The Road to Havana

The Road to Havana

Nelson Mandela’s funeral opened the way for Obama’s historic Cuba visit.


Electo Rossel wears a shirt with a picture of U.S. President Barack Obama near the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba. Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters

Jeffrey Goldberg 7:00 AM ET Global


On Sunday, President Obama will begin his historic visit to Cuba. He will be the first president since Calvin Coolidge to visit the island, and his mission is a prime manifestation of what some people—not me, necessarily—might call the “Obama Doctrine.” Obama has been remarkably consistent over the years in questioning why adversaries of the United States have remained adversaries, and in Cuba, at least, he has an answer: They don’t have to be adversaries, at least not all of them. (The chance of an Obama victory lap in Tehran appears at the moment to be vanishingly small, despite the nuclear agreement.)

Over the years, Obama has been criticized steadily for “apologizing” on behalf of the United States for its various alleged misdeeds in other countries. As he told me in one of my recent interviews with him, “We have history. We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people’s suspicions.”

Obama clearly believes that acknowledging the complicated history between the United States and certain developing-world countries is a prerequisite for better relations (the jury is out, I believe, on whether this is, generally speaking, an effective tactic, or more just a trolling of the American right). Though he did not name Cuba in this list of countries that have been wronged by past American policy, it is entirely plausible he considers at least some of that country’s claims legitimate, such as those regarding U.S. support for the Batista regime, which was overthrown by Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army, and for the Bay of Pigs invasion and other regime-changing schemes.

I mention this because in a recent conversation, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, foreign-policy amanuensis, and secret Cuba envoy, mentioned that it was Obama’s respectful treatment of Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and the current president, at the December, 2013 funeral of Nelson Mandela, that may have helped the then-nascent, and then-unpromising, negotiations with Cuba turn a corner. “We had been in negotiations with the Cubans secretly for about six months at that time and hadn’t really gotten anywhere,” Rhodes said, explaining that Cuban suspicions of American intentions were almost overwhelming. “We were mainly talking about their desire to recover several Cuban prisoners in the United States and Florida—the remaining members of the Cuban Five—and our desire to return [USAID contractor] Alan Gross to the United States, but we wanted a bigger package. We wanted to use the exchange of some prisoners as an entry point to changing the relationship.”

Mandela’s funeral provided the White House with the opportunity to change the tenor of the talks. “The president was going to the funeral of Nelson Mandela—his personal hero—and I remember on the plane to South Africa I raised with him—we had a list of the leaders who were going to be up on the dais where he’d be speaking—and one was Raul Castro, and I said, ‘Look, inevitably it is going to come up as to whether or not you shake his hand.’”

Obama’s response was not necessarily the response of a typical American president. According to Rhodes, Obama said, “‘Look, the Cubans, given their history with Mandela, with the ANC, they have a place at this event, and I’m not going to, essentially, cause an uncomfortable situation for the Mandela family, for the South African people, by snubbing the president of Cuba who has a right to be on that dais.’” The Cubans were early and ardent supporters of Mandela’s African National Congress party, and were also deeply engaged militarily across southern Africa. I asked Rhodes what “right” he was referring to. He said, “Well, look, whatever you think of the Cuban government, they supported the anti-apartheid movement; they fought side-by-side with the ANC; the Castros had a relationship with Mandela. And this is the president’s hero and he doesn’t want to cause an incident at his memorial service by carrying forward this dispute between the United States and Cuba, so he shook Raul Castro’s hand.”