14, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

They say that bipartisanship is a thing of the past in foreign policy, but its death has clearly been exaggerated. The new hawk consensus in China is strongly bipartisan, to the point where both parties are enthusiastic about reviving classic industrial policies. The Trump administration was bound and determined to get out of Afghanistan, and now so is the Biden administration. The only difference there is that President Biden seems competent enough to actually follow through on his policy pronouncements.

The United States leaves Afghanistan in … let’s say a “fragile” state. This would suggest that there is also a bipartisan consensus that the United States should turn away from state-building. The past week’s events in the Caribbean, however, have complicated that bias toward retrenchment. First, Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, injecting unwanted instability into the impoverished nation. Second, Cuba experienced the largest protests observers have seen since the “special period,” when Havana lost its Soviet patron in the early 1990s.

This seems like a big deal, although some of the restrainers are unhappy with what seems like cognitive dissonance:

This is an odd way to frame how U.S. foreign policymaking should proceed. Even if state-building is hard, distance matters. Afghanistan is more than 6,000 miles from the United States; Haiti and Cuba are in America’s backyard. Instability in those countries automatically translates into waves of refugees entering Florida. The Caribbean Basin is an area where even if intervention is difficult, it seems directly tied to the fortunes of ordinary Americans.

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So, what does this mean for U.S. foreign policy toward both countries? The Haiti case is … weird. According to the Miami Herald, “Seventeen Colombians and two Haitian Americans from South Florida are in custody in Haiti. … The men claimed to have been recruited to do work in Haiti by an under-the-radar firm in Doral called CTU Security.” CNN’s Evan Perez reports that “several of the men involved in the assassination of Haiti’s president previously worked as U.S. law enforcement informants.”

The question, of course, is who invested in an operation involving nearly 30 people and why. CNN and BBC report that Haitian authorities arrested Christian Emmanuel Sanon, an emigre who returned to Haiti in June and ostensibly hired CTU Security. The Herald reporters note, however, that “Haiti has asked for FBI help, in part because of the large number of businessmen and drug gangs that might have had an interest in getting rid of the president.”

Interestingly, in Haiti, the government seems to want U.S. intervention more than the Biden administration does. According to the New York Times’s Michael Crowley, Michael D. Shear and Eric Schmitt, Haitian authorities requested U.S. troops, but the Biden administration officials “show no immediate enthusiasm for sending even a limited American force into the midst of politically-based civil strife and disorder.”

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Meanwhile, in Cuba, the protests in Havana surprised a lot of observers and appear to be grounded in grievances about how the Cuban regime has handled the pandemic and the economy. My colleague Adam Taylor has an excellent FAQ column that helps to provide some context. In essence, Cuba’s economy faced a triple whammy in the past three years, akin to the special period: the collapse of its new benefactor, Venezuela, the tightening of U.S. sanctions and the collapse of tourism due to the pandemic. The whole “repression of civil liberties” is probably a source of tension, too.

Both Biden and the GOP really want to win Florida are voicing support for the Cuban protesters, but the question is what, if anything, the United States can do beyond that.

The traditional play is more sanctions. As someone who has long been skeptical of their utility vis-a-vis Cuba, I can actually see a case to be made for keeping them in place right now. The Cuban economy is in better shape than it was during the special period, but the Cuban polity is not. Fidel Castro had some legitimacy from overthrowing a corrupt dictator; the current leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, does not.

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If the United States wants to squeeze harder, it also needs to prevent Cuba from using immigration to the United States as a release valve for political pressure. As James Bloodworth noted in Foreign Policy:

In the aftermath of the 1994 riots, Castro, along with his entourage, traveled down to the Malecon, Havana’s iconic sea wall. Castro declared that anyone who wanted to leave Cuba could do so. “We are not opposed to anything, to letting those who want to leave, leave,” he declared. Over the ensuing months, the wily Cuban leader opened Cuba’s maritime ports, allowing thousands of balseros (“rafters”) to depart for the United States, a regular safety valve the former Cuban leader deployed to get rid of malcontents.

The Biden administration is acting to reduce the utility of this gambit for Cuba’s government. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that any Cuban (or Haitian) asylum seekers would be resettled in a third country.

Bloodworth suggests that it is too early to label this Cuba’s 1989 moment, and my Post colleague Anthony Faiola concurs: “Analysts say Cuba’s powerful intelligence and security apparatus … will probably prevent the protests from spiraling rapidly into a Caribbean version of the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

The Biden administration is approaching both Haiti and Cuba as if they are unexploded land mines that, if detonated, would trigger a tsunami of refugees. That is a wise approach. Whether they are successful in navigating the next few weeks, however, will probably have a lot more to do with luck than skill.