Mr. Vladimir Andres Gonzalez Quesada is Cuban ambassador to Tehran. On last Monday, Mehr News International Service crew including Payman Yazdani and Hamidreza Gholamzadeh asked him about the historic development, in recent month, of rising flag of the US in Havana and in Washington of Cuba; however, Mr. Gonzalez Quesada believes that despite the initial détente with the US, there is still a need to more opening in the relations of the two hostile countries, and that the rising flags indicated only a political thaw in the thick ices of the relations. In the following, you will find about the history of US blockade on Cuba since 55 years ago, Cuba’s potentials in the region as well as relations with farther countries including Iran and more:
First of all, I have to thank you for accepting our invitation. I want to put you some questions about the resumption of ties between the US and Cuba. After about 55 years the US and Cuba decided to resume their ties. After 55 years of hostility what are the main reasons behind this action?
There are different reasons for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and I need to clarify that we are only talking about diplomatic ties. Different conditions have been created for that, not only in Cuba but also in the Latin American region and even inside the USA. We were living for more than 50 years the hostility and even aggression from US against Cuba. Remember that, in 1961 there was a mercenary attack against Cuba that some people call it Bay of Pigs Invasion, but we call it with the name of the place it happened: Playa Girón. Conditions around the world changed. At that time there were two main powers in the world, Soviet Union and USA. Even for a long time people thought we were a Soviet Union’s satellite. But now we have not any more Soviet Union and the Cuban Revolution is still alive; we maintained our revolutionary process like Iran has maintains its Islamic Revolution. Nowadays we have one superpower in the world: USA and its allies, but also in Latin America we are living a new moment because there are different revolutionary and progressive process in Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Brazil. Remember that when our revolution triumphed in 1959, the reaction of the Latin American continent was against our political process and the majority of its countries supported US policy against Cuba, except Mexico. All these countries interrupted diplomatic relations with the Island, except Mexico. At that time the conditions were different than the condition we are living now. Today, we have relations with all the Latin American nations and we have good cooperation with all of them at different levels. Of course, it doesn’t mean that we have the same political ideas and positions, but the majority of these countries asked from the US to reestablish and normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba and even some of them refused to participate in last America’s Summit in Panama if Cuba was not present, countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Brazil. Although USA has lost influence in Latin America, it maintains its hostile policy against the new processes that take place in our continent. This situation proved USA has not change its mentality regarding the region, including Cuba. It means that the super power maintains the same purposes and objectives, but has changed its strategy and tactic. On the other hand, business community in US which is very big and important asked Obama’s administration to reestablish economic and trade relations with Cuba, because our country is a natural market for US; between both nations there is a very short distance, only 90 miles. Nowadays, because of the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the US against Cuba, we make expensive barter with very far countries in Europe and Asia, and this situation creates a lot of problems in our economy. The majority of the Cuban-American community in the US was historically against our revolution, especially during its first stage because of political reasons. But today, there is a new generation in this community who ask to reestablish the bilateral relations in order to ease the family links between the Cuban people living in the US and those living in Cuba. Now the majority of this community, except some small groups, asks to establish normal ties with Cuba. This is another condition which provoked that US changed its tactic regarding Cuba. There is another very important topic. US administration realized that the historical leadership of our Revolution -the old generation- has to give way to the new generation. We are talking about the historical leader Fidel Castro and current president, Raul Castro, who announced this mandate will be his last one. A new generation in Cuba, which didn’t participate in the revolutionary fight against Dictator Fulgencio Batista, is taking a very important participation in the political process. The present Cuban government has the high responsibility to provide them the better conditions for the future. And the last point but not the least, we cannot live in isolation in the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and also when European socialism failed, we had to adapt our economy to the international reality we are living in. We have to create the conditions for the new generation in Cuba. Then we are now trying to adapt our country from economic and from political point of view to the context we are living in. These are the reasons both governments in the US and in Cuba started secret negotiations more than a year ago that became public on December 17th, 2014. Then we announced the decision to reestablish the diplomatic relations as the first stage, which finished when we officially declared it in July 20th, 2015 and we reopened the respective embassies in Washington and Havana. The first stage is different than the second one: to normalize the relations. In order to normalize the relations, we have to overcome firstly several problems and obstacles. The first and the most important barrier is the economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed by USA against Cuba for more than 50 years. The second problem is that USA has to compensate us for all the material and human damage they provoked because of this unfair and criminal blockade. We consider that because of the blockade we lost more than a trillion U.S. dollars until now. The third obstacle is that they have to stop the radio and television broadcast aggression carried out daily against Cuba from the US territory. The fourth point is that we have to recover our territory in Guantanamo which is occupied by an American navy base and it is used today as jail for people considered terrorists. Last point is that the US government has to stop the political and financial support to the artificial opposition they want to create in Cuba, which we call “mercenaries”. These are the different conditions that we ask from USA in order to normalize the relations. I need to clarify that this second stage will be longer and very complicated because we are talking about the historical problems we have with USA. We’ve finalized the first stage and now we are in better conditions to start the second one, but the most important thing is that both governments have the willingness and disposition to continue the negotiation process. We are optimists but careful because president Obama expressed his position by saying that it is a need to promote a good approach and relation between the two countries. We know that not everything depends on the President and that many things are on the Congress and Senate hands, but we consider that he (Obama) can do more in order to solve the problems stated because he has executive powers.
As far as I remember, last week US Secretary of State John Kerry had a visit to Havana on August 14. Before the trip, he had some interfering remarks against Cuba. Some analysts believe that the final goal of USA is the regime change in Cuba. What is your idea about this?
