Cuba's Transition After Castro

Good morning. My name is Carlos Pascual. I am the Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. I'd like to welcome you here today for this event on Cuba's transition after Castro with the focus on Cuban-American views on how best to advance change in Cuba. This is part of an all-day conference that we are sponsoring today in conjunction with a Cuba study group and in collaboration with Florida International University. And the intent of this conference is to be able to bring together ideas of the dynamics of change in Cuba, the instruments and the levers for change and understanding of the politics behind it. For those of you who are new to the Brookings Institution -- and I say this because there are many from the Cuban-American community who follow issues of transition in Cuba who may not be as familiar with Brookings -- let me just say a couple of things: We are an independent and nonpartisan think tank, in fact the oldest think tank in the United States. We are a policy research institution; that is our focus. We're not an advocacy group, we focus on policy research. The scholars of Brookings Institution take positions on issues. We advocate particular policy views, but there is no Brookings Institution view on Cuba, or Iraq, or any other matter. In fact, I guarantee you that if you go down the halls of Brookings and ask the people here their views on any given issue, you'll probably get about 15 or 20 different positions. Why this focus on Cuba? Really, two reasons: The first is that whether it is weeks, or months, or years away, Fidel Castro will pass away, and that will create an opportunity for the most significant change in Cuba and U.S.­Cuba relations since Fidel Castro came into power in January of 1959. If one's goal is a free and democratic Cuba, one cannot assume that that change is guaranteed after Fidel leaves. The Cuban people will ultimately, and should, ultimately drive and design their own future. For us to be able to support that, it is important for us to understand the dynamics of change that can take place within the government of Cuba, its military, the intelligence services, the general population, the Afro-Cuban community, the youth. It is among those points of power, those parts of the population that we will see the pushes and the pulls on how Cuba will transform itself. We have to be realistic about the incentives and the self-interests of Cuba's future leaders as well. Inevitably, they will want to maintain power, and what are the right policy tools to respond to a situation like that? What we do know from history is that it would have been a mistake to have the same policy toward Mikhail Gorbachev's Russia, Soviet Union, as we did toward Brezhnev. Indeed, we could have missed an opportunity of historic proportion. And it's in that spirit of understanding what the right and most constructive policies might be that we are having this conference, and we look forward to being able to put forward a report on the conference results. The second reason for this focus on Cuba has to be the political drivers of policy, and on Cuba the politics of policy have been focused in the Cuban-American community. And today we are particularly fortunate through this panel to have the benefit of an outstanding and totally recent poll completed at the beginning of last week by Florida International University. And we will focus on some of the trends and dynamics highlighted in that poll right now. In order to guide us through this discussion we have the benefit of three professors and leaders at Florida International University. To begin with, Guillermo Grenier will take us through the basic contents of the poll. Guillermo is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Following Guillermo, Hugh Gladwin, who is the Director of the Institute for Public Opinion Research and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, will follow up and add some additional comments. And then finally, Damian Fernandez, who is a Professor of the Department of International Relations and the Vice Provost to Florida International University, as well as the Director of the Cuban Research Institute, will help us understand these poll results in a broader context. And then finally, following on their comments, we have the benefit of Vicki Huddleston, who is a friend and a colleague at Brookings Institution, a Nonresident Senior Fellow here, and a former Chief of Mission at the Cuban Interest Section in Havana -- of U.S. Interest Section in Havana, who will be able to look at these issues from a perspective of how -- what the ramifications are for U.S. policy. So I thank you all for joining. I thank my cosponsors from the Cuba Study Group and our partners in Florida International University and, Guillermo, I'd like to ask you to come forth. Well, good morning, and thank you for coming. And I also would like to thank the Brookings Institute as well as the Cuba Study Group, that helped FIU and the Cuban Research Institute conduct this poll. We have been conducting this poll -- Hugh Gladwin and I have been conducting this poll since 1991 -- asking many of the questions that you will see today, repeatedly, since 1991, not every year but years when things we think are worth measuring. And what you will see is that