Will Spain make the EU go soft on Cuba?

Spain wants to reward Cuba for defying the EU’s wishes.

For the past 13 years the EU’s member states have followed a common policy on Cuba. That is about to change, if Spain has its way. It has made clear it wants to end the EU’s ‘common position’ during its presidency of the EU, enabling member states to pursue bilateral policies within a framework agreement with Cuba, such as the EU has with China.

This should trouble anyone interested in human rights – including EU foreign ministers, who said this June that they remained “seriously concerned about the lack of progress in the situation of human rights in Cuba”.

Firstly, for the past two years Spain has itself pursued an independent, bilateral policy – with no results, other than a few favourable business contracts.

Secondly, without what amounts to a common code of conduct, some other EU countries are likely to do as Spain has done: in breach of previous EU commitments to make political engagement conditional, Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, has consistently refused to meet dissidents during visits to Havana for fear of provoking the regime.

Thirdly, to normalise relations now would be to reward Havana for doing exactly the opposite of what the EU demanded this June, “to release unconditionally all political prisoners”. (There are currently some 200.) Since then, the regime has pursued a course toward greater centralisation, militarisation and – as Human Rights Watch documented in a report in November – toward heavier repression (it has, for example, imprisoned more than 40 people merely on suspicion that they are likely to commit a crime).

The danger is that a broadly uniform EU position will be replaced by national policies that feed the Cuban regime’s perception that it can dictate to European countries what is and is not acceptable. It is the EU’s common position that gives it leverage on human-rights issues.

Spain is testing the waters. There is, though, a growing current in the direction it wants. Belgium, which will assume the EU’s rotating presidency in July, also has policies friendly to the regime of Fidel and Raúl Castro. An increasing number of European ministers are visiting Cuba, frequently not meeting dissidents. The European Commission has done likewise, a point very evident this summer when Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the outgoing commissioner for external affairs, visited Havana. Shortly before, she had visited Belarus and made a specific effort to meet dissidents; in Havana, she ignored them.

Spain is relying on this type of change in the political consensus so that the entire framework of the EU’s relations with Cuba can be changed, since, if objective, the annual review planned for June will conclude that Cuba is failing to meet the EU’s current conditions.

But Spain is also, in effect, making Cuba one of the first tests for EU foreign policy under the Lisbon treaty regime. One of the purposes of the treaty was to forge greater unity on foreign policy, not to fragment it.

This is also a test for the European Parliament. It now has the power to exercise its enhanced powers of oversight.

A fragmentation of EU policy matters not just to dissidents; it affects ordinary Cubans’ perceptions of Europe. I spent 18 March in Havana watching the Ladies in White, the wives and relatives of jailed dissidents, defy the police and protest quietly on the sixth anniversary of the biggest crackdown of recent years. That same evening, Cubans learnt from their television news that Louis Michel, then the European commissioner for development, was happy with the direction of EU-Cuban relations. During his high-profile visit, the cigar-puffing commissioner refused to meet the Ladies in White, to whom the Parliament had awarded its Sakharov Prize. The Commission’s development department later said it made this “scheduling mistake” because it was unaware of the date’s symbolism. Be that as it may, this episode demonstrated how a desire for engagement that is blind to other considerations can lead to shame. If Spain has its way, we will see more self-interested engagement, with less progress on human rights.

Milan Nič is deputy director of the Pontis Foundation in Slovakia, which provides humanitarian aid to the families of political prisoners in Cuba.