American hýbris: US Democracy Promotion in Cuba after the Cold War — Part 1

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.6.2.0157
• Pages: 157-188
• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Author: Alessandro Badella
• Subject Matter: Cuba,democracy,promotion,embargo,US

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AMERICAN HÝBRIS1: US DEMOCRACY

PROMOTION IN CUBA AFTER THE

COLD WAR  PART 1

Alessandro Badella

University of Genoa, Italy

Abstract

Cuba is probably one of the best examples of the signif‌icance of the democracy promotion

discourse in US foreign policy: the efforts to democratise the island have been one of

the main features in the US–Cuba bilateral relations since the end of the Cold War. Even

the embargo against the island has evolved from a tool to generate regime change to

an instrument of democracy promotion to foster a democratic transition. Today, the

Cuban embargo, after the codif‌ications of the 1990s, is intimately connected to a ‘Cuban

democratic future’. Moreover, in the last three decades, US presidents have committed

themselves to promote democracy on the island, inaugurating a sort of ‘state policy’ with

little or no evolutions or changes. The main aim of this two-part article is to explore the

rationale behind US decennial efforts to promote a peaceful democratic change on the

island, while trying to answer some crucial questions about US strategy in Cuba: Why

promote democracy in Cuba? Why did democracy promotion become a long-lasting

feature in US–Cuba relations? The f‌irst part deals with the security framework, and

American economic interests in Cuba as a crucial push factor for democracy promotion,

while the role of the Cuban-American community and the problems and perspectives of US

strategy will be included in the second part, to be published in the next issue of the Journal.

Keywords: Cuba, democracy, promotion, embargo, US

Introduction

In a memorandum delivered to the members of his Cabinet (April 2009),

President Obama underlined (once again) US strategy and interests towards

Cuba: ‘The promotion of democracy and human rights in Cuba is in the national

interest of the United States and is a key component of this Nation’s foreign

policy in the Americas’ (White House 2009). This was nothing but the latest

attempt to def‌ine US stance towards the socialist government of Cuba and the

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158 ACADEMIC ARTICLE  ALESSANDRO BADELLA

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hemisphere, while considering democracy promotion as a crucial approach. This

strategy towards the Caribbean island has been part of US foreign policy debate,

which was taking place by the end of the Cold War, but, despite this issue being

part of US foreign policy for a long time, it has only in recent decades entered the

studies of political and international relations.

In fact, democracy promotion has been studied generally as an external

push factor in the process of democratisation (Silander 2005: 82–87). Even

if scholars have primarily focused on the analysis of endogenous elements in

describing the transition to democracy (Linz and Stepan 1996; O’Donnel et al.

1986), more recent works have tried to compensate the divide between external

and internal factors (Grugel 1999: 157–63; Schmitter 2001: 26–54), focusing

on the interactions between these two elements in the process of transition

towards democratic rule (Remmer 1996: 289). Recently, the study of the role

of international actors in the internal process of democratic transition has been

f‌lourishing (Brinks and Coppedge 2006; Brown 2000; Gledish and Ward 2006;

Pevenhouse 2002a, 2002b, 2005), but democracy promotion has remained

as an external component (or at least as an external promoters’ strategy) and

considered lower in importance in comparison with economic and social internal

indicators (Mainwarning and Pérez-Liñán 2013: 214–41).

Despite the growing academic interest around this issue, its theoretical

framework has remained particularly weak and ambiguous: because of the

plurality of players involved (see Melia (2005) for an attempted systematiza-

tion of the external promoters) and the variety of strategies used, the discipline

never managed to create any models and theoretical frameworks, such as those

used for the study of regime transition to evaluate the output and the conditions

for the success of democracy promotion. For these reasons, a huge part of the

academic literature analysed democracy promotion from a descriptive (rather

than prescriptive) point of view, without a solid theoretical approach (Wolff and

Wurm 2011). The weak mechanisms of causal correlation between democracy

promotion and democratisation represent the main limit in the evolution of this

academic f‌ield: even today, we actually do not know how, or when and where,

democracy promotion can work (Burnell 2007; Finkel et al. 2007; Knack 2004;

Seligson et al. 2009; Shapiro 2003: x). In a 2006 document prepared for the

Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) underlined that this

regime of uncertainty has been a thorny issue for US democracy promoters and

co-operators, as ‘every day, literally tens of thousands of people in the democracy

promotion business go to work without training manuals or blueprints in hand’

(NED 2006: 18).

In recent years, some scholars have tried to connect empirically the investment

in democracy promotion and the effective democratisation of the target countries

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US DEMOCRACY PROMOTION IN CUBA AFTER THE COLD WAR  PART 1 159

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(Scott and Steele 2011). However, even if Scott and Steel did f‌ind some evidence,

they still excluded the entire ODA (Off‌icial Development Assistance) spectrum.

In fact, it is still hard to judge how (and how much) the different key components

of US foreign policy (geo-strategic, economic, political, ideological, electoral,

etc., issues) can help to successfully promote democracy in a target country.

According to the NED, the evaluation success of the democracy promotion

strategy would be ‘an overwhelming, if not impossible, task’ (NED 2006: 5). In

the same way, Carothers’ (1999) ‘learning curve’ was nothing but the manifesto

of a ‘try-fail-learn-retry’ approach in the democracy promotion f‌ield, hardly

based on theoretical and empirical analysis. Despite this, democracy promotion

still represents a sort of ‘brave new world’ in foreign policy (especially regarding

its eff‌icacy), the US has seen a hike in funding since the 1990s and after the

terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (Azpuru et al. 2008) and democracy

promotion has been considered as one of the main components US strategy in

foreign policy (Epstein et al. 2007).

The Cuban case presents some more problems compared with other

hemispheric cases in US democracy promotion. In fact, as we can deduce from

Legler et al. (2007), the study of US democracy promotion has been limited to its

analysis in countries which experimented with a successful (or partly successful)

transition to democracy. Actually, this is not the case for Cuba. Pickel’s (2008:

614) approach to the discourse on the Cuban transition (or regime collapse) is

suitable to this analysis: ‘What should happen to the Cuban Communist regime

after Castro’s death? What ought to be the role of the US in any post-Castro

transition? These are of course important and legitimate questions that motivate

much scholarly work on Cuba today; but as explicitly normative questions, they

are not for the social sciences to answer.’

Understandably, US democracy promotion in Cuba is a failure (as the Cuban

government has not collapsed, and the US has not succeeded in ‘exporting’

liberal-democratic institutions to the island) but, given the lack of theoretical

frameworks, it is hard to evaluate why and how US democracy promotion failed

(and is failing) in Cuba or even to deal with a ‘what if debate’ in US–Cuba

relations. This article is aimed to examine the core of the question (and the

core of US policy towards Cuba): Why promote democracy in Cuba? Why has

the US spent so many resources in pushing democracy from outside? Why did

democracy promotion become a long-lasting feature in US–Cuba relations?

From ‘cold warriors’ to democracy promoters

The main theme of US democracy promotion in Cuba is deeply rooted in the Cold

War. In the 1970s, President Carter introduced the human rights and democracy

question in his attempt to seek for a normalisation of the bilateral relations with

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