Normalization of relations between Cuba and the US?

 An eventual normalization with the United States can only be achieved after a “long and difficult” process Cuban authorities claim. What has been achieved is the reestablishment of diplomatic relations after the announcement only creates a channel for fluid dialogue between the parts without almost any measure of an aggressive character against Cuba being suppressed by Washington. A positive step but far from repairing the main affronts that are part of the policy of that nation towards Cuba. An example of the complexity of the process is the political crisis between Central American countries created by the traffic jam in Costa Rica and with Panama where approximately 8 000 Cubans await reaching the United States. As The New York Times reported the unique migratory privileges for the Cubans begins to create problems for the United States and other countries are a contrast with the “severe” treatment of migrants from other countries, including children.

In its editorial the newspaper said that the application of the Cuban Adjustment Law is an obstacle for the normalizations with Cuba and since Congress does nothing. Obama has executive faculties to abstain from applying it.

The crisis broke out in November when San Jose granted the Cubans transit visas and opened its border with Nicaragua without consent that led authorities to return them and declare that they will not be allowed to return. Added to this refusal were the governments of Guatemala and Belize. Almost all had bought air tickets to Ecuador, taking advantage of a 3 month tourist visa granted by that country a few days ago. They were contracted by a band of traffickers for 8 100 dollars per person to take them to US territory. The Cubans are not going to work in fruit stands or domestic services or in slaughter houses as most of their Central American or Mexican counterparts who escape to the neighbor of a north of misery, unemployment, ignorance, lack of public services nor abuse of the security forces and the Mafias.

Their purpose is to cross with guarantees the bridges along the Mexico-US border and reach the sentries with their Cuban passports in hand. Contrary to the migrants from the rest of the world, in a short time they will have their green card, no authorities will pursue them and after a year and one day they automatically have the right of residency in the powerful North. Those are some of the benefits granted by the Law of Cuban Adjustment of 1966. It is the prize Washington reserve for the Cubans – almost all literate or have technical training who travel illegally to its country or desert from governmental, scientific, sports or art missions. They do have to request political asylum without any proof – that does not exist – of alleged persecution they suffered in the Island.

Washington has used the migratory issue as a political weapon against Cuba since 1959. It received assassins, torturers and embezzlers of the Batista dictatorship who fled revolutionary justice and arrived illegally at its coasts. They were not returned nor the goods stolen. Washington then stimulated the exodus of the bourgeois, of sectors of the small bourgeoisie and university professors to bleed the Island of its talents.

This migration increasingly became an economic. As many Cubans interviewed in Costa Rica and Panama their reason for the trip is “to buy a car”, “have a better life”, “live better. Who can deny that these are legitimate reasons when all is reduced to the enjoyment of a little piece of the consumer ideal. In Cuba with enormous tourism and hundreds of thousands of Cuban travelling every year, there is an important influence of neo liberal common sense including in the first place an insatiable consumerism.

In this case those who push Cubans to leave for the United States while the blockade is still in force is the main cause by which Cuba cannot take the road of economic development.