The
Ripe Fruit Syndrome
By Carlos Alzugaray (February 2002)
The recent decision of the Bush Administration to intern in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo prisoners from the war in Afghanistan has focused again world attention on the anomalies present in Washington's relations with Revolutionary Cuba.
Although the State Department still includes Cuba in its list of seven states that sponsor terrorism, the U.S. Armed Forces consider its facility in the Eastern tip of the Island as a place where it can safely detain, interrogate and eventually put on trial this group of toughened terrorists coming mostly from the dreadful Al Qaida organization.
Anyone would think that if Cuba really were a country that sponsors terrorism, the U.S. would stir this group away in order to impede any attempt at liberating them. Many observers of U.S. foreign policy have openly questioned the logic behind putting Cuba on that list, given the fact that its government, which has suffered terrorism itself, has demonstrated on many occasions its rejection of that kind of activity and cooperated with U.S. authorities in repressing them. In the early 1980s, for example, Cuban representatives warned the FBI about a possible assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan, even though his Administration's policies were extremely hostile to Havana.
Many explanations have been put forward to elucidate the unusual fact that since 1959 10 different U.S. administrations have rejected any possibility of reaching a 'modus vivendi' with the Cuban Government, with the possible exception of President Carter in the late 1970s. There is a school of thought, which claims that the main stumbling block has been Cuba's nationalization of foreign-owned companies in 1960, but that explanation is not acceptable any more. Most countries whose companies were nationalized in that year, like Canada, Spain, Great Britain or Switzerland, successfully negotiated compensations and are back with huge investments in the Island.
Another rationalization placed emphasis on the supposed security threat that Cuba represented to the United States when it was the Soviet Union's main ally in the Western Hemisphere. That argument disappeared with the demise of the Socialist community in the early 1990s.
Again, some analysts have suggested that Washington's reluctance to normalize its relations with Cuba stems from its role as a subversive actor in the Hemisphere and supporter of National Liberation movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. Nevertheless, the days when guerrilla groups and revolutionary insurgents proliferated in the region and had Havana as their most usual gathering place have long gone by. Cuba today has normal diplomatic relations with all Latin American and Caribbean countries, El Salvador excepted, and is part and parcel of the vibrant processes of multilateral governmental diplomacy in the region from the Association of Caribbean States to the Iberoamerican and Euro-Latin American Caribbean Summits.
There was a time when Henry Kissinger complained about Cuba's support for African governments from Angola to Ethiopia resisting aggression, claiming that Havana was too small a country to project power so far away from its shores. Yet, in the late 1980s Cuba not only withdrew unilaterally from the Horn of Africa but negotiated with Angola, South Africa and the United States a peace agreement that brought security to the Angolans and independence to Namibia, as well as the necessary conditions for the end of apartheid in South Africa, in exchange for the return of its troops deployed in the South West African region.
The fact of the matter is that Cuba is not a diplomatic pariah as the U.S. Government claims, but a very active participant in the complex web of international institutions that constitute the world system of governance and a very much-respected actor in multinational diplomacy.
Since bilateral or international accounts are not sufficient to explain Washington's position not to normalize relations with Cuba, the most common argument recently advanced is that for U.S. administrations relations with the Island are a typical issue of domestic politics. According to the logic of this argument, what stops the American political class from adopting a more constructive approach to Cuba, similar to the one applied with China or Vietnam, is the power of the Cuban American community, which unanimously supports the blockade of Cuba and other hostile measures and opposes any normalization. However, this explanation faces several important problems.
In the first place the number and power of this community has been generally exaggerated. There are no more that 600 to 700,000 Cuban Americans, as demonstrated in the last census, and not the 2 million sometimes claimed. Secondly, this community is more diverse than the right-wingers assert as demonstrated by recent polls conducted in Miami and other communities. Thirdly, more than 100,000 Cuban-Americans visit their relatives in Cuba every year and many more send dollar remittances to their families in the Island, which indicates that a large part of the community would not mind a change in policy and more normal contacts with their relatives and friends in Cuba.
