Is Canada giving Cuba the cold shoulder?

OTTAWA—Is Canada suddenly giving Cuba the cold shoulder? It sure seems like it. At the June 6 press conference with visiting Chilean President Gabriel Boric, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked if he opposed the American decision to keep Cuba out of the Organization of American States meeting in Los Angeles. While Boric was emphatically in the affirmative, Trudeau was evasive and non-committal. On Aug. 5, lightning struck Cuba’s main oil storage facilities in Matanzas. The fires raged for five days, destroying 40 per cent of the country’s oil reserves and leaving 16 people dead, while 14 firefighters are still missing. While European countries have rushed in to help Cuba recover, Trudeau has yet to issue a statement of support or empathy to the Cuban people, let alone provide any humanitarian aid. It wasn’t always like this. Canada has had friendly relations with Cuba since the 1700s. The friendship has endured the thick and thin of many geo-political pressures. Global Affairs Canada ranks Cuba as our second largest market in the Caribbean and Central America. Our annual bilateral trade with Cuba is close to $1-billion. Roughly 55 per cent of it goes to Quebec and Ontario, 40 per cent to the Western provinces, the rest to the Maritimes. Trading with this tiny country of 11 million is a pan-Canadian success story. But something has changed under Trudeau. He has gone quiet on Cuba. Perhaps he wants to punish Cuba for not distancing itself sufficiently from Russia vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine. But such an antagonism would be grossly misdirected. It’s not only Cuba, the entire global south has refused to join the NATO narrative against Russia, including the Commonwealth countries. Despite aggressive lobbying by Trudeau and his Foreign Affairs Minister, Mélanie Joly, the June 24-25 meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Rwanda refused to rebuke Russia. So why single out Cuba? Maybe Trudeau sees Cuba as a political liability for his electoral chances against the Conservatives. This, too, would be a miscalculation, given the historical record. Despite pressure from the Americans, we did not cut diplomatic ties with Cuba after the 1959 Cuban revolution. We defied the Americans again in 1962 by refusing to put the Canadian army on high-alert during the Cuban missile crisis. The prime minister who stood in solidarity with Cuba during this tumultuous period was the very conservative John Diefenbaker. In 1976, when Trudeau senior cut off nearly all diplomatic ties after Cuba sent its soldiers to fight apartheid in Angola, it was again a Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, who went against U.S. President Ronald Regan’s anti-Cuba stance and put the friendship back on track by facilitating the United Nations to take over the Angola mission in 1991. And who can forget former prime minister Stephen Harper using his Cuban connections to pave the way for then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s historical visit to Havana in March 2016. It could be that Trudeau has been frightened off by anti-Cuba lobbyists. If true, his fears would be completely unfounded. He need only take a cue from the Conservatives: Cuba is not a liability with Canadian voters. Quite the contrary, according to the website Statista, in the years preceding 2020, before the pandemic, on average 1.1 million of us were visiting Cuba every year. It appears we like Cuba. Trudeau should rebuild our rapport with the Cubans. It might even turn into a foreign policy success story. The fundamentals are all there. He can invite Cuba’s new ambassador to Canada, Hector Igarza, for a briefing on the feasibility of importing Cuban health-care professionals to tackle the shortages in Canada’s north, or exploring foreign direct investment opportunities for Canadian entrepreneurs to commercialize Cuban intellectual properties. These are not far-fetched ideas. Italy brought in Cuban doctors, in 2020, to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic; and it is an open secret that Cuba is sitting on a slew of biotechnology and pharmaceutical discoveries, but lacks the capital to bring them to international markets. The notion of Canadian capital investments in Cuba is nothing new. Canadian companies have had energy, mining, travel, and tourism projects in Cuba since the mid 1990s. The prime minister who first opened the doors for Canada-Cuba joint ventures was none other than Jean Chrétien, a Liberal. Canada-Cuba relations in fact have never been bound by partisan politics. Former prime ministers have all recognized the benefits of being Cuba-friendly: it generates a sense of Canadian foreign policy independence. There are no political downsides to normalizing rapprochement with the Cubans. There is however something not quite Canadian about giving a time-honoured friendship the cold-shoulder because of some misplaced fears or anxiety, no matter how real or imagined they might be. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general with the federal government. He is a community organizer with a keen interest in Canadian foreign policy issues. The Hill Times