We never asked the US to change their political system; we never asked any nation to change their system or regime. The principle of our foreign policy is to respect all the countries and its policy. You cannot force any country to change its system or foreign policy. We cannot ask Iran to give up its Islamic Revolution because the most important thing to build good bilateral ties and friendship with Iran is to respect the Iran's system. You can criticize without interfering in internal affairs, but it is different than asking for changing a country's system. From the moment that the USA decided to reopen an embassy in Havana and raise their flag there, they accepted and recognize our system. Mr. Kerry can speak in this way, but we can ask the same to Washington. If we want diplomatic relations we have to recognize our governments [mutually]. One of the bilateral issues we can discuss is that US is trying to get inside Cuba to promote a kind of political opposition, which they call “dissidents” but we call them “mercenaries”. These people are dedicated to receive money from the US; they are critics and make illegal actions against Cuba, this means against their own country. We believe USA has to give up to its intention to change our political system, which is supported by the majority of the Cuban people and it’s the result of a legitimate electoral process. The US government has alleged many times that we don't have free elections, but they should respect our electoral process as we should respect the ones in the US, Iran and others countries. This is a basic principle to maintain diplomatic relations with any nation. We may have different ideas, but we have to respect each other.
I am going to talk about two factors, the political observers would pose two overriding theories: one of them is to force Cuba to get closer to the USA, the other promotes the theory of forcing the US to get closer to Cuba. Some experts say that USA have concerns over growing influence of China and Russia in the Latin American countries. So this has forced the US to compromise with Cuba and get closer to Cuba. What do you think about this?
Historically, the Revolution maintained the relations with all countries which respect our country and its Revolution. In the past, we had strong relations from the political and economic points of view with the Soviet Union because the conditions under which we were living in Latin America at the beginning of the Revolution were really hard and the US started its hostility against us. Mexico was the only country in our continent which maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba at that time. We had excellent relations with the Soviet Union, but we didn’t copy the political system of this great nation because we created our own socialist system. Cuba has kept during the Revolution good relations with any country which wanted to maintain links with us based on mutual respect and according to the international law. Since the Soviet Union ceased to exist, we had to maintain ourselves to defend the socialist process. Today we have relations with all Latin American and Caribbean countries; the only country in our continent which had no relations with Cuba was the US. Now we have the relations with the US and the rest of the continent. Nevertheless, I don’t think our relations with Russia and China would create a new provocation or bad relations with the US; the reason that the US changes its policy towards us is that they became isolated in the region, because the majority of Latin America asked them to normalize the relations with Cuba, to finish the hostility and aggression against the Island. Firstly the Soviet Union and later Russia has been present in Cuba; China is also the same, then I think that the reason of the change in the US policy regarding Cuba is neither Russia nor China. It’s clear that they have to change the strategy and tactic on Cuba because they became isolated especially in Latin America. Of course, the US still have some influence in the region because they have several military bases there, even one in Guantanamo, Cuba. The US couldn’t destroy our Revolution in 55 years. We suffered a lot because of the American aggression and hostility, but the Revolution is still there even with the leadership of the historical generation and our current president Raul Castro is part of that generation.
And the next factor which I told you some people say that force the Cuba government to get closer to the US some say, because of the decline of the oil price in the world markets and cheap oil coming from Venezuela to Cuba; you know Venezuela is one of the greatest supporters of Cuba; some people say that at the moment because of the oil price Venezuelan government itself is not a problem and will rush into crisis in near future; some experts say that these factors pushed Havana to get closer to the US. What do you think of this?
First of all, I have to say that there are some speculations about this historical event between US and Cuba, and one of them is this. I respect the opinions of your news agency, which published some article from a journalist who say that Venezuela criticized Cuban government because we decided to reestablish diplomatic relations with US, but this is not true. Historically, Cuba suffered a lot from the consequence of the oil price going up and down, because we haven’t enough oil. We have it in small quantities and its quality is no good; it’s very heavy and even we cannot use it in all of the industrial processes. Cuban oil production is still very low and we have to import a high percentage of hydrocarbon. Last president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, established excellent relations with the Cuban government and people. He also created and promoted a very important project in the Latin American and Caribbean region, whose name is “Petrocaribe”. This economic mechanism guarantees the oil supply to the beneficiary countries with standard prices regardless of its price in the international market. It’s a kind of cooperation between Venezuela and these countries, including Cuba. In return, we offer Venezuela cooperation in health, education and sport fields. The Venezuelan oil is not the only one we use because we still import oil from Russia and we are producing our own oil which is more than 100,000 barrel per day, and we are trying to increase its quantity for internal consume. Petrocaribe isn’t an economic help only for Cuba but also for the rest of the Latin American and Caribbean countries which are part of this mechanism. Then these are only speculations, because our economy doesn’t depend only on Venezuela. We have economic and trade relations with others nations like Russia, China, Canada and Spain, and in the future we hope to have it with the USA. On the other hand, we have a new policy in Cuba to promote foreign investments. Maybe you have heard on Mariel, one of the biggest development zones in our region and Brazil is one of the countries investing there. Venezuela was one of the countries who strongly requested the US to reestablish relations with Cuba, because –as I mentioned- we are living a new moment in Latin America and we are working for the integration in our continent, whose best example is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which includes 33 countries in the region except US and Canada. CELAC shows that we are living new times in our continent and we would like to consolidate this regional organization. Then if the US wants to have some influence in the region, they have to change their old strategies and methods.
End of Part One