A few years ago, crossing the Sierra Madre on the way to the Pacific coast, we stopped at a village founded in the 17th century in northern Sinaloa called El Fuerte. After trying to stay at the Posada del Hidalgo, where according to legend the very Diego de la Vega (Zorro) was born, we discovered that that night of September 15-16 was the eve of the Cry, that is, the national holidays. If it were true that the town did not exceed 12,000 inhabitants, it seemed that everyone was in the square, where it was almost impossible to walk. In truth, I have never known a town that celebrates Independence Day like the Mexicans.
Last week I had the same feeling again, corrected and increased when some Cuban-Mexican friends invited me to the Zócalo on the night of the Cry. The image of the gigantic square packed with people in the rain, waiting for the last speech of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, as they call him) on the date, was worth more than a thousand words.
When everything was over, while we waited an hour to leave that esplanade, where the most popular music bands did not stop playing until dawn, I evoked other nights and days, many years ago, in the middle of waves of people who occupied the streets of towns and cities, doing politics, singing and dancing at the same time. They were other times of radical changes, another climate, and another world, but the enthusiasm and intensity were very similar.
Cuba’s relations with the Mexican revolutions and left throughout the 19th and 20th centuries are an inextricable part of our history. We Cubans grew up accustomed to José Martí speaking to us about Mexico, teaching us about Mexican things, its heroes, thinkers, and political and intellectual movements; its causes in defense of sovereignty and social justice.
It was not by chance that “Nuestra América” (Our América, 1893) was published in a Mexican newspaper. Just as his last letter, which we all remember by heart, was addressed to a close Mexican friend, Manuel Mercado, telling him in secret his last concerns about the future of Cuba’s independence under the shadow of the United States.
The Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and extended during key decades of political and social struggle in both countries, left a deep mark on Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s. Its legacy in Cuban political modernity wove very visible connections between that leftist culture and our own, which would nourish the Revolution of 1959 in its origins. In the frequencies that reached us from the popular movements and the Constitution of 1917; the diversity of socialist currents rooted in its political culture; the leadership of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa; the example of organic intellectuals such as Flores Magón or Vicente Lombardo Toledano; the profound transformations in Mexican society and political structure derived from that revolutionary process.
Naturally, Mexico was the ideological watering hole of the Cuban revolutionaries of that time, as well as a land of exile, since the revolutions they fought for on both sides were in a certain way the same.
Better known is the Mexican connection of the third Cuban revolution, which began in 1953 to overthrow the Batista dictatorship. The main rearguard of that revolution was not the United States, as in Martí’s time, but Mexico, where it was organized and from where the insurgency began in 1956.
It is not strange then that in the first days of 1959 many Mexicans linked to that insurgency and its project were already present in Cuba, such as Lázaro Cárdenas. In that Cuba, where the Agrarian Reform soon became the core of definition of the social and political change that the Revolution brought with it; and where economists such as Juan F. Noyola, who had been there from the beginning, brought with them the innovative thinking of ECLAC and helped to plan a different future, as advisors at the highest level in the new State.
The only Latin American and Caribbean country that maintained relations with the island between 1965 and 1970, in that period of almost perfect isolation in the region, Mexico was the Cuban revolving door with the Latin American world. This accompaniment left a mark on the Cuban people. So when President Luis Echeverría visited the island in the early 1970s, those people went overboard, celebrating a Mexico that, without agreeing with the ideology or the politics of our Revolution, continued to defend Cuba’s right to decide its future for itself.
Looking at it in the opposite direction, I wonder why Mexico has always maintained relations with the Cuban Revolution; and not simply “with the Republic of Cuba,” as a certain Mexican foreign minister said, believing he could modify at will or through a decree the political nature of that relationship. Marked as it is by an accumulation like the one outlined above, regardless of which party is in government and who is the president of Cuba, as time has shown.
Mexican relations with Cuba are explained by a multidimensional logic, which goes beyond the bilateral. First, they respond to a function of the principle of self-determination, key to Mexican foreign policy. Second, the domestic policy dimension, analyzed in texts such as Olga Pellicer’s classic, México y la Revolución cubana, which emphasizes the triangulation with the left there: Cuba has been part of the Mexican government’s dialogue with that left-wing opposition. Third, the Mexico-Cuba-United States triangle, where the policy toward the island is a mirror of Mexican independence in foreign policy vis-à-vis the United States, and whose significance does not need to be emphasized.
Most authors stay within these three dimensions, although there is a fourth, referring to the regional and multilateral framework. It covers the Latin American and Caribbean dimension, as well as the Non-Aligned Movement, to which Mexico does not belong fully, but as an observer, but whose agenda it shares.
The multilateral environment in these areas and international forums has been a space for understanding and diplomatic cooperation with Cuba, whose role stands out for its activism and ability to weave transcontinental alliances, since the 1960s and especially the 1970s. Mexican interaction with currents where the island has navigated contributes to its global foreign policy.
Recognizing these commonly accepted dimensions, I want to add a couple of critical and marginal notes about political convergences of special significance.
Some authors turn the dense relationship between Mexico and Cuba into a logic of linear pragmatism: not getting involved in the internal affairs of the other, expecting reciprocity. To get around ideological differences, for domestic political interests such as those mentioned. Or to the symbolism of an image of autonomy from the United States.
If we were to measure it only in terms of Mexican and Cuban foreign policy topics, we would see that it is not something as elementary as “Mexico supported Cuba while Cuba was respectful of Mexico and did not encourage an armed or political revolution,” as some try to explain as “the great pact since 1959 that reaches even to the present moment.” According to that vision, Cuba would be “an ace up the sleeve of the Mexican president,” because he would use it as an ideological resource for domestic politics, and with that turn, 50 years of diplomatic cooperation and mutual interests would be dissolved [AMLO visita La Habana: “Cuba es un as bajo la manga del presidente mexicano que esté en turno” – BBC News Mundo (AMLO visits Havana: “Cuba is an ace up the sleeve of the Mexican president in office”)].
