A complicated history kept US-Cuba animosity alive for decades, writes Manuel Roig-Franzia.
The Cold War died on Wednesday. Its death was foretold, yet somehow it still came as a shock.
It didn’t expire on a bayside battlefield in the Caribbean or with a mushroom cloud or even with an exploding cigar. It perished at a White House podium.
The prisoner swop that set Alan Gross free – and the sweeping changes to US policy on Cuba that went with it – won’t heal all wounds, nor will it vanquish the powerful cold warriors in the US Congress.
But it did fundamentally alter a curio of American foreign policy that deeply influenced popular culture and played an outsize role in US presidential politics for more than half a century.
In April 1959, Richard Nixon was unimpressed with the bearded revolutionary in green fatigues who arrived at his office. Fidel Castro’s “ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed than those of almost any world figure I have met in 50 countries”, Nixon, then the US vice-president, wrote in a memo.
Nixon distrusted the newly victorious Castro, whom he had correctly pegged as a communist, as did his boss, president Dwight D Eisenhower.
In the years to come, the Berlin Wall rose and fell. The Soviet Union collapsed. Nixon went to China. Yet the grudge match with Castro persisted, spanning 11 US presidencies.
Dating back to the early days of his regime, killing Castro became the tragicomic obsession of a generation of American spies. If they couldn’t get him with a combustible cigar, then they might consider offing him with a gift of a wet suit laced with tuberculosis.
Sometimes, however, the efforts to rid the island of Castro were tragic. In 1961, President John F Kennedy’s administration approved a poorly planned and poorly supported invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Castro demonstrated his brutality by executing nine of those who had plotted against him. It was a crushing blow to Cuban exiles in Florida who welcomed the coming of each new year with the toast “Next year in Havana”.
The next year, instead of reunions on the island, they got the threat of a nuclear holocaust. Soviet missiles were spotted in Cuba, and it took extraordinary diplomatic gymnastics to avert an apocalyptic conflict between the superpowers.
Castro’s seemingly eternal squabble with the US evolved into the central animating force of Cuban political discourse during his years as president and remained there once he gave over titular control of the country to his brother Raúl after falling ill in 2006.
Rather than accept blame for mismanaging the Cuban economy and for the startling decay of the nation’s infrastructure, the Castros were forever pointing at the US trade embargo. (Even though the embargo remains in place, Obama’s policy shift is designed to increase commerce between the nations.)
Castro’s repression of free speech, jailing of political prisoners, refusal to hold elections, travel restrictions and almost total ban on private enterprise have made thousands of Cubans desperate to leave. On the streets of Havana, people talk of escaping to “La Yuma”, Cuban slang for the US that most likely derived from the 1950s Western 3:10 to Yuma.
The reference to a long-ago film reinforces the impression of Havana as existing in a time warp, where classic US cars share roads with clunky Soviet junkers and where every driver has to be a mechanic.
In the provinces, they don’t even have the luxury of broken-down cars; many people have to get around in horse-drawn carriages or walk.
To get to La Yuma, Cubans have been willing to do almost anything, including risking death. They’ve pushed into the sea on rafts and inner tubes and surfboards. They’ve arrived on makeshift boats made from tractors and old tyres.
Tens of thousands came in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, crowding into temporary housing at the Orange Bowl in Miami while Castro boasted that by allowing them to leave, he had “flushed the toilets” of Cuba.
A succession of US governments tried to make it easier for Cubans to come to the Us. In the mid-1960s the Lyndon Johnson administration instituted the Cuban Adjustment Act, which aids Cuban migrants in becoming permanent residents after being admitted to the US.
Clinton widened the opportunities for Cuban migrants by putting in place a “wet foot, dry foot” policy in which Cuban migrants who are caught at sea are usually sent back to the island, while those who land are usually allowed to stay.
Some of the most intractable disputes between the United States and Cuba can be traced to the waters of the 90 kilometres of the Florida Straits.
Thousands of Cuban migrants are believed to have died trying to enter the United States by sea. Through the tragedies, a certain mystique about Cuba has been magnified by its inaccessibility. American tourists slipped on to the island, evading US restrictions by flying to Havana via Mexico or Jamaica and then pleading with Cuban airport personnel not to stamp their passports.
The US Chamber of Commerce has pressed to expand options for US businesses in Cuba. And investors have looked longingly at the island, as Spanish and Canadian firms have established footholds in a place with vast tracts of undeveloped beachfront, scuba-diving Edens and outmoded, inefficient farms.
The Cuban American sugar baron Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul – a major backer of anti-Castro exile groups – recently said he would be interested in exploring business opportunities on the island. His remarks, published in January, set Cuba watchers aflame with speculation that major changes in US policy might be coming.
US Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, accused Fanjul of trying to make a deal with “the devil”.
Popular culture has been impervious to the political disputes. It’s almost impossible to walk on to a college campus in the US or Europe without seeing Alberto Korda’s famous photo of Che Guevara, titled “The Heroic Warrior”.
The New Year’s Eve scene in Godfather II probably educated more Americans about the victory of the Castro revolution than any schoolbook. And Woody Allen sent up the Cuban revolution in his spoof Bananas.
But farce might be the hardest genre to pull off because the reality of US-Cuba relations is often so quirky.
This year, the Associated Press figured out that the US Agency for International Development had sought to trigger a youth uprising, a sort of Cuban Spring, by setting up a phony, Twitter-like network in Cuba called “ZunZuneo”.
More recently, AP revealed that Usaid had hired a Serbian music promoter to infiltrate Cuba’s hip-hop scene in the hope of sparking youth protests against Castro.
And the US has spent tens of thousands of dollars a year to maintain a plane that is supposed to broadcast American television programming in Cuba but never flies because of a budget stalemate.
Meanwhile, Fidel Castro revealed a few years back that he has been collecting annual rent cheques from the US government for the use of Guantanamo for half a century. But, in protest of US policies, he says his cash-strapped government has only cashed one of the $4 000 cheques in all those years – and by accident.
For years, the two nations conducted an odd propaganda war, one-upping each other, in front of the building that houses the US Interests Section in Havana, along the city’s scenic seawall, known as the Malecon. US officials angered Castro by putting up a Christmas display that included a large “75” – a reference to the number of dissidents arrested in an early 2000s crackdown. Castro responded by putting up images of US abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Two years later, the US infuriated Cuban officials by installing a digital sign that scrolled news reports and provocative quotes. On a typical day, there would be news items such as a US magazine naming Castro one of the world’s wealthiest heads of state.
The Castro government responded by installing 148 giant flagpoles in the park outside the building, making it almost impossible to see the scrolling news display. In 2009, US officials in Havana quietly had the sign removed as Obama was beginning to loosen restrictions on travel to Cuba.
Now people look for another type of sign: the departure board at Miami International Airport. It’s filling with flights leaving for Havana.
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Washington Post-Bloomberg