The detente between the U.S. and Cuba after nearly 54 years of
mutual hostility has the potential to redraw political and economic
alliances across the hemisphere that have endured since the Cold
War, government officials, diplomats and scholars say.
"We can see that the agreement between the United States and
Cuba has created an opening for the entire region to rethink its
relationship to the U.S. and each other," said Milos Alcalay, a
former United Nations ambassador under former Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez.
But it won't be easy for every country to give up long-held
animosity toward El Imperio--the empire--as some in the region call
the U.S. No country is more likely than Venezuela to feel the
effects of the U.S.-Cuba thaw.
Mr. Alcalay said that his country, which for more than a decade
has been Cuba's closest ally as well as a fierce Washington critic,
must decide whether to "maintain its hostile posture toward the
U.S." or follow Cuba's example in establishing more constructive
links with its northern neighbor.
So far, Mr. Maduro is maintaining a hostile stance.
As President Barack Obama signed congressional sanctions against
Venezuelan officials for alleged human-rights abuses, Mr. Maduro
tweeted that while the U.S. embargo against "our sister Cuba"
failed, the U.S. has initiated "an escalation of a new stage of
aggressions" toward Venezuela.
Nicmer Evans, a university professor and dissident in
Venezuela's ruling party, said that the Cuba development "has swept
the ground out from under the feet of Maduro in regard to his
policy toward the United States."
Much of Mr. Maduro's rhetoric, Mr. Evans noted, is
"fundamentally based on the anti-imperialist struggle and the
condemnation of the American blockage against Cuba." With the
normalization of ties between Washington and Havana undermining
that rationale, Venezuela's leadership needs to reconfigure the
country's relationship with the U.S., Mr. Evans said.
The U.S.-Cuba rapprochement could remove a long-standing
obstacle to warmer relations between Washington and other Latin
countries as well.
"I think a constructive dialogue with Cuba has placed us in a
much better place strategically to talk to countries like
Argentina, Ecuador and others," said Alana Tummino, who heads the
Cuba Working Group of the Americas Society and Council of the
Americas. "Where before we could be criticized for our isolation
policy, we can move past that now."
As an example, Ms. Tummino pointed to a previous flurry of
speculation about whether Cuba would be welcomed at the coming
Summit of the Americas next year. With the new accord, she said,
the summit's focus can shift to other, more substantial policy
issues, even though Cuba is expected to attend.
"Engaging with Cuba is going to change not only how we interact
with Cuba but also the region," she said.
For the last half-century, the antagonistic U.S.-Cuba
relationship has created political fault lines large and small
across Latin America. A visit by Fidel Castro to Chile helped
precipitate Gen. Augusto Pinochet's political coup against leftist
President Salvador Allende. Cuba and the U.S. backed opposite sides
in the civil wars that scarred Central America in the 1980s.
Support for the Castro regime helped split some Latin American
political parties into center-left and hard-left factions.
Intellectuals took sides in the ideological struggle between
capitalism and communism, the most prominent being Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who had a close
personal friendship with Fidel Castro.
And Cuba still plays an outsize role for its relatively small
size, said Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America program at
Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center.
In Colombia, the U.S.-Cuba accord coincides with Havana's active
role in helping to broker a peace accord to end a half-century-old
war between Marxist rebels and the Colombian government.
"Cuba has been an important reference for the guerrillas in
Colombia," who may now see negotiations as a better way to settle
the conflict, said Aldo Civico, a conflict resolution expert at
Rutgers University who is close to the negotiators in Havana.
At the same time, Mr. Civico said, the U.S.-Cuba agreement also
may help sway Colombians who have been skeptical of sitting down at
the table with armed rebels. "It's a boost of optimism and a sign
that it is possible to resolve a problem even though it transcended
generations," said Mr. Civico.
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