Today the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn the United States embargo on Cuba, with the U.S. and Israel as the lone opposing votes and Moldova abstaining. The 187-2-1 vote for the non-binding resolution is the thirty-second consecutive year in which the non-binding resolution was adopted by large margins.
“Every year, the UN vote highlights that the U.S. is completely alone in its mission to punish the Cuban people as a means to an end,”said Center for International Policy senior non-resident fellow María José Espinosa.
Wednesday’s vote occurred at a moment where Cubans are facing one of the worst crises in decades, with brutal blackouts affecting more than 10 million Cubans amid an ongoing energy crisis, economic crisis and historic exodus.
This crisis presents urgency and opportunity to revive a policy of engagement. Espinosa continues:
“As a policy, the U.S. embargo on Cuba is an epic failure. Cubans are no more empowered, no closer to achieving democracy than they were in February of 1962. Instead, the embargo has ensured Cubans face a daily struggle to meet their basic needs, without pushing the Cuban government toward political reform.
“The U.S. should abandon the failed regime-change-through-sanctions strategy and resume a normalization process focused on promoting economic freedoms, fostering open exchange, technological growth, and global market connections to create space for economic and democratic actors. This approach is not a concession to the Cuban government but a pragmatic strategy that aligns with the best interests of both the United States and the Cuban people.”
This week, as Cuba implements new laws and regulations that impose new taxes, restrictions and requirements on the private sector, CIP senior non-resident fellow María José Espinosa Carillo offers her analysis of their implications on businesses in Cuba and for the country’s economy. In a Q&A with Latin America Advisor (a daily publication of The Dialogue), she explains:
“The stated aim of the new regulations is increased order over the private sector in Cuba, but they risk undermining private-sector growth—a necessary component of the country’s economic future. The mixed nature of the reforms—some offering protection for workers while others curtail entrepreneurial freedom—signals the Cuban government’s ongoing reluctance to fully embrace private enterprise as a driver of the country’s growth. Shifting regulations create uncertainty and distrust among entrepreneurs and potential investors, hindering investment and economic progress. The Cuban people are suffering an unprecedented multidimensional crisis. Over a million people have migrated since 2022, creating a massive brain drain–the effects of which we will see for decades to come.
Meanwhile, civil society organizations, entrepreneurs and community leaders are at the forefront of promoting community initiatives that generate employment and create social benefits such as social services for elderly and vulnerable populations. With an entrepreneurial solidarity spirit, they are building partnerships among themselves, as well as with state institutions, when possible.
We hope to see a more coherent regulatory framework that balances inequality stopgaps with the need for non-state sector growth and innovation. Increasing transparency, reducing barriers and fostering partnerships between state and non-state actors would help build confidence and stimulate investment, which the country so desperately needs. Further, the state must recognize the non-state sector and other civil society groups as legitimate actors. The government should send a clear message of support and encouragement to young entrepreneurs, who are currently looking anywhere but the island to build their futures. Lobbing confusing laws and repeatedly shifting regulations is no way to empower them.”
Bill Goodfellow co-founded the Center for International Policy in 1975, and from 1985 to 2017, served as CIP’s executive director. He is a member of CIP’s advisory board and the director of the Afghanistan Peace Campaign.
For nineteen years, Wayne Smith led the Center for International Policy’s Cuba program. Wayne, who died on June 28th, was widely acknowledged as the most effective and best-known critic of the failed U.S. policy toward Cuba.
Wayne spent twenty-five years in the Foreign Service and had a PhD from George Washington University. But he was not a cautious State Department bureaucrat or a milquetoast academic. Rather, his aggressive style of political advocacy drew on his time as a star high school and college football player and a Parris Island Marine drill sergeant.
While directing the Center for International Policy’s Cuba program, Wayne continued to teach at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. His perch at CIP gave him the freedom to speak out, provided full-time staff to organize delegations to Cuba and provided legal and financial backing to fend off his litigious right-wing critics.
Wayne took on the powerful and well-financed Cuban-American National Foundation, which twice sued him, and CIP, for libel. After we spent tens-of-thousands of dollars for lawyers in Washington and Miami, Wayne eventually prevailed.
Wayne loved Cuba and the Cuban people, but he was not a starry-eyed admirer of Fidel Castro or the Cuban government. Cubans from all walks of life respected him for his long commitment to increasing understanding between Cuba and the United States. In Havana, cab drivers often called out to him, and his visits to Cuba occasionally included long dinner meetings with Fidel Castro.
But his best Cuban friends on the island were independent thinkers like Pablo Armando Fernández, one of Cuba’s most famous poets and novelists, and Elizardo Sánchez, a former philosophy professor who is one of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents still residing in the country.
Wayne challenged the U.S. government’s restrictions on American citizens’ freedom to travel to Cuba by intentionally going to Cuba without the required license.
Wayne challenged the U.S. government’s restrictions on American citizens’ freedom to travel to Cuba by intentionally going to Cuba without the required license. He was disappointed when he was not arrested after giving a press conference on the Miami airport tarmac before boarding a flight to Havana.
Under the auspices of the Center for International Policy and using the Center’s Treasury Department travel license, Wayne took dozens of influential Americans to Cuba. Delegations of members of Congress and their staffers, farm-state business executives keen to sell American agricultural products to Cuba, as well as academics, all traveled to Cuba with Wayne.
One memorable trip was in December 2014 when I accompanied Wayne and a half-dozen CIP board members to Havana. Wayne was being honored by a Cuban academic institution for his decades of advocacy for better relations between the United States and Cuba. The morning after the ceremony, we were stunned to see Barack Obama and Raul Castro on the television announcing that the U.S. and Cuba would begin to move to restore full diplomatic relations. Wayne was summoned to the CNN studio in Havana to explain the significance of the two presidents’ announcement to a world-wide audience.
