(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange is itching to get back to Cuba – especially while it’s still cold here!
(LANGE) At the height of the Cold War, President Eisenhower declared the United States insulted by Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and ordered an embargo of the island nation. His advisers were sure that would soon bring Castro to his knees. Fifty years later, we citizens of the Land of the Free are still not free to travel to Cuba; and El Caballo has become a feeble old man. Still we persist in our anti-Communist snit.
A few years ago I heard a lecture at the magnificent United States Interests Section in Havana. The building was originally the United States Embassy when it was built in 1953, but with the rupture of diplomatic relations, we asked the Swiss to protect our assets and maintain communication with the Cubans. How like a bunch of children we are, passing notes back and forth through intermediaries!
The American staffer hewed to the party line: Cuba’s people were enslaved by a ruthless Communist dictator; Cuba was sending revolutionary provocateurs to Africa; thousands of Cubans were rotting in political prisons; etc. But I could sense the speaker’s heart wasn’t in it. Sure enough; during the question-and-answer session she tacitly admitted what she’d said was a bit over the top. Someone asked what we might do about changing our relationship with Cuba. "Well," she said, "you can vote…"
We’ve done that now, and a growing number of us consider the embargo outdated and absurd. While we sit on our thumbs, other countries – Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Venezuela – are building hotels and infrastructure and sharing the profits with the Cuban government. Our nation, while spending billions to export democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, is loath to water the roots of liberty only ninety miles from Key West.
Foreign capital, however, has not much improved the lot of Cubans; it’s made life more comfortable for tourists. Cuba still gets around in 1950s automobiles. Its agriculture limps along with aging Russian machinery. But Cuba has the highest percentage of literacy in the Western Hemisphere. Schoolchildren asked us to help them practice their already excellent English. We asked Cubans how they liked their system of socialized medicine, and heard only enthusiasm. It’s hard to believe United States business interests haven’t pushed harder, in these fading days of the revolution, for access to Cuba’s markets and products.
The way to free oppressed people is not to put the screws to their governments; the people suffer, and their leaders still get three squares a day. Instead, show them what they’re missing and help them attain it: the old how-ya-gonna-keep-‘em-down-on-the-farm technique.
Literally only half an hour farther from New England than the airports of Florida are a place and a people we’ve neglected for so long we’ve forgotten why the island has for over 500 years been called the Jewel of the Caribbean. It’s time for us freezing Vermonters once again to lead the way.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.