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In the past month, the island nation of Cuba has been hit by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake, Hurricane Rafael, and a series of blackouts. The U.S. embargo continues, and now Cuba has to deal with the announcement that President-elect Donald Trump has picked Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to be his secretary of state.
Trump’s selection of foreign policy hard-liner Rubio will have political repercussions not only in Cuba, but throughout the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Al Jazeera reported on the most recent disaster to hit the island nation in “Earthquake rocks Cuba as residents struggle to recover from recent storms”:
The tremor is the latest in a series of natural disasters that have compounded existing infrastructure problems in Cuba, where large swaths of the population also face economic insecurity.
In October, Hurricane Oscar brought heavy rains and widespread power outages to the island and left at least six people dead after making landfall in eastern Cuba.
Another storm, Hurricane Rafael, knocked out power for at least 10 million people after slamming into the eastern part of the island last week.
The storm uprooted trees and knocked down telephone poles. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.
Local news stations in Florida, where there are approximately 2 million Cuban Americans, immediately broadcast reports from the island.
Meanwhile, there was very little media coverage of the United Nations’ recent vote on the U.S. embargo on Cuba. The ongoing embargo has won us few global friends, as the UN continues to call for its end.
The UN General Assembly on Wednesday once again urged the United States to end its economic, commercial, and financial embargo on Cuba, renewing a demand it has made annually since 1992.
The resolution, titled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba,” passed with 187 votes in favor, two against (Israel and the US), and one abstention (Moldova).
Though non-binding, the result drew attention the relative isolation of the US regarding the embargo, which was first imposed in 1960 after former leader Fidel Castro came to power following the revolution.
Trump’s announcement that Rubio will be secretary of state is making the most news. It will not be well received in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, reported The Miami Herald’s Nora Gamez in an article titled “With Rubio’s selection as next secretary of state, Cuba leaders’ worst fears come true”:
A group of Cuban-American Republicans is poised to play prominent roles in the upcoming Trump administration and Congress in the coming years, bringing to life the worst fear of the Cuban regime: that Cuban exiles and their descendants would be able to dictate U.S. policy toward the island. News that President-elect Donald Trump will pick Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as the next secretary of state, the first Hispanic and the first Cuban American in such a role, doubtless spread shock waves in Havana, where he is regularly demonized in state media as the nation’s enemy. If his nomination is confirmed, Rubio is likely to be joined in Washington by other like-minded Cuban Americans in a position to influence U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba and the entire Latin American region.
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When President Barack Obama announced in December 2014 that he was restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, Rubio vowed to do “everything possible” to block the engagement policies in Congress. “The President’s decision to reward the Castro regime and begin the path toward the normalization of relations with Cuba is inexplicable,” Rubio said at the time. “Cuba, like Syria, Iran, and Sudan, remains a state sponsor of terrorism…. Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté during his final two years in office. As a result, America will be less safe.”
Rubio’s anti-Obama rhetoric came at a time when the former president was opening relations with Cuba, which I covered here in 2016, in two stories titled “Thoughts on President Obama's address to the Cuban people” and “Black Cubans celebrate Barack Obama's visit.”
The Florida senator lied about his family coming to the U.S “fleeing Castro,” which was reported in The Washington Post in 2011 by Manuel Roig-Franzia. The story didn’t use the word “lies” in its headline, opting to use “embellishes” instead. The article was titled “Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show”:
During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio frequently repeated a compelling version of his family's history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the "son of exiles," he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after "a thug," Fidel Castro, took power.
But a review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.
[..]
The supposed flight of Rubio's parents has been at the core of the young senator's political identity, both before and after his stunning tea-party-propelled victory in last year's Senate election. Rubio — now considered a prospective 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and a possible future presidential contender — mentions his parents in the second sentence of the official biography on his Senate Web site. It says that Mario and Oriales Rubio "came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover." And the 40-year-old senator with the boyish smile and prom-king good looks has drawn on the power of that claim to entrance audiences captivated by the rhetorical skills of one of the more dynamic stump speakers in modern American politics.
Rubio has milked his lies to great effect in Florida, which has helped him win elections and garner strong support from anti-Castro Cubans and other Latin American groups in the state. Emily Sweigart at America’s Quarterly compiled a list of Rubio quotes in “What Marco Rubio Has Said About Latin America”:
On Cuba
August 2024
Introducing a resolution in the Senate condemning the Cuban government:
“The world is bearing witness to the multiple ways the Castro/Díaz-Canel regime has served as a puppet for Communist China, Iran, and most recently Russia. America has a moral duty to defend our nation’s interests and we must continue to uphold democratic order and justice in our hemisphere.”
April 2024
Interview in Voz:
“Cuba has a long history of intelligence and military cooperation with the communist government of China…. In many cases, we have not done enough to create alternatives to what China has done in many countries.”
