U.S. Department of State
Spectators cheer the Obama motorcade in Havana, March 22, 2016. Trump has reversed Obama’s overtures, freezing what was a diplomatic and economic “thaw” between the United States and Cuba.
“That guy is going to destroy the whole world,” said Alberto Ortega of U.S. President Donald Trump. Like many other Cubans in the beach resort town of Varadero, he makes his living from tourism, carting visitors along the city’s main strip in his horse-drawn buggy.
It is the kind of comment I heard often during a recent visit to Cuba.
Accounting for some 11 percent of the island’s GDP, tourism is an important source of income and provides coveted jobs for many locals. Alberto earns in convertible pesos (known as CUCs) pegged to the U.S. dollar, meaning he generally has a higher disposable income than Cubans who earn in the local currency.
Reform efforts may be stunted by Washington, D.C.’s pivot back to a more hostile posture towards its Cold-war era adversary.
Despite a professed distaste for politics, the gray-haired Ortega offers up his blunt assessment because of the Trump Administration’s retreat from the “thaw” in U.S.-Cuba relations initiated by former U.S. President Barack Obama. The opening of relations had buoyed the Cuban economy as a whole and the tourism sector specifically.
The island also began various reforms, some of which are now enshrined in the country’s constitution. Following an extensive, six-month public consultation, Cubans were asked earlier this year to vote to approve or reject hundreds of changes to the country’s 1976 constitution, including instituting term limits for the head of state and recognizing private property.
But reform efforts may be stunted by Washington, D.C.’s pivot back to a more hostile posture towards its Cold-war era adversary. Arturo Lopez Levy, a visiting assistant professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, explained, “the policies of President Trump have already imposed constraints in the Cuban political debate.”
Beginning in 1962, the United States imposed a blockade on the island, arguing that the devastating economic measures were necessary in order to pressure Havana to implement reforms or abdicate.
Now, even as the Caribbean nation begins to institutionalize some of the most profound political and economic reforms seen since the beginning of its revolution, Washington, D.C.’s hardening stance is putting the efforts at risk.
In July 2018, Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power—the legislative branch of government—initiated a massive citizen consultation process seeking feedback on a draft law for major amendments to the nation’s charter.
Following more than 130,000 local meetings that yielded hundreds of thousands of proposals for revisions, lawmakers sent a package of 750 changes to the constitution for ratification by popular vote on February 24.
The “yes” campaign obtained 90.6 percent, according to election officials.
Voting is not mandatory in Cuba, and the higher than normal voter turnout, exceeding 84 percent, reflected the participation of the population in the process leading up to the referendum.
“I participated in a few discussions about the constitution,” Arturo Vazquez told me after voting in a middle-class area in Central Havana. “In general I think the proposals were well-received and here I am, exercising my vote like any citizen of this country.”
Cuba’s trade unions were actively involved in the consultation, and leaders of the movement saw this as an opportunity to institutionalize changes that have been taking place in the Caribbean nation over the last decade.
“The new constitution recognizes the self-employed as actors within the Cuban economy, as secondary actors but actors nonetheless,” said Pedro Victor Simon Rodriguez, the secretary-general of the Trade Union of Commercial Workers of Cuba and a member of the National Assembly.
Rodriguez, who also represents more than 100,000 Cubans who identify as self-employed, points to the benefits of recognizing this type of economic activity, which began to flourish on the island after 2000.
“Now, as a business owner, you have the ability to contribute services, to contribute to the economy, and contribute to the tax base, which is also an important part of sustaining the gains that we have been making in education, health, and safety,” he said.
Rodriguez also emphasized that other articles in the constitution continue to safeguard against the concentration of property and establish measures to involve workers in the management of the economy.
While the reforms are certainly substantial, they should not be taken as a retreat from Cuba’s socialist project, says Lopez Levy, who is also a graduate from the Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales in Havana. “These policies were made to implement a more flexible and practical government, but that doesn’t endanger the socialist system.”
At the polls, many Cubans confirmed this reality.
“The vast majority of articles in the new constitution explain why we support a system such as this one, which is socialist,” said Frank, a fifty-seven-year-old voter in Vedado. “It’s very simple, this is a socialist system.”
While the “no” side garnered some 700,000 votes, there were few visible signs of an anti-campaign, and a voting-day protest only drew a handful of marchers.
A more robust campaign was driven by U.S.-based Cuban organizations and media, including the State Department-funded Radio Marti.
Days after the decisive ratification vote, the Trump Administration announced a waiver of the infamous Helms-Burton act, effectively paving the way for U.S. citizens to sue companies that engage in business with Havana.
The Cuban government was quick to condemn the announcement, and looked to reassure potential investors that “full guarantees will be granted to foreign investments and joint projects.”
“Article 28 of the Cuban Constitution, which was ratified by an overwhelming majority on February 24, 2019, also recognizes those guarantees,” Cuba’s foreign ministry said in a release.
It added, “the United States will keep on failing to achieve its main purpose of submitting by force the sovereign will of Cubans and our determination to build socialism. The majority feelings of the peoples of Cuba and the United States in favor of improving relations and establishing a civilized and respectful coexistence shall prevail.”
The moves are viewed as a deliberate move to scare off investors, but will also have the effect of making the Cuban government “more skeptical, more risk averse, in the way that it manages the reforms,” says professor Lopez Levy.
Beyond how this affects the pace and implementation of Cuba’s constitutional reforms, it will also affect U.S. businesses and U.S. residents—including many Cuban-Americans—who have been looking to invest.
Numerous observers suggest the bellicosity of the Trump White House and conservative Republicans towards Latin American leftist governments has an electoral component. With the U.S. presidential race heating up, politics is taking precedence over policy.
In the case of Cuba, Lopez Levy explains, this means appealing to satisfy a demand for regime change from the rightwing émigré in the United States, even if this goes against the “pro-business” ethos that Trump touts.
“It’s clear that this is harming U.S. interests,” he said, “and the Trump Administration is doing this in part due to electoral politics, in part out of imperial arrogance.”