{"id":242352,"date":"2021-08-09T15:20:17","date_gmt":"2021-08-09T19:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=242352"},"modified":"2021-08-09T15:20:17","modified_gmt":"2021-08-09T19:20:17","slug":"the-biden-administration-and-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba-usa\/the-biden-administration-and-cuba\/","title":{"rendered":"The Biden administration and Cuba"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cWe\u2019re going to do everything we can to keep Cuba on the front burner,\u201d a senior administration official said in a call with reporters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The verb neglect<\/em>, one of whose meanings is \u201cto ignore,\u201d is perhaps the one that best describes the Biden administration\u2019s relationship with Cuba, at least until July 11. A group of reasons and facts suggest this. Let\u2019s look at them briefly.<\/span><\/p>\n

The so-called <\/span>Trump Era<\/span><\/i> promoted a certain type of country and left a political-social and cultural heritage perceived by a sector of the political class as a drag on the existence of a liberal United States and diametrically opposed to those promoted for four years: they are seen as a violation of policies that have formed the hard core of historical values \u200b\u200band behaviors, both internal and external.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hence, the focus of the new administration was directed, above all, to put order in his own house. The extent to which this is so is expressed in that only during the first day in office, the new president signed 17 <\/span>executive orders<\/span><\/a> reversing decisions and policies adopted by the previous president. They were basically related to issues such as immigration, DACA, the halting of the wall on the southern border, the Keystone pipeline, the Population Census and discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation, among others, but they set the fundamental guideline during the famous first hundred days of the new government.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first emphasis was the coronavirus pandemic. \u201cA potential pandemic is a challenge that Donald Trump is not qualified to handle as president,\u201d candidate Biden wrote in <\/span>USA<\/span><\/i> Today<\/span><\/i> in January 2020. \u201cThe outbreak of a new coronavirus, which has already <\/span>infected more than 2,700<\/span><\/a> people and killed over 80\u00a0in China, will\u00a0get worse before it gets better. Cases have been confirmed in a dozen\u00a0countries, with at least five\u00a0in the United States. There will likely be more\u2026. To be blunt, I am concerned that the Trump administration\u2019s shortsighted policies have left us unprepared for a dangerous epidemic that\u00a0will come\u00a0sooner or later.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The result was, by opposition, the creation at the beginning of the Biden administration of an ambitious plan that went so far as to propose that 70% of Americans be vaccinated with at least one dose by the 4th of July (2021), Independence Day. For a series of reasons not necessary to analyze here, that objective was not met, but in any case what was achieved up to that point sent a loud and clear message about the importance that the government attached to the fight against the coronavirus and to Americans\u2019 health. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that by that date more than 172 million Americans \u2014 that is, about 67% of the adult population \u2014 had received at least one dose of the vaccine and approximately 156 million both doses (47%.).<\/span><\/p>\n

But the appearance of the Delta variant made things difficult for the executive. In early July, shortly before the <\/span>protests<\/span><\/a> broke out in Cuba, the combined effect of this variant of the coronavirus, as contagious as chickenpox, according to experts, plus a slowdown in the rate of vaccination, began to stoke fears of a resurgence of the pandemic. By that date in the United States, up to an average of 32,387 new cases of coronavirus were reported daily, according to Johns Hopkins data. Between July 7 and 13, hospitalizations increased 35.8% compared to the previous week, according to the CDC.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Testing
Testing center in Los Angeles, California. Photo: Lucy Nicholson\/Reuters.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Deaths also increased by 25%, reaching an average of 250 per day. Biden urged those who had not done so before to get vaccinated. \u201cIf they are not vaccinated, they are not protected,\u201d he <\/span>told<\/span><\/a> reporters. \u201cSo please get vaccinated now. It works. It\u2019s safe, free, and convenient.\u201d That call reflected the fact that the vaccination rate had plummeted across the country. On August 6, the <\/span>White House<\/span><\/a> announced that half of the total population of the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second step in order of priorities was assistance due to the coronavirus, that is, an economic stimulus <\/span>package<\/span><\/a> in the face of the pandemic, consisting basically of: a) $1,400 checks per person or $2,800 for couples filing taxes jointly (those with annual incomes of up to $75,000 or 160,000 in the case of married couples would receive the full amount; b) federal unemployment assistance benefits of $300 per week, which would run until September 6 (this figure will be added to state unemployment programs); c) restaurants and bars affected by the pandemic would receive loans of up to 10 million dollars non-reimbursable to the government if they were used to pay salaries, rents and other operating expenses; d) expansion of the fiscal credit granted by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for each child. <\/span>Parents\/guardians would receive direct payments of $3,600 per year <\/span><\/a>\u00a0($300 per month) for each child under the age of 6 and $3,000 per year ($250 per month) for each child between the ages of 6 and 17. The parameters were the same, that is, applicable to parents earning less than $75,000 a year and couples earning less than $150,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

