This week in Trinidad and Tobago at the Summit of the Americas, President Obama plans to begin the process of lifting the trade embargo against Cuba. The embargo will still be enforced but money and people will be able to travel freely back and forth from Cuba to the United States. In time the embargo will no longer be in place and Cuba will be open to the wider world. Why the U.S. has pursued a Cold War strategy towards Cuba in the post-Cold War world is the last piece in an irrational U.S. policy towards Latin America that began after WWII when the U.S. started to support dictatorships in Latin America in order to spread democracy and free-market economics. The policy towards Cuba is even more irrational when you think that since 1979 we’ve normalized relations with both communist China (even sending them our industrial power) and communist Vietnam where the U.S. lost 58,159 soldiers. So why haven’t we normalized relations with Cuba?

The short answer is that the Cuban lobby in Miami was powerful enough in Washington to stop any move to normalization. You could add to that the fact that Fidel Castro was not willing to normalize relations with his #1 enemy – to do so would have removed the main legitimacy for communist rule on Cuba. So normalization never happened because of the extreme politics in the U.S. and Cuba, but that has begun to change as a new younger generation of Cuban-Americans and Cubans begin to take up positions of power in their respective societies. In other words, the politics on the island of Cuba and in Miami are beginning to converge for the first time since 1959. The younger generation on both sides is unwilling to take the extreme positions of their parents. The question is what will this new more harmonious relationship look like: what will be its pros and cons.

Pros:

Certainly there will be new business opportunities for investors in Cuba. Cuba needs a new infrastructure and this should give investors hope. Cuba’s educational and medical infrastructure is about the best in Latin America. But its banking, telecommunications and industrial sectors are light years behind other countries in Latin America. One can imagine that in the near future the Cuban government will set up more export zones(since 1996 export Zones have been allowed)where capitalist business methods will be welcomed with tax incentives and low wages. The tourism sector is already developing with Spanish and Canadian money: look for the tourist sector to develop more rapidly when Cuba opens its doors to outside investors.

Another advantage will be the unification of Cuba. Guantánamo Bay is a piece of 19th century American colonialism – think the Panama Canal Zone, Hong Kong, Macao, Goa – and you can add Guantánamo Bay to the list of territories that were eventually turned over by the colonial powers to their true owners. Certainly a democratic government in Cuba would demand the return of Guantánamo Bay to Cuba.

Another advantage would be a stronger sense of security on the southern border of the United States. There could never be another Cuban Missile Crisis but normalized relations would help stop the flow of boat people to the U.S. as happened in 1980 and the 1990s.

Cons:

While Cuba has had a communist government there have been no significant flow of drugs through the country. Cuba is never mentioned as a point along the drug chain to the U.S. If the country were to open back up that would certainly change. In the 1950s Cuba had a drug trade; it was shutdown by the communists. If the communists are no longer in power, there is little doubt that drug shipments through Cuba would begin.

Another problem might be a massive movement of people off the island to Miami in order to reunite with family members who left Cuba years ago. So if Cuba opened its borders there might be a massive wave of Cubans heading to Miami.

Another problem might be a conflict between Cuban-Americans returning to the island to claim family property and Cubans living on those properties. Many Cuban-Americans don’t recognize the fact that their family properties were expropriated by the state after the revolution – they want to wrestle those properties back.

The process of transition in Cuba will take years if not decades and it needs to be done in such a way so as not to recreate the forces that brought about the 1959 communist revolution in the first place.