The Cuban Revolution Today: Proposals of Changes, Scenarios, and Alternatives 57
tions that have taken place with China: displaying a real political will to
normalize the relations (a will that has never been present in the
Cuban case) rather than just to resolve specific topics of basic interest
to the United States (plane kidnappings, migration, the South African
conflict in the 1970s and 1980s) and eliminating from the agenda what
today it considers the primary issue-a substantial modification of the
political regime of the island-in favor of political, economic, military,
cultural, juridical, technical, and other topics of bilateral interest
(Hernández, 2010c; Domínguez, 2010).
What might lead the U.S. executive and the Congress to forge a
consensus in this direction?
The argument that the Cuban issue is a “highly emotional” one-
especially with Fidel Castro as secretary of the Cuban Communist
Party and Raúl Castro as president of Cuba-does not seem to me to be
unavoidable. If prejudices were insurmountable, Nixon's and Kiss-
inger’s policy toward China could not have achieved success in negoti-
ations, much less the reestablishment of relations. Although the
Chinese case is different in some respects from the Cuban case, this
does not affect the validity of the example. The logic and rationality of
U.S. interests go against this type of prejudice.
Given that Cuba has not collapsed in spite of the crumbling of
European socialism and that an invasion is inadvisable because of the
losses that it would cause for the United States in more than one
sense, perhaps it would be best to keep on negotiating specific issues
such as the migration agreements, weakening the blockade, and finally
lifting it. This would allow the United States to try to influence Cuban
socialism from inside while allowing U.S. corporations to benefit from
enormous earnings on the island. Cuba has reentered international
markets and is receiving foreign investment from around the world
while North American transnationals have been prevented from prof-
iting from this market.^38