Rio Group Gains Cuba As 23rd Member And Calls On Incoming Obama Administration To End Embargo

Latin American heads of state invited Cuba to join the Rio Group last week at a meeting in Salvador da Bahía, Brazil. Formed in 1986 to advance Central American peace talks, the Rio Group is a coalition of Latin American nations that meets annually to discuss and harmonize regional foreign policy. Cuba will become the group’s 23rd member.

Cuba’s inclusion into the Rio Group provides a signal that the Cold War tensions that forced Cuba out of hemispheric political organizations are finally beginning to dissipate nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The OAS first ostracized Cuba from inter-American organizations by voting to expel the country in 1962 on the grounds that “the present Government of Cuba, which has officially identified itself as a Marxist-Leninist government, is incompatible with the principles and objectives of the inter-American system.” Raúl Castro announced at the Salvador meeting that Cuba will not seek to resume membership in the OAS.

Latin American leaders across the political spectrum took advantage of the Rio Group meeting to call upon the incoming Obama administration to end the American embargo against Cuba. Bolivian president Evo Morales posed the most extreme position, asking Latin America’s leaders to recall their ambassadors from the United States until the US drops the embargo on Cuba, according to the Associated Press.

Morales’s proposition failed to inspire his companions, but it is clear that leaders throughout the hemisphere agree with the mission, if not the tactics. Mexico’s conservative president Felipe Calderón gave the speech that welcomed Cuba into the Rio Group. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, a moderate by Latin American standards, announced that she would visit Cuba in mid January–marking the first visit to Cuba by a Chilean head of state since Salvador Allende’s 1972 visit. Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner will also travel to Cuba in January.

Brazilian president Lula da Silva made the most direct statements regarding the embargo (with the exception of Evo Morales’s), calling upon the incoming Obama administration to “put an end the embargo, which no longer has any economic or political rationale.”

Da Silva has a point. Like Cuba’s aging, white, and male leader–who stood out at the meeting among Latin America’s increasingly diverse and occasionally female leadership–the embargo is a relic of the Cold War. President-elect Obama has plenty of leverage to end the embargo if he wants to, after winning the state of Florida without the support of the Cuban exile community.

Obama seems committed, however, to continuing the policy of dangling the promise of relaxing the embargo as a reward for effecting political change on the island. His website currently states that “if a post-Fidel government takes significant steps toward democracy, beginning with freeing all political prisoners, the US is prepared to take steps to normalize relations and ease the embargo that has governed relations between our countries for the last five decades.”

Obama will be the eleventh president to attempt some variation of this as yet unsuccessful policy.