Our Man in Havana: John Kerry Begins a New Era

The most significant and contentious issue remains the US Embargo
http://www.thenation.com/article/our-man-in-havana-john-kerry-begins-a-new-era/



In the aftermath of inaugurating the reopened US Embassy in Cuba last week, Secretary of State John Kerry toured the Plaza San Francisco in Old Havana and hopped into the driver’s seat of one of the vintage American automobiles that still traverse the streets of the Cuban capital. The shiny black ’59 Chevy Impala had been restored, just in time for the secretary’s historic visit, by master mechanic Julio Alvarez Torres; his renowned taxi fleet, NostalgiCar, is one of the new, entrepreneurial businesses in Cuba’s rapidly expanding private sector. In a sense, the classic Detroit car is a moving symbol—not only of past US-Cuban relations, but their future potential for full restoration.

The past and the future were very much on Kerry’s mind during his dramatic one-day trip to Cuba. During the flag-raising ceremony under a blazing mid-morning sun, Kerry noted that the breakthrough in relations owed to a courageous decision by Presidents Obama and Castro “to stop being prisoners of history and to focus on the opportunities of today and tomorrow.” But that “doesn’t mean that we should or will forget the past,” he noted. “How could we, after all?”

In his speech, Kerry recalled the Bay of Pigs—he referred to the CIA-led invasion as “a tragedy,” forgoing an opportunity to acknowledge and apologize for a flagrant act of US intervention that continues to resonate in Cuba—as well as the 1962 missile crisis. During those tense “13 days,” he remembered, “we were unsettled and uncertain about the future because we didn’t know, when closing our eyes at night, what we would find when we woke up.” For more than half a century, Kerry stated, US-Cuban relations “have been suspended in the amber of Cold War politics.” The raising of the Stars and Stripes marked the official beginning of a full-fledged détente in the Caribbean.

To be sure, there remain hard issues that divide the United States and Cuba and that will be difficult to resolve. At their press conference in an ornate salon of the Hotel Nacional, Kerry and his counterpart, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, exchanged words over the politically charged subjects of human rights and democracy. Rodriguez fended off criticism of Cuba’s human rights record by pointing to gender and racial discrimination in the United States, as well as the ongoing killing of young unarmed African-Americans at the hands of white policemen.