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AN old photograph of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro has lately been circulating on social media, with speech bubbles in which Che asks “When will relations with the US be restored?” and a chuckling Fidel responds: “When the United States has a black president and the pope is an Argentinean, like you.”
Recent developments on that front will presumably inject an extra dose of optimism into celebrations marking the 56th anniversary of the Cuban revolution tomorrow.
The simultaneous announcements in Havana and Washington predicating the inauguration of a new phase in ties took most observers by surprise. The preceding 18 months of negotiations were a well-kept secret.
The start of a new phase in US-Cuba ties surprised many.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama had indicated his willingness to push the reset button on ties with Cuba, and as president he has vaguely been reiterating the stance since 2009. Intriguingly, though, despite his perceived ‘softness’ towards Cuba, Obama won Florida in both 2008 and 2012.
This could partly be attributed to a phenomenon that the more percipient observers have been commenting on for several years: namely that younger Cuban-Americans tend to be considerably less blockheaded than their parents about the choices Cuba has made since 1959.
There is also a broad tendency to overlook the fact that the Cuban revolutionaries of that era, notwithstanding their disenchantment with imperialism, were perfectly willing to establish mutually respectful ties with Washington. They were disinclined, though, to pander to US diktat on the economic front, and the nationalisation of US-owned enterprises followed the refusal of American firms to refine crude oil obtained from the Soviet Union.
US designs on Cuba go back a long way, and between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was determined Cuban resistance to annexation that prevented the isle from turning into a second Puerto Rico. Periodic American intervention was almost taken for granted, though, and the dictatorship that Fidel Castro and his comrades overthrew 56 years ago epitomised a neocolonial relationship whereby US-based corporations controlled the Cuban economy and the American mafia operated the casinos and nightclubs in Havana.
There is a persistent school of thought that ascribes the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the failed attempt to invade Cuba in 1961 via the Bay of Pigs, essentially as payback for the broken vow from JFK’s dad that his son would restore mafia ascendancy in Havana if the underworld helped to elect him. JFK sensibly refused to provide US air cover for the CIA recruits sent into Cuba, and the following year also resisted the advice of generals eager to nuke Cuba after it emerged that the island was hosting Soviet nuclear missiles, choosing instead to negotiate with Nikita Khrushchev.
More than half a century later, it is still widely assumed that in the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between the superpowers, it was Khrushchev who blinked by agreeing to pull out the missiles. However, the Soviet leader crucially got JFK to agree that the US would desist from attempts to invade Cuba.
Washington has stuck by that undertaking, although it didn’t prevent it from pursuing assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, which of the two sides blinked in the lead-up to this month’s rapprochement remains a matter of perception, just as the consequences of the new deal remain open to conjecture.
Obama lacks the power to lift the economic blockade: only the US Congress can do that, and it will inevitably be reluctant to proceed under Republican control — although by no means are all Republicans opposed to an opening, albeit chiefly under the assumption that restored ties will enable the US to play a more dominant role in determining Cuba’s post-Castro future.
Obama himself channelled that line of thought in declaring that the change of tack was necessitated by the fact it hadn’t worked for more than 50 years, rather than because it was reprehensible.
For several decades now, an annual resolution against the blockade has won overwhelming support in the UN General Assembly, lately with only the US and Israel opposing it. It will be interesting to see which way the US votes in 2015.
The US president is meanwhile expected to use his executive powers to loosen the embargo, facilitate travel between the two countries and authorise the re-establishment of full diplomatic ties — even though some legislators have vowed to thwart funding for an embassy and congressional approval of a new ambassador.
On both sides, though, the recalcitrants are in a minority, and within Cuba there is substantial evidence that even those hungry for greater economic opportunities and a dose of glasnost are keen to retain the outstanding gains of the revolution, notably the region’s highest standard of education and a level of healthcare that extends to almost a knee-jerk deployment of Cuban doctors in disaster zones the world over.
Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2014
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