The Four Chairs in Havana

Four chairs stood across from Miguel Díaz-Canel in Havana this week, and none of them was a negotiating chair.

That is the small, almost theatrical fact inside the visit by Representatives Mark Pocan, Teresa Leger Fernández, Maxine Dexter and Delia C. Ramírez: elected Americans came to an island where Washington has made pressure its principal language and Havana has made endurance its official dialect, then sat down with the president of a one-party state without possessing the authority to alter either government’s course.

They were witnesses. That is not nothing. It is also not diplomacy.

The delegation traveled to Cuba from July 9 through July 13, met Díaz-Canel and other officials, spoke with people in medicine, business and civil society, and returned calling for engagement rather than further strangulation. Their joint statement said the fuel restrictions and secondary sanctions were helping produce blackouts, shortages and a shrinking private sector. The Associated Press reported that Pocan repeated a Cuban’s description of the island as a “silent Gaza.” (Associated Press, https://apnews.com/article/cuba-embargo-congress-pocan-legerfernandez-dexter-ramirez-e369a23097dcf104d424af88cdc2134a) (apnews.com)

The phrase is too large for easy use. Gaza is under bombardment; Cuba is not. Historical catastrophes should not be borrowed as scenery for another country’s argument. But the comparison was meant to name a condition rather than equate two wars: an enclosed population, ordinary life narrowed by forces imposed above it, food spoiling, medicine becoming harder to obtain, transport thinning out, the most vulnerable paying first.

A chair is a modest piece of furniture. It does not decide policy. It does something more revealing: it shows who has been invited into the room, who is expected to remain standing, and who never receives a place at all.

The four Americans were given chairs because Havana needed them to see the consequences of Washington’s campaign. A government that distrusts foreign scrutiny suddenly finds virtue in foreign witnesses when those witnesses can testify to the cruelty of the other side. Díaz-Canel’s government has every incentive to show visitors the island’s wounds. It has less interest in showing them the hand that has helped keep those wounds open: the monopoly, the arbitrary power, the surveillance, the chronic refusal to let Cubans organize their own remedies without permission.

This is the old Cuban trap. The embargo is real. The regime is real. Each becomes the other’s alibi.

Washington can look at Havana’s repression and decide that punishment is policy. Havana can look at Washington’s punishment and insist that repression is merely national defense. Between them sits the Cuban family, which does not experience this as a seminar in international relations. It experiences it as a refrigerator that fails, a bus that does not come, a pharmacy shelf that has become a display case for absence.

The congressional visitors saw some of that. They saw enough to argue that an American strategy designed to weaken the state is doing direct damage to the society beneath it. Dexter, a physician, described the pressure as a health emergency; Leger Fernández called the policy a siege. Their statement urged negotiations, trade and humanitarian relief while also calling for respect for human rights. (Office of Rep. Maxine Dexter, https://dexter.house.gov/media/press-releases/reps-dexter-pocan-leger-fernandez-and-ramirez-return-cuba-fact-finding-mission) (dexter.house.gov)

That combination matters. The case against the present American approach does not require anyone to pretend the Cuban government is innocent. It requires only the recognition that collective deprivation does not become moral because its target is an immoral state.

There is, however, a serious objection to the delegation’s performance, and it should be heard plainly. Official visits to Cuba are never neutral walks through an open house. The regime stages access. It selects the rooms, manages the introductions, arranges the sightlines. Foreign lawmakers can leave Havana having encountered hardship that is entirely genuine and still having missed the political machinery that turns hardship into obedience. They can meet entrepreneurs who want sanctions eased without meeting enough citizens who want the state eased from their lives. They can hear the hunger and not fully hear the fear.

The strongest anti-regime case is not that Cubans are suffering less than the delegation reported. It is that the government has made suffering administratively useful for decades. Scarcity disciplines. Dependency isolates. Emergency grants the state a permanent excuse to command rather than persuade. A country cannot be liberated by being pushed into darkness, but neither can it be rebuilt by asking its rulers to distribute light on their own terms.

Still, the answer to an apparatus that hoards power cannot be a foreign policy that hoards oxygen.

The four chairs in Havana therefore expose a failure larger than four members of Congress. They were occupied by people who could observe but not negotiate, appeal but not execute, return to Washington but not open a channel that Washington has chosen to keep shut. Their visit was an unofficial conversation held in the shadow of an official silence.

That silence has become its own system. It rewards the hard men in both capitals. In Miami and Washington, it permits the fantasy that pressure will somehow strike only the Palace of the Revolution and spare the apartment building. In Havana, it permits the fantasy that national sovereignty means never having to answer to the nation. Both fantasies are durable because neither asks much of the people who maintain them. The bill is delivered elsewhere.

The opening of 2015 to 2017 briefly suggested a different arrangement. Not a clean one. Not a sentimental one. It was full of compromises, contradictions and official caution. But it created rooms in which Cubans could imagine commerce, travel, argument and connection as ordinary conditions rather than exceptional permissions. That window has been nailed shut. It cannot simply be reopened by reenacting old photographs, because the island has changed, the United States has changed, and too much trust has been ground into powder.

But a new room must eventually be built.

Not one furnished by Havana alone, where every chair is assigned by the state. Not one furnished by Washington alone, where hunger is mistaken for leverage. A room in which Cuban citizens are more than evidence for somebody else’s case.

For now, four chairs in Havana remain what they were: proof that people can still sit across from one another, and proof that sitting is not the same as speaking, and speaking is not the same as being heard.