Cuba Confidential: How Wild Were the Secret Negotiations That Led to a Revolution in Our Relationship with Cuba?
A radical change happened in 2014 when President Obama announced the normalization between Cuba and US. This historic event results from an 18-month secret negotiation about prisoner exchange which involved various powerful people and, of course, the Pope and AI. The relaxed restrictions on trade and travel and the prisoner swap have marked a new chapter of the relationship between these two countries. On top of that, the young generation of the Cuban-Americans community has come to realize that the sanctions of embargo have done more damage than help, and thus demand a policy shift, which some Republicans also agreed with.
After reading the article, I had a few questions about how the embargo has affected the Cuban people for the past five decades, and the case of Alan Gross as to why he was considered a threat to the Cuban government. While I was investigating my questions, here are the research I’ve found:
In the “Pros and Cons of the Cuba-US Embargo”, the proponents of the embargo argue that the embargo serves as a bargaining tool to promote human rights and sanction Cuba’s political alignment with the communist countries. However, the embargo has been proven not only a failure in helping the Cuban people moving closer toward freedom but also a burden for improving their living condition. For instance, Raul Castro legalized the agriculture exchange in 2007, which partly liberalized some small businesses to promote food production and to reduce the cost of imported goods. The project didn’t go well as planned due to the lack of equipment, proper transportation, and poor management, resulting a great amount of produce ended up being waste and the increasing of product price.
As to the case of Alan Gross- when he was arrested, the Cuban government didn’t announce his charge until 14 months in his detention. So why does a subcontractor who traveled to Cuba to set up wi-fi hotspot in a Jewish community pose such a huge threat to Castro’s Cuba? Turns out that the internet is highly restricted and filtered by the government, and still, a large portion of the population doesn’t have access to the internet. Before Gross was imprisoned, he showed the Old City of Jerusalem on Google Earth to a Jewish man, which he’d never seen before. Gross said that the government wants to keep its people ignorant of world affairs by keeping information away from them. And since the government has the latitude of repressing anyone who voices their opposition or challenges its authority, many have been imprisoned as “political prisoners”, including Gross.
Work Cited:
Cave, Damien. “Cuba’s Free-Market Farm Experiment Yields a Meager Crop.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 8 Dec. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/world/americas/changes-to-agriculture-highlight-cubas-problems.html.
Gilsinan, Kathy. “Five Years in a Cuban Prison.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 30 Nov. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/alan-gross-castro/509075/.
“Cuba.” Freedom House, 9 Nov. 2016, freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/cuba
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