In July of 2015, we were invited to the Cuban mission in Washington when the Cuban flag was raised and it became the Cuban embassy. A month later, Wayne was in Havana, along with Secretary of State John Kerry, when the U.S. interests section reopened as the U.S. embassy.
Wayne had been the third secretary at the U.S. embassy in Havana in 1962 when relations were broken and the American flag was lowered, and from 1979 to 1981, Wayne was chief of the U.S. interests section. He was teary-eyed when he saw the American flag once again flying over the U.S. embassy.
Although relations between the United States and Cuba are fraught, the two countries still maintain full diplomatic relations. Moreover, most Americans agree with Wayne: our policy of trying to isolate Cuba is counterproductive and it is long past time to try something new, diplomacy and engagement.
Although Wayne did not live long enough to see it, eventually the United States and Cuba will have truly normalized relations, just as every other nation in the hemisphere has with Cuba. That will be Wayne’s legacy.
On February 6, Members of Congress and progressive movement leaders gathered at a conference hosted by the Center for International Policy (CIP), demanding changes to US foreign policy decisions as a necessity in a consequential year that will determine the trajectory of the US both at home and globally.
In a keynote address seen by over 60,000 people, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) argued that the concentration of wealth and power foments war, violence and mass insecurity for everyday people globally, benefiting billionaires at the expense of whole families, nations, peoples and regions and declared that, “For many decades we have seen a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign policy—a consensus which, sadly, has almost always been wrong.”
Pointing to the distorting influence of moneyed forces ranging from AIPAC, super PACs, big defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical companies, oligarchs supporting Putin, Trump and other autocrats, and other multi-billionaires and multinational corporations; as well as the growth of right-wing extremism, tax havens and economic inequality, Senator Sanders declared, “It’s hard to overstate just how fundamentally this broken global financial system undermines faith in democracy and saps our ability to deal with the pressing crises we face today.”
“We live in a world where a small number of multi-billionaires and multinational corporations exert enormous economic and political power over virtually every country on earth,” added Sanders. “That reality has a huge impact on all aspects of our foreign policy and whether or not we will be able to effectively address the major crises we face.”
In a “Congress and Progressive Foreign Policy” session, Members of Congress discussed their personal pathways to foreign policy and outlined key challenges and opportunities for a “people-centered national security” that delivers for people in the US and the Global South, recognizes the interdependence of domestic and foreign policy on issues like migration and climate change, and allows the outside world to interact with the US in positive ways like refugee resettlement rather than negative, militarized interactions.
“Nowadays, most people are interacting with the United States through drones, through weapons that are made in the US that are in the hands of dictators, police or their military, or they’re interacting with us in regards to sanctions that are making it hard for them to have necessary medication and food. And that creates a national security problem for us,” said Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
“We’ve spent more on border security since 2013 than was in the immigration reform bill of 2013. And we’ve seen no improvement in anything because we haven’t fundamentally shifted the system. So we have to think about, how do we invest in other countries? Our foreign policy is directly tied to this,” added Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).
“What I would like to see is a people-centered security, where the United States can actually engage with people of a nation, and help empower them, help them pursue freedom and dignity on their terms, not necessarily our terms,” concluded Representative Jason Crow (D-CO).
In “Prioritizing a Progressive Foreign Policy Agenda,” regional experts discussed strategies for the US to reorient its relations to better serve the people and address the realities and needs on the ground. Speaking to the pitfalls of Great Power Competition and the Cold War as frameworks for US-China relations, China expert Ali Wynedeclared, “Diplomacy is not something that you do out of kindness to competitors. It’s something that you do to advance your own national interest.” “We can’t support a progressive movement in Ukraine if they’re dead,” emphasized Terrell Jermaine Starr. Speaking on Latin America, María José Espinosa Carillo stressed, “We have deep connections with the region, not only through our borders, but also through funding and economic ties. But what’s more important, there is a renewed vision of the region.”
In “The Political Necessity of a New Foreign Policy,” movement leaders from MoveOn, Center for American Progress, AFL-CIO and Win Without War explored the intersection of domestic and foreign affairs, offering their analysis of policy tradeoffs and highlighting how they see these issues moving the progressive base.
“That [progressive foreign policy] actually is not just a morally and ethical position, but it is an electorally salient one, one that is a winning position in elections,” declared MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting. “With Biden, he campaigned in 2020 promising to end endless wars, and that helped him win. That was one of the reasons I believe helped him win in that election cycle. And now we see Donald Trump poised to exploit the current situation in Israel Gaza and how that’s going to show up in November.”
Center for American Progress president and CEO Patrick Gaspard described the threat of antidemocratic forces at home and abroad, and said, “We’re now in a place of the world where you win votes by arguing that you build a moat around yourselves and pull up the drawbridge, our progressive transnationalism, internationalism is not actually ascendant. We should recognize that and we should fight fiercely.”
This fight for democracy at home and abroad takes place not just at the ballot box but in workplaces too. Cathy Feingold, International Director for the AFL-CIO, arguedwe must recast our priorities in favor of “ worker-centered security,” explaining, “It sends a very specific message to people in this country and around the world who are working day in and day out and want to make sure that they can live with dignity. I have found that workers here and workers around the world are interconnected.”
Win Without War executive director Sara Haghdoosti added, “We talk about foreign policy like there are not people in this country who have family connections, and deep commitment to what happens around the world. And it’s just not okay. That’s not how people work.”
View all the key moments from the conference on YouTube here and read opening remarks from CIP president and CEO Nancy Okail here.