The third, the infrastructure plan. In late January 2021, the new administration unveiled a plan to make a leap in the national infrastructure. In April 2021, Biden announced the American Employment Plan, aimed at spending about $2 trillion in federal funds on a wide variety of infrastructure, clean energy, research and development, and training. This included, among other things, rebuilding conventional transportation infrastructure \u2014 highways, bridges, airports, railways, and public transportation \u2014, a program to transition from government gasoline and diesel vehicles to electric vehicles, networks, and light rail infrastructure, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

Renewable energy would receive around 74 billion dollars. But the plan also includes cybersecurity, another weakness of the United States in the face of the emergence of repeated external attacks (hacks). All this in congruence with the presidential campaign, which handled proposals to expand public education, health care for the elderly and paid family leave, in contrast to Trumpist policies, which would dilute the size and productivity of the workforce. Biden\u2019s infrastructure policy would create an additional 2.7 million jobs and increase the average American income by $4,800 during his administration.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The
The Employment Plan. Photo: CNBC.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All in all, the one trillion Senate proposal, backed by the president, would funnel money toward everything, from road repairs to broadband expansion and clean energy, though its approval is not guaranteed in any of the chambers of the U.S. <\/span>Congress<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for Cuba, these internal decisions contributed to blurring it from the agenda, a result of asymmetry, that is, of the place that one party places the other in its system of international relations. In this last area, the focus has been on China and Russia, countries with which an adversarial relationship is being handled that in many ways is projected as a <\/span>revival<\/span><\/i> of the Cold War.<\/span><\/p>\n

II<\/b><\/p>\n

The previous ones were, basically, the initial hard core of the young administration. \u201cCuba is not something central or fundamental in United States politics, unlike the United States, which does occupy a relevant place in Cuban politics. The Cuba-U.S. dispute is real, but not the same for both sides. You just have to notice how many times senior Cuban leaders allude to the United States and how many times the Americans mention Cuba,\u201d observed a <\/span>Cuban journalist<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ignoring it would mean leaving aside the fact that the island has been losing importance in the U.S. foreign policy system after the fall of \u201creal socialism\u201d in Eastern Europe and the USSR. And that for that same reason it was not a priority issue even for President Obama, who as it is known only became involved in the policy change at the end of his second term, when he had little or nothing to lose. The export of the revolution, one of the great themes of U.S. policy toward Cuba, and the status of \u201cSoviet proxy\u201d disappeared when the maps changed color.<\/span><\/p>\n

But these events had another effect: feeding sectors of liberal politics and the press the idea that the conflict with the Cubans could be a thing of the past. Indeed, Cuba could no longer be a satellite of those who did not exist, it had normal to very good relations with the vast majority of Latin American governments \u2014 which left without effect the issue of the export of the revolution and the security of regional allies, two of the historical objections to normalize relations \u2014 so that the bases of the dispute would have disappeared and, consequently, it could be negotiated, especially after both parties sat down to talk face to face about the independence of Namibia and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem is that this assumption turned out to be logical, but wrong in the long run. Once the classic objections disappeared as a result of these changes, what distinguished U.S. policy towards the island was a greater emphasis on the domestic front, precisely the order that the Cuban leadership considers untouchable, arguing a problem of sovereignty. This perspective continued the characteristic preconditioning in the projection towards Cuba, now by other paths, and demanded the dismantling of the internal order to normalize things \u2014 something that, for the aforementioned reason, the Cuban leaders would never accept. That was precisely what <\/span>was<\/span> not done <\/span><\/i>by Obama,<\/span><\/a> who dedicated himself to initiating policy courses to achieve his own objectives without waiting for \u201csignals\u201d or \u201canswers\u201d in return, a new way to advance the interests of the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

Biden apostar\u00eda por \u201cempoderar al pueblo cubano\u201d si llega a la presidencia<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n