there has been change over the years, and what you'll see is that there are some reasons why those changes occurred. It's not just because of the Cuban community as a whole has changed its mind; it's just that different people with different mind-sets have come, as well as those who have changed their minds, too, living the Miami area. This poll was conducted, specifically, in Miami, Dade County. We have done polls in New Jersey as well as in the Broward County area looking at different attitudes of Cuban-American communities living throughout the United States, but this is not one of them. We started doing this poll trying to understand the Cuban-American political culture which is probably the most unresearched element of Cuban-American reality in the United States. Most of the literature on Cuban-Americans is focused on the success stories, the economic success stories, economic adaptations, successful economic adaptations, the ability to shape an entire area and, in essence, dominate cultural developments of a major metropolitan area. This is ironical because, in essence, the political forces, micro and macro, are at the core of the existence and the origins of contemporary Cuban-American presence in the United States. In fact, whatever image most Americans have of Cuban-Americans I would say is probably constituted more than anything else by political features such as staunch anti-Castroism, militancy, terrorism, political conservatism, and a dominant affiliation with the Republican Party. So these are clearly the faults of many of our public officials as well as the public in general about what the community is like. But there's much more than that in the community, of course. We don't always vote directly on Cuba policy. We vote on taxes, and child care, and health care, and things like that. So the monolithic view of the population, Cuban-American population, is unlikely to really exist, if it ever did exist at all, and unlikely to exist now in the 21st century. People have left the island at different times for different reasons. When we speak of a Cuban American community, we're speaking of a group that has had an almost continuous flow into the South Florida regions since 1959. The flow can be categorized by waves which we'll look at in a minute. And I'm not sure that we should expect people who lost everything in the revolutionary turmoil immediately after 1959 to feel the same about Cuba as those that came in the 1980s-1990s and are still coming now. So this poll tries to tease out the subtleties and the differences among different segments of the community, specifically as they relate to Cuba policy. The big picture, as here you have a bit of methodology -- and Hugh will talk more about the methodology in a second -- the big picture that you see is that Cuban-American are eager for change. What you have is a population that is expecting for change to occur within the next five years at the maximum. That's 17 percent or so look at the next years being when the rubber meets the road. About 45 percent look at the next one to five years, so you see a population that really is expecting change relatively rapidly. What you see at the bottom of all these charts until you notice that that's no longer there is how the polls have changed over time. Each one of these bars represents a year that we've conducted the poll. And it takes a little bit of time to kind of look at and make sense of these bars, right, but I'm going to leave this one up here just so you will get used to looking at the different -- at the polls as it's changed over time, the responses that have changed over time. Now, while this desire for change has been a constant in the Cuban-American community, some key variables have altered their significance over the last 15 years that we've conducted the poll. What you see now is a more pragmatic approach to changes you had before. There's always been this hope that change would occur overnight, as you will see when we discuss dramatic violent change in a minute. But now you have more -- the Cuban-American population is looking for policy solutions that will drive change. The tightening the embargo. The embargo is a very strong symbol in the Cuban-American community. It is an alliance between the Cuban-American community and the United States of America trying to there is the favoring of tightening the embargo. All right, so what you see is a decrease in the support for tightening the embargo. Now, we're still looking at 58 percent of the population, as you see in the far right corner of the upper row there. But that has been as high as 85 percent in 1985. So you see that there's a decrease. This is the lowest figure that we've ever had for tightening, of a population that tightens the embargo. The fact is that there's still a dominant part of the population that sees the embargo as an important part of the U.S. policy. That's the stick, in essence, that drives a lot of the other answers. When you break down some of the restrictions that the embargo imposes on the community, then is when you start to see some variations within that community. For example, to allow -- this is a positive -- allow medicine sales to Cuba. The light blue again is the positive response here: We would like to have medicine sales to Cuba. Hugh will talk a bit