As the anniversary of President Obama’s Dec. 17 historic breakthrough on relations with Cuba approaches, Joe Biden’s incoming administration has the opportunity to revive the successful détente that, as vice president, Biden endorsed and supported. As president, however, Biden will face fierce political pressure to demand quid pro quos from Cuba’s leaders in return for lifting the punitive sanctions that Trump imposed over the last four years in his obsessive quest to sabotage his predecessor’s signature foreign policy achievement. But the reciprocity approach is a recipe for failure — as the opponents of normalizing relations with Cuba know perfectly well. As Biden and his foreign policy team confront the political crosswinds that any positive change in U.S. policy toward Cuba inevitably brings, it is important to recall how President Obama successfully opened what he called “a new chapter” in U.S.-Cuba relations that advanced U.S. interests as well as those of the Cuban people. Obama’s policy of “positive engagement” was in place just two years before the Trump administration began to dismantle it. “I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba,” Trump announced in June 2017, claiming, falsely, that the U.S. had gotten nothing in return for normalizing...