VOICE It’s More Than Cigars and Rum: Why Cuba Matters
July 26, 2017
James Stavridis, Foreign Policy
Photo Credit: Ramon Espinosa/AP
The fraught strategic relationship of the United States with Cuba — which was then a Spanish colony — began on Feb. 15, 1898, when the USS Maine, an aging, undersized battleship, mysteriously blew up in Havana Harbor. The Hearst newspaper chain, in what we would think of today as “fake news” or “alternative facts,” created an inflammatory storyabout Spanish saboteurs having destroyed the warship. As was the case after the Pearl Harbor attack almost half a century later, the nation was suddenly galvanized into war. “Remember the Maine” became the battle cry; a young Theodore Roosevelt lead a daring charge up San Juan Hill, which later won him the Medal of Honor, and launched his political career.
Cuba began a brief sojourn as a quasi-American colony, the United States stumbled its way through administering it, and eventually it became an independent nation, but one economically intertwined with its neighbor to the north until the communist revolution led by the Castro brothers in 1959. Cue a brutal dictatorship, the long twilight of the embargo, and a failed theory of how to shift the trajectory of America’s Cuba policy. When I spent three years as the head of U.S. Southern Command several years ago, we saw Cuba not as a security threat but as a potential source of refugees, the location of a detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, and an irritant to the Cuban-American population of southern Florida — but we saw it neither as a serious security challenge nor an opportunity for diplomatic engagement.