I lack the fortune-telling skills to know what will happen in the next U.S. elections. Furthermore, I consider that no poll can completely dissolve the prevailing margin of uncertainty, not only regarding electoral mechanics that will stretch dangerously for days, but also because of the volatile circumstances in which it will take place. To judge that the science of polls can penetrate this furious tangle of polarized interests is to grant the electoral struggle a transparency that it does not have, and attribute to science an infallibility that is strange to it. As is evident, in the belligerent America of Trump and Biden, voting intentions are not the only thing that counts.
How many of those who have not voted before will actually do so now? What will be the winner’s margin of victory? Which states will decide the outcome? What will be the reaction of those who lose? What role will the Supreme Court play?
Almost four years ago I wrote this, in November 2020: just six days before the elections. Let’s return for a moment to the thread of this process, clouded every day by news and characters.
In the 2016 elections, most experts had been wrong in their predictions, trusting in the polls, but also carried away by the common sense of “what everyone says.” Some had predicted, in 2008, that Obama “couldn’t win because he was black.” At the end of his term, they took it for granted that a candidate disfavored by the mainstream media (read, The New York Times and CNN), and who had prevailed over the Republican Party machine, coming from outside, had no chance at all.
We later learned that, although Hillary Clinton won the absolute popular vote (48%) by 3 million, she lost it in 30 states, equivalent to 56.5% of electoral votes. Trump won with only 46.4% of the popular vote, but taking the majority of the states, which is what counts in that mechanic. It was a mistake not to take it into account.
A couple of weeks before the election between Trump and Biden in 2020, some commentators advocated that “a Democratic tsunami could win not only the White House but Congress.” The enthusiasm, aroused by the intoxication of the polls and the enormous advantage between Biden and Trump (“the largest in the history of presidential campaigns since 1934”) would vanish with the real voting figures.
What was chilling about the 2020 elections was precisely how much that margin hid. Biden won; but Trump got more than 74 million votes, almost 5 million more than Barack Obama in his historic victory in 2008; that is, a proportion of the total vote higher than that against Clinton in 2016. Although he lost the algebra of the total electoral vote, he won in as many states as Biden, that is, he took half of the Union.
When on the eve of those last elections I asked what the reaction of those who would lose would be, I did not base it so much on the quarrelsome tone of the campaigns, which has become almost normal in U.S. politics, but on the violent content of the Republican challenges to the legitimacy of the process, the anticipated accusations of fraud, the ideological terrorism of branding the opponent as a “communist” or “Putin’s henchman.”
I confess that I did not then imagine a mutiny encouraged by the president himself to storm the Capitol. But if it had occurred to me, some knowledgeable friends would have responded: “Who can dare to storm the Capitol in Washington? That is a third-world leftist nightmare, typical of people who don’t really know the United States, no way.”
Regarding my last question of 2020 — What role would the Supreme Court play? — this brotherhood appointed for life that guarantees the perfect balance of the three powers has gone from certifying the integrity of the 2020 elections to legitimizing, barely four years later, its main challenger, and putting him above the law, in that and wherever he can exercise his power, within an already very presidential regime.
A quantitative and descriptive portrait, such as the one that polls can provide, does not save us from putting them in a context and in a qualitative analysis. As much as the presidential debates, the changing pictures of public opinion, the latest statements of the candidates, and the party conventions themselves project a certain political meteorology, they are only the tip of the iceberg.
Although we do not have access to investigate it, we know that this context includes alliances between currents and interest groups, internal party dynamics at the federal and state level, money that supports some and others, commitments with decisive powers such as the military industry and energy, who bet on all the horses.
I recently heard an expert friend comment that the winning strategy to face the challenges of the next elections would be, in the absence of ideal candidates, to constitute an anti-Trump front capable of prevailing, as the Front Populaire did in the recent French elections against the extreme right. Great idea, I thought.
The difference with Europe is that there the popular fronts have had a long history, left and center-left parties that have come to government, union movements, environmentalists, feminists, with high mobilization capacity, a public sector that has played a key role in economic and social development, and which includes large media outlets, health and education systems, which condition mentalities, whose identity and roots are part of the inherited political culture, and where the term socialist is not “the S word,” a bad word.
My last question refers to what the elections portend for our relations, and if there is something we can do to favor them: does the historical record reveal that, when the Cuban government has made significant economic or political changes, from 1988 to now, has U.S. policy reacted favorably?
Another expert friend told me that this logic is “random.” For example, the Torricelli Act (1992) was a reaction to the perception that “now communism is really falling” (in Cuba); and the Helms-Burton Act (1996) sought to accelerate that fall, instead of reacting to the economic changes in Cuba (1993-95). Likewise, the opening to agricultural exports, under a Republican administration, did not respond to Cuba continuing on the path of economic reforms, but rather to its reaction to the U.S. offers after the 2008 hurricanes and, in particular, to the weight of the Senators from the agricultural states.
