When President Barack Obama authorized reopening the Cuban embassy in Washington and U.S. embassy in Havana June 30 over GOP objections on Capitol Hill, a new era of U.S.-Cuban relations began. Cuba’s 89-year-old former leader Fidel Castro’s still around to talk about his 26th of July Movement which declared victory Jan. 1, 1959 over U.S.-backed dictator Fulgenia Batista. Fighting a five-year, five-month communist guerrilla war only 90 miles from Key West, raised the hackles of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration watched Castro’s communist revolution succeed under his watch. Two weeks before John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon Oct. 19, 1960 Eisenhower declared an embargo against Cuba, formally breaking off diplomatic and trade relations. Obama’s decision to reestablish relations after nearly 55 years is long overdue.
Once day before 70-year-old Secretary of State John Kerry was due to commemorate the opening on the U.S. embassy in Havana, Castro wrote in a local paper the U.S. owes Cuba millions for lost trade during the 55-year-embargo. Kennedy extended Eisenhower’s trade embargo Feb 7, 1962, a little more than year after taking office. Castro forgets how his revolutionary government, aided by his comrade Cuban Finance Minster Ernesto Ché Guevara, confiscated an estimated $ 6 billion in businesses and private property. When Kerry officially opens the U.S. embassy tomorrow, it’s no guarantee that conservatives on Capitol Hill, backed by the Cuban exile community, will allow complete diplomatic relations, including a permanent Cuban ambassador. While reluctantly watching Obama and Kerry move ahead restoring ties with Cuba, the GOP-controlled Congress won’t go along.
Castro’s throwing gasoline on already hot embers, opining about how much cash the U.S. owes Cuba. Had Castro and Guevara not pounded their chests and pledged loyalty to the Kremlin, the U.S. might have found a way to restore some kind of normal relations. Castro hailed his communist revolution as a sea change in the Western Hemisphere, violating the U.S. Truman Doctrine, determined to keep the Kremlin from meddling in Central and South America. Castro’s communist revolution in the U.S. backyard sent chills through Congress, especially with Nixon whose investigations of communist infiltration in the U.S. government created widespread persecution of alleged communists. While Castro and Guevara pounded their chests after toppling Batista, the U.S. battled Russian and Chinese communist takeovers around the globe.
Writing in a local paper, Castro asks for compensation for 55-years of U.S.-imposed economic hardship. “Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages, which total many millions of dollars, as our count has stated with irrefutable arguments and data in all of its speeches at the United Nations. Despite the official end of diplomatic relations with Cuba Jan. 3, 1961, the Eisenhower administration stopped trading the day Batista and his family was airlifted out of Cuba Jan 1, 1959. Castro ignores the claims of thousands of Cuban exiles now making up Miami’s Little Havana for billions of dollars in restitution for Castro’s larceny of private property. Due to undisclosed medical problems, Fidel handed the reins to his younger, more conciliatory brother Raul July 31, 2006. Unlike Fidel, Raul tries to stop litigating his brother’s old revolutionary battles, looking to the future.
Conservative opposition on Capitol Hill runs deep, despite tomorrow’s embassy festivities in Havana. “We don’t have to be imprisoned by the past,” Obama said at the White House June 30. “Americans and Cubans alike are ready to move forward,” said Obama, just not anti-Castro Cubans that still dominate South Miami’s political landscape. Opening embassies “will do nothing to help the Cuban people and is just another trivial attempt by President Obama to go legacy shopping,” said Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl.), showing stubborn opposition in Congress. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), echoed Ros-Lehtinen’s concerns but insisted it was time to move on to a “common sense approach to Cuba.” “Arrests and detentions of dissidents must cease and genuine political pluralism is long overdue,” said Cardin, knowing it’s unlikely human rights would improve anytime soon.
Opening up embassies in Washington and Havana is no different than diplomatic relations with communist China or Moscow. Lecturing communist states about human and civil rights violations does little to improve the plight of average citizens. Communist or authoritarian regimes don’t like getting lectured by the U.S. Russian President Vladimir Putin reacted harshly March 1, 2014 seizing Crimea from Ukraine, after an alleged Feb. 22, 2014 CIA-backed coup in Ukraine. Iranian officials remember well the Aug. 19, 1953 CIA-backed coup that toppled Iranian socialist leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, all for threatening to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. Whatever brand of communism works or doesn’t work in Cuba, it’s not up to the U.S. to repeat another Aug. 17, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to topple the current Cuban government because it doesn’t meet U.S. human or civil rights standards.
