We’ve seen “movement” so often in the past but, like Charlie Brown and the football, here’s to hope that maybe this time things will actually happen.
It’s about time.
There seems to be movement in the half-century — half-century!! — gridlock between the United States and Cuba. Through the administrations of Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama relations have been poisonous between the neighboring peoples of the United States and Cuba.
Everyone’s at fault. Like family grudges, long-forgotten actions linger to poison people who should be friends. The Cuban government has oppressed its people and made a mess of things; the Cuban exile community has exercised disproportional political clout to ensure that no relaxations of the American embargo are considered; the U.S. government has relentlessly tightened the screws, punishing the Cuban people alone in its disdain for the Cuban leadership. It is crazy.
For more than 50 years. Over that span we have gone into hot wars against nations all around the world, have been in cold war frenzy against dozens of others. Yet, in time, we work it out with them. We are now great pals to the Russians and the Chinese, the Grenadians, the Panamanians. We have open and important dealings with the Vietnamese. We try to deal with the snarly world of the Mideast.From earlier, we are now the strongest allies with the Germans and Japanese. We try to deal even with the North Koreans.
But never Cuba.
I visited Cuba just a while back and saw with my own eyes the harsh reality of the imbroglio between Havana and Washington (or Miami). The people suffer. The people are poor. The people are divided from one another. The people lack basic opportunities. The governments, of course, lack for nothing whatever.
But now, keep your fingers crossed, there may be some small movement.
The Havana government agrees to release some of the many held there as political prisoners. A committee in the U.S. House votes to relax travel constraints between the nations. People are talking instead of yelling. A hunger strike is called off. The snarls are sheathed. Cautious voices from within Cuba, like the brave Yoanni Sanchez, hope out loud.
Yes, we have been here before. But maybe times are changing, a little. American business and agriculture leaders — forces to possibly balance the Cuban-American zealots whose money and intensity has for so long ruled on U.S-Cuban matters — have moved deeper into the matter, recognizing that the long-standing, mad policies benefit no one and punish everyone.
How long does this horrid thing have to go on?
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