Washington, D.C. July 12, 2024 - “Cuba,” as former Foreign Service officer, Wayne S. Smith, was fond of observing, “seems to have the same effect on American administrations as the full moon has on werewolves.”

As the leading proponent for a rational and productive U.S. policy toward the Cuban revolution, Smith devoted his career—in and out of government—to advancing the cause of dialogue, diplomacy and normalized relations between Washington and Havana. He lived to see many of his tireless efforts come to fruition when the Obama administration moved to restore official diplomatic relations, normalize travel, and expand commerce between 2014 and 2016. But those advances were mostly rescinded during the Trump era and have not been fully restored by President Biden. At the time of Smith’s death at age 91 on June 28, 2024, the cause that he championed—rapprochement between Washington and Havana—remains as critical as ever.

As a tribute to Smith’s life and legacy, the National Security Archive today is posting a small selection of the hundreds of formerly secret cables, memoranda of conversation, options papers and reports he generated during his 25-year career as the State Department’s leading expert on Cuba. The selected documents represent the diplomacy and dedication that Smith brought to his foreign service career, as well as his advocacy for a common-sense approach to the controversial issue of Cuba policy.

Smith’s Cuba-related career was exceptional and unique. As a young diplomat, he was posted to Havana as the third secretary of the U.S. Embassy only months before the triumph of the Fidel Castro-led Cuban revolution. He was one of the last U.S. officials to close the Embassy doors and depart the island by ferry after the Eisenhower administration broke relations with Cuba on January 3, 1961. “When the break came,” Smith recalled, “we merely packed our bags, turned out the lights, and were ready to go.” Eighteen years later, Smith returned to help turn the lights back on as “Principal Officer” of the recently opened “Interests Section”—part of the Carter administration’s incremental and often halting efforts to restore diplomatic ties with Havana.

In his capacity as director of the State Department’s Office of Cuban Affairs during the first two years of the Carter Administration, Smith pressed for significant U.S. gestures to advance the goal of normalized relations. In a comprehensive and witty options memorandum, “Possible Steps to Improve Relations with Cuba,” he recommended key economic, cultural, military and diplomatic steps to reset U.S. policy and move toward normalized relations. He was one of the first U.S. officials to push a plan to incrementally lift the trade embargo, starting with food and medicine. “Many consider the embargo on the sale of medicines unconscionable,” he wrote, “irrespective of the state of our bilateral relations.” The U.S. should also open the door to selected Cuban exports, especially seafood products—shrimp, lobster, and crabs—he argued, along with Cuba’s renowned tobacco products (of which Smith was a connoisseur). “Few, save U.S. cigar makers, would object to the importation of fine Cuban cigars,” he noted in his options memo.

Culturally, Smith suggested, the U.S. should allow the American Ballet to perform in Cuba and organize a special baseball exhibition game in Havana. Given Cubans fanatical love of the sport, Smith argued, baseball diplomacy could provide “more bang for the buck” than any other aspect of normalized relations and “emphasize the affinities between our two countries in a way that serves our long term objectives,” pointing out that “the Soviet Union does not play baseball.” Smith was also one of the first officials to identify advantages for U.S. national interests in a Coast Guard collaboration with the Cuban navy on counternarcotics operations. “DEA is enthusiastic,” Smith reported. “Further, this strikes me as an initiative to which only the Mafia could object strongly.”

As head of the U.S. Interests Section from mid 1979 to mid 1982, Smith navigated diplomatic discord between Washington and Havana on such divisive issues as Cuban support for the Sandinista revolution and other insurgencies in Central America, Cuba’s role in Africa, and the 1980 immigration crisis known as the Mariel boatlift. The change in administrations from Carter to Reagan generated significant tensions between the State Department and the Interests Section as Reagan officials deliberately misrepresented Cuba’s interest in negotiations on Central America and threatened Castro with military force if Cuba continued to support insurgent groups there. “And as for keeping the heat on,” he wrote to his superiors in an angry cable protesting their distortion of Cuba’s negotiating positions on Central America, “we have kept it on for more than 20 years to no avail. The Cubans have seen it all before and are no more likely to respond now than previously.”  

Smith was so disgusted with the mendacity of his own government that he turned down an ambassadorial appointment and retired, on principle, from his career as a foreign service officer. “We obviously proceed from totally incompatible perceptions of Cuban reality,” he cabled Washington. “There is clearly no possibility of reconciliation of my views and those put forward by the [State] Department. I have therefore advised through other channels the situation in which I believe that leaves us—or more correctly, leaves me.” Sixteen days later, on his 50th birthday, Smith tendered his resignation and ended his diplomatic career at the State Department.

As a diplomat, and after he left the State Department, Wayne Smith met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro numerous times. 

Leaving government liberated Smith to become the most prolific and prominent proponent of a rational U.S. policy toward Cuba. Working out of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and then the non-profit Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., as a senior fellow, Smith published his candid memoir, The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic History of the Castro Years, along with countless opinion articles, reports, policy pamphlets, newsletters and interviews for over 30 years, criticizing hostile U.S. policies for “reaching new heights of absurdity.” He traveled to Cuba innumerable times for meetings and conferences, including as part of the National Security Archive’s delegations to the 40th anniversary conferences with Fidel Castro on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

As a leading critic of hostile U.S. policies toward Cuba, Wayne Smith appeared in many televised interviews. He frequently labeled U.S. efforts to sanction and pressure Cuba as "absurd." 

For Smith, freedom to travel to Cuba was a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Over the years, he took creative and strategic action to challenge U.S. restrictions on travel, including engaging in open civil disobedience. In December 1994, he organized a delegation of academics to openly visit Cuba without the prerequisite license—with the intent of getting fined and fostering a legal case to challenge the restrictions. “We traveled to Cuba to defend the rights of North Americans to go where they want—to Ireland, Switzerland, it doesn’t matter where,” Smith declared at a press conference in the Miami airport terminal, after the group had been detained on the plane and interrogated on the hot tarmac by Treasury Department agents. “We are ready to be prosecuted; we would like to be prosecuted because that will permit us to bring this case to the Supreme Court and win,” he declared. Ten years later, as director of Johns Hopkins University’s Cuba Exchange Program, Smith created and chaired The Emergency Coalition to Defend Educational Travel (ECDET) and then filed a lawsuit against the Treasury Department to challenge new Bush administration restrictions on academic study abroad programs in Cuba. “This is a case concerning academic freedom,” the suit stated, “specifically the right of professors and students of higher education to, free from government interference, organize, teach, and attend their institutions’ courses conducted abroad.” The suit was eventually dismissed by the U.S. District Court, and ECDET’s appeals were also rejected.

Wayne Smith’s penultimate visit to Cuba remains his most poignant. As part of Barack Obama’s and Raúl Castro’s December 17, 2014, agreement to normalize bilateral ties, formal diplomatic relations were restored in the summer of 2015. Accompanied by his daughter, Melinda, Smith attended the ceremony to officially reopen the U.S. Embassy—the same building that Smith had closed as a young attaché in January 1961. Walking with her father to the Embassy, Melinda Smith recalls all the Cubans in the streets reaching out to shake his hand, yelling out to him, “Gracias Smith. Gracias, gracias.” The raising of the American flag to re-inaugurate the Embassy represented “the pinnacle of his life’s work and he cried when it went up the pole,” Melinda remembered. “But the people’s recognition and gratitude for that work and personal sacrifice was what he most cherished and kept with him until the day he died.” 

SEE THE DOCUMENTS....

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2024-07-12/wayne-s-smith-his-declassified-legacy-cuba

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