about the wording of these questions in a minute. Seventy-two percent of the population would like to allow medicine sales to the island, and that is again, as you see on the top, the highest number perhaps in 2004. We were in the error margins of the 2004 poll. Food sales. Allow food sales to the island, 62 percent support that. Lower than medicine, but still the highest number that we've had in the 15 years that we've been conducting the poll. Unrestricted travel. This is unrestricted, this is not just family travel. This is you, me, you know, my neighbors, my Filipino friends, everybody go to the island. Fifty-five percent of the poll's populations supports unrestricted travel to the island. Now, that is again the highest number. We've had 53 percent, we've had 50 percent. In 1991, for those of you whose memory works that far back, everybody thought everything was going to change immediately in Cuba. You know, the Soviet Union was going down, the support that the Cubans had been receiving from the Soviet Union was going to dry up, so things were going to change. So at that point in time we had 50 percent. In 2004 we had 53 percent, now we have 55 percent of the population wanting unrestricted travel to the island. National dialogue, which is a very hot word in Miami, if those you who live there know this, to be a dialogero is a -- it's not a term of endearment and has not been over the years. Now, this was the highest answer of percentages favoring a dialogue between the Cuban community in the United States, the U.S. government and the Government of the Island, 65 percent. That is by far the highest. Now, we've had 56 percent, we've had 52 percent, we've had 52 percent ­-you can see across the top that there has been a sizable portion of the population that's been willing to entertain this as a policy option for many, many years. But now we're finally over -- the respondents are over 60 percent, and clearly it is a very strong force within the community Now, there's one thing: It's very rare to find things that all Cubans agree on. I mean you have six people in the room and there are eight opinions. But you have one element of the poll consistently has shown that the Cuban population in the United States is willing to assist the human rights groups working on the island, so called dissidents, the opposition, however you want to call it. That has been a consistent element of Cubans thinking about the future of the island. They want to support the people in the island trying to promote change in that island -- on that island. Now, here are a lot of numbers, but I want you to have a sense of how the waves have an impact on opinions, okay, and you don't need to look at all of this stuff, but look at, for example, favor ending the U.S. embargo: 42.5 percent at the very top line favor the lifting the embargo. Now, you can see as you look across there that not all waves coming have the same attitude towards the embargo. Here you only have 22 percent, the early arrivals 22 percent support lifting the embargo. At the other end, the ones that have come since 1995, close to 60 percent, so that kind of difference is evident in all our questions. That is, the community is not monolithic. It depends on when you came because there are different reasons, why you came. There are different receptions that you have received in this country. The community itself in Miami has changed over time. The question that I want to focus on, real quickly as we move on rapidly, is a favorable return to the 2003 policy. Right -- where are we? -- right there. Sixty-four percent -- and this is family travel in essence, okay? That was the big shift in 2003, remittances and family travel. Sixty-four percent support returning to that 2003 Clinton-Bush policy. And again over the waves, as we look over the period of time the people arrived here, 85.7 percent of the new arrivals favor that return, whereas only 35 percent or 36 percent you round up of the early arrivals do that. When you conceive -- and this was an important little chart just because it shows you how the communities have broken down. Now, this is the 2003 policy broken down by waves, the return to that. So you can clearly see that after 1995 you have a lot of blue there, but the blue is present in all groups. It's not -- it's a sizable minority even in the folks that have come between in earlier waves. Now, this chart will guarantee to make your eyes bleed if you look at it too long, but I only want to show you the trend. The trends of all of these variables that we have been talking about favoring more moderate approaches to policies used from the islands are clearly up. Here we have things, diplomatic relations -- which I think we should probably go back to real quickly -- favor reestablishing U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba. Fifty-seven percent of the entire population supports that; 72.3 percent support that. But the purpose of this chart right here was basically to show you in essence that there is an upward flow based on when you got here. There is a significant difference between early arrivals and later arrivals, and guess who's growing: the later arrivals. The biological solution is taking care of the rest of us. This chart will be very brief because I just want to raise one issue with you