Cuba and the U.S.: Turning the Page | Javier Ciurlizza & Mark Schneider

The dramatic improvement this week in U.S.-Cuban relations, and the possibility of an end to the decades-long U.S. embargo of the island, is set to transform political relations in the entire hemisphere. In the three posts below, the director of Crisis Group’s Latin America and Caribbean program, Javier Ciurlizza, and our vice president and special adviser on Latin America, Mark Schneider, look ahead to how the U.S. and Cuban moves could transform the wider region.

Ending the “Hemispheric Anomaly”

The announcements made by presidents Obama and Castro were enthusiastically welcomed across Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina, and in at least some quarters of Venezuela. Although there is a great deal to be done before any true normalisation of relations between the two countries, the announcements do at least represent the end of 60 years of Cuba as a “hemispheric anomaly”.

The U.S. embargo of Cuba, in place since 1961, was only the most explicit of several sanctions and decisions that effectively isolated Cuba from the rest of the continent. Expelled from the Organisation of American States (OAS) and excluded from summits, the Caribbean nation was caught up more than most in the maneuverings of the Cold War’s protagonists. Latin American countries aligned themselves with the United States during the 1960s and ’70s. In the 1980s they started to move toward a growing solidarity with their secluded neighbour.

In the past 20 years, a period marked by both a return to democracy and, in many Latin American countries, a marked shift to the left, the Cuba question was no longer taboo. It was continually pushed onto the regional political agenda even by nations ideologically distant from Havana. In fact, rejection of the embargo was one of the few things on which politicians, from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, could agree.

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Photo: Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach