Expert. Not a cuba i study the u. S. Cuba relationship. I want to focus on what intrigues me most about washingtons policy toward cuba. That is the mental software we use to undergird our policy. That is what the book is about. What it attempts to explain is what everyone agrees is a dysfunctional policy. Saysirst, as wolf blitzer on the situation room, we have some breaking news. I want to talk about what president obama did yesterday. He announced a relaxation of the u. S. Embargo of cuba. This began in october, 1960. It was instituted by president eisenhower just a few days before the election between Richard Nixon and john kennedy. Candidate nixon asked the president to do something to show some spine toward cuba and step thato was the was taken. [no audio] i think there is a little truth in advertising to begin. Not a cuba specialist. I studied the u. S. Chiba relationship. What i would like to spend about 30 minutes doing now is focusing upon what intrigues me most about washingtons policy toward cuba. That is the mental software we use to undergird our policy. And thats what the book is about. What it attempts to explain is what everyone agrees is a dysfunctional policy. But first, as wolfowitz or says we havesituation room, some breaking news. I want to talk about what president obama did yesterday. He announced a relaxation of the u. S. Embargo of cuba. This began in october, 1960. It was instituted by president eisenhower just a few days before the election between Richard Nixon and john kennedy. Candidate nixon asked the president to do something to show some spine toward cuba and the embargo was the step that was taken. President obama yesterday relaxed the embargo. The announcement was a product of several factors. One of them is he promised to do so on the campaign trail. In may of 2008 when he was still trying to get the democratic nomination, he went down to miami and spoke to a group of cubanamericans and he said i will relax the embargo to allow for more family visits and unrestricted remittances to families in cuba. And clearly, mr. Obama is as you know, a very bright man, but he has spent no time studying cuba so he was told to do this. This is while you are on the plane, mr. Obama, read this. This is what you are going to say to the cubanamericans when you land in 20 minutes. And what is generally the case , although it has not been confirmed, is mr. Obamas supporters looked at the data from south florida where there are about 800,000 cubanamericans. They said they want more family visits and to be able to send money to their families and that is what he promised to do in may. And here shortly after taking , office, he fulfilled his promise to the cubanamerican community. It is also true the congress is seizing the initiative of the embargo. I dont know if you saw last week the black caucus from congress. It is composed of 42 members. Six of them went down to cuba and they came back talking like senator richard lugar, the ranking republican on the Senate Foreign relations committee, like jeff flake, libertarian republican from arizona, member of the house of representatives. There are several bills from in front of congress right now to eliminate the travel restrictions and a couple others to take steps to weaken the embargo. And then there is the problem that mr. Obama has with the rest of the hemisphere. We are the only country that has an embargo of cuba, and the rest of the hemisphere is adamantly opposed. They look at us as a bullying neighbor. Mr. Obama on the friday has to go to the fifth summit of the americas in trinidad. He has already been told by the mexican and the brazilian president , lula da silva, he was going to run into some really heavy criticism in trinidad if something cant be done for the embargo. There is still a long way to go. It could go fast, it could go slow. And in his miami speech last may , candidate obama suggested it was going to go slow. He promised to keep the rest of the embargo he said because United States needed to be a relentless advocate of democracy. It isowly or quickly, very clear that our current dysfunctional policy is coming to the end of its life. What do i mean by dysfunctional . I mean that the United States and cuba have not had formal normal relations since january 4, 1961. That was 11 president s ago. In contrast, the u. S. Estrangement from the soviet union after the bolshevik revolution and its estrangement from the peoples republic of china after the fall of chang , that lasted 16, 22 years respectively. The five president s. We are on the 11 president s in the case of cuba. And the United States did not simply declined to have normal relations with cuba for 48 years and still counting. But its also spent most of the past half century openly and actively attempting to overthrow the government of cuba. Now there is no similar estrangement in the history of u. S. Foreign relations. You can go back to the days of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and cant find a similar estrangement. So the interesting question or is the one i start out with in this book. Have weve been trying to accomplish . At one level the explanation is easy. We have been trying to protect our interests. That is what we always do. Many of you take place i150, introduction to the Foreign Policy course, and we will say it all nations try to protect their interest. In the case of cuba, washington has been trying to protect economic interests. The second and much more important for many decades for over three decades by the United States was trying to protect its security, its interest in having a secure homeland. More recently we have been , trying to address concerns of u. S. Politicians seeking the support of cubanamericans. It is not an accident that barack obama flew down and gave a talk to cubanamericans and only cubanamericans in may of 2008. Several hundred thousand of these cubans vote in the crucial state of florida. We dont know exactly how many because thetally registration in florida categorizes people as hispanic if they are hispanic if they say they are. But it doesnt break down the hispanic adjective by any other term like cuban or mexican or whatever. But look, anyone who watched president george w. Bush snatch the white house away from al 2000important floridas 800 plus thousand cubanamericans can be. That was the election if you remember al gore lost the state of florida and the white house by 537 votes. You know what al gore would have done for half those loss one . Toss one . Plus one . It was a lesson to other politicians. But look, florida has the fourth largest number of votes in the electoral college. The department of commerce which takes the census in this country tells us after the to the believeensus they florida will move into a tie with new york for electoral votes. But, look, this is how you would explain the forces driving u. S. Policy toward any country. As a very mixture of Economic Security and domestic political interest. What makes the cuban relationship so intriguing is the ideology, the belief that underlie these everyday interests. We have a set of tightly structured beliefs that controls the way we react when we perceive a threat to our interests from cuba. Think. Do you work with computers . Ok. You know you go in in the morning, turn on your computer, it boots up an operating system, windows probably, boots it up and very soon you have facing you on the screen a group of icons. One of them says email, but one web, another one says word and excel. You are all with me . Ok. Think of those in washington doing the same thing when they go into a room and the chair says we have a problem with cuba. Well, in just a second what everybody in that room does is they mentally move the mouse, the cursor, over to the cuba on icon and click on it, and what comes into their head, the software in their head, is distinctly different than what would come into their head is the chairman of this said will have a problem with the government of france. They would move it over to the french icon. What i i would like to do for the few minutes that i have adis i have, i would like to focus three important components of our cuba software. The first is the belief that with occasional bursts of attention we can safely and safely neglect all those little countries that lived down live down there beneath the United States. We are big, rich, and very powerful. Cuba is obviously dwarfed by its continent wide country. Times largers 250 than the economy of cuba. I am six feet tall. I am not a mathematician. Think of me as cuba and then think of a 1500foot giant standing next to me. That is the economic relationship. In comparison, the Empire State Building is around 1200 feet. Here i am. Here is the Empire State Building plus a couple hundred feet. And imagine this economic john giant has used a portion of its fabulous wealth to create the most powerful military in the history of the human race. And that raw strength has given politicians such as Richard Nixon during the campaign the ability to tell voters, he said the United States has the power and mr. Castro knows this to throw him out of office. And that has also given a cabinet members like secretary of state Alexander Haig the ability to ask president reagan for a simple green light. What he said according to nancy reagan is you just give me the word and i will turn that bleeping island into a parking lot. Whatwould seem puzzling, would seem puzzling to a visitor from visitor from another planet is why when the cubans refused to behave the way we want them to the castro government was not thrown out of office. Cuba was an turned into a parking lot, how they managed to get away with it. We could squish them easily. How have we managed to get away with it . First of all, it is costly especially in the currency that might matter the most in the end which is global opinion. So unless there is a crisis like the cuban missile crisis of 1962 which i would be happy to talk about later if you like, unless there is a crisis, why bother. We have so many other important things to do. You are living right now in the week where more attention has been given to cuba than any time since probably the shootdown of the rescue plan in 1996. This is an unusual moment. Basically if someone goes up to a president like the first president bush after the cold war when the soviets were gone the soviet union was gone, go up to a president like first president bush, president clinton, second president bush or even now president obama and say, i would like to talk to you about cuba, i would say you have a hard time getting on the agenda. He has so many other things to think about. Unimportance is also how you would explain when we finally decided we had to do something about cuba back in 1960, we decided to do it with a little sneaky invasion called the bay of pigs. Give cuba a short burst of attention and then we could go back to whats really important. We were convinced it would be a cakewalk. We really could squish them on the first week, the end of the first week of John Kennedys presidency, late the cia gave january 1961, president kennedy intelligence analysis that said less than 30 of the population is still with fidel and in the 30 are included the negroes who will now fight. It took j. F. K. s best and brightest three months to find out they would fight at the bay of pigs. Certainly we could subdue but we are not going to be able to do it they discovered with a couple thousand cuban exiles trained in guatemala. We would have to do it ourselves with the marines and they might have to turn the place into a parking lot. So what was plan b . Well, first we went back to some sneaky ways. President kennedy went his way, but his brother, attorney general Robert Kennedy watched , over a program called operation mongoose which was essentially what we would call today statesponsored terrorism. Torching sugar fields, arming assassins, blowing up power stations, and it didnt work very well because we dont know how to destroy an economy without bombing it. Using sabotage was hard because the cubans are good at their intelligence and were able to protect themselves. So what happened . What happened is Lyndon Johnson inherited the white house in 1963 and he was inexperienced in foreign affairs. He was a domestic president and until he got caught up in took him ten days before he picked up the telephone and called jay William Fulbright a widely respected chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations a fellow southerner from arkansas and a billion men, a rose scholar. And Lyndon Johnson says marshall i do about cuba . We have tried to blow them up. We have tried this cheap invasion and so forth. What do you think i ought to do . Senator fulbright began to reply to say lets not get into anything really dramatic. And he didnt even get the sentence out of the end of his mouth when Lyndon Johnson interrupted to agree with him. He said im not getting into any bay of pigs deal. I am just asking what we should do to pinch their knots more nuts more than we are doing and thats been the u. S. Policy ever since. That was the first week of december, 1963. Its what we do with insignificant aggravations like cuba. Ok, for three decades the fight to contain communism is would what justified this policy. But then the cold war ended and the justification for the our hostility was really difficult to continue. It was hard to say we are going to keep being angry at you because of what . Our anger was with the alliance with the soviet union, security interest. And it looks bad for a country that claims Global Leadership to be seen as strangling the economy of a small neighbor and for no good reason. The soviet union disappeared in 1991. In 1992 and every year since then, the u. N. General assembly voted in the fall on a resolution urging the United States to stop the embargo. The last boat was in september the last boat was in september 2008. The vote was 1853. The three in the United States, israel which has a completely separate problem with cuba and we can talk about it if you like a little bit later, but the United States, israel, and palau. Do you all know where this is . I had to look on a map. It is in the far western pacific. Basically you fly westward towards the philippines and before you get to the philippines, you stop and there is the island of palau. It is a very small country but it is a country and has a seat in the united nations. It doesnt have an ambassador. Ithas a new York Attorney hires to be its ambassador named stuart beck and his instructions are to vote like the united 1852. So basically it is not only does it look bad but , theres a lot of people in the United States, the left end of the Democratic Party in particular, the left of the Democratic Party that put all of the fizz in the campaign mr. Obama just ran. They dont like the embargo on cuba. If you read the nation magazine for example, take that wonderful magazine i recommend highly you will see it speaks for a really important part of the Democratic Party and they are not going to leave the party because mr. Obama does this or doesnt do this in the case of cuba. Where are they going to go . Are they going to vote republican . They are going to be there, but they are not going to do the kind of work for mr. Obama in 2012 they did in 2008. There has to be a concern you dont know those people to wander off just like you dont want the religious right to wander off from the Democratic Party if you are john mccain. Remember the concern about that . The mobilizing the base issue. So first of all, it doesnt look good to be voted down 1853. Thats bad. Second, youve got significant people in the Democratic Party who dont like what is going on in our policy towards cuba and then you have business interests particularly agribusiness, the agricultural business is the strongest lobby by far that we have. Agriculture will defeat anyone if they are unified and they want to sell to cuba. Very conservative groups. Rice farmers from arkansas. Pork growers. Have any have you been to cuba . Cuba, every meal seems like rice and pork in it. And they are importing their rice from thailand. Imagine the shipping differential from thailand. Agribusiness wants that market back so washington needs a good , response to this criticism and here comes the second believe in belief in the cuba ideology. It is the Firm Conviction that we are responsible for uplifting cuba. Ive been able to trace this back in the book to 1901 when Congress Passed the platt amendment. It granted the United States the right to take over cuba whenever it felt necessary for the protection of life, property and individual liberty. Having passed the platt amendment giving us the right to come back we were already in , cuba having taken over cuba from the spanish in 1898, 1901 comes the platt amendment and in 1902, we leave. In we go back. 1906, there was too much instability in cuba and people asked president theodore roosevelt, a man who charged up San Juan Hill during the spanishamerican war they asked president roosevelt, what are you trying to do . And he was pointedly questioned before a harvard audience and here is what he said to the harvard audience. I am seeking the very minimum of interference necessary to make them good. And roosevelts secretary of war, the man responsible for the takeover of cuba in 1906 said the same thing directly to cubans. He presided over the reopening of the university of havana. He gave a speech and said we are here only to help you with our arm under your arm lifting he you again on the path of wonderful progress. Ok, fast forward to a more recent time, 1991. The soviet union had just disappeared and a reporter yelled out a question while mr. Bush was walking by in the rose garden. He said are you going to talk to , fidel castro now that you have been successful with Mikhail Gorbachev . And mr. Bush paused, turned around and said whats the point . All i would tell him is what i am telling you, give the people the freedom they want and then you will see the United States do exactly what we should. Go down and lift those people up. President bushs immediate predecessor, Ronald Reagan always said first before talking , with him the cubans have got to kick out the russians but now the russians were gone. The soviets were gone. What happened was clear in 1991 when the soviet threat disappeared, u. S. Policymakers reached into the cabinet and pulled out the platt amendment. Like Teddy Roosevelt and taft today we insist cubas leaders , are misbehaving, that they are violating their citizens human rights and the United States cannot stand by quietly and misbehavior to continue. And that brings us to the third believe in the cuba ideology which underlies both the neglect and commitment to uplifting. The existential core of our policy towards cuba today is our view of the regions inhabitants as a retarded a branch of the human species. As inferior. They are backward. For latinions word americans has been underdeveloped, which is a polite way of saying backward. Or as a u. S. Ambassador report ed from havana as the cold war was beginning in the 1940s she he said cubans possess the superficial charm of clever children, but under the surface they combine the worst characteristics of the spanish and negro cultures, laziness, cruelty, your responsibility, and your responsibility and , inbred dishonesty. It is probably a sign of progress our diplomats no longer write sentences like that. De writing this book a lot more difficult. What we have to do now is not look for people to say that they think cubans are an inferior people. You have to look at their thathen in for infer they think they are inferior. Inferences from behavior are always risky. Sometimes when my students and in my classes look like they are about ready to fall asleep why i stop and say why are you here today . I could guess and say what you are here for is because i told you attendance was important and therefore you wanted to please me because i have your agreed in your grade in my hand and if you dont pass this course you will have to take another three hour course before you can get your degree. If you dont get your College Degree you wont get a good job and if you dont get a good job you cant do this, that ended that and the other thing. Those inferences without hearing a word come out of the students mouth. Or i could say you are here today because of your first for thirst for knowledge. [laughter] not at 8 00 tuesday, thursday, but thats another story. Inferences from behavior are really risky. But for a quick minute and then i will stop, lets look at our most recent plan for cuba uplifting which was unveiled in 2004 by the president s for assistance to a free cuba. What would you say if venezuela were to create a committee to improve the United States . And if the first chapter of that huge report the venezuelans produced, this is 423 pages, if the first chapter was called hastening cubas transition. It was 42 pages with 62 steps the United States is taking to overthrow the government of cuba now. Well, we can talk about what you would say if venezuela did this to us. The really interesting question is why did we concoct this 400 page report . Look at the size of this. Why is it the selection of cubans leaders is the first and most important of the six chapters . The hastening cubas transition from its current government to a new government. Well why not . , that is what we have been doing at least since 1901 when the governor general in charge of cuba during the period after spanish but before independent ce, the governor general wrote to president roosevelt from havana saying no one wants more than i a good and stable government here, but we must see that the right class is an in office. Or ask barack obama said on the campaign trail last may weve got to keep the embargo because the right people are not running cuba. The point in 1901 is the same point being made by president obama, and in a much more aggressive way by president bushs commission for a free cuba. The point is if you leave them to their own devices, they will make poor choices. Now, to our modern ears, that sounds presumptuous, right . Inferior to make the right choice you dont know how , to choose the right kind of leaders. Leonard wood back in 1901 came and said that president roosevelt. That sounds so presumptions presumptuous today that now we label this chapter the 42 page chapter. We label it hastening cubas transition which is a euphemism for getting rid of their current government and installing, we hope, a democratic government. Ok, let me conclude. What are these three beliefs . Neglectef we can safely these countries down there and the caribbean and when we cant neglect them, second, we should uplift them, we have the obligation to lift them up, and third, the reason we have an obligation is because they are a retarded branch of the human species. What are these three beliefs tell about the years that lie immediately ahead . It says the best wager would be that eventually some cubans , probably the next generation will become convinced by them not pinching, the embargo, and accept a little uplifting. They will agree to do it our way. So after weve got the right class in office that allegedly is democratic, then you can expect to see an army of contractors from the u. S. Agency for international development, the National Endowment for democracy, helping construct a new and improved country. Maybe it will work this time. But at a discouraging moment 107 years ago, general leonard wood wrote back to president roosevelt. He said it is next to impossible to make them believe we have their own interests at heart. In this book i look over the , history of the past century ask, what lesson can be more obvious and more obviously unlearned then that cubans simply do not want to be uplifted by the United States of america . Will we ever learn this lesson . I dont know. The mere existence of this document suggests my generation doesnt even recognize the problem, that we would do this thinking we are helping cuba when clearly all we are doing is stiffening the resolve of cuban nationalists. Imagine a 1500foot giant standing next to me we think a waving a 423 page document saying i have it all planned for you. What the cuban generation passing through the scene would have done is turned around and gave the giant the finger. I dont know whether that will continue. I am not a futurologist, but the road ahead is going to be pretty bumpy. Those of us starting to get a little gray hair have given it our best shot. If my generation hasnt made as much progress as we would like , it is not because we have it tried. It has been difficult to get anyones attention. Once youve got their attention to get them to control their compulsion to uplift because we think they are an inferior branch of the human species. Well, look, you are no doubt happy to learn my halfhour of unremitting pessimism is up. Maybe one or two of you could find a ray of sunshine, but i certainly apologize for being so negative and i thank you very much for listening to me. Do you have any comments . [applause] what would it on take to undo the helmsburton act . [inaudible] is ae helmsburton act 1996 act passed by Republican Congress and signed by a democratic president that codifies the embargo. Until the embargo was an 1996, executive branch decision. There were president ial proclamations of an embargo and it changed with each administration. Sometimes, it was weaker. Sometimes, it was stronger. But in the cubanamerican 1996, Community Working through an Interesting Group called the cubanamerican National Foundation went to senator jesse helms of north carolina, representative dan burton of indiana, and got congress to come this close to passing a bill that codified the embargo. We have had embargoes of various countries like north korea. But it has always been a president ial embargo. The helmsburton act would codify and president clinton said i will veto it. The constitution gives me, the chief executive, the president the right to conduct foreign , policy. And this codifying of the embargo is an infringement upon my executive branch prerogatives. And thats where it stood until the castro government shot down two planes of the brothers of the rescue. They used to fly in the straits of florida looking for rafters and would radio back to the coast guard and say there is a rafter out there, grab that rafter. And then they also started flying over havana leafleting. And in 1996, 2 of their three planes in the International Waters were shot down by cubans. The homes britain the helmsburton act requires the president to keep the embargo until cuba has embarked upon a series of steps. This is a very complex piece of legislation. Long out 30 pledges pages long of singlespaced small font type. It says for example the president may not remove the embargo until cuba is moving toward a market economy. Market economy, i can quote that. It doesnt define what a market economy is, but it is not what cuba has right now. But the president in theory is constrained. President obama cannot officially into the embargo end the embargo without cuba doing these steps, 30 pages worth of steps or congress repealing helms burton. I think frankly it will come to the president simply saying to the members of congress you have to understand i need to go ahead with this, please dont challenge me. Senator helms was the chair of the Senate Committee on final relations. Dan burton was chair of the committee on western Hemisphere Affairs and these were too two powerful people who wanted to strengthen the embargo. Today one of the principal leaders of the effort to end the embargo as i said was richard lugar, republican senator from indiana, who was the ranking minority member on the committee on Foreign Relations. There is no chance that he would oppose ignoring the law. When president clinton signed the helmsburton act, he did it in an auditorium. He invited the cubanamerican Community Leaders to come up from miami, he did it in an auditorium in the Old Executive Office building to the right of the white house when you are looking from the lafayette park. Signing ceremony, one of those where he had 25 pence. He wrote w. And handed it to one of his Campaign Contributors and so forth. In the signing statement that he had attached to the law, he said i consider this law precatory. I had to look that up in the dictionary, it is advisory. Its the law and its explicit with what the cubans have to do to stop the embargo. But mr. Clinton said i consider this law precatory. If mr. Obama were to end the embargo and someone challenged him on the basis of the helms helmsburton, it would be possible to say mr. Clinton said he never looked at this as with the words really say and then you have an interesting court case because i dont think there has ever been a challenge to a signing statement that has gone all the way to the supreme court. Nobody wants to fight with this president , folks. Fighting with him is a really losing proposition right now. But he all by himself has said i am going to keep the embargo until cuba becomes a democracy. I enjoyed your talk by the way. You might touch on the cuban missile crisis, how influential you think that is as far as our reluctance to open arms and neighbor trading and that sort of thing . It seems it still hangs over us. I think it did. I am not sure that it still does, but unquestionably, unquestionably to go through the archives of the kennedy library, the Johnson Library in austin, texas, is to be astounded by how worried everyone was. I was a college undergraduate of in the cuban missile crisis. I was hanging around watching television and so forth, but they thought this was going to be like a 9 11 attack they could see coming at them and. There was a very worried washington, d. C. And then of course over time , that faded into the past. I took a flight three or four days after 9 11. I was terrified. It was just a flight. And i think the same thing happened with the cuban missile crisis over time and once of course the soviet union disappeared, cuba was essentially neutered in terms of its ability. But i think there was a sense of betrayal that this man is really evil, that was cemented at the time as i read the documents and i spend an awful lot of time and in president ial libraries reading the various advisers and so forth and it is fascinating to do so. You get a sense that after the missile crisis there was not that this man is a communist, he is dangerous, he doesnt like us, but that this man is really evil in a hitler type of fashion. He moved into a new category on the cuban missile crisis. But of course all of that is gone. I think that is gone now. But your reputation follows you through the years. I just want to say something. Im not from this country although i am a u. S. Citizen. I am from south america, bolivia. And i remember a student of mine, we never understood about these embargoes. Our professors could never explain why the United States would do that to that small nation. They said that was something that had to do with the politics of washington looking up to this leader which was very smart, bright person. But however the United States , never put embargoes on the other nations like china, vietnam. We dont understand why did he nation thatttle hurt them in a way. We thought it was a very imperialistic attitude. People want to fix government and say you need to be a space democratic country. You need to do this. Its like commanding them. The United States is a powerful country but has no right to decide for other nations will what they want to do. I think you can tell i couldnt agree with you more. That myipotent syndrome generation was reared by the people who won world war ii. They had an all or nothing total victory. We wanted Unconditional Surrender of our adversaries and that is the way my generation who fought the war raised people like me. And my sense is that sense of entitlement that we had lasted in large measure because the soviet union really was powerful. The key to khrushchev in 1956 said we will bury you and that was said by a man whose finger rested on a nuclear button. Regardless of how horrible those 9 11 attacks were, their best shot was to fly a couple into a a couple of airplanes into buildings. Nikita khrushchev, im sure we would have destroyed him, too, but this it could have been armageddon. The problem is explaining policy after the end of the cold war when this threat cuba was 90 miles away. You take off from Miami National airport and go into the wind right, andeast, turn there is cuba. In five minutes you see cuba. , its one thing to have a missile fired at you from the peninsula over above japan. It is another thing to have it fired at you from cuba. They could destroy our strategic bombers before they could get their engines started. It really was a legitimate worry. After the end of the cold war, my sense is what happened we are talking about 1990, 1991 is as the defense interests walked out the door of the cuba policy, they just left. George h. W. Bush, the first president bush, named as assistant secretary of defense for latin america a woman named nancy dorn. She was 31yearsold. She had no experience in latin america. She did not speak spanish, but she was the only republican who asked for the job and she got. And she got it. President kennedy, president nixon, president johnson and never would have given that position always went to someone who was experienced and competent who you had confidence in because latin america was a problem. After the end of the cold war, there is nothing wrong with nancy dorn. Shes not stupid. I dont mean that. Its important for me to emphasize she is a bright human being, but she just is not the kind of person you would put in that job before the end of the cold war. The cold war ended. People walked out the door and into that space came the cubanamerican community. Who we have polling figures that go back now for more than a decade and a half and it is a very clear the cubanamerican community is beginning to this aggregate. Disaggregate. But until recently it cast its vote on the basis of which party would be more hostile to the government of the country from which they immigrated. Which is unusual when you think about the irishamericans or the italianamericans. They devoted the breadandbutter issues when they ran for office up in boston they ran on the basis of delivering the goods and services to their constituents. The cubanamerican leaders until recently ran on the basis of i will be more effective in getting washington to be hostile to the castro government and. Let me if i can filibuster your a second. Or in 2004, mr. Bush was running for reelection. Florida by 537 votes. In 2004, he tightened the embargo to restrict family visits and remittances. Now, he had pollsters that were every bit as competent as the pollsters that helped president the white win house last november. Mr. Bush doesnt know what is in the mind of cubanamerican. How can i get you to vote for me in 2004 . His pollsters told him tighten the embargo and he did. Pollsters,. Obamas every bit as competent told him , relax the embargo. The cubanamerican community, the pollsters discovered that they were unhappy about being able to being unable to visit their families and send their family money. And you can see when you leave. When you go to leave havana, you go through immigration and customs and into a waiting room before you go to board the plane and sit there. It is a room about as big as this room. There are people crying, just devastated because with the bush tightening they knew they were seeing their mother for the last time. Their mother was old. They cant go back for three years. If there is a funeral no extenuating circumstances will let you go back. And i think they that is what controlled u. S. Policy until recently. Now the cubanamerican community is all over the place. If you look at them demographically, cubanamericans they are about 1. 3 according to the 2000 census, there are about 1. 3 cubanamericans living in the United States. If you go through the break down, they should be democrats. There are very republican tide of demographics among some to cubanamericans. But the typical cubanamerican works in a hotel changing bed linen. They work in airports. If youve ever been in miami airport, they are the people that take your tickets or handle baggage. That is a democratic constituency. They belong to the democrats, not the republicans, and i think they are starting something to improve the relations and release the embargo. I am hopeful. Look, yesterday was interesting. Yesterday was encouraging. It is an encouraging first step. What is discouraging is this statement about we have to be the relentless advocate of democracy and therefore we have , to continue the embargo. That is what is discouraging because it puts you in the mind set of people like general under leonard wood. He says we have to write platt amendment because the cubans cant do this by themselves. What kind of questions do you think obama is going to face when he meets the leaders of the council of the americas . Questions on cuba or in general . Questions on americas Foreign Policy. I think they are going to give him the clearest sailing imaginable. This he defused the cuba question which could have been the big question. Let me go back if i could a couple of years. The whole concept of the summit of the americas was created in the early 1990s by president clinton. The first meeting was unlike any i believe this, 1993, 1994. Is the fifth. The fourth was held in argentina in 2004 before the holidays. I think it was either late november or early december. Hugo chavez was there riling up the crowd. I got a call i was home writing this book and a friend called me and said turn on cnn. They are burning down Martha Platte and rioting against president bushs policy toward latin america. All of it, from the drug war to the immigration procedures to cuba, you name it but especially trade they were protesting against. You watch. Obama, regardless of where you are politically, you have to look at the way hes handling himself and being handled, being advised, by his senior people. And i think it is just remarkable. I dont know if you are aware on thursday he isnt just flying air force one from Andrews Air Force base back to trinidad. Where is he going . He is going to haiti on thursday. And he is going to stay there a few hours and get back on the air force one and go to the dominican republic. Then to trinidad. As far as i know no u. S. , president has ever stepped foot in haiti. Has anyone . I dont think so. It is a brilliant stroke. It is a real statement that i president obama, care about , which as you know, it is just a terribly sad humanitarian story. You wait and watch the applause unless something famous last word dont let a political scientist predict the future. We always mess it up. But i would put a significant part of my next months paycheck on that he gets as clear a ride as he got in europe last week. We will see. We will see. Listen, you have all been really kind. I appreciate you coming here. Thank you so much. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] america,s for reel archival films that take you through the 20th century. Week, the history of Police Brutality in oakland, california. Documenting a variety of efforts to reform the department, including audio Recording Police interactions with the public. Tomorrow at 4 00 p. M. Eastern time. Historian damien shields talks