Skip to main content

It began with a handshake




The writing had been on the wall for quite sometime, but it still took Congress and the media by surprise that the President actually normalized diplomatic relations and eased traveled restrictions with Cuba.  Opportunities date back to Jimmy Carter, but there had been too much political pressure against Democratic administrations to do so.  With the reviled Fidel Castro on the sideline, Pres. Obama finally seized the opportunity with Raul Castro to end this ridiculous embargo, which has plagued US relations with Latin America for decades.

Of course, this latest executive decision was not received well among conservatives in Congress and in the media.  Marco Rubio offered a particularly vitriolic retort,  but let's face it Cuba is no longer the bogeyman it once was, if it ever was.

We made a demon out of Castro because it suited us politically.  It allowed successive presidential administrations to bring the Cold War closer to home.  Conservatives had all the justification they needed in the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though the US had previously positioned nuclear warheads in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union.  Kennedy was able to "stare down" Khrushchev by promising to remove the US warheads from Turkey, which he did after the Soviet Union had removed its warheads from Cuba.  Tit for tat, as was so often the case during the Cold War.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US maintained the same Cold War attitude toward Cuba, despite what were seen as largely positive signs coming out of Cuba for normalization of relations.  However, the shooting down of two "civilian" planes by Castro in 1996 led to the Helms-Burton Act, further freezing relations with Cuba.  Clinton tried to ease those restrictions in the wake of Pope John Paul II's historic visit to Cuba in 1998, but his measures only went so far given a recalcitrant Republican Congress.

The Helms-Burton Act is still in effect, so Obama cannot lift the trade embargo without Congress's consent, which seems unlikely in the immediate future.  However, American business interests will most likely push Congress to lift these restrictions as they smell a new market in Cuba.  The 1996 Act is regarded as one of the most heinous set of foreign policy restrictions passed in the last 20 years, and seems pathetically antiquated given that we are one of the few countries not to have normal relations with Cuba, pretty much negating the intended effect of the embargo.

What it has done is split families and engender hostilities between Cuba and exiles living in the United States.  Rubio represents the conservative wing of those Cuban exiles, which once commanded a strong influence in American politics.  This latest action by Obama indicates that this influence has waned and that we have truly entered a "new chapter" in our relations with Cuba. To think it all began with a handshake.


Comments

  1. Marco Rubio is a Cuban-American with visions of becoming President himself. This surprise shift in U.S. Cuban relations must be an especially bitter pill for him to swallow. For the GOP in general, it undercuts their strategy to cast Obama as a weak leader without a plan.

    Craig

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not to mention it undercuts his base of support. The Cuban American influence in politics is not as strong as it once was, influencing Democratic thinking as well. Clinton relied on exiled Cuban money and votes in Miami to take Florida during the 1992 primaries.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rubio is a phony. Everyone knows that it was economic trades and diplomacy is what stimulated reform in the old Soviet bloc. It could have worked just as easily in stimulating reform in Cuba. Had relations been normalized Cuba would have been democratic and enjoying far greater economic prosperity than it has today.

    ReplyDelete
  4. By the way, in my youth Cubano beisbol players were among my faves in the MLB. Luis Tiant, Leo Cardenas, and Tony Perez were among them. I can hardly wait to see them come back to baseball - when it happens the majority of players will be Latino and we will have an even better quality of game.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great scene from Seinfeld,

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e7LicRweOg

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!