“When the Guidelines (2011) were released,” my friend continues, “Obama did not go beyond applying some specific measures promised in his campaign. The United States intensified its financial sanctions against Cuba. The opening of relations in December 2014 coincides with the beginning of the ‘counter-reform’ in Cuba, which would be more evident during the 7th Congress of the PCC (Communist Party of Cuba), and which follows Obama’s visit. Subsequently, Trump’s measures had more to do with Miami than with developments in Havana.”
I would only note in the margin that the Republican administration of George H. Bush had resisted approving the Torricelli Act on several occasions and decided to announce that it would not veto it, in the middle of the 1992 campaign, because the candidate Clinton promised that he would approve it, to ingratiate himself with the Cuban-American lobby.
None of this had to do with the changes in Cuba between 1989-1992: return of troops and advisors deployed in Africa and Nicaragua, contraction of military spending and halving of the armed forces, end of the Cuban-Soviet alliance, and of everything that had been the main U.S. objections to Cuban policy throughout the Cold War.
I commented to my friend that three decades of post-Cold War rather revealed that there has been a kind of “imbalance” between the two sides. More than random actions-reactions, I would say that each one’s dynamics are what have governed their policies towards the other, and these dynamics are rarely synchronized nor are they strictly foreign policy.
Speaking of interaction and cooperation between the two, I pause for a moment on the argument, coined by the enemies of normalization, that Obama limited himself to making concessions to the Cuban government; and that the latter lacked the flexibility to advance the dialogue.
The first thing is that the negotiations were able to take place because the two sides made “concessions”; that is, they gave up establishing preconditions to start them. The United States declared that it was leaving aside the policy of regime change, without hiding its desire for economic and political changes to occur on the island. Cuba agreed to begin a normalization process that was not based on the lifting of the “embargo,” nor even from the intention to question the Helms-Burton Act, but only with the U.S. recognition that this policy of sanctions had been unproductive. Although it did not renounce the objective of having the blockade lifted, it did not demand it in order to advance the negotiation. In doing so, by the way, Cuba moved away from the lessons of China (1978) and Vietnam (1995), which only normalized relations with the United States once it had lifted sanctions.
If it is about pragmatism, having started normalization without waiting for the United States to use the powers of the Executive to open all possible holes in the blockade was a bold decision, more than “pragmatic,” and a gesture of confidence towards Obama, the same as accepting his visit to the island without reciprocity.
Having assumed these risks, and the possible costs that accompanied them, was not easy for the promoters of normalization in Cuba, considering the commitments of an administration in retreat. The United States, however, was not exposed to the same risks of political discontinuity on the Cuban side.
Second, if you closely examine the 23 agreements reached between the two sides from December 2014 to January 2017, you will see that almost all of them coincided with U.S. national security interests; but above all, they were memorandums of understanding (MOU), subject to the will of the Executive, and not mandatory based on the legislation of that country. In other words, the Cuban government exposed itself to signing agreements that could become a dead letter under the next administration. And that was what happened.
I want to end with two points of convergence in the political debate in Cuba regarding these elections in the United States.
The first is that we have made progress in interpreting the political theater in a less deterministic way, and in judging the scope of its contingencies, not as the variables of an equation that anticipates what will happen, or a set of rules that mark an irreversible course. In this complex context, for example, the attack against the Republican candidate is not a bolt of lightning in a clear sky, but part of a series of clear and distinct signals about polarization and growing violence in the real functioning of the political system.
The second point is not new to us, although it responds more to a situation that is now perceived as more critical and dangerous. This is the call to the Cuban government to assume the worst possible scenario, to not get its hopes up with a détente, as a premise for projecting decisions in the short and medium term. Something like: “let’s be more realistic than ever, let’s not wait for a change in relations to get us out of the fire.” Until then, that call is unquestionable.
However, that awareness or that call for realism by itself does not deactivate the U.S. factor in our life as a country and as a society. Let’s say, an effective policy that contains the antidotes to the blockade is a well-oriented idea, although easier to design at a table or in a speech than in “concrete” practice. Doing so with the other aspects of our society and culture is surely even more complicated.
What to expect from that “worst case scenario”? What is it about when we think about that inevitable condition of our relationship with the North, both between governments and between societies? How can we all conceive those relations that concern us all, without illusions or voluntaristic pragmatism?
Choosing the cat regardless of its color is a reasonable formula, but too simple. Because we are not dealing with a mouse and we could end up hunted.
Author
Rafael Hernández