My suspicion is that a change towards normalization, which can be gradual, would not elicit more than token resistance from a few diehards in Miami. Moreover, as a very well-known hardliner on Cuba admitted to me in private in Washington a couple of years ago, in the U.S., as in many other countries, Presidents make public opinion and a clear indication of change towards Cuba from the White House would inevitably impact in the way that Cuban-Americans look at the issue. Examples abound of Presidential leadership bringing about changes. The Nixon-Kissinger opening to China or former President Bush's approach to Palestine come to mind.
I have long thought that what stops the U.S. from taking a firm decision on normalizing relations with Cuba is what I call 'the ripe fruit syndrome'. By that I mean the rooted perception in the political class that the U.S. has the right, or indeed the duty, to impose its hegemony over Cuba and Cubans because of historical, ideological, geoeconomic and geopolitical reasons.
When analyzing the decision-making process in the 1970s, political scientist Robert Axelrod came up with the hypothesis that most policymakers depended on a set of beliefs and previous knowledge that colored their perceptions of the problems about which they had to make decisions and that these beliefs were usually formed at a very early stage in their lives. They called it the 'cognitive map of decision makers'.
The 'cognitive map' of U.S. political leaders about Cuba was formed at a very early stage in the history of the relations between the two countries. Its earliest manifestation was John Quincy Adams' so-called 'ripe fruit doctrine'. In 1823 the founding father of American Diplomacy wrote that as there were laws of physical gravitation, there were laws of political gravitation and that, on the basis of these, Cuba would inevitably fall into U.S. hands as soon as it was severed from the Spanish Empire just like any fruit inevitably falls to the ground when it ripens.
All through the XIX century that vision of Cuba prevailed in U.S. policy-making until the Platt Amendment secured the long-sought hegemony over the Island in 1902.
This vision of Cuba was reinforced by the Cuban oligarchy, which very soon allied itself with the U.S. political elite and established a tacit unwritten agreement by which they insured the legitimacy of the semi-colonial regime in exchange for U.S. guarantees to their preeminent status inside the country.
In the first part of the XX century the 'ripe fruit syndrome' stopped the more enlightened U.S. elites from recognizing that the majority of the Cuban people rejected a state of affairs that obstructed the rightful exercise of their sovereignty. Take what Philip Bonsal, the last U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, wrote in a book published in 1971:
"In pre-Castro Cuba, the pervasive American presence in geopolitical terms was a constant reminder of the imperfect nature of Cuban sovereignty. Valued by some as a guarantee of stability and of the maintenance of what was on the whole a satisfactory way of life, it was rejected by others as an intolerable infringement on the independence and dignity of the Cuban people. I suspect that the majority of thinking Cubans regarded it as a fact of life against which it was useless to struggle. It did, after all, bring Cuba a number of apparently irreplaceable economic advantages."
Only a perception hindered by a "cognitive map" formed by previously acquired and misleading views could lead an otherwise intelligent and perceptive observer of Cuban and Latin America affairs, as Ambassador Bonsal was, to have such a distorted and unreal perception of Cuban thinking at the time.
The Miami Cuban right wingers in their efforts to promote their return to the Island and the reestablishment of U.S. hegemony, claim that normalization can take place only after the historical leadership of the Cuban Revolution disappears from the scene. In that way they reinforce in the minds of their supporters in the establishment the 'ripe fruit syndrome'.
For normalization to take place under solid premises, the U.S. political elites must begin to recognize that Cuba is not a ripe fruit for the taking. It is a country inhabited by more than 11 million human beings with a very strong sense of their national identity; of their political, social and cultural values; and of their role in the world. A people proud of the achievements of a system they have built over the last 43 years, much more humane and fair than the one that existed before 1959 when "the fruit was ripe".
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Dr. Carlos Alzugaray is a Full Professor at the Higher Institute of Foreign Relations of the Cuban Foreign Ministry at Havana.
originally posted at Radio Progreso website