Clinton Position On Cuba Signals New Political Era

Clinton Position On Cuba Signals New Political Era

by FRANK JAMES

June 10, 2014 3:54 PM ET



One of the few revelations in Hard Choices, former Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton's new book about her time in the Obama administration,

is that she urged President Obama to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba.



"Since 1960, the United States had maintained an embargo against the

island in hopes of squeezing Castro from power, but it only succeeded in

giving him a foil to blame for Cuba's economic woes," Clinton writes.

"It wasn't achieving its goals and it was holding back our broader

agenda across Latin America."



In an interview with NPR, Clinton elaborated: "I would support

normalizing relations, which could very well lead to lifting the

embargo," she said. "But I would hasten to add that I've been down this

road both in the '90s and with President Obama where we make a move

toward Cuba and, in my opinion, the Castros do not want the embargo

lifted. It's their best friend.



"They can look as though they are standing up against America. They can

blame every problem in Cuba on the embargo. Because I know what happened

when my husband wanted to normalize. I know what President Obama was

willing to do."



Hillary Clinton cited the shooting down of a small airplane with two

anti-Castro activists by the Cuban military during the Clinton

administration and Cuba's imprisonment of U.S. government contractor

Alan Gross during the Obama administration as acts done "all to stymie

the effort to try to force Cuba to be more open by normalizing our

relationship."



There may be no greater sign of the declining power of the Cuba embargo

as an issue in U.S. politics than Clinton's openness about advocating

for its end.



This is a noteworthy moment, something close to a sea change in American

politics. It is the first time a politician from one of the two major

parties with a real possibility of becoming the party's presidential

nominee has stated publicly that the embargo should end.



For Clinton, well-known as cautious, deliberate and cagey, to publicize

this in her book shows just how much the political climate has changed,

especially in the mother of all battleground states — Florida.



Obama, for instance, called for an end to the embargo in January 2004

before he won a U.S. Senate seat. But by August 2007, when he was

running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, he was

telling audiences, especially in Florida, that he supported the embargo.



In that, he joined generations of politicians who knew the quickest way

to antagonize Cuban-American voters, particularly those who fled Fidel

Castro's Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s, was to call for an end to the embargo.



Clinton's comments, however, reflect the growing political power of a

younger generation of Cuban-Americans for whom the embargo holds little

to no meaning. A 2011 poll conducted for the Cuban Research Institute

and the Ford Foundation showed this dynamic, as well as the tendency of

those Cubans who arrived in the U.S. in 1994 and later to oppose the

embargo.



An Atlantic Council poll from earlier this year found that even in

Miami-Dade County, the Florida locality with the highest percentage of

Cuban-Americans, 64 percent of adults supported an end to the embargo

and the normalization of economic and other ties with Cuba. Nationally,

56 percent of respondents favored normalization. Even a majority of

Republicans, 52 percent, favored normal relations with Cuba.



Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas are two politicians

who buck the trend of younger Americans with Cuban roots who favor

ending the embargo. Both are 43 years old and frequently mentioned as

2016 Republican presidential candidates. It will be interesting to see

what political use, if any, they make of this newest revelation by the

former secretary of state.



Source: Clinton Position On Cuba Signals New Political Era : It's All

Politics : NPR -

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2014/06/10/319534329/clinton-position-on-cuba-signals-new-political-era