Caribbean & Central America - October 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Come January, Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro, now 90, will have seen 11 US presidents come and go since he first came to power in 1959. For the Cuban government, now led by Fidel’s younger brother Raúl, the prospect of a Republican Party victory in the upcoming US election on 8 November is a negative; the currently dominant conservative wing of the party (which hopes to retain control of Capitol Hill) vehemently opposes the US-Cuba rapprochement begun by President Barack Obama two years ago. And while the elder Castro has given only a tepid welcome himself to the rapprochement, he too has signalled disdain for the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump.

Castro routinely puts paid to rumours about his imminent demise by way of photographed appearances with visiting dignitaries (the latest being the president of Guinea-Bissau, José Mário Vaz, on 1 October) and well-timed ‘reflections’ on world affairs. The latest such opinion piece, dated 9 October, once again addressed one of Castro’s major preoccupations in his vintage years, the state of the planet and the future of humanity.

In a short piece entitled, ‘The Uncertain Destiny of the Human Race’, published by the state website Cubadebate hours before the second US presidential debate that same day, Castro considers “the infinite forms of human experiences” and suggests that the US, “the most powerful imperialist country that has ever existed”, is “deceiving itself” in “assuming as doctrine” the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights). Castro later follows this apparent stab at US democracy/foreign policy by concluding, “Let's not forget that this Sunday there will be a debate…Two weeks ago, the first debate was a shock. Mr. Trump, allegedly a competent expert, was as discredited as much as Barack in his policies. They both now will have to be given a medal of clay”. While not arguing against his brother’s diplomacy with the Obama administration, Fidel has remained clear that Cuba does not need lessons on human rights or governance from the US and is carving out its own sovereign path.

Meanwhile, the window for US senate approval of President Obama’s nominee as US ambassador to Cuba, Jeffery DeLaurentis, the existing senior official at the re-accredited US embassy in Havana, falls in the ‘lame duck’ period between the election and the swearing-in of the new congress and executive in January. The Republican senator Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (which oversees the confirmation of foreign service nominees), has admitted that confirmation of DeLaurentis is “highly unlikely”. Leading Cuban-American senators, including Republicans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Democrat Robert Menéndez, have warned that they will block the nomination. Rubio and Menéndez are both members of the foreign relations panel.

Trump riles Cuban-Americans

Hard-line Cuban-Americans are a little wary of Trump, who says that if elected he would not necessarily end the US rapprochement with Cuba, but would place much tighter conditions on it while simultaneously invoking his vision for a ‘Trump Tower’ in Havana one day. Suspicions among Cuban-Americans as to his intentions intensified when the US outlet Newsweek reported that one of Trump’s businesses, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, had paid consultants some US$70,000 in 1999 to covertly look into doing business in Cuba, in breach of the US economic embargo on the island. According to The Hill, the main Capitol Hill news-sheet, Rubio, who represents the critical swing state of Florida, described the allegations that Trump had explored business in Cuba without official pre-clearance as “very serious and troubling”. The New York Times also noted that the story “has started to percolate among the state’s large Cuban-American population and could have the potential to undo some of the progress that Mr. Trump – a pariah to many Hispanics – had been making there”.

• Clinton’s response

In response to the allegations that US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump broke the US embargo, his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton ran radio ads in Florida declaring: “While our parents and grandparents were fighting the Castro regime both on and off the island, Donald Trump was looking to line his pocket, and even worse, those of the Castro brothers. This is a serious insult to our community”. Florida has 29 electoral college votes and is home to an estimated 1.4m Cuban-Americans, on latest US census data.