Does it include a mass deportation of Cubans from the US?
According to Joe Garcia, the talks would not point toward an immediate expulsion, but rather a gradual scheme. / 14ymedio
Joe Garcia describes eight issues on the table including: political prisoners, the embargo, confiscated properties, internal reforms, and financial reintegration.
By Yunior Garcia Aguilera (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – Much has been speculated in recent weeks about the secret agenda between Havana and Washington. But now, for the first time with this level of detail, a source with access to officials from both governments is putting a concrete roadmap on the table. Businessman and former Democratic congressman Joe García speaks of eight points ranging from the release of political prisoners to the lifting of the embargo. At the center of this possible negotiation, however, appears an issue thornier than any diplomatic gesture: the return to the Island of up to 500,000 Cubans currently living in the United States.
The figure alone is enough to shake both sides of the Florida Straits. Half a million people are not an abstract category in a federal file. They are families, workers, people who arrived under humanitarian parole, asylum seekers, and individuals with pending immigration cases. It would also include individuals deemed inadmissible because they committed crimes. Lumping them all together may be politically useful, but humanly dangerous.
In an article published by The Palm Beach Post, Garcia identifies eight main points in the conversations between the United States and Cuba: the release of more than 1,000 political prisoners, economic reforms, compensation for confiscated properties, political reforms, lifting the embargo, Cuba’s readmission into multilateral organizations, Most Favored Nation status, and the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Cubans.
This would therefore not be a simple immigration arrangement, but a return to the chessboard of the entire bilateral relationship. Speaking with 14ymedio, Garcia acknowledged that the issue involving half a million migrants “is the one that moves the heart,” but he considers the other seven aspects equally “precise” and constituting “a pretty big move.”
The release of political prisoners would be the minimum moral condition needed to sell any agreement to the exile community and Congress; economic reforms would open the door to investments that today clash with state and military control of strategic sectors; compensation for expropriations would touch an open wound dating back to 1959 and require the creation of legal and financial mechanisms for US American and Cuban claims; and political reforms would be the most sensitive point for Havana, because any real opening would challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly.
Garcia’s statements rest on an old rule of US foreign policy: sometimes only a hawk can negotiate with the enemy without being accused of weakness. Nixon was able to open the door to China because his anti-communist record protected him from suspicion. Reagan could sit down with Gorbachev after calling the Soviet Union “the evil empire.” And George H. W. Bush was able to manage the Soviet collapse without turning it into a public humiliation that would push Moscow toward chaos. In all those cases, rapprochement was not sold as sympathy toward the adversary, but as the result of a position of strength.
That is possibly the card Trump could try to play with Cuba. If successful, he would have managed to wrest concessions from Havana that no Democrat had previously obtained. Obama bet on détente, and his critics portrayed it as a unilateral concession. Trump, by contrast, could present any shift as a personal victory.
But the migration issue overshadows all the others because of its human burden. Trump wants to show results to his base regarding his promise of deportations. Havana, meanwhile, lacks the material conditions to absorb a massive return. The country can barely sustain an ever-smaller and impoverished population. Receiving 500,000 returnees would amount to adding an entire city to an already collapsed system.
That is why, according to García, the talks would not point toward an immediate expulsion, but toward a gradual arrangement, with work permits and relocations spread over several years. Even so, the mere proposal reveals the extent to which Cuban migrants are no longer untouchable in US politics.
Trump has not explicitly said he intends to deport Cubans en masse back to the Island. But he has repeatedly floated the idea that many of them “want to return.” The phrase, repeated in different settings, makes the return scenario a plausible point on the agenda.
The symbolic blow would be enormous. Many Cubans who arrived during the Biden Administration crossed borders, sold property, put their families into debt, or waited months for parole authorization convinced that the United States was a refuge. Now they discover that their permanence depends not only on immigration judges or pending paperwork, but also on a geopolitical negotiation between Washington and Havana.
The Cuban regime, for its part, cannot celebrate either. Accepting deportees in large numbers would mean receiving a population that has already experienced different wages, different rights, and a different relationship with the State. They would be citizens with direct experience of life outside totalitarian control. For a government that fears any spontaneous concentration of discontent, that human mass could become a major political problem.
The possible negotiation also comes at a moment of maximum pressure on Havana. The Trump Administration has tightened sanctions, worsened the Island’s oil logistics, and raised the personal cost for the regime’s leadership. The criminal indictment against Raul Castro for the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes adds an unprecedented judicial dimension to the Cuban case.
The problem is that the package described seems too ambitious for a regime whose priority is not reforming the country but preserving power. Cuba does not have Beijing’s strategic weight or Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. Its real power lies in its ability to provoke migration crises, sustain hostile intelligence networks, serve as a platform for Washington’s adversaries, and produce a humanitarian emergency just 90 miles from Florida.
For that reason, the Cuban dossier would not be a negotiation between equals, but a pressure operation against a dangerous and exhausted regime. The question is whether that pressure seeks a real transition or merely an agreement that would allow deportations to be displayed, free some prisoners, and sell as a victory what could end up being yet another transaction between elites.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
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