On the other hand, to illustrate the common space of interests and values and the political will for understanding between Cuba and Mexico, I will comment on three well-known cases.
The first is these agreements to ban nuclear weapons in the region, where Mexico has played a leading role since 1962, following the Missile Crisis, and in particular, the Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967), the work of architects of Mexican diplomacy such as Alfonso García Robles and Jorge Castañeda. This regional and global problem has been a strategic goal of its diplomacy in the United Nations, as has the project of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace (2014), and its prominent role in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017).
Cuba, as it is known, resisted signing the Treaty of Tlatelolco until 1995, in a logic that the Cuban leadership characterized with a moral argument: if the island has been the only country directly threatened by nuclear weapons if the threatening country has been the United States, and if the United States is not subject to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, there was an unacceptable moral asymmetry in the act of committing ourselves not to have nuclear weapons on our territory, while the United States exempted itself from this commitment, and on the contrary, was a main actor in the arms race.
Added to this question of principle was the paradox, in strictly strategic terms, that Soviet nuclear weapons had left Cuba in 1962, but the U.S. ones continued to be placed on our territory, every time an aircraft carrier landed or a nuclear submarine docked at the Guantanamo Naval Base; and this unwanted presence of nuclear vectors on Cuban territory was not restricted by the Treaty of Tlatelolco. When Cuba agreed to sign it in 1995, it did so as a very special gesture towards Mexico and the regional community, even though the asymmetry remained the same.
A second moment in which Cuba and Mexico had very close collaboration was in the negotiation of the Central American conflict in the 1980s, to put an end to the war of the Nicaraguan counterrevolution with the support of the United States, also involved in the armed conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala. Although Washington refused to allow Cuba to form part of the negotiated peace processes of such conflicts that Mexico and other countries in the region were promoting (Contadora and Esquipulas), the Cuban government favored a negotiated solution and recommended that the Central American revolutionaries seek a peaceful solution to the conflicts, instead of prolonging the war. Although Mexico was unable to get Cuba to be present at the negotiating table, it coordinated with the island every step of the conciliation process throughout the 1980s, as Mexican diplomats who played an active role in those negotiations know.
The last topic that illustrates cooperation and special interests that are not exactly ideological is Mexico’s reaction to the Helms-Burton Act, the new tightening of the U.S. blockade in 1996. Together with Canada, the Mexican Congress rejected this law for its extraterritorial scope and voted for legislation opposed to its instrumentalization to dictate the terms of the commercial or financial relationship of Mexican companies with the island. It did not neutralize the inhibitory effect of the Helms-Burton, but it contributed to the U.S. presidents (until Trump) suspending the application of Titles III and IV, which were considered its “teeth,” so to speak.
In none of these three cases does the logic of pragmatism or quid pro quo explain Mexican behavior toward the island, nor does it explain Cuban reaction.
There is one last issue regarding the current situation: the lessons that Latin America, the Caribbean and Cuba could draw from the political process that has taken place in Mexico in recent years. I will focus on four particularly significant points.
The first is the management of domestic politics, and President López Obrador’s ability as a political communicator, his way of dealing with hostile media sieges; of defending himself in an even-tempered manner, without losing his serenity and ability to debate; and, at the same time, without closing the space for disagreement, defending the space for political discussion. And being able to refute that opposition, often bitter, effectively and convincingly.
The second is to renew Mexico’s political projection and influence in the region. It is a country with a historical record and a greater presence in Latin-Caribbean affairs, which had declined noticeably in recent decades. Although AMLO has not exactly spent his time traveling around the region, like other presidents, but rather the opposite, he has nevertheless given Mexico visibility, not so much derived from its economic growth, or even from the authority granted by a solid political leadership internally, but based on his capacity to adopt a position as an interlocutor with the United States, negotiator and at the same time jealous of its sovereignty, and to take charge of problems shared with the region, such as migration or inflation.
A third lesson consists of having assumed the defense of the rights of lower-class Mexicans, the poor, workers, large majorities, within Mexico, but also of emigrants; to consider it the State’s task to protect their rights, of that labor emigration that goes to the United States or Canada, in a large flow, and that comes to work in precarious conditions compared to others, at a disadvantage concerning the treatment and respect for labor laws and union protection in that country, and that constitutes, beyond the wall and the border closure, whether they are allowed in or not, the latitude of their citizen status, and their rights to receive protection from their State wherever they are.
A final lesson, derived from the current situation in Mexico, is essential: the question of the legacy of the charismatic leader. How to assume it, so that it can be channeled and made effective, transformed and recreated. And above all, to what extent this legacy can be used by Claudia Sheinbaum, a woman president, the first in the history of that country, who could assimilate continuity and enhance it as change, reaffirming social democracy, participation, from below, and State reform, from above. So that this change prevents the old state apparatus from compromising the transformation; the inertia of the bureaucracy accustomed to exercising uncontested power, to align itself with the chains of interests; so that they do not compromise the progress of these ongoing transformations beyond the horizon to which they were taken by the charismatic leader.
The amount of audacity to face this challenge, including that determined by the role of gender in national politics, to transform the style of the presidency into a different one, with the hallmark of a woman endowed with the intelligence and sensitivity to deal with problems and lead that men do not usually have.
The contribution of this experience to the Latin American political context, including Cuba, would be difficult to exaggerate.
Author
Rafael Hernández
