Some diplomacy data points I have picked up during my trip to Havana in the last couple of days:

~ There are 65% more non-immigrant visas processed by the US State Department for Cubans wanting to travel into the United States this year than last year.

~ The average non-immigrant visa profile is someone in their 70s going over to see relatives in the US

~ The backlog for non-immigrant visas in the US Interests Section (Embassy-lite) used to be more than 2 years, the longest in the world. The new head of the US Interests Section, Jonathan Farrar, worked with the Cubans who help staff a significant portion of his operation, and they added a "second shift" to process more visas each day. But now the demand is so large that even with the second shift, the backlog for visa interviews is two years and three months

~ The US Interests Section in Havana is restricted in the bilateral agreements between Cuba and the US to 51 employees. The representative of the US Department of State employs about 300 Cuban citizens to help in its consular work -- and these staff are managed and hired by Cuban government authorities.

~ If the travel ban on Americans traveling to Cuba is lifted, there will have to be a structural adjustment in the number of American diplomats permitted into Cuba. Some have suggested moving the number to 60 staff would work -- but given the broad opportunities for social, cultural, political and economic engagement, this writer thinks that an upward adjusted staff target should be about 75 US personnel.

~ Spouses of American diplomats assigned to Cuba can work at the Interests Section and not count against the personnel head count. The same is true of the Cuban Interests Section staff and spouses in Washington, DC.

~ Senior officials at the US Interests Section in Havana report to TWN that there is a marked, highly noticeable change in the attitude and "posture" of the Cuban government towards US State Department and other US officials assigned to the embassy-lite operation in Havana. They state that the Cuban authorities are constructively engaging with US government personnel -- and this just didn't happen before, according to them.

~ American officials were told by the Cuban government, however, that they could not attend an environmental summit in which several leading members of the Environmental Defense Fund from Washington attended. In contrast, there was a major agricultural products/economic fair this week which US government officials stationed at the Interests Section were permitted to attend. According the State Department, this is a welcome change in the climate which is less and less constrained.

~ US officials have also been permitted recently to begin visiting various Cuban-Americans held in Cuban prisons and to visit them as part of the consular duties of the Interests Section. This used to be off the list of what was permitted, but the Cuban government has become supportive of US contact with ten or so prisoners who have dual nationality.

~ The US government has had constructive meetings with Cuban government officials on migration (the first meeting hosted by the New School in New York City) and on direct mail service. Cuban government officials have informed TWN that there are a number of other key areas of "common interest" -- such as narcotics interdiction, alien smuggling, air traffic control, weather analysis and reporting, environmental policy that could be on the agenda as well -- but the Cubans report that the US has not yet responded.

~ On the subject of bilateral discussions on narcotics and drug smuggling, US government officials tell TWN that the US is actually quite interested and is still waiting for the Cuban government's proposal. (i.e., the ball is in Havana's court -- but I'm not sure Havana sees it that way)

For those who have the sense that things are not moving in the atmospherics of US-Cuba relations, that impression is wrong. Things have not stalled, at least from my perspective.

After discussions with both senior Cuban government officials and US officials, there is quite a bit of new opportunity, relaxed posturing, proposals, micro progress on a number of fronts that is not designed to be in the public eye or the media -- that is consistent with two parties who have long not trusted one another trying to construct a different kind of relationship that needs confidence-building steps and healthier interaction than has historically been the case.

There is much that could still take US-Cuba relations back off the rails again, as one diplomat said, but right now there is much that appears promising.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

President Obama has missed yet another chance to pressure Congress to end the self-inflicted damage of a "unilateral embargo" against Cuba and to take American foreign policy writ large in a new, more constructive direction.

Today, the President officially extended the trade embargo against Cuba for another year -- putting the US at odds again with roughly 183 nations that vote against the embargo each year in the United Nations.

The President's global mystique has been based on a perception that he would shift the Bush era gravitational forces in more constructive directions -- that he would support engagement and exchange as tools of American foreign policy in order to try and get better outcomes in international affairs.

But by continuing an embargo that undermines American interests and even US national security, he chooses the continuity of failure over the opportunity for change and over his own principles.

By arguing that "he will not lift the embargo until Cuba undertakes democratic and economic reforms", Obama is perpetuating a fallacy that conditionality produces results in Cuba's domestic internal affairs. That approach has failed for decades -- and needs to be dropped.

The President has made some progress on Cuba -- but its mostly progress that the most hawkish, right wing elements of the Cuban-American community desired, not progress that was based on the interests of the nation as a whole.

