It may take a while before Americans can legally smoke coveted Cuban cigars in the US, but make no mistake about it, that privilege is coming their way soon.
Finally, and at long last, after well over half a century of estrangement between the US and Cuba, came the historic handshake in Panama city last week between Cuban president Raul Castro and US President Barack Obama, with the latter identifying the meeting as “a path towards the future”, an opportunity to “turn the page and develop a new relationship between our two countries”. The venue for that historic handshake — for historic it was — was right. It took place on the sidelines of the 35-nation Summit of the Americas, which traditionally brings together leaders of North America, Central America, the Caribbean and South America to foster discussions of issues affecting the Western Hemisphere.
And, yes, the chemistry between the two men, it appears, was also right. Next step? A fully functioning American embassy in the capital of the impoverished island nation and an equally functioning Cuban embassy in the capital of the world’s dominant power. It is about time, won’t you say? And, hey, it was not that complicated, was it? Actually, considering the almost 60-year stand-off between Havana and Washington, a stand-off defined by Cold War imperatives, the reconciliation seemed downright pedestrian.
The drift towards detente began, you may say, after Fidel Castro’s protracted farewell in 2008, when his brother Raul, who was aware that Cubans had grown bone-weary of deprivation and the absence of personal freedoms, moved to open the suggestion box, as it were, to Cuban intellectuals, social critics and activists to offer their own views about reform — all within the context, lest we forget, of the “socialist paradigm”.
Until that time, as Ann Louise Bardach, an award-winning reporter and a member of the Brooking Institution’s Cuba Study Group, explained recently, US forays into engagement with Cuba were a lot like that very well-known New Yorker Cartoon by Robert Mankoff, depicting a high-handed boss behind his desk dodging a luncheon encounter with a caller. The caption said: “No, Thursday is out. How about never? Is never good for you?”
Matters shifted after Obama was elected president and he began to retrench from Washington’s implacable policy against engaging Havana in any way, a policy informed not just by the hysterics of the Cold War, but by the manipulations of a two-million strong militant exile Cuban community that had espoused a take-no-prisoners stance against detente with Fidel Castro, and pressured, over the years, 11 American presidents to get along — unless he wanted his party to lose a pivotal state like Florida.
That policy began as early as 1960 under the 63-year old president Dwight Eisenhower, who was not only disturbed by Fidel Castro’s Marxist rhetoric, but repulsed by the image that the unkempt and hirsute 32-year-old Cuban revolutionary projected, a revolutionary who was criticising the US at every turn. Now when we think about it in the cold light of hindsight, that policy was no less than sinister: It was embodied in a CIA plan to sabotage Cuba’s sugar refineries. That failed.
Then a bill was introduced in Congress to give the president the power to eliminate the existing sugar quota, which left Cuba, whose chief product was sugar, with much of its harvest unsold. That succeeded. The charismatic Cuban leader remained defiant at “the Empire” (Castro’s preferred designation for his northers nemesis), even coining the slogan “Without a quota but without a master”. And the less said about the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year — the closest the world came, within a hair, to a nuclear war — the better.
Those were confrontational, not to mention dangerous, times. Now Americans, including Cuban Americans, with two of their own, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas entering the 2016 presidential race, can say all that is now behind us.
Look, detente between the US and Communist Cuba in 2015, that brushed aside opposition by the Miami exile community, is not detente between the US and Communist China in 1972, that brushed aside opposition by Right-wing. China has 20 per cent of the world’s population, with a wide range of overseas investments projected to be between $2 trillion (Dh7.35 trillion) and $3 trillion by the year 2020. It is a country with a state bank that supplies over half the world’s liquidity and a government that has found diverse global markets for its products. And it has bought into western companies and exploited resources in Third World countries. We know that.
And Cuba? Well it is a small, deprived, island nation in the Caribbean, 150km off the Florida Keys, inhabited by 12 million souls, that has struggled to barely survive all these years. We know that too. But Cuba is also a small island nation whose language, music, cuisine and literature — and indeed its history — are intertwined with those of the US, whereas to Americans, China remains out-there — the Orient, the ‘Other’.
Over the years, Cuban Americans may have become, to other Americans, obtrusive and probably irritating with their constant complaints, but they have managed to command a perch for themselves in American political culture. It took Obama to remind these folks that it was time to turn them into Americans.
I too shall look forward to buying my first box of cigars marked Producto de Cuba.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.