Rubio will strongly oppose lifting or even loosening the embargo. Isabella Oliver and Mariakarla Nodarse Venancio wrote “Understanding the Failure of the U.S. Embargo on Cuba” for the Washington Office on Latin America:
On December 17, 2014, President Obama broke the mold in the U.S. approach to Cuba policy. His administration lifted restrictions for Cuban-Americans to travel and to send family and donative remittances, reestablished the U.S. Embassy in Havana, removed Cuba from the SSOT list, expanded access to the internet, and licensed a range of trade opportunities for U.S. companies. Beyond these specific policies, this shift in discourse by a U.S. president signaled the biggest change in U.S.-Cuba policy since diplomatic relations were severed in 1961, and ushered in a new era in the relations, leading to 23 bilateral accords on issues of mutual interest. The next two years saw an unprecedented boom in private-sector activities in Cuba, significant openings for civil society discourse, and other reforms by the Cuban government.
In 2017, the Trump administration undid all the progress Obama achieved and more. It swiftly imposed new restrictions prohibiting U.S. companies from doing business with certain Cuban companies managed by the armed forces and prohibited U.S. visitors from staying in hotels operated by those companies. It eliminated people-to-people educational travel, placed strict caps on family remittances, and made it impossible to send remittances by wire service. It also interrupted consular services and significantly diminished staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Havana following the onset of unexplained health incidents, now known as the ‘Havana Syndrome’ cases, due to concerns of foul play by foreign states that have now been dismissed following findings by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Trump also decided to implement Title III of the Helms-Burton Act to enable U.S. nationals to pursue lawsuits against any business or person, U.S. or foreign, benefiting from property nationalized after 1959 discouraged foreign investment in Cuba. Finally, the Trump administration put Cuba back on the SSOT list during its final days in office in an effort to make it harder for President Biden to repair U.S.-Cuban relations.
Two years ago, WOLA streamed this discussion examining the embargo 60 years later. The forum featured WOLA’s Cuba expert Mariakarla Nodarse, Peter Kornbluh, Dr. William LeoGrande, Dr. Ricardo Torres Pérez, and Gail Reed:
Cuban Americans play a major role in local politics wherever they live. The Pew Research Fact sheet on Cuban Americans has some data on who they are and where they are located:
An estimated 2.4 million Hispanics of Cuban origin lived in the United States in 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Cubans in this statistical profile are people who self-identified as Hispanics of Cuban origin; this includes immigrants from Cuba and those who trace their family ancestry to Cuba.
Cubans are the fourth-largest population (tied with Dominicans) of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 4% of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2021. From 2000 to 2021, the Cuban-origin population increased 92%, growing from 1.2 million to 2.4 million. At the same time, the Cuban foreign-born population living in the U.S. grew by 50%, from 850,000 in 2000 to 1.3 million in 2021.
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The Cuban population is concentrated in Florida (64%), Texas (5%), California (4%), New Jersey (4%) and New York (3%).
Pew also looked at Cuban identity in an earlier study:
Cubans are far more likely than other Hispanics to identify themselves as white when asked about their race. In the 2004 Census data, about 86% of Cubans said they were white, compared with 60% among Mexicans, 53% among other Central and South Americans and 50% among Puerto Ricans.
In the Census data, a third or more of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics chose “some other race” when answering this question. But among Cubans, only 8% chose “some other race.”
A 2004 report by the Pew Hispanic Center concluded that Latinos who identify themselves as white and those who say they are some other race have different characteristics. Survey data also show that Latinos in these two groups have different attitudes and opinions on a variety of subjects. Hispanics who identify themselves as white have higher levels of education and income and than those who choose “some other race.” The report said the findings suggest that Hispanics see race as a measure of belonging and “whiteness” as a measure of inclusion, or perceived inclusion.
The “racial identity” data on the island shows fewer residents there are categorized as “white.”
As in many Latin American and Caribbean countries, there is also a large mestizo or ethnically mixed population (also referred to as ‘mulatto’, especially to describe mixed European and sub-Saharan African ancestry), and colour, class and social status are closely interlinked. Few Cubans are either ‘pure’ white or black. Definitions of ‘colour’ are as much the result of social criteria as of somatic classification. Afro-Cubans are most prevalent in the eastern part of the island and in districts of Havana.
Estimates of the percentage of people of African descent in the Cuban population vary enormously. While the 2012 National Census concluded that the majority of the population (64.1 per cent) of Cuba was white, with 26.6 per cent mestizo (mixed race) and 9.3 per cent black, these figures are based on self-identification and so, in a context of widespread internalized racism and the entrenched stigma around race, are widely believed to significantly under-report the black and mestizo populations. Other assessments suggest that only around a third of Cubans are whites, with the remaining two–thirds composed roughly equally of mestizos and blacks.
Taking all of this into consideration, the fact that there has been a significant exodus of ‘white’ Cubans from the island means that Afro-Cubans have now come to represent a larger proportion of the overall population and are now thought to constitute a significant majority of the population.
For further readings on Cuban Americans, see this list from the University of Central Florida.
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