Cuba: Choosing the starting point of history
US relations with Cuba are changing. Thawing. Returning to what were once close ties.
Many people are outraged. Others are relieved. Others are joyous.
Many don't really understand what all the fuss is about. The Cuban exile community is divided along generally generational lines, while the US body politic is divided along generally partisan lines.
For the first time in many years, the subject of the Cuban revolution has bubbled towards conciousness - of the Castros and the communists and the cold war... all are starting to get some new attention. Many people find any potential normal ties with "that imprisoned island" thoroughly disgusting. The argument is the Cubans have been under a savage and repressively totalitarian regime, led by the Castros, whose every social, economic and geopolitical precept is antithetical to the American way of life. Before ISIS, before the Kim cabal of North Korea... before Al Qeda and the Taliban, before bin Laden - Castro was very much at the crux of the Axis of Evil. "How can we forget that?" comes the cry. "How can we forgive that?"
What is most fascinating about the entire debate is it pretty much defines the history of Cuba almost exclusively in the context of the Castro regime - as though history started with the 1959 Cuban Revolution, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, through Angola and exportation of Communist Revoltuion throughout the Americas and the Third World. Standing on the tip of the resistance spear - those vocally, materially and actively resisting the Castro regime - has been the Cuban Exile community in the United States. Those who fled Cuba during or in the aftermath of the Revolution. Those refugees from Marxist evil. And those now third and fourth generation Cuban Americans who continue to consider themselves "exiles". Interestingly, it is from the Cuban exile community that we here in the United States have taken the starting point of Cuban history.
Why, I have always wondered, do we not discuss the rest of Cuban history, and why do we think that repression, terror, heartache and imprisonment started with the Castros? Was communist repression of Castro significantly different than the mafia-like fascism of the Batista regime? Was serfdom under Castro materially different than Spanish colonial serfdom? When - I have always wondered - was Cuba anything other than "that imprisoned island?"
The basic reality is this: Castro's evil displaced the Batista evil, and simply replaced one small minority of politically and economically privileged people with another. He inverted the social order and drove out those who had prospered under the prior regime... and then simply returned the island to its prior state with a new set of thugs in charge singing different words to the same tune - supported by the imperialistic superpower on the other side of the globe, rather than the one 90 miles away.
Cuban history and Cuban American relations didn't start with Castro, and it won't end with Castro. And while Castro was and is evil, he's just a different (and perhaps different degree of) evil than every other totalitarian ruler of our island neighbor. Countries' politcal leaders have relationships, but the real relationships between countries are those between people. Rekindling and reinvigorating the human relationship between our people is not an evil, and cannot be construed logically as evil. The Castros will eventually be displaced - either organically or forcefully - and something will take their place; we could hope that it will be something better, but if history is any judge, it might just be worse. But the people will remain the people, and there will always be some kind of deep and abiding commonality between us.
