President Obama's move to normalize relations with Cuba will test a theory that has been popular for years in Democratic circles, and a few Republican ones too.
The Castro government doesn't fear the embargo and interminable hostilities with the United States; it has thrived on them, so the thinking goes. What worries the island's control-minded leaders far more is change.
The response of Cuban officials to this argument has always been: try us. But a new relationship with the country Fidel Castro used to call "the colossus of the North," and its wealth, influence and power, could put significant pressure on the communist government whose post-Castro future remains murky.
Raul Castro, 83, has said he will step down in 2018. His ailing older brother is 88 and virtually absent from public life. Miguel Diaz-Canal, the 54-year-old vice president who would be in line to replace him, remains very much in the shadow of the Castros and their circle of aging army generals.
"In the medium and long term, this is a challenge for the Cuban system, because it undermines the climate of hostility that has long been used to justify one-party state," said Arturo Lopez Levy, a former Cuban government analyst who now teaches at NYU.
The Cuban government has long defended its strict political and economic controls with the argument that the U.S. would use any opening as an opportunity to stir unrest. But if tensions with the United States ease, Cubans will increasingly look inward at the shortcomings of their anachronistic system and Soviet-style planned economy.
"I want to see who they blame now for the economic collapse and lack of freedoms that we have in Cuba," dissident activist Yoani Sanchez wrote on Twitter following the White House announcement.
The narrow market opening permitted by Raul Castro over the past few years has already shattered many of the ideological underpinning of his older brother's brand of socialism. Where private enterprise is allowed — food service, repairs shops, hair salons — Cubans flourish. In dingy state-run factories, they see stagnation and ruin.
They want more — especially the young Cubans who bristle at the paternalistic state and yearn to flee. With U.S. ties improving, they will expect more.
As part of the rapprochement, U.S. officials say Cuba has agreed to expand Web access on the island, which has one of the lowest internet use rates in the world. That will bring additional challenges, as Cuban officials have long feared the type of Web-enabled activism of the Arab Spring, and its potent cocktail of social media, smart phones and frustrated young people.
Obama's moves on Wednesday were the type of breakthrough many of them hoped for after he won the presidency in 2008. Cubans knew he'd questioned the long-standing U.S. trade embargo and thought his message of "change" might include them.
The new president began to deliver in 2009, making it vastly easier for Cuban Americans to visit relatives on the island and send money. The island's Cold War overtime, it seemed, was finally winding down.
Then the Castro government threw Alan Gross in jail and snapped the thaw back into ice.
Cuba was once again in control of the relationship, and the pace of change.
Wednesday's announcement puts the weight back on Cuba. Aside from the prisoner swap and the symbolic importance of renewed diplomatic relations, the president's executive orders make clear that more substantial change to the relationship will come only if the Castro government continues to open its closed economy and political system.
"The normalization of diplomatic relations will offer an opportunity and a challenge to deepen and accelerate the reforms," said retired Cuban diplomat Carlos Alzugaray, reached in Havana. "Cuba will have to take advantage of the opportunity but guard against other effects that new investment may bring."
Senior U.S. officials said Wednesday that the move will not end the democracy-promoting USAID programs that Gross was working for at the time of his arrest in December 2009. Instead, they will operate from within a future U.S. embassy in Havana, and the Cubans will be watching and almost certainly trying to thwart them.
But those programs could switch from the kind of undercover political activity to more above-board American training and assistance programs for the emerging small business sector permitted by Castro's reforms, said Cuba analyst Phil Peters. That would be a trust-builder, if the Cubans allow it.
Cuba has yet to permit its small businesses and worker-run private cooperatives to engage directly with foreign companies and import the technology and goods they need, Peters noted. "It would be problematic if Obama has opened a door to significant business engagement and Cuba doesn't accept," he said.
With nearly 80 percent of the economy under state control and key industries like tourism and retail largely operated by the military, the government stands to profit too, of course, from more robust trade ties permitted by the Obama measures.
"For a government that denies economic freedom and property rights it seems clear that the changes proposed will first benefit the state apparatus," said Jose Daniel Ferrer, leader of the Cuban Patriotic Union dissident group in Santiago, the island's second largest city. "Only in the medium or long term will we know the effect on the Cuban people."
Nick Miroff is a Latin America correspondent for The Post, roaming from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to South America's southern cone. He has been a staff writer since 2006.
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