William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh explain Menendez’s influence in U.S.-Cuba affairs. They point out, “His retirement may bode well for US-Cuba relations—if Kamala Harris can retire Trump.”
William LeoGrande is a professor of government at American University, author of Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, and coauthor with Peter Kornbluh of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Peter Kornbluh, a longtime contributor to The Nation on Cuba [. . .] is also the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
[Here are excerpts. Read the full article at The Nation.]
As Senator Robert Menendez cleans out his desk in the Hart Senate Office Building, he leaves Congress as one of the most corrupt US legislators in modern times. The senator’s July 16 conviction on 16 counts of bribery, extortion, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent has dramatically revealed how he abused his power and influence as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to line his pockets. Lost in the scandal of his flagrant corruption, however, is how Menendez used his political muscle for years to corrupt US policy toward Cuba.
Menendez rose to power in Union City, New Jersey, a mini-Miami on Hudson with the largest concentration of Cuban exiles outside Florida. He was the product of the state’s Democratic political machine and a reliably liberal vote on most issues during his six terms in the US House of Representatives and 18 years in the Senate—but not on Cuba.
On relations with Havana he was, as one longtime associate put it, “unmovable”—a position Menendez attributed to his family history in Cuba, even though he was born in the United States and his parents came as economic immigrants in the early 1950s, long before Fidel Castro’s revolution. During his corruption trial, the Senator reached for this legend when trying to explain the $635,000 in cash and gold bars the FBI found in his home in 2022, claiming that hoarding cash was a family tradition because his parents had faced “confiscation” in Cuba. The jury didn’t buy it.
Being tough on Cuba was a way for an aspiring politician to court Cuban exiles, not only in Union City, but in Miami as well, where Menendez made regular fundraising trips, starting when he was Union City’s mayor. Along with Robert Torricelli (another New Jersey Democrat driven from the Senate by a corruption scandal), Menendez was a favorite of the militant and the monied Cuban Americans in south Florida, who, from 1992 to 2006, contributed a million dollars to his campaign coffers to jump-start his political career in the House of Representatives.
To satisfy that constituency, Menendez became an implacable and pugnacious foe of even the smallest steps to relax tensions with Havana. In 1993, as a freshman House member, he introduced the “Free and Independent Cuba Assistance Act” prohibiting the president from lifting the embargo until Cuba became a democracy with a market economy. The bill didn’t pass, but it provided the blueprint for the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 (aka Helms-Burton), on which Menendez was an original cosponsor. That law, more than any other, has hamstrung every president’s authority to engage with Cuba.
Menendez opposed President Ronald Reagan’s 1988 migration agreement with Cuba because it “gave up too much,” and he opposed the Clinton administration’s 1993 negotiations to repatriate migrants who committed crimes in the United States. [. . .] Clinton agreed to the financial sanctions, not the blockade. Menendez then opposed Clinton’s 1995 migration accord with Cuba regularizing safe and legal migration. [. . .]
Clashing With Obama
Senator Menendez was a thorn in President Obama’s side from the moment he entered the White House. Obama had campaigned on the need for a new approach to Cuba, but Menendez was having none of it. Before the election, he warned Obama, “If you want my support, I don’t want you making any policy changes on Cuba without consulting me.” [. . .]
When the Organization of American States convened in June 2009 to repeal the 1962 suspension of Cuba’s membership, Menendez, chair of the Senate subcommittee that approves foreign aid, threatened to cut off US funding—making up 60 percent of the OAS budget—if Cuba was readmitted. Under US pressure, the OAS reactivated Cuba’s membership provisionally, effective only if Cuba accepted the organization’s democratic principles. Cuba declined the invitation.
[. . .] Alan Gross sat in a Cuban jail for another four and a half years. Throughout, Menendez opposed any negotiations to win his freedom. When Gross finally came home on December 17, 2014, as part of Obama’s historic decision to normalize relations with Cuba, Menendez criticized the “swap of convicted spies for an innocent American” in a deal that “vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”
After the early clashes with Menendez, the Obama White House asked the senator what steps to improve relations with Havana he could support. The answer came back: none. That rigidity proved to be Menendez’s undoing. Obama was committed to changing Cuba policy, and if Menendez was unwilling to consider even modest steps, consulting him was pointless. When Obama and Raúl Castro announced their agreement to normalize US-Cuban relations, a chagrined Menendez joined the chorus of Republicans denouncing the new policy as “a reward that a totalitarian regime does not deserve.”
Menendez then spent the next two years opposing every step toward normalization. He rebuked the president for taking Cuba off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of international terrorism, calling it a “reward…for decades of repression.” He criticized every regulatory change that made travel and commerce between Cuba and the United States easier. He joined with Marco Rubio (R-FL) to block Obama’s appointment of an ambassador to Havana and the appointments of other candidates he deemed soft on Cuba. [. . .]
A Brighter Future for Cuba Policy?
The impending retirements of Biden and Menendez, one with dignity, one in disgrace, may bode well for relations with Cuba—if Vice President Kamala Harris can finally retire Donald Trump. Harris’s record on Cuba is sparse but progressive. In 2017 and 2019, she cosponsored Senate bills to end restrictions on travel, and during her 2020 run for the presidency, she called for lifting the embargo. A generation younger than Biden, she is less shackled by the Cold War mindset that framed his Cuba policy. [. . .]
[Photo above by Adam Gray, Getty Images: US Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) exits Manhattan federal court on July 16, 2024, in New York City.]
For full article, go to https://www.thenation.com/article/world/cuba-harris-menendez-corruption-diplomacy/
William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh explain Menendez’s influence in U.S.-Cuba affairs. They point out, “His retirement may bode well for US-Cuba relations—if Kamala Harris can retire Trump.” William LeoGrande is a professor of government at American University, author of Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, and coauthor with Peter Kornbluh of Back Channel to
