Obama’s impact in Cuba will be limited

(Photo: Desmond Boylan – AP)

People will assess the impact of President Barack Obama’s historic trip to Cuba for years to come, but a long conversation with Cuba’s oldest and best-known human-rights leader shortly before the U.S. president’s visit left me skeptical that there will be significant changes on the island anytime soon.

I talked with Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz, 72, president of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, hours before he returned to Cuba after a family visit to Miami last week. He was detained for 3 1/2 hours on his arrival in Havana Saturday, and is scheduled to attend a private meeting between Obama and a small group of Cuban dissidents in Havana on Tuesday.

Sánchez is one of the founders of Cuba’s human-rights movement and an interesting political figure. After breaking with the Castro dictatorship in the 1960s, he founded the commission to keep track of the regime’s human-rights abuses and became one of the government’s most vocal critics. But at the same time, he has always opposed the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba and has supported the re-establishment of diplomatic ties.

Still, Sánchez has no illusions that Obama’s trip will bring about any important changes on the island. In fact, there has been “a big increase” in repression of peaceful oppositionists since Obama’s Dec. 17, 2014, opening to Cuba, he told me. There were more than 2, 500 short-term detentions for political reasons in the first two months of this year.

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