Wayne S. Smith, a leading critic of the Cuba embargo, has died at 91
Wayne S. Smith, a longtime State Department expert on Cuba who, after resigning in protest of the U.S. embargo on the island in 1982, led efforts to restore ties between Washington and Havana for nearly four decades, died June 28 at his home in New Orleans. He was 91.
According to his daughter, Melinda Smith Ulloa, complications from Alzheimer’s disease were the cause.
For more than 24 years after joining the Foreign Service in 1958, Mr. Smith was America’s man in Havana, both physically in the Cuban capital and from an office in Washington.
Later, after leaving the State Department, he used his extensive experience to wage a sustained campaign against the U.S. strategy of isolating Cuba, while simultaneously leading private and congressional delegations to the island in an effort to initiate dialogue.
“He was one of the main spokesmen for the normalization of relations,” William Leo Grande, an expert on Cuba at the American University in Washington, said in an interview.
Mr. Smith was a witty and agile writer, producing numerous op-eds, magazine essays and books, including a memoir-cum-history, “The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of U.S.-Cuban Relations Since 1957,” published in 1987.
“Cuba seems to have the same effect on American governments,” he liked to say, “as the full moon once had on werewolves.”
Mr. Smith first arrived in Cuba during the revolution against the government of Fulgencio Batista. After the government fell on January 1, 1959, he oversaw the evacuation of American citizens from Cuba, including future actress Kathleen Turner, whose father worked at the embassy.
He became an outspoken critic within the State Department of America’s hardening stance toward Cuba, and was among officials selected by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to reopen relations. Two years later, Carter sent him to Havana to head the United States Interests Section, which represented the U.S. in lieu of an embassy.
Mr. Smith was no fan of the Cuban regime. But he believed in the power of diplomacy and dialogue, and his own experience convinced him that the embargo was self-defeating and antithetical to American interests.
The arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House heralded a hardening of US policy toward Cuba, based in part on the assessment that Fidel Castro, the island’s leader, was supplying weapons to leftist guerrillas in Central America.
Mr. Smith sent a series of critical cables to the Foreign Office; the Foreign Office responded by attempting to transfer him to a new post in Uganda. Furious, he resigned in protest in August 1982.
Weeks later, he published a jeremiad in Foreign Policy magazine accusing the administration of “myopia” on Cuba for continuing a long tradition of mistakes.
“The administration is determined to repeat the mistakes of the past,” he wrote. “The handling of the Cuban problem is as hackneyed as it is unsuccessful, and evokes a strong sense of déjà vu.”
Wayne Sanford Smith was born on August 16, 1932, in the small town of Seguin, Texas, east of San Antonio. His mother, Opal (Baldwin) Smith, managed the home; his father, Paul Smith, was an oil field engineer, a job that took the family around Texas and Oklahoma during Wayne’s childhood.
After graduating from high school at 16, he convinced his father to sign papers allowing him to join the Marines as a minor. He served in the Korean War and then as a drill instructor at Parris Island, S.C., one of the Marines’ primary training sites.
In 1953 he was honorably discharged and enrolled at Mexico City College (now part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico) on a football scholarship.
In 1957 he joined the State Department, where he worked on Cuban and Latin American affairs. He passed the Foreign Service exam in 1958.
He married Roxanna Phillips, also a State Department employee, in 1958, just before they were sent to Cuba — their trip south, by car and boat, became their honeymoon. She died in 2014.
He is survived by his daughter, their son Sanford and two grandchildren. A previous marriage, to Jacqueline Richard, ended in divorce and a son from that union, Michael Smith, predeceased him.
Mr. Smith also served on assignments in Argentina and Brazil. He received two master’s degrees from Columbia, in philosophy and international relations, both in 1962. He also earned a Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University in 1977.
After retiring from government, he served as a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, taught at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and in 1992 joined the Center for International Policy, a progressive think tank, as a senior fellow.
The embargo against Cuba remains in place, and in that sense Mr. Smith did not live long enough to see his efforts succeed. But in 2015, the United States resumed relations with Cuba and reopened the embassy. Mr. Smith was in Havana to attend the flag-raising ceremony.
“Cuba was my life,” he said in a video interview with The New York Times in 2015. “I was there when we broke, so I would love to be there again when we raise the Stars and Stripes over the old embassy. It will be a beautiful day for all of us, but especially for me, because I was there when we lowered the flag.”
