Cuba's Anniversary, the U.S., and Ostpolitik's Lessons

Roger Cohen had a good column yesterday about how some in the West still harbor illusions about the Castro brothers and their revolution. The Economist this week has a useful overview of the past fifty years, pointing out that George W. Bush will be the tenth U.S. president to leave office with a Castro still in power on the island. And the BBC World Service has been running a series on Cuba, fifty years after the fall of Batista. Just about everybody (well, not Sean Penn) believes that the Cuban government's economic policies have served the Cuban population poorly, to say nothing of the political repression. And most folks think the Castro regime would not have survived this long if the U.S. had been less rigid in its approach, if it had explored ways to relax or even lift the economic embargo. The embargo, the argument goes, has helped the regime in Havana justify its repressive policies and it has also created some level of solidarity between the population and the regime. Most important, by pointing at the U.S. embargo, the Castros have been able to deflect attention from their own disastrous policies. So the obvious conclusion would be for the U.S., the new Obama administration, to lift the embargo and thereby expose the rottenness of the communist regime on Cuba for all to see. One model for this could be West Germany's Ostpolitik vis-a-vis Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, but especially the German Democratic Republic during the 1970s and 1980s. The objective of this policy was to establish ties with East Germany at all levels in order to lessen the impact of the division of Germany, and ultimately to make it meaningless in practice. Through economic, cultural, and personal contacts, the idea was, the communist dictatorship's hold on the country would be undermined. The debate on the effectiveness of the policy is ongoing. On the one hand, you could argue that Ostpolitik laid the groundwork for the protests and the revolutionary changes of 1989 and 1990. The East German population certainly did get more opportunities after 1970 to learn how well people in the West had it compared to their own situation. On the other hand, you could also argue that "1989" was brought about by the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, and that until 1989 the East German regime had become very skilled at accepting Western financial and economic aid while maintaining a tight grip on power. In this reading Ostpolitik actually helped keep communism in power in East Germany. Western politicians failed to challenge the political control of the regime (mostly treating them like any other legitimate government), and all the Western money and goods flowing East helped the regime keep its population (relatively) content. In other words, it's conceivable that lifting the U.S. embargo against Cuba will do relatively little to change the political situation on the island. At the same time, even if the current regime were able to survive a new U.S. "Southern policy," it is also hard to imagine how there would not be an evolution which would make Cuba a very different place in a generation from what it is today. In any case, it would be nice (it's not a given) if whatever change Cuba will experience is as peaceful as East Germany's transformation in 1989-1990.