President Obama’s decision to visit to Cuba and his call to end the U.S. embargo bring me joy. It’s time to “normalize” relationships between our two countries.
But what does normalizing mean between the capitalist super power and tiny island socialist republic 90 miles from the Florida coast? A return to normal or a new kind of normal?
The President’s speech this morning is disappointing. I couldn’t help thinking of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States when he poked the President in the eye in a speech aimed at the American people. This morning Barack Obama did the same in Havana.
The President says he knows the history. He may. But the history he knows is different from the one the Cubans know. When he talks about opening up Cuba, opening up Cuban markets so that Cubans can buy goods and have 21st century jobs, he ignores the reason for the Cuban revolution. The Batista regime was a U.S. puppet. Havana and Veradero Beach were playgrounds for North American capitalists, elites, and businessmen who gambled in the casinos and vacationed on the white sands few Cubans – except for the table-servers, maids, bartenders – ever got to touch.
Cuba was not a democracy under Batista and his predecessors. It was a dictatorship – AND its economy was free-market capitalism with egregious disparities of income and wealth. The majority of Cubans were as poor as the masses in other Latin American banana republics.
An article in The Independent provides the history of the challenges and successes of the post-revolution Cuban government’s literacy campaign and Cuba’s highly praised universal education system.
Will normalizing relations return Cuba to the pre-socialist inequalities that caused the revolution in 1959? Will it mean a return to “normal” – in which the superpower calls the shots while the little brother watches our president embarrass him from center stage?
Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, March 22, 2016
Views from the Edge 
And remembering that much of this happened in a period when everyone was primed to be scared of Communism on our doorstep… That is something that a large portion of our population has no memory of… Fear drives us to many unworthy situations.
LikeLike
Unfortunately our culture is often amnesial, if that’s a word. We can’t remember what we did and why we did it, and when we don’t or can’t we repeat, repeat, repeat the past.
LikeLike
History is not primarily facts. History consists of the stories we tell. Our mythology. There are some facts, but far more interpretation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Marilyn, I agree. The shared colonial history of which the President spoke does bind us at the hip. What’s missing, however, is the subsequent history when Cuba became, for all intents and purposes, a colony of the U.S. before the Cuban Revolution. I listen also to the use of the term “dissidents” used by our press, and wonder whether the same word would be used if Castro were to meet with dissenters and critics while visiting the United States. Are those who’ve been arrested during Black Lives Matter events dissidents? We don’t call them that. We call them protesters. History is, as you say, far more about interpretation, the stories we tell ourselves. Thanks for chiming in.
LikeLike
What can one say except good for you, doing something that the media don’t seem to be doing. Not in any notable way, anyway.
LikeLike
They won’t do it, Mona. The media are corporate instruments. And the speech was directed, in part, toward easing the fears back home that Obama that he is an anti-democratic socialist. His speech will play well with the American business community looking for investment opportunities.
LikeLike
I guess this response would be easier to get if it were broken into a couple of sentences. Are you saying he proved himself to be a closet socialist?
LikeLike
Thanks for pointing out the reason for confusion. I edited the earlier response. Hope it’s clear.
LikeLike