that is very important in recognizing the policy concerns of Cuban-Americans, and that is U.S. citizenship. Sixty-five point nine (65.9) of all -- 66 percent of all Cuban-Americans in Miami, Dade County, are citizens. Now, look at these groups of the early arrivals: 96.5, yeah, 97 percent. Even the ones characterized by the Marial* boat lift, you have 81 percent citizenship. After that, it tapers down rapidly. Now, what does that mean? It means that when you are a registered voter, these are the people that are regis- -- you have a high registration rate anyway, 60 percent, but these are the numbers that count for a lot of politicians, the people that came earlier, because they are the ones that have registered most and have become citizens. Now, a quick tally of those citizenship numbers shows that if you came after 1985, you have about 85 percent -- about 30 percent of the people are citizens; if you came before 1985, you have over 91 percent of the people are citizens. So just there you have a bulk of voters that puts all of these opinions in the context of who's going to vote for what. And again, here you have that return to the 2003 policy, but then let's look at the registered voters that support that policy. And there you have a majority of the registered voters favor over, you know, what? Sixty, seventy-some percent, is that right? I can't quite even read it off my own thing. Fifty-four percent, yeah. Okay, there we go. Fifty-four percent favor return to the 2003 policy. Hugh, do you want to take over on the methodology? So these were just -- the things I want you to carry away from this brief presentation is that there is change. They're changes that are driven by policy now. It's not just what people that want to go see tia cuka (?) on the island. There are some specific policy issues that are the focus of the change, and that the change is supported variably by people -- by Cuban-Americans depending a lot on when they came to the United States. Okay, I just want to say if you take a couple of minutes to talk about the methodology of the poll, first the questions themselves and how they're formatted, and then a little bit about the sampling and waiting. This is a tracking poll that's done every so often, and we want to get, first off, as much replicability from one year to the next as we can, which means it's very important that we have the same questions and the same context of questions each time. Secondly, we want to be sure that the questions themselves are not biased as we go along. So what we've done is, you know, back in 1991 when Guillermo and I first did this, we spent a lot of time developing these questions. We've been criticized across the spectrum and praised across the spectrum for the way the questions have been worded and come out, which indicates to us we did a fairly good job in designing them. But then since we've started, we keep the beginning of the poll the same. You know, it's virtually the same questions -- I mean it is, yeah, virtually the same questions for the first five, six, seven minutes of the poll, and the exact same question wording. That's very important because answers to a poll question depend, as we in the survey research business know, not just on the question itself but on the context that the interview creates. And if I could just point to -- this is one question that people every year have kind of raised their eyebrows about: Supporting the U.S. invasion of Cuba, it's always had a majority. The darker-colored bars at the top are the opposed, and that's gone down a little bit over the years, but it's still there's favoring a majority. I mean, what does that mean? What that means to us is that the context of the first questions of the poll, and particularly the first one -- When do you expect political change to occur in Cuba? -- creates a kind of environment of thinking about the issue of frustration, if you will, about what the situation is. And you get answers that seem contradictory. Many people will say they favor dialogue, they favor U.S. invasion. The last time we did it we did some follow-up for those who called for invasion to see what that meant. It meant something like, for most people, like the U.S. going into Haiti. But we have to keep it in because we don't want to suddenly switch to a beginning of the poll that's kind of warm and fuzzy suddenly and would influence the results. It's exactly the same beginning and the same context. Okay, now, the other thing we do in polling in general these days, as careful as you can be about encouraging a good response rate and everything else, you still have a bias towards having older people answer more readily, and women answer more readily. And this is particularly pronounced in Miami. It's one of the most difficult areas to do polling in the country. So to compensate for that we weight by board-age categories and gender. We weight the results after first checking to make sure it doesn't affect the statistical significance against the U.S. -- that is, census figures. And for that we use the 2005 American community survey, U.S. census figures. So, and then we ran, once we put that in, we went back to look at the actual census data on number of Cubans -- yeah, this is Cubans born outside the U.S. by year of first entry. So this is just a census check on