The Week in Europe

By David Jessop

 

Once again Cuba is back on the European Union’s (EU) agenda. After a year and half during which Cuban and European Government Ministers and officials have not been speaking to one another, the EU has begun to debate whether the policy changes it implemented in 2003 after the imprisonment of seventy-five dissidents and the execution of three hijackers, has had any effect.

 

On November 16, representatives of Europe’s twenty-five member states sitting in the Committee on Latin America (COLAT) decided to review the EU policy of inviting dissidents to receptions and national days at their embassies in Havana. They also agreed to look at alternative ways to ensure their contacts with civil society become ‘more effective’.  The review is also expected to look at other aspects of the present EU policy that has halted all high-level Ministerial and official visits to Havana.

 

The official statement that followed the meeting of COLAT in Brussels was bland. It acknowledged that the lack of dialogue with the Cuban government was not positive. As a result EU Ambassadors in Havana will now be asked to propose ‘new measures’ to establish political dialogue with civil society. Their report is expected to be considered at the level of EU Foreign Ministers in December.

 

The attempt to restore political dialogue with Havana was begun the new socialist Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Luis Zapatero: the EU nation with the greatest trade and cultural links to Cuba. Subsequent conversations between the British and Spanish Foreign Ministers saw both nations backing the need for a change to the EU’s present policy that was personally developed by Spain’s previous Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar. At a recent joint meeting in Madrid both the UK and Spain made clear their belief that this had led to a dead-end, that ran counter to EU interests in Cuba. 

 

However, within Europe opinion remains divided on how to address the question of dialogue with Cuba. A number of member states including Germany and the Netherlands, as well as several from Eastern Europe, oppose any change in policy without an improvement in human rights in Cuba or related positive gestures from the Cuban Government. 

 

Also complicating any new decision is the fact that during the period in which the new EU approach has been in force, the European Union has been enlarged to include states that are opposed to any engagement with a country they see as exhibiting some of the characteristics of their own states before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The result is that there is now the possibility of EU Ministers failing to agree. 

 

The original EU common position on Cuba seeks constructive dialogue and contact. However, European embassies practice since mid-2003 has been to invite dissidents to national days at which Cuban Ministers would normally expect to be present. This has had the effect of putting relations with Europe into a deep freeze. In response, Cuba has ended all contact with EU Embassies and halted all programmes of development assistance with Europe. 

 

To make matters more complex, the EU Common position has allowed Europe not to have to confront the US over its extra-territorial Helms Burton legislation that threatens legal action against companies in the EU and elsewhere alleged to be ‘trafficking’ in expropriated assets. Europe’s common position has enabled successive US Presidents to be able to waive every six months the Helms Burton provisions as they relate to Europe in return for the pressure for change in Cuba that the European approach implies. For this reason the common position cannot easily be amended or set aside.

 

More broadly, the European decision to look again at Cuba policy hides increasing cracks in one of the its few genuinely common foreign and security policy positions and points to the probability that a Europe of twenty-five may find it hard in future to be able to agree to any joint foreign policy stance. While the failure to agree on a Europe-wide basis on big issues such as the war in Iraq was hardly surprising, it is argued that failure to achieve consensus on a Cuba policy, an issue of relatively minor importance to the EU, suggests that a common European foreign policy may have little chance of success. 

 

What happens next is far from clear. Cuba has managed without Europe for a year and a half and has continued to diversify its relations. While it recognises the strategic importance of Europe in a global context, its carefully crafted relations with other regions of the world and its continuing strong investment and trade relationship with the European private sector enable it to determine the pace at which relations with the EU will improve.

 

Of particular importance in this is Cuba’s understanding of the way that global power is changing. In this respect, the visit that begins on November 21 by the Chinese President, Hu Jintao and a large accompanying delegation of officials and businessman and women is particularly significant. China’s willingness to take a high profile in a nation informally at war with the US and one that is so geographically close suggests, following a similar high profile visits to Latin America, the rapid emergence of a new global political order.

 

Cuba is also seeing many of its predictions about social and economic change in Latin America come true and has been able to develop an increasingly close relationship with Venezuela and Brazil and other governments in Latin America. The result of all of this is that in Havana there is little sense of isolation. 

 

The decision by Europe to again debate its Cuba policy is welcome but there is a sense in which Europe may now be playing in the periphery of a vastly larger game on terms that will not be of its making. 

 

David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at [log in to unmask]

November 19, 2004

 


        	
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