Obama needs to fix his course on Cuba, or despite the modest creep forward recently -- helping a single class of ethnic Americans access Cuba but keeping up prohibitions on other American citizens, he will be added to a long roster of Presidents who maintained a Cold War in the America's backyard that is, as David Rothkopf called it, "the edsel" of US foreign policy.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Anyone who knows New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson knows he can be a handful, can be complicated, and can too often want the story about him more than others. Those are characteristics of most who aspire to the presidency.

However, this week during his trip to Cuba allegedly for agricultural trade promotion reasons, Governor Richardson demonstrated why he is such a vital national asset in America's diplomatic game.

Richardson has a knack for dealing with the harder challenges in international affairs -- often extracting American captives from totalitarian regimes but also understanding that in some cases what the game is about is not getting some journalist or innocent released from a gulag but rather using that engagement to create "possibilities" in America's engagement with that nation that did not exist before.

My devout Republican friend Phil Peters writes at his blog, The Cuban Triangle, about RIchardson's recent diplomatic foray to Havana very positively.

Peters reports (and here is a good CBS News clip of some of this in Richardson's press conference):

1. Governor Richardson concludes his visit by saying he will report to President Obama and by offering to set up a dialogue between the Cuban government and Cuban Americans.

2. Richardson urges Cuba to act, "especially in the humanitarian area," and wants both Washington and Havana to ease travel restrictions. "Normalizing relations is going to take time, it is a complicated thing and there are a lot of issues to address...It will take time, but we have to do it," he said.

3. Richardson said that the United States has suggested that the two governments drop restrictions on their diplomats' movements, and he urged Cuban officials to agree to the idea.

If its reporting is correct, Mexico's La Jornada stated that Richardson offered a "plan of reciprocal actions to normalize relations with Cuban authorities."

Let's call this "The Richardson Plan."

From the Cuban Triangle report on what we are now calling "The Richardson Plan":

The plan would defer larger and more contentious issues and start with the two sides taking humanitarian steps.

The United States would put into effect the announced Obama policy ending restrictions on family travel and remittances; allow greater sports, cultural, scientific, academic, and business exchanges; and allow Americans in general to travel to the island.

Cuba would end "bureaucratic restrictions and high fees" that make family visits more costly, accept a U.S. proposal to end the restrictions that limit both sides' diplomats to the Havana and Washington capital areas, and start an "informal dialogue" with Cuban Americans.

Regarding his own role:

Richardson also said that he sees no need for a U.S. special envoy and doesn't think he will have a role in U.S. diplomacy toward Cuba.

A couple of quick reactions from TWN's corner.

First of all, Bill Richardson is the right guy to upend the institutional inertia at the Department of State and the House Foreign Affairs Committee in charting a new, more constructive course in US-Cuba relations. He gets this issue better than any other major player in US politics and made this clear as well during the presidential debates and his campaign for the White House.

His modest statement that America did not need a "special envoy" -- and did not need him -- for this challenge is incorrect.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "promised" Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar a "full policy review" during detailed responses to written questions (pdf) posed by Lugar to the then nominee Clinton.

Nothing at all of consequence has happened with this review. There is no broad re-assessment of opportunities and challenges in the US-Cuba relationship, nor a new assessment of what was achieved or not regionally and internationally from Obama's recent Summit of the Americas outreach to Cuba and his efforts to lighten travel and remittance restrictions for Cuban-Americans.

At this point, Secretary of State Clinton has a State Department that is in "non-compliance" with the oversight committee of the US Senate that measures and observes the administration's actions because of the failure to perform this promised "policy review" -- behind which Clinton hid when not responding to a number of important questions.

That is why Bill Richardson is needed.

There are many decades of institutionalized neglect and built in inertia in the US-Cuba relationship that prevent the State Department from not only "seeing what is possible" in a restructured relationship -- but in deploying a strategy that moves us squarely and definitively in a new direction.

Travel for Cuban-Americans is not enough. That is a discriminatory executive order that creates a class of action and opportunities for one class of ethnic Americans and denies equal treatment for other Americans. Obama should know better.

But despite Richardson's own references to Cuban-Americans in his commentary in Cuba, he has frequently endorsed the removal of travel restrictions for all Americans. That is the policy that an American democratic government should embrace.

As Republican Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ-6) said on one occasion at the New America Foundation:

Communist governments are supposed to be the ones that restrict the travel of their citizens -- not the government of the United States of America where people are supposed to be free. But it is our government -- the United States government -- that is imposing restrictions on American citizens. This is wrong.

Barack Obama should take a step back from the US-Cuba question and realize that changing US-Cuba relations much more than he has remains the lowest hanging fruit among foreign policy possibilities for him. US-Cuba relations has always mattered far beyond the relationship itself and had important "echo" impacts on broader world affairs.

It's time that Obama realized that this one is easier than it looks. People to people exchange. Travel. Scientific, cultural and educational exchange. All of these are the pathway to taking the US-Cuba relationship in a new and healthy direction.

Drop the counterproductive, compulsive obsessiveness with "conditionality." It does not work and undermines American interests.

Those who wanted conditionality have achieved nothing the last five decades except freezing the relationship in a Cold War status quo that must be shattered.

And the best way to shatter it is to incrementally pull out the foundations of the "theory of the embargo" and to rebuild some degree of trust between regimes that may not learn to like each other for a long time -- but who nonetheless could demonstrate a practical kind of engagement that few thought possible even a few years ago.

Obama should ask Bill Richardson to be his envoy, sherpa and nudge to drive US-Cuba relations beyond the anachronistic Cold War trap they have been in towards new terms of engagement fit for the 21st century and Obama's eventual foreign policy legacy.

-- Steve Clemons

Extra reading: For those interested, my colleague Patrick Doherty's work on a set of humanitarian protocols tied to hurricane diplomacy with former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson is gaining some real traction.

Yesterday, the New America Foundation and the National Security Network delivered the following letter to the White House, signed by some of the most respected former senior officers of the United States Armed Forces.

In the document pasted above and offered in text below, these senior officers urge the President to go beyond his initial statement, issued yesterday, repeal the full travel ban on all Americans and engage the Cuban government in dialogue on key bi-lateral security issues.

From:
General James T. Hill (Ret.)
General Barry R. McCaffrey (Ret.)
General Johnnie E. Wilson (Ret.)
Lieutenant General John G. Castellaw (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Daniel W. Christman (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Robert G. Gard (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy (Ret.)
Major General Paul D. Eaton (Ret.)
Rear Admiral Donald J. Guter (Ret.)
Rear Admiral John D. Hutson (Ret.)
Brigadier General John Adams (Ret.)
Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson (Ret.)

To:
The Honorable Barack Obama, President of the United States

As former senior officers of the United States armed forces, we are writing today to encourage you to support the Congressional initiatives to end the ban on travel to Cuba for all Americans.

The current policy of isolating Cuba has failed, patently, to achieve our ends. Cuba ceased to be a military threat decades ago. At the same time, Cuba has intensified its global diplomatic and economic relations with nations as diverse as China, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, and members of the European Union. It is hard to characterize such global engagement as isolation.

Though economically weak, the Castro government has kept the broad support of its people by responding to economic shocks and providing universal access to health care and education. There will be no counter-revolution any time soon.
Instead, the current embargo serves more to prop up the Castro regime and shows no sign of triggering a popular uprising against the communist government it runs. When hard times fall on the Cuban people, inevitably, the Cuban government blames the U.S. ―bloqueo‖ for the suffering. And the people, with a strong sense of national sovereignty, rally to their flag.

Even worse, the embargo has inspired a significant diplomatic movement against U.S. policy. As military professionals, we understand that America's interests are best served when the United States is able to attract the support of other nations to our cause. When world leaders overwhelmingly cast their vote in the United Nations against the embargo and visit Havana to denounce American policy, it is time to change the policy, especially after 50 years of failure in attaining our goals.

The congressional initiative to lift the travel ban for all Americans is an important first step toward lifting the embargo, a policy more likely to bring change to Cuba. It begins to move the United States in an unambiguous direction toward the kind of policy--based on principled engagement and proportional and discriminate action that was the hallmark of your presidential campaign. Combined with renewed engagement with Havana on key security issues such as narcotics trafficking, immigration, airspace and Caribbean security, we believe the U.S. will be on a path to rid ourselves of the dysfunctional policy your administration has inherited.

It is a clear cut case. During the Cold War, the U.S. encouraged Americans to travel to the Soviet bloc resulting in more information, more contact, and more freedom for captive peoples, and ultimately the end of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War itself. This idea of engagement underlies our current policies toward Iran, Syria and North Korea all much graver concerns to the United States - where Americans are currently free to travel. By sending our best ambassadors--the American people--to engage their Cuban neighbors, we have a much better chance of influencing the eventual course of Cuban affairs. Broader economic engagement with the island through additional commercial and people-to-people contacts will in time promote a more pluralist and open society. And, by actually striking down an element of the embargo, that signal will be sent to the government in Havana.

Mr. President, around the world, leaders are calling for a real policy shift that delivers on the hope you inspired in your campaign. Cuba offers the lowest-hanging fruit for such a shift and would be a move that would register deeply in the minds of our partners and competitors around the world.

-- Patrick Doherty