Obama's steps to lift embargo on Cuba 'opens up a whole range of possibilities'

Alan Gross was released and this triggered Obama's efforts to try and lift the embargo on Cuba - was this a surprise for you?

Sebastian Arcos: Not really. Everyone knew there were conversations going on for the release of Mr. Gross. And the public campaign to change US policy of Cuba has also been going on for a while. But it was a surprise in the sense that nobody expected that the president would go as far as he did.

But this pressure is not new, the UN General Assembly has voiced criticism of the embargo against Cuba since 1992 every year. And there have been other prisoners. So why is this happening now?

There are no previous cases similar to Alan Gross'. He was detained years ago by the Cuban secret police while he was on the island working for USAID on a peaceful program.

But he was accused of being a spy - he was working for an agency which an AP report found to be involved in clandestine activity, including setting up the Twitter-like ZunZuneo to incite dissent and possibly overthrow the government.

He was working for USAID, which is a public agency. He was not a spy. He was not a member of the CIA. He had no connection with any intelligence agency. He was doing work that the US is doing right now in Egypt or in any other country of the world - promoting democracy, promoting freedom of information, promoting things that totalitarian regimes don't like.

The fact that USAID has been accused of these things does not mean that that is what USAID is doing. It is just an accusation and where it is coming from is regimes who do not respect civil liberties so it should not be surprising that they are accusing USAID of these things. So we're talking reality vs. propaganda.

There are multiple AP reports coming out of Havana and they all have the same flavor, meaning they all presume that what USAID does … is subversive. And it is considered subversive by the Cuban government. But I cannot imagine anything more ridiculous that accusing anybody of trying to topple a government by creating a Twitter account. The accusation itself is ridiculous.

This is not the CIA, this is USAID, which is a public agency.

What do you think finally secured the release of Alan Gross?

The US was concerned over the deteriorating health of Mr. Gross … Conditions in Cuban prisons are awful and even though he was at a hospital prison … the conditions there are much better than in the rest of Cuban prisons but they are still awful. But here is where the surprise comes in: The Cubans wanted five Cuban spies who were in prison here in the US in exchange for releasing Alan Gross. From the very beginning, the US said this is not a fair trade, Alan Gross is not a spy, we cannot exchange five spies convicted of espionage for one man who was working for a public agency in Havana. But when the release of Alan Gross was announced yesterday, it was announced immediately that the remaining Cuban agents had been sent back to Havana. So the US caved in on this very important demand of the Cuban government. But it went beyond that, it also agreed to take Cuba off the list of countries that support terrorism, which is a long demand that Cuba also had for the US. But that was not enough - it went even further and relaxed some of the regulations allowing American citizens to travel to Cuba and to spend money in Cuba, which goes directly against the existing sanctions against Cuba.

Will Obama be able to convince Congress to lift the embargo?

No, that is not likely to happen. That is the one holdout. Only Congress can change law, according to the US constitution … and Congress is now majority Republican. Everybody, all the experts agree, that it is very improbable that Congress will move to lift the embargo.

In his televised speech after Gross' release, President Obama said 50 years of isolation has shown that this approach does not work. Why has the embargo been in place for five decades?

Well, the embargo is punishment. The policy was put in place in 1962 as a reaction to the confiscation of all the American properties in Cuba two years before and as a reaction to the alliance between Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union. The embargo is an economic sanction. It doesn't have political undertones. The embargo never had as its purpose to defeat Fidel Castro or to change the type of government in Cuba. That was not the purpose of the policy. It hasn't changed because the Cuban regime hasn't changed. It is stated very clearly that once the Cuban government takes steps towards a more open society and a wider respect to individual rights, that the embargo will be lifted.

But the US does business with other countries that do not have a very clean human rights record, China to name one. The US has a very close economic relations with China although its human rights record is disastrous…

Of course it has to do business with China. China is the second largest economy in the world. China is a nuclear power. It has 1.3 billion people. You cannot ignore China. You can ignore Cuba. You cannot deal with Cuba the same way that you deal with China.

Long-standing policies are not an exception. The policy of containment that was created against the Soviet Union in 1946 lasted for almost 50 years. And in the end, it succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union. There is nothing unusual about this.

Obama mentioned in his speech human rights and that Cuba should release certain prisoners, for example, political prisoners. The UN recently released a report on the state of US prisons and the treatment of its detainees and police brutality and, of course, Guantanamo… The US' track record is poor here. Should the US be asking Cuba to review its human rights record? Or is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

No. There is a big difference between the two countries. One is an open society, where the UN can go into the prisons and find out the conditions of the prisoners, where any body, and human rights group, including the International Red Cross can go in and find out information about any particular legal case against any particular prisoner. The other is a totalitarian society where the Red Cross is not allowed in, where human rights activists are persecuted and incarcerated. We're talking about two opposite societies. It is true that the US has problems and it is obvious that no society is perfect. But in the US you don't persecute people for political reasons. You might be able to find cases of people who have been killed by the police and the society in the US is dealing with that fact. It's trying to heal itself. In the case of Cuba, the government is putting people in prison, not because they have committed a crime, but because they are public opponents of the government. The conditions of the prisons in both countries - there is no way you can compare the worst conditions of a prison in the US with the conditions in Cuba.

Where do you see US-Cuba relations in say five or 10 years?

That's a good question because this opens up a new range of possibilities. In my opinion, Cuba is not so much interested in having normal diplomatic relations with the US as it is to have normal commercial relations with the US. Now the US has an emphasis on diplomatic relations because of course it's the best way to claim that relations have been normalized. My prediction is that the Cubans will postpone the opening of an embassy in Havana as long as they can because they don't want to have an ambassador in Havana. The Cubans have exploited the hostility of the US for a very long time to justify their own repression of freedoms in Cuba. They are not about to change that. And they are not about to change it quickly. So this is going to take some time and this is going to take a lot of negotiation. A lot of issues are depending on this. For example, will Cubans be deported back to Cuba? Will the US change its immigration policy with Cuba? … or will the US agree to accept Cuban imports into the US? There are many questions that need to be resolved and it all depends on how fast these negotiations go.

Sebastian A. Arcos is the associate director of the Cuban Research Institute in Miami, Florida.

Interview conducted by Sarah Berning