the waves that Guillermo just talked about, and it does match very well. Now, one area I'll say where I think we probably did not do a good job where you can't do -- a weighting procedure like this is for to get an accurate measure of the number of Cubans of African descent in Miami. That's partly because there are big problems with the census questions. There are also big problems because the census questions, when you ask them in a poll, don't actually make much sense in terms of the prevailing view of race and color in Miami. So I would suspect that our numbers may be somewhat off in terms of that category. So end of methodological points. Thank you. I guess it's my lucky day to follow the section of methodology. Anything I say now is brilliant. I'm going to make four points and then reach some conclusions. The first point is a contextual one. It's the one I call "the paradox of control." Cuban-Americans have been represented both as being in control and on the verge of out of control. And I think this poll sheds light on the fact that first we're not in control of U.S. policy. There's a lot of dissonance there between the way that we think or what we desire and what the actual policy formulation is. And we're definitely not out of control. I mean this is a group that is over time increasingly moderate. It's a group that is not monolithic, that is quite diversified in many of its public opinions. We're not as extreme as we're represented, and, in fact, the image of Cuban-Americans as extremists or as being in control and the single driver of U.S. policy is a very handy and misguided stereotype on our community. The poll undermines these useful cliches, and I hope the media takes not of that. Clearly, the poll also shows that we are, in fact, not in sync with many of the current policy aspects in place. It reminds me almost of a Bohrhist* story in which the supposed controller is, in fact, being controlled. And Cuban-Americans have become now the object of trying to be controlled: limit their access to the island, limit their travel, limit their remittances; which leads to a second point here: voting Republican acting like Democrats. There is that policy dissonance at the heart of Cuban-American political action and public opinion. Cuban-Americans supported the Bush electoral campaigns both times around, but there is great frustration as to the policy outcomes. It seems that President Bush's initial take on sanctions regarding Cuba and other countries resonated much better with the community. And that initial take was soft on the people, tough on the governments. And, in fact, what we've had is rather tough on the people and not very tough on governments, as we've seen by issues of trade, sale of medicine, and grain, and foodstuff, in part to address some of the constituencies in the Republican Party that favor a greater access to the Cuban market. The prior U.S. policy -- that is the one that had a two-track which allowed people-to-people contract and also calibrated steps in the Cuban government -- made some positive changes towards a more open political and economic system, seems therefore to resonate with these two currents in the Cuban-American policy culture -- that is, one that wants to be tough on the government but soft on the people, that two-track approach -- address stakeholders in a much more elegant way. The third point is the shifting center of political gravity, and I think this is very important. Over time Cuban-Americans are looking less at Washington and even less at Miami as a source of political change on the island. Now there's a consensus that it's within the island that political innovation will transpire -- clearly, not as soon as many of us would want, but then, eventually, through the human rights groups, through the opposition there is great support in the community over time to support these political actors inside Cuba. And there's even support for negotiation and for dialogue. That also is new. And I think that that presents a context for change that is different from 10 years ago in which we thought that it was exclusively lobby in Washington or the U.S. card that would have the final say in the political outcome on the island. And fourth point, before I reach conclusions, is less passion, more affection, more dollars. And that is that over time what we've seen is the politics of passion, this moral imperative to negate any of the engagement aspects of Cuba, that seems to be eroded over time and sliding to a more moderate policy in which humanitarian concerns, family concerns, travel and engagement that U.S. values and other pro-democratic values would have an impact on the island. That seems to be taking its place. And also great support for the politics of the dollar, that is, greater access to the market seems also to resonate with some folks in the Cuban-American community in increasing numbers. Now, what does this all mean? Well, Cuban-Americans have changed in significant ways over the past 10 years, and the reasons for that change are multiple. Yet it's not reflected in our political leadership and our U.S. policy the change at the grass roots. There is more political space for policy changes, more political space than ever before I would say. Policymakers will find support for their policies if their changes are in the making, but these changes really aren't the margin, not necessarily at the center of the embargo one way or the other. And I think that we need to start looking at the aspects of U.S. policy, not exclusively Cuban Americans as the drivers of this policy, and this is where the debate is really of interest. What are the aspects of continuity and change? What explains beyond Miami the continuity and change in U.S. policy towards the island? Thank you. Well, Damian said that he was lucky because he followed methodology, but I'm unlucky because I follow Damian. I'd like to tell you just a little story about when I was the principal officer in Havana, Cuba, and this was during the time that our policies were, in fact, more liberal on Cuban-American travel as well as on people-to- people, as well as bilateral cooperation on migration and antinarcotics and crime. But one evening I was driving the Interest Section car, which is a rather nice black Crown Victoria, down Kinta Avenita, and I saw a group of teenagers. And I stopped and I picked them up, and they jumped in the car, and they said, "Aw, wow, this is a beautiful car. Where did you get it?" I said, "Well, it belongs to the Interest Section." And he said, "Oh, well, what do you do at the Interest Section?" I said, "Well, I work there. I'm the chief of Interest Section." They said, "Oh, be our mother. Take us to Miami." Well, I'm telling you this story because those kids should stay in Havana. They should want to stay in Havana because Havana should be a place where there's hope for the future, where they can get jobs, where they can raise families, where they can have good housing and enough to eat, and good health care. And one of the main ways that can come about is the same way, in fact, that this came about in Eastern Europe. And that is through more contact. And what Guillermo and Hugh have just told us is that the younger generation of Cuban-Americans understands that absolutely perfectly: that if there's going to be real change in Cuba, there has to be contact. There has to be people talking to each other. So let me just reiterate a couple of things very quickly. The first of all, this is the first time we've seen a majority of Cuban-Americans now say: Lift the travel ban. Nine percent more than in 2004 are saying that. These percentages really are astounding. This is the first time we had a majority say: Reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba. That means maybe an ambassador -- God forbid -- and that was a 14 percent change from 2004. Something is really going on there. And now a national dialogue with Cuba. This national dialogue would be exiles, dissidents, and the government of Cuba, but something the government of Cuba isn't particularly interested in, but this, as Damian is pointing out, means Cuban-Americans are looking at this in a logical way, and that's a 10 percent increase from 2004 So there is real change, real desire for change in the Cuban-American community. But that same desire for change is in Cuba, too. Cubans clearly have to be tired of living under an authoritarian system. I remember my colleagues -- and some of them are here this morning with me -- in Havana used to say -- and these were the Eastern European ambassadors: The control of the Cuban government is greater than the control of the communist Eastern European governments over their people. So there is no doubt that in Cuba people want more freedom. And a Gallup poll that was mentioned this morning indicates that. Now, of course, the slide I like best up here, if you want to put that back up, is the slide that says, "Go back to the policies at the beginning of the Bush administration and at the end of the Clinton administration." Well, I do admit that I have some vested interest in that since that was when I was there. But I an tell you what I saw, and this was the time that we call the Cuban Spring, and we have the former ambassador from United Kingdom, the former ambassador from Canada who were here at the same time. Because there were so many Americans coming down, "so many" being maybe a total of 20,000, they were talking to church groups. They were helping church groups, providing money so that they could start having farms. And from the farms they would take produce, they would can the produce, and then they would make meals, and they would take those meals to the elderly. This is building civil society. This is grass roots democracy. We had doctors going down that were doing operations with Cuban doctors and showing them the latest skills. This is grass roots democracy, and this helps Cubans in Cuba. This is the soft side of policy that Damian is talking about. Across the board we had the groups coming down, many of them with museums, many of them with foreign affairs consuls, and they would meet in the hotels with brave Cuban dissidents like Ramon Colas, who's here with us today, and Cubans could see them talking in the hotel to these Americans when generally the only Cubans who can go into the hotel happened to be the Cubans who are serving the tourists. And so this is where we have to get back to if we're going to see real change, and if we're going to influence what happens. Because time is running out not just on the Cuban Revolution but also on U.S. policy. Thank you very much.