Anthony DePalma: History Lessons on Cuba for a New President
I first set foot in Havana 30 years ago because Jimmy Carter thought he could end the tensions that had torn apart millions of families, including my own. It seemed like a new beginning, but it turned out to be more of the same old story about Cuba and the United States.
Time and again Fidel Castro has taken an American overture or challenge and, using a Fidelista jujitsu, turned it to his own advantage. In the process, countless families like mine have been whipsawed between hope and despair.
Mr. Castro’s enduring tactic has been to fit each initiative to his revolutionary script of a brave Cuba resisting the giant United States. Framed that way, attempts to bring down the regime strengthened it. Efforts to democratize Cuba left freedoms further restricted. Presidents came and went, but the constants were disappointment, and Fidel.
Now with Mr. Castro ailing and a new president about to be inaugurated — the eleventh to hold office since Havana fell 50 years ago this month — another match in this long competition is about to begin.
The half-century has been a roller coaster for Cuba and the United States. Dwight Eisenhower was quick to recognize Mr. Castro’s government, and quick to slam shut the diplomatic door. John Kennedy got stung at the Bay of Pigs. Lyndon Johnson was uninterested in negotiating with Castro; so was Richard Nixon until his opening to China made him and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, think they could do something similar with Cuba. Mr. Kissinger tried, and continued under President Ford, but got nowhere.
In all that time, my wife, Miriam, who had left at age 10 in the tumultuous months between the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 missile crisis, had little contact with her family in Cuba. A phone call was near impossible, and sending anything by mail was a test of patience and luck. But soon after President Carter took office, he opened a United States Interests Section in Havana and allowed Cuba to do the same in Washington. That’s where we went in 1978 for visas so Miriam could visit her father for the first time since 1962, and I could see Cuba too.
The ferocious tension of the past seemed to have abated when we reunited with her family at José Martí Airport, and Miriam, now married, could hug her father one last time. There were other reasons for hope. Mr. Castro had released some 3,500 political prisoners and promised to make it easy for some Cubans to leave. We filled out immigration papers for Miriam’s younger brother. Maybe the worst was over.
But it wasn’t. Mr. Castro, flush with Soviet aid, had tens of thousands of troops (including Miriam’s stepbrother) in Angola and was itching to get into Ethiopia. Robert A. Pastor, President Carter’s national security adviser for Latin America, warned Mr. Castro that entering Ethiopia would end further normalization.
Mr. Castro sent troops anyway. As relations deteriorated, he accused Washington of reneging on immigration promises, and threw open the port of Mariel along with prisons, hospitals and insane asylums. More than 120,000 refugees landed on Florida’s shores, backing the United States into taking them all....
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Time and again Fidel Castro has taken an American overture or challenge and, using a Fidelista jujitsu, turned it to his own advantage. In the process, countless families like mine have been whipsawed between hope and despair.
Mr. Castro’s enduring tactic has been to fit each initiative to his revolutionary script of a brave Cuba resisting the giant United States. Framed that way, attempts to bring down the regime strengthened it. Efforts to democratize Cuba left freedoms further restricted. Presidents came and went, but the constants were disappointment, and Fidel.
Now with Mr. Castro ailing and a new president about to be inaugurated — the eleventh to hold office since Havana fell 50 years ago this month — another match in this long competition is about to begin.
The half-century has been a roller coaster for Cuba and the United States. Dwight Eisenhower was quick to recognize Mr. Castro’s government, and quick to slam shut the diplomatic door. John Kennedy got stung at the Bay of Pigs. Lyndon Johnson was uninterested in negotiating with Castro; so was Richard Nixon until his opening to China made him and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, think they could do something similar with Cuba. Mr. Kissinger tried, and continued under President Ford, but got nowhere.
In all that time, my wife, Miriam, who had left at age 10 in the tumultuous months between the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 missile crisis, had little contact with her family in Cuba. A phone call was near impossible, and sending anything by mail was a test of patience and luck. But soon after President Carter took office, he opened a United States Interests Section in Havana and allowed Cuba to do the same in Washington. That’s where we went in 1978 for visas so Miriam could visit her father for the first time since 1962, and I could see Cuba too.
The ferocious tension of the past seemed to have abated when we reunited with her family at José Martí Airport, and Miriam, now married, could hug her father one last time. There were other reasons for hope. Mr. Castro had released some 3,500 political prisoners and promised to make it easy for some Cubans to leave. We filled out immigration papers for Miriam’s younger brother. Maybe the worst was over.
But it wasn’t. Mr. Castro, flush with Soviet aid, had tens of thousands of troops (including Miriam’s stepbrother) in Angola and was itching to get into Ethiopia. Robert A. Pastor, President Carter’s national security adviser for Latin America, warned Mr. Castro that entering Ethiopia would end further normalization.
Mr. Castro sent troops anyway. As relations deteriorated, he accused Washington of reneging on immigration promises, and threw open the port of Mariel along with prisons, hospitals and insane asylums. More than 120,000 refugees landed on Florida’s shores, backing the United States into taking them all....