MAIN DOCUMENTS HERE, National Security Archives
The late President Jimmy Carter, who was laid to rest last week after a state funeral in Washington, D.C., adamantly believed that the U.S. embargo on Cuba was “a deprivation of American civil liberties” and called restrictions on trade and travel “unconscionable,” according to an interview published for the first time today by the National Security Archive.
The interview recorded Carter’s continuing commitment to normalizing relations with Cuba long after he had attempted, through secret diplomacy, to do so during his presidency. “I felt that it was time for us to have completely normal relations with Cuba,” as Carter reflected on his time in the White House. “And I felt then, as I do now, that the best way to bring about a change in its Communist regime was to have open trade and commerce, and visitation, and diplomatic relations with Cuba.”
The Archive posted an audio file and transcription of the exclusive interview—conducted by the co-authors of Back Channel to Cuba, William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, at the Carter Center in Atlanta in July 2004 — along with a revealing selection of formerly TOP SECRET White House, NSC and State Department records on the Carter administration’s back-channel efforts to negotiate better bilateral ties with Cuba.
The documentation covers what one secret briefing paper described as “the extremely complex and nettlesome” issues in U.S.-Cuba relations during Carter’s tenure as president, the secret meetings between emissaries, as well as Carter’s post-presidency efforts to act as a secret interlocutor between Washington and Havana to resolve the 1994 balsero crisis.
The declassified history of Carter’s focus on back-channel diplomacy remains relevant this week as the Biden administration dramatically announced its decision to remove Cuba from the list of states that support terrorism and lift several punitive Trump-era sanctions.
Less than a week before Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Biden administration’s effort to improve U.S.-Cuba relations comes as the Senate Foreign Relations committee holds confirmation hearings for secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio, the leading proponent of applying “maximum pressure” on Cuba. Rubio’s nomination hearings are sure to raise questions about the wisdom of punitive measures in the wake of President Biden’s dramatic, last minute, lifting of sanctions imposed during the first Trump administration.