Explaining Canadian Foreign Policy Toward Cuba - Yvon Grenier - April 2022

Domínguez’s (2021) summary: The application, for the first time, of Title III of the embargo law; the restriction to US flights to Cuba; the imposition of a top to remittances and the prohibition on Western Union from sending such remittances to the Cuban agency run by the military; and finally, the tightening of sanctions on international banks that do transactions with Cuba. [...] Finally, if one follows the arrests that have taken place in the wake of the protests, the lower level of the Catholic Church seems to be contributing to an ever more apparent manifestation of opposition to the status quo on the island. [...] In fact, in the past few decades, the trend has been to bring Cuba back into the community of Latin American and Caribbean states with open arms, with initiatives such as the Rio Group, now the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and the Summits of the Americas. [...] This being said, with the demise of the OAS’s alternatives like the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America and CELAC, and the crisis lingering in both Nicaragua and Venezuela, Cuba’s support in the hemisphere may reveal itself to be conditional on the country being stable with no overt repression. [...] While the Trudeau government eventually condemned the government’s crackdown of the July protest, the NDP and the BQ preferred to focus on the US embargo as the main culprit for whatever goes wrong in the island, whereas the imploding and minuscule Green Party could not bring itself to make a foreign policy comment.