Colombia’s Closing Embassy Door in Havana

An embassy door is supposed to open both ways.

It opens for the diplomat arriving with a leather folder and a practiced expression. It opens for the citizen whose passport has been lost, whose father has fallen ill, whose return ticket has turned into a problem too expensive to solve. It opens, sometimes, for messages no government is willing to say aloud. An embassy is a hinge disguised as a building.

This week, Gustavo Petro is expected to arrive in Havana for what may be his last foreign trip as president of Colombia. He is scheduled to meet Miguel Díaz-Canel and offer a gesture of solidarity before handing power to Abelardo de la Espriella on August 7. The timing is the story. Petro is flying toward a door that his successor has said he intends to shut.

De la Espriella has announced that his government will close Colombia’s embassy in Havana and break relations with Cuba. Havana has answered with the vocabulary it reserves for such moments: friendship, fraternity, history. The Foreign Ministry called the announcement a departure from the traditional bonds between the two countries. That is true, in the narrow diplomatic sense. It is also incomplete.

For Cuba, every embassy is more than an embassy. It is a small proof of survival. A flag on a foreign building in Vedado or Miramar is evidence that the Revolution remains legible abroad, that it has not been reduced to its electricity outages, empty pharmacies, departing young people, and permanent demand for sacrifice from those left behind. The regime has always understood the visual economy of recognition. A visiting president is not merely a visitor. He is a photograph waiting to happen.

That is why Petro’s farewell trip has the shape of an old Havana contradiction. The Colombian president comes bearing solidarity just as Colombia’s next president promises rupture. One man arrives to preserve the frame; the other threatens to remove it from the wall. In between sits the Cuban state, which has made an art of treating diplomatic contact as moral absolution.

It is not absolution.

Cuba’s government deserves neither the isolationist fantasy that imagines hunger as a cleansing political instrument nor the sentimental indulgence that calls every act of engagement “solidarity” and leaves it there. The people who queue for food, medicine, transport, and a chance to leave do not live inside the regime’s ceremonial language. They live in the space after it. They know that a friendship between governments can mean a meeting, a communiqué, a wreath, a photograph. It does not necessarily mean a working bus, a stocked clinic, or the right to speak without calculating the cost.

The most bitter irony is that Colombia once knew what Cuba could be when it functioned as more than a stage set. Havana helped host negotiations in Colombia’s long conflict. It was not a democratic transformation, and it did not become one because foreign delegations met in its halls. But the island could, at least, serve as a place where enemies spoke. That was a practical achievement. It belonged to the world of diplomacy, not revolutionary mythology.

Now the same island is being used to make opposite arguments. Petro’s visit will be presented as proof that Cuba retains friends. De la Espriella’s threatened closure will be presented by his supporters as proof that Colombia has finally discovered its spine. Both claims are too theatrical.

The question is not whether Díaz-Canel deserves another visitor. He does not need another visitor. He needs the kind of relationship he has spent decades avoiding: one in which governments can trade, negotiate, cooperate, and still speak plainly about political prisoners, coercion, economic ruin, and the state’s monopoly over Cuban life. Havana prefers recognition without conditions because conditions disturb the mural.

But severing relations has its own dishonesty. It turns an embassy door into a campaign prop. Closing a mission does not weaken the Cuban leadership as much as it narrows the passageways available to everyone else: Colombians on the island, Cubans with family or commercial ties in Colombia, journalists, church groups, students, negotiators, and people who need a consular desk when history becomes personal. It is easy to close a door from a podium. It is harder to explain why the person outside it should thank you.

The strongest argument for De la Espriella’s position is not frivolous. Cuba is an authoritarian state. Its government has exported intelligence services, ideology, and methods of control far beyond its shores. It has demanded international respect while refusing ordinary political dignity to its own citizens. A democratic Colombia is entitled to say that recognition is not endorsement, but neither is recognition morally neutral. There are moments when diplomacy can become camouflage.

That argument deserves to be heard. It does not, however, compel a bonfire.

Diplomacy is not praise. An embassy is not a valentine. It is an instrument, often clumsy and sometimes compromised, for keeping a line open when governments would rather perform outrage than do the exhausting work of contact. The Cuban regime has benefited from the false choice for sixty-seven years: embrace us as a victim of imperial pressure, or abandon the island to its jailers. The regime survives inside that binary. It needs outsiders to choose a side of the argument instead of demanding a third thing: a Cuba in which the state is neither besieged saint nor permanent warden.

That third thing briefly appeared possible during the opening of 2015 to 2017. The window was narrow, and Havana helped close it, terrified that commerce, travel, capital, and ordinary contact might loosen the party’s grip faster than the party could manage. Washington later helped seal it shut. What remains is the wreckage of an opportunity that cannot be reenacted by nostalgia, executive orders, or airport diplomacy.

Petro’s plane cannot reopen that window. De la Espriella’s promise cannot close Cuba off from history. The island has already had too many doors slammed in its name, by foreigners and by the men who claim to defend it from foreigners.

Still, an embassy door should open both ways.