Venezuela-Cuba alliance’s shaky future fuels debate

Venezuela-Cuba alliance's shaky future fuels debate

By Paul Guzzo | Tribune Staff

Published: February 27, 2014



TAMPA — Both sides of the Cuba debate are citing the latest crisis in

South America to make their case, saying the uprising in Venezuela

provides clear evidence that the U.S. should alternately continue or

halt its long-standing Cuban travel and trade embargo.



Cut off the crucial partnership between these two nations — tens of

thousands of skilled workers go to Venezuela in return for $3.5 billion

in oil for Cuba each year — then tighten the embargo even further and

watch the Castro regime collapse, one side argues.



Among those espousing this view are people who have taken to the streets

of Tampa and other Florida cities in support of anti-government

protesters in Venezuela who have risen up this month in sometimes fatal

opposition to the government of President Nicolàs Maduro.



Some on the other side of the debate shake their heads at this notion.

The current unrest in Venezuela, they say, and its potential fallout for

Cuba provides an opening to end the embargo once and for all. The U.S.,

they say, should help Cuba develop its own oil industry.



Either way, if the uprising ends or even strains the mutual dependency

between Cuba and Venezuela, it stands to fundamentally change relations

between the U.S. and this island nation just 90 miles off Florida's shores.



"It would be a failed state," said Jorge Piñon, interim director of the

University of Texas at Austin's Center for International Energy and

Environmental Policy. "You have to consider, is it in the better

interest of the U.S. to have Cuba as a failed state or as a state you

can work with in transition into democracy?"



Cuba and Venezuela have been partners since the late Venezuelan

President Hugo Chavez announced he was guiding his country toward full

socialism. Chavez struck the oil-for-professionals deal in 2000 with his

self-professed mentor, Fidel Castro.



Today, Cuba sends Venezuela 30,000 to 50,000 skilled workers such as

doctors, nurses and technicians.



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If the protests succeed, and a new Venezuelan government was to end the

barter, Cuba could not pay its petroleum-rich partner for the 150,000

barrels a day of oil it needs to fuel its economy.



The Cuban government has announced intentions to explore for oil in 2015

but oil experts say it would take five to seven years after a supply is

located to ramp up.



Cuba has been through such an economic crisis before. It was called "The

Special Period," the decade following the collapse of Cuba's previous

oil patron — the Soviet Union.



Infrastructure crumbled. Citizens went hungry.



Cuba survived the crisis, in part through the bailout by Venezuela with

its oil-for-professionals deal.



This time, Piñon said, things would be different.



Piñon was part of a team of scholars at the Brookings Institution who in

2009 released the report, "Cuba: A New policy of Critical and

Constructive Engagement," which urged the U.S. to normalize relations

with Cuba — going so far as to recommend helping Cuba with oil

exploration. This approach, the report said, is better for U.S.

interests than Cuba's continued reliance on Venezuela.



Pinon said he and a team of scholars spent 18 months running through

different scenarios of another oil-driven economic collapse for Cuba.



"There is no one who can help them now," Pinon said. "Cuba has spoken to

the Brazilians, the Angolans, Russia and Algeria — the four countries

politically aligned with Cuba with crude oil exports. None have the

capacity to give away that much oil."



Not even communist China seems willing to provide the oil or the capital

needed to purchase it, Pinon said.



What's more, facing this potential financial crisis, Cuba would do so

with a Castro regime that is much older.



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At 87, Fidel already has aged himself out of power. Raul is 82.



Who would succeed them raises concerns, Pinon said: "The vacuum that

would be created could be taken over by drug cartels."



Perhaps not directly, he said, by committing billions of dollars to buy

oil. Rather, through bribery of a politically weak post-Castro

government, with an eye toward transshipment points for smuggling to the

U.S.



Piñon favors an immediate policy shift to constructive engagement with a

Cuban government the U.S. knows rather than risk dealing with strangers

and a nation in chaos.



On the other hand, Tampa attorney and longtime pro-embargo activist

Ralph Fernandez said the possibility of a failed state is exactly why

the U.S. should clamp down on economic sanctions against Cuba rather

than loosen them if Venezuela breaks the partnership.



He said that once the Castros are out of power and Communism is swept

from the island, Cuban Americans from throughout the United States would

flock there to help rebuild.



"There is a ton of political exile money in the United States,"

Fernandez said. "These are people who are staunchly opposed to investing

in Cuba now but would do so if Cuba was free of the Castros."



Maura Barrios of Tampa, a longtime activist for normalized relations

with Cuba who has visited the island a dozen times, scoffed at both

assessments of Cuba without Venezuela.



Neither the Cuban government nor its citizens would welcome U.S.

interests back unless the current government was recognized and the

embargo was lifted, Barrios said.



Before the Cuban revolution, U.S. companies controlled the island's

sugar, railway and petroleum industries and held majority interests in

the telephone and electrical services, and U.S. banks held one-quarter

of all Cuba deposits.



Cuban citizens are taught that the U.S. gained this control because

Cuban presidents agreed to serve as U.S. puppets in return for power and

money.



"Fidel is smart," Barrios said. "He has never let the people forget why

the revolution took place. It was a reaction to 50 years of U.S.

domination."



"Cuba Si Yankee No," Barrios said, was the rallying cry of the Cuban

revolution.



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Still, Barrios doesn't buy into the failed state scenario. New leaders

are poised to replace the Castros.



"That system is institutionalized from top to bottom," Barrios said.

"There are plenty of people who could fill that void."



During the post-Soviet Special Period, she said, Cuba handled its

transportation shortfall by purchasing 1 million bicycles from China.

And a strict food rationing program was put in place to make up for the

slowdown in fuel-starved agricultural production.



"Cubans like to call themselves the cockroaches of the Americas," she

quipped. "That means they always survive. The government will do what is

necessary."



Another scenario comes from Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of

U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, a Washington D.C. lobbying group promoting

democracy in Cuba.



During the Special Period, Claver-Carone said, Cuba began making

economic reforms. For instance, farmers were allowed to sell surplus

production and some self-employment was permitted.



Fidel Castro made these exceptions, he said, to retain power. When the

people get antsy, the philosophy goes, promise them changes.



Recent reforms started when Venezuela's Chavez grew ill in 2011. Raul

Castro, Claver-Carone said, knew the partnership would be in jeopardy

once Chavez died.



All this argues for tightening the embargo, Claver-Carone said.



"It's hard to believe anyone would think a 55-year dictatorship would do

anything for reasons other than to stay in power," he said. "If they

believed in democracy and open markets, they wouldn't have headed a

totalitarian regime for 55 years."



pguzzo@tampatrib.com



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