Carter and Cuba:
A Legacy of Dedicated Diplomacy Toward Normalization

Washington, D.C., January 15, 2025 - The late President Jimmy Carter, who was laid to rest last week after a state funeral in Washington, D.C., adamantly believed that the U.S. embargo on Cuba was “a deprivation of American civil liberties” and called restrictions on trade and travel “unconscionable,” according to an interview published for the first time today by the National Security Archive. The interview recorded Carter’s continuing commitment to normalizing relations with Cuba long after he had attempted, through secret diplomacy, to do so during his presidency. “I felt that it was time for us to have completely normal relations with Cuba,” as Carter reflected on his time in the White House. “And I felt then, as I do now, that the best way to bring about a change in its Communist regime was to have open trade and commerce, and visitation, and diplomatic relations with Cuba.”

The Archive posted an audio file and transcription of the exclusive interview—conducted by the co-authors of Back Channel to Cuba, William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, at the Carter Center in Atlanta in July 2004—along with a revealing selection of formerly TOP SECRET White House, NSC and State Department records on the Carter administration’s back-channel efforts to negotiate better bilateral ties with Cuba. The documentation covers what one secret briefing paper described as “the extremely complex and nettlesome” issues in U.S.-Cuba relations during Carter’s tenure as president, the secret meetings between emissaries, as well as Carter’s post-presidency efforts to act as a secret interlocutor between Washington and Havana to resolve the 1994 balsero crisis.

The declassified history of Carter’s focus on back-channel diplomacy remains relevant this week as the Biden administration dramatically announced its decision to remove Cuba from the list of states that support terrorism and lift several punitive Trump-era sanctions. Less than a week before Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Biden administration’s effort to improve U.S.-Cuba relations comes as the Senate Foreign Relations committee holds confirmation hearings for secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio, the leading proponent of applying “maximum pressure” on Cuba. Rubio’s nomination hearings are sure to raise questions about the wisdom of punitive measures in the wake of President Biden’s dramatic, last minute, lifting of sanctions imposed during the first Trump administration.

The Carter-Cuba Initiative

“I have concluded that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba,” President Carter instructed his national security team just weeks after taking office in 1977. “To this end, we should begin direct and confidential talks in a measured and careful fashion with representatives of the Government of Cuba.” Known as NSC-6, this directive marked the first time a U.S. president had formally initiated a comprehensive effort toward a rapprochement with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary regime.

Declassified documents posted today include a secret, 17-page Presidential Review Memorandum (PRM) on U.S. interests and challenges in attempting to normalize relations with Cuba. Among the “many compelling reasons” it listed: “Lessening of Cuban dependence on the Soviet Union,” giving Cuba “added incentives to cease its foreign adventures in Africa,” and demonstrating U.S. “support for the universalist principles in diplomatic relations and make a major gesture to the Third World which sees our posture toward Cuba as symbolic of great-power aggression.” Normalized relations would also “enable us to pursue important U.S. interests with Cuba such as human rights” and “open up trade opportunities in a relatively small but natural market for us,” according to the PRM.

But “the difficulties in achieving full normalization should not be minimized,” the PRM stated with a prescient warning. “The process of resolving differences with Cuba will be difficult and tensions and problems will remain even after relations have been restored.”

Initially, Carter’s directive set off a flurry of positive interaction and results. The President made a series of gestures toward Cuba, including lifting restrictions on U.S. travel to the island. Cuban and U.S. delegations held a series of meetings to sign a fishing treaty and take a major step toward re-establishing formal diplomatic ties by opening “Interest Sections” in Washington and Havana. The talks have “gone unexpectedly well,” Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher reported on progress in August 1977.

But as Washington and Havana turned to thornier issues, such as Cuba’s expanding military role in Africa and Castro’s demand that the embargo be lifted as a pre-condition for serious negotiations, communications between the two countries stalled. Impatient, Carter bypassed his own national security team and sent a personal emissary, Coca-Cola CEO Paul Austin, to speak with Fidel Castro in February 1978. “I have hoped it would be possible for you and me to move toward full normalization of relations,” read a signed note from Carter that Austin gave to Castro, “and I would like to see progress made in removing the obstacles that impede forward movement.” Austin returned with a note of noncommittal appreciation from Castro to Carter. But both sides subsequently agreed to restart the back-channel diplomacy to find common ground.

The Secret Negotiations

Within weeks of the Austin’s mission to Havana, Castro and Carter initiated a series of secret negotiating meetings that stretched from April 1978 to September 1980. Initial meetings took place in downtown Manhattan; subsequent talks were held in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Cuernavaca and in Havana with Castro himself. U.S. negotiators included NSC and State Department officials, notably Brzezinski’s Latin America specialist, Robert Pastor, and Under Secretary of State, Peter Tarnoff; Castro was represented by his top aide, José Luis Padron, and, at times, a military intelligence officer, Tony de la Guardia. (A State Department interpreter, Stephanie van Reigersberg, was also present at a number of the meetings and drafted the memoranda of conversations that recorded them for posterity.)

Following the Castro-Austin meeting, U.S. and Cuban officials met secretly eleven times:

**April 14, 1978: Deputy National Security Advisor David Aaron and NSC staff member Robert Gates met with Fidel Castro’s emissary José Luis Padrón at La Côte Basque restaurant in New York. (Gates secretly wore a wire under his clothing to record the conversation.) To revive the normalization effort, Cuba was prepared to release a large number of political prisoners, Aaron countered that Cuban military intervention in Africa was “the principal obstacle to an improvement.”

**June 15, 1978: Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Newsom met with Padrón and Tony de la Guardia, a Cuban intelligence officer, at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. The talks continued to focus on a prisoner release and Cuba’s role in Africa.

**July 5, 1978: Newsom and State Department Executive Secretary Peter Tarnoff met with Padrón and de la Guardia at Newsom’s home in Washington, D.C. The talks begin to focus on broader issues to be resolved, among them U.S. property claims and Cuba’s counterclaims generated by economic losses from the trade embargo. Padron reiterated that Cuba was willing to find “peaceful and negotiated solutions to the problem areas in Africa on a country-by-country basis.” Newsom told him that the United States would admit released prisoners, but he was not authorized to discuss the embargo.

**August 8, 1978: Newsom and Aaron met with Padrón and José Antonio Arbesú, from the Communist Party Central Committee staff, at a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. At this meeting, Cuba’s calls for Puerto Rican independence at the United Nations became a point of contention, and Carter’s negotiators reiterated U.S. objections to Cuba’s military presence in Africa. Padrón replied that Cuba would always support independence for her “sister nation” and reminded Aaron that Cuba was in Africa at the invitation of “legally constituted governments.” When Padrón tried to raise the issue of the U.S. embargo, the U.S. side refused to discuss it.

**October 28-29, 1978: Newsom and Aaron met with Padrón and Arbesú at the Hotel Villa del Conquistador, Cuernavaca, Mexico. The U.S. offered a new proposal of incrementally lifting the embargo: Aaron said that the United States was willing to remove restrictions on food and medicine if Cuba would withdraw from Angola and Ethiopia. Padrón repeated that Cuba’s role in Africa was not negotiable but he urged that their next meeting be in Havana so that Fidel Castro himself could participate.

**December 2-3, 1978: Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff and NSC Director for Latin America Robert Pastor met with Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, Communist Party Central Committee Secretary for Foreign Affairs Raúl Valdés Vivo, Padrón, and Arbesú at the Palace of the Revolution, Havana, Cuba. The talks focus on a proposed prisoner swap—several CIA agents imprisoned in Cuba in return for four imprisoned Puerto Rican nationalists in the U.S. (In September 1979, Carter commuted the sentences of the Puerto Ricans and Castro released the CIA agents.) Tarnoff reiterated U.S. concerns about Cuba’s role in Africa, and Rodríguez reiterated Cuba’s support for negotiated settlements to the conflicts there but stated that Cuba would never accede to U.S. demands.

**December 3-4, 1978: Tarnoff and NSC Director for Latin America Robert Pastor met with President Fidel Castro, for more than five hours at the Palace of the Revolution, Havana, Cuba. Castro began by crediting President Carter who had “created a favorable atmosphere” for dialogue. But then “someone got the idea of fomenting agitation in regard to the presence of Cuban military and civilian personnel in Africa,” Castro complained. He refused the linkage between lifting the embargo and withdrawing Cuba’s troops in Africa. “We have never discussed with you the activities of the United States throughout the entire world,” Fidel pointed out. Perhaps it is because the United States is a great power, it feels it can do what it wants…. Perhaps it is idealistic of me, but I never accepted the universal prerogatives of the United States. I never accepted and never will accept the existence of a different law and different rules.” In his report to President Carter summarizing the meeting, Brzezinski wrote that “Castro was clearly speaking directly to you and he decided that this was the time for him to vent twenty years of rage which had been bottled up inside of him.”

**January 16-17, 1980: Tarnoff, Pastor, and Wayne Smith, chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Interests Section, meet with Fidel Castro, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, and Padrón, at the Palace of the Revolution, Havana, Cuba. After a yearlong hiatus in direct talks, U.S. officials revisit the dialogue with Castro. Most of the discussion centered on the deteriorating international situation—especially the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The U.S. delegation urged Cuba to denounce the invasion, but Castro refused, arguing that Soviet aid had been “a matter of life and death” for Cuba’s survival. The participants discussed Africa once again and Cuba’s support for revolutionary movements in Central America. Castro expressed Cuba’s willingness to withdraw Cuban troops from Angola if there was a negotiated peace settlement in Angola and Namibia. As the meeting concluded, Castro complained that the U.S. was encouraging boat hijackings by limiting legal migration and never prosecuting hijackers. If this continued, he advised, he would be “free of any obligation to control those who want to leave illegally”—a stark warning of the Mariel boatlift to come.

**June 17-18, 1980: Tarnoff, Pastor, and Smith meet with Padrón, Arbesú, and Vice-Minister of Foreign Relations Ricardo Alarcón, at a Cuban government protocol house, Havana, Cuba. After several months of the Mariel boat lift, the dialogue has entered a crisis stage. Tarnoff opens the meeting affirming Washington's desire to “eventually normalize relations,” but the “pressing issue” of the Mariel migration crisis had to be resolved first, and improvement in relations would still depend on Cuba responding to U.S. concerns about its relationship with the Soviet Union and its role in Africa and Central America. Padrón expressed “dissatisfaction and frustration” that the U.S. would only discuss the issues it was interested in and not Cuba’s, especially the embargo. The talks made no progress toward resolving Mariel. When Pastor and Tarnoff return to Washington, they report to Carter that the dialogue with Cuba has reached a “dead-end.”

**September 3, 1980: Carter sends his personal emissary, Paul Austin, back to Havana with a concrete proposal to end the Mariel boatlift in return for a promise of comprehensive talks after the U.S. elections take place in November. But unbeknownst to Carter, Austin has developed Alzheimer’s disease and is no longer a trustworthy interlocutor. Instead of presenting the proposal, Austin tells Fidel that there should be a summit between Carter and Castro and that Carter is ready to lift the embargo before Christmas.

**September 12, 1980: Tarnoff met with Fidel Castro and Padrón in Havana, Cuba. Tarnoff began by explaining that proposals made during the September trip by Coca Cola CEO J. Paul Austin did not represent U.S. policy. President Carter, Tarnoff said, would be willing to open a broad dialogue with Cuba on the embargo and normalizing relations if the migration crisis could be resolved. President Castro responded that he would take Carter’s word “on good faith” and would close the port of Mariel without a “formal commitment” on broader talks, which he subsequently did.

Post Presidency Diplomacy

The planned revival of talks to restore relations after the election never took place because Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan, a strident cold warrior who opposed normalization of ties to Cuba. In the interview with Kornbluh and LeoGrande, the former president expressed his frustration at the lost opportunity. “I think in retrospect, knowing what I know since I left the White House, I should have gone ahead and been more flexible in dealing with Cuba and established full diplomatic relations,” he reflected.

Former President Carter visits Fidel Castro in March 2011.

But during his long and active post-presidency, Carter remained engaged in diplomacy with Cuba. In August 1994, amidst another mass exodus known as the balsero crisis, Castro reached out to Carter to be an interlocutor with the Clinton White House to bring an end to the dangerous flow of small, flimsy rafts and boats carrying Cubans fleeing the island in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. For five days, Carter played the role of secret intermediary, and mediator, between Washington and Havana.

But after he spoke to President Clinton and suggested “minimum concessions” to key Cuban demands, Clinton unceremoniously removed the former president as a go-between, as a letter he wrote to Castro posted today reveals. “My hope is that you and American officials will be successful in finding some common ground on which to resolve the present crisis,” Carter’s message concluded, “and to prepare for a future resolution of long-term differences.”

Eight years later, in May 2002, Carter became the first U.S. president since the revolution—former or sitting—to visit Cuba; Castro met Carter on the tarmac, welcomed him with a red carpet as a Cuban band played the American national anthem. While in Cuba, Carter gave a nationally televised speech on human rights and democracy. “And later, to my surprise,” he recalled in the interview posted today, “they printed the entire text of my speech, and also the questions and answers, some of which were very deleterious to Castro, in Granma. It took [up] the whole paper. And the day after that, as we traveled around in Cuba, it was amazing how many people had a copy of that in their hand or in their pocket. So that was one thing that [Castro] did that I thought was very nice.”

Carter returned to Cuba in March 2011 for an exploratory effort to obtain the freedom of imprisoned USAID subcontractor Alan Gross. He was allowed to meet with Gross; and also met with the wives of the “Cuban Five”—five Cuban spies who had been incarcerated in the United States for over 13 years. During a press conference in Havana, he called for the release of the spies—and Alan Gross. He also publicly denounced the U.S. trade embargo as “a serious mistake that my government continues to make” and called for U.S. economic sanctions to be lifted “immediately.”

Then 86 years old, Carter remained committed to using his unique stature as the 39th president of the United States to pursue a goal that dated to the beginning of his presidency—a rapprochement with Cuba. “My dream is to see this issue resolved before I die,” Carter told his Cuban hosts during a private meeting in Havana. “I don’t know if that will happen.”