This week Cuba and the European Union held the second round of talks to reset their relations. The previous period was marked by Cuba’s rejection and American disrespect for the 1996 European Common Position. That measure was a failed European attempt to define the terms of a triangular relationship that has at its other vertices the USA, in the logic of the great powers, and Cuba as an underdeveloped country, with a special historical, cultural and economic relationship with Europe. Despite the optimal position as a pivot in a ménage à trois, where cordial relations converge from two opponent vertices, Europe has never decisively influenced the triangular Havana-Brussels-Washington relationship. Eighteen years of European common position on Cuba confirmed that the limited engagement and symbolic sanctions policy after 2003 reduced European influence in Cuban adaptation to a post-Cold War world. Cuba diversified its foreign relations, to lessen the weight of Europe and Canada as uncomfortable trading and investment partners in the nineties. Havana emphasized strategic affiliations with Venezuela, China and Russia lately. The rise of the Latin American left gave Cuba more space in the developing world through the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77. Cuba led the Community of...

There is a medical motto that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would do well to adopt: "First, do not harm." It seems reluctant to understand it in the Cuban case. From the Bush Administration to date, the agency belonging to the Department of State has spent hundreds of millions of dollars following a destructive conception of what it calls "promotion of democracy and civil society in Cuba." Under this section, subcontractors and agency officials have implemented an interventionist model that has nothing to do with the empowerment of Cuban civil society and the promotion of human rights: the Helms-Burton Act. The bill, sponsored by late Senator Helms, who had the democratic credentials of a member of a "whites only" club, ignores any U.S. obligation under international law. Obsessed since 1959 to oust Fidel Castro, the authors of the law chained the U.S. policy toward the entire Cuban nation to that goal. As explained by former senior CIA analyst for Latin America Fulton Armstrong, under the Bush administration destabilizing missions against the Cuban government, which previously fell under the rule of the intelligence agencies, were transferred to the USAID. The USAID tried to employ new methods to reach the...