“The flag that we revere at the entrance of this room is the same flag that was hauled down here 54 years ago and zealously kept in Florida by a family of liberators and later on by the museum of our eastern city of Las Tunas as a sort of premonition that this day would certainly come,” Cuba's Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla declared at a ceremony to officially re-open the Cuban embassy in Washington DC this month. “We are particularly reminded of [former US president Jimmy] Carter's decision to open the respective interests sections back in September 1977,” Rodriguez Parrilla noted. “On behalf of the government and people of Cuba, I would like to express our gratitude to members of Congress, scholars, religious leaders, activists, solidarity groups, business people and many US citizens who have worked hard for many years so that this day would come,” he added. The raising of the national flags in the two countries' respective capitals was an unprecedented and highly symbolic act. Nevertheless, there are hurdles. Cuba insists on the lifting of the economic, financial and trade embargo against it, and the Caribbean island nation is also demanding that the United States return the naval base at Guantanamo, illegally occupied by the US in the aftermath of the 1903 Cuban-American War. Washington has exercised jurisdiction over Guantanamo to this day. The Cubans refuse to accept that the naval base, nicknamed “GTMO” or “Gitmo,” is on a perpetual lease and view US control of it as an infringement of national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The US has incarcerated suspected terrorists at the base without due process or civil rights with impunity. “The old policy did not work. It is long past its expiration date,” US President Barack Obama declared in his State of the Union address to Congress. “When what you're doing doesn't work for 50 years, it's time to try something new,” he said. Cuba, after all, is no Puerto Rico. It is a sovereign nation. It will continue to be a socialist country. The re-establishment of diplomatic ties is a signal victory for the Obama administration, but Cuba will not bow to political pressure from the US to become a capitalist lackey of Washington. Cubans are in no mood to compromise on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of their country. The only serious influence that Washington wields over it is in trade and economic dealings, and here the Caribbean island nation is fast adopting a kind of socialism akin to that practised in the People's Republic of China and Vietnam. “I was not chosen to be president in order to restore capitalism to Cuba. I was elected to defend, maintