Wayne Smith: An Appreciation

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.