Editorial | Good time for partnerships with Cuba

Among the shifts expected in the United States (US) foreign policy when Joe Biden becomes America’s president later this month is Washington’s posture towards Cuba. It is likely to become less hawkish. This is an opportunity for Jamaica and the other members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to begin to think seriously about how they might exploit their more than two-decades-old trade and economic cooperation agreement with Havana.

The circumstances for a renewed and fuller engagement of Cuba, this newspaper believes, are real, and the timing propitious. And it would be in either side’s interest, as they recently agreed. The opportunity rests on two planks.

The first has to do with the Americans, or more precisely, Donald Trump’s defeat in last November’s presidential election, which is leading to Mr Biden’s occupancy of the White House. In 2014, after more than half a century of what he described as a failed US policy towards Cuba, Mr Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, began normalising relations with Havana. The following year, the US and Cuba re-established formal diplomatic relations, severed in 1961. The Obama administration eased some of the trade and economic sanctions in place since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Having rolled back most of Mr Obama initiatives, US-Cuba relations under Mr Trump are near to where they used to be. Joe Biden, Mr Obama’s vice president, has, however, talked about reversing “the failed Trump policies that inflicted harm on the Cubans and their families”. He has not, as yet, shared what his reset will look like. The consensus is that it is likely to be far less hostile and possibly include easing the travel ban and remittances to Cuba.

TRADE AND ECONOMIC COOPERATION

A softer Washington attitude towards Havana should increase CARICOM’s confidence to move from rhetoric to action, its stated commitment to deeper trade and economic relations with Cuba. They have had an agreement to this end since 2000. Little has been done with it. For example, in 2019, Cuba-Jamaica trade valued a mere US$5.99 million, of which Kingston exported US$3.18 million. The only time the possibility of economic cooperation with Cuba appeared to have seriously exercised the minds of Jamaican policymakers and the private sector was at the start of Mr Obama’s initiative, when they feared that a reopened Cuba would siphon tourists and tourism-related investments from established regional destinations. The advent of Mr Trump scuppered those concerns.

At last month’s triennial summit, there was the obligatory mention in the final declaration of the trade and economic cooperation agreement and of both sides’ “commitment to finding avenues that promote our economic and commercial relations by identifying our strengths and possible complementarities”. This time, a confluence of circumstances could make it happen. One, of course, is the expected tone of the bye-Trump-welcome-Joe Biden era.

More important, however, is the damage that the COVID-19 pandemic has done to Caribbean economies, including Cuba’s, whose GDP was projected to slump in 2020 by between four and eight per cent. In Jamaica, the drop is expected to be even more precipitous – between 10 per cent and 12 per cent. The expected decline for CARICOM as a whole is around six per cent. It will take years to recover lost ground.

In a New Year statement marking the start of his six-monthly stint as CARICOM’s chairman, Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister, Keith Rowley, suggested that the community make the CARICOM single market and economy “our principal means of recovery” by harnessing the region’s institutional and intellectual capacities that helped to contain the spread of the coronavirus. We agree. But we believe, too, that CARICOM has to leverage other partnerships, including those with countries of the South as it prepares for a new and potentially more hostile global environment and the world order that will emerge after COVID-19. That order is beginning to manifest itself in which countries are having their first crack at vaccines against the coronavirus.

Cuba is one of the potential partners. This newspaper, last week, suggested that CARICOM members should be pursuing research and investment agreements with Cuba’s biotech sector, which has a track record of developing vaccines and therapeutic drugs. Indeed, Cuba has two COVID-19 vaccines in trial.

The post-conference declaration from the CARICOM-Cuba summit reminded of Cuba’s Mariel Special Development Zone, a sprawling 180 square-mile port, free zone, and logistics facility west of Havana. People who invest there get tax breaks and other concessions. The zone, the conference declaration said, “offered broad and additional opportunities for intensification and reinforcement of economic ties between CARICOM and Cuba”.

Notably, biotech research and development and production are among the activities advertised for Mariel.

We appreciate that there may be competitive friction between Cuba’s logistics facility and the ambitions of other Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, but as the declaration said, there may be “complementarities”. CARICOM, and in our case, Jamaica’s Government, should be engaging our private sector to determine if, indeed, there are any.