For about 55 years, the United States did everything it could to topple or strangulate the communist regime in Cuba. President after president — from John F. Kennedy through George W. Bush — sustained the hostility. In fact, April 17 will mark the 55th anniversary of the failed U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion to topple Castro.
Then in 2014 President Barack Obama declared that enough was enough and instituted a thaw in the relationship. To further the thaw and minimise the chances of a refreeze after his tenure, Obama undertook a three-day state visit to Cuba,beginning two Sundays ago. It was the first time an American president visited Cuba in about 90 years. And Cuba just happens to be just 90 miles away from American shores.”
With wife and two daughters in tow, Obama couldn’t have been more gracious: “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas. I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people.“
The people in attendance applauded these words, but the remarks apparently rankled a notable person who wasn’t in attendance: the aged, ailing and retired leader of the communist revolution, Fidel Castro.
Referring to Obama’s call for Cuba and the United States to leave the rancorous history behind, Castro snickered: “I suppose all of us were at risk of a heart attack upon hearing these words from the president of the United States.”
That may have been true for those Cubans, like himself, who are trapped by history and afraid of change. However, unlike Castro, Obama refuses to be ensnared by history. “Since 1959, we’ve been shadow boxers in this battle of geopolitical politics and personalities,” he said.“I know the history, but I refuse to be trapped by it.”
The 89-year-old Fidel Castro fears, of course, that the revolution he led in 1959 might come crumbling because of rapprochement with the United States. After all, the US hostility — especially the economic embargo —provided fodder for anti-imperialist rhetoric. America was the bogeyman to blame for all that goes wrong, just as George Orwell depicted in Animal Farm.
To ensure that the political and economic system remained the same, Fidel Castro handed over to his younger brother, Raul Castro, in 2008 when he fell severely ill. Though an ardent communist himself, Raul isn’t Fidel. And so he almost instantly began to institute some reforms, if not in the political sphere at least in the economic. That provided enough opening for Obama to slip in the diplomatic overtures that resulted in his state visit.
Obama took the opportunity of the visit to press for more reforms, especially with regard to political liberties. “It gives individuals the capacity to be catalysts,” he said, suggesting the link between democracy and economic development. And without such reforms, Cuba can only make limited progress even if U.S. economic embargo is lifted, Obama said.
More than anything else, it was probably this aspect of the speech that rankled Fidel Castro. “We do not need for the empire to give us anything,” he wrote in a lengthy article in the Communist newspaper Granma after Obama’s visit.
“Nobody should be under the illusion that the people of this dignified and selfless country will renounce the glory, the rights or the spiritual wealth they have gained with the development of education, science and culture.”
Indeed, if Obama erred in the speech, it was in not giving Fidel Castro his due for bringing a measure of economic justice to the island. Nor was he explicit in noting the role of the US economic strangulation in keeping Cuba down. But what he articulated was more important: a vision of the future, a vision that all Cubans — and Americans — should embrace.
Ironically, while Fidel Castro ostensibly rejects Obama’s overture and criticises him for not giving his regime its due, Obama’s critics in the United States see quite the opposite: he is giving the Castros’ regime much too much credit. Most notable among the U.S. critics are two presidential candidates of Cuban parentage, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Rubio characterised Obama’s visit as a disgrace to the United States. “This is an Obama presidential trip whose ultimate results will be giving away legitimacy and money to an anti-American regime that actively undermines our national security interests and acts against our values every single day,” Rubio has said.
Cruz was just as scathing: “I cannot wait as president to visit Cuba. But when I visit Cuba, it will be a free Cuba. It will be a Cuba without Raúl Castro, without Fidel Castro.” In other words, Cruz is determined to press on with the 55-year-old hostility.
Castro, Rubio and Cruz are thus stuck in the clutch of history — from the opposite ends of the clutch.
Unfortunately, such ideological imprisonment is all too common. Look around the world, and the manifestations are all over, none more enduring than the ever bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama had ambitiously declared his goal of settling it during his tenure. But he has long given up in frustration, subverted by those who cannot see an alternative to history.
Nigerians, don’t have to look at the Middle East to see such burden of history at work. We are living it every day, most manifestly in the activist quest for the resurrection of Biafra. Chinua Achebe gave the cause a most rarefied articulation in the jaundiced memoir, There Was a Country: A personal History of Biafra. Well, all memoirs are jaundiced, but some more so than others. Achebe’s stuck a nerve and infused life into latent angst.
The well-known saying is that “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The saying — variously attributed to philosophers Edmund Burke and George Santayana— should be modified to refer to those who don’t learn the proper lesson. As it is with Castro, Rubio and Cruz, so it is with our Biafra advocates.
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