The American flag now flies in front of the U.S. Embassy in Havana. While travel and trade between the U.S. and Cuba are hardly unfettered, this was a big deal. Here, there, throughout this hemisphere, all the way to the United Nations.
What just happened is still resonating–or maybe reverberating–a fortnight later. Too much has happened across the years. The geopolitical history. The familial subplots. The visceral and ideological emotions. The agendas. The politics. The Cold War to the Heated Rhetoric battlefield.
The Obama administration, via Secretary of State John Kerry, made the pragmatic case for normalization: More than a half century of embargo-related tactics aimed at isolating Cuba, fomenting grass-roots agitation and provoking regime change had manifestly failed. Opponents make the case that Cuba is still no bastion of democracy and the dictatorial brothers Castro are still there. Why reward oppressors with appeasement?
Foremost among those opponents right now are the two Floridians, former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, who are running for president. Their joint take: This is a zero-sum exercise and the U.S. just got taken to the diplomatic cleaners, because it got nothing back in return for embassy-openings and more normal relations.
Let’s look beyond that requisite, knee-jerk response.
* Nobody is better positioned to benefit economically–from trade to travel–than the state of Florida and the city of Tampa. The latter includes TIA as well as Port Tampa Bay. To paraphrase Al Fox, longtime Cuban policy activist and founder of the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation: We’re doing this because, first of all, it helps us. It’s in our enlightened self-interest.
* The likely opening of a consulate here would represent a further broadening of this city’s international bona fides.
* Travel-easing promotes renewed research relationships between Florida state universities and their Cuban counterparts. Travel-and-remittance easing are also humanitarian issues for many Cuban-American residents. Ask those directly impacted if humane issues matter and who benefits.
* Closer cooperation on a range of bilateral national issues–from oil-drilling to drug-running to hurricane-watching–is expedited to the obvious benefit of both countries.
* And U.S. credibility, hardly an abstraction, is enhanced, especially among our hemispheric neighbors–from Brazil to Bolivia–when America is not seen as overbearing and out of touch. Washington’s detente with Cuba has made it far more likely that a pivot to more Latin American cooperation will gain traction. And it’s hardly incidental–or coincidental–that this comes at a time when China is increasingly wooing Latin America for investment and expanded trade.
In short, this opening to Cuba is hardly without benefit to the U.S.
And, BTW, you know where Secretary Kerry was the week before the Havana flag-raising? Hanoi. He was marking the 20th anniversary of normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam. The timing couldn’t have been more appropriate; the irony couldn’t have been more transparent.
“Think about that,” said Kerry in his Havana speech. “A long and terrible war that inflicted indelible scars on body and mind, followed by two decades of mutual healing, followed by another two decades of diplomatic and commercial engagement. … And all that time, through reconciliation, through normalization, Cuban-American relations remained locked in the past.”
No more.