US-Cuba: Despite Trinidad, Still in Limbo

WASHINGTON, Apr 22 (IPS) - Despite a growing sense of anticipation coming out of the Trinidad Summit of the Americas last weekend regarding the possibility of a historic breakthrough in U.S.-Cuban relations, specialists here remain uncertain about how and even if that breakthrough will be achieved.

The uncertainty revolves around the question of whether the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is prepared to take further unilateral steps to ease the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo and normalise diplomatic relations – or whether it will first insist that Havana reciprocate in some way for those moves it announced just before the summit.

"The Cuban leadership is fundamentally ambivalent about engaging with the United States, so they're not prepared to make concessions to support greater normalisation," according to Daniel Erikson, a Cuba expert at the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), an influential think tank here. "And so far it seems like the Obama administration is still wedded to the idea that the U.S. should take incremental steps and wait for positive responses from the Cuban government."

"So there's still this essential deadlock about how far the U.S. is willing to go without a response by the Cubans," said Erikson, author of a 2008 history of modern U.S. Cuba relations entitled "The Cuba Wars."

Most analysts here believe that the domestic U.S. debate over Cuba policy has shifted decisively in favour of those forces who have argued that Washington's nearly 50-year effort to isolate the Caribbean island has utterly failed to bring about the changes that it was designed to achieve.

The strength of the new consensus has been made evident not only by the plethora of reports published by the country's most influential foreign policy think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, over the past year, calling on Washington lift the trade embargo, if for no other reason, than to improve ties with other Latin American and Caribbean countries.

But it has also been demonstrated by calls by senior Republicans, notably the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, for normalisation of ties with Havana, and by a series of recent polls of Cuban Americans – historically those citizens who have been most strongly opposed to normalisation – that show a sharp shift in sentiment in favour of engagement.

Indeed, in a December poll of Cuban Americans in Florida's Miami-Dade County – the traditional bastion of fierce anti-Castro sentiment - three out of four respondents said they felt the embargo had not worked well or at all, and an even higher percentage said they favoured direct talks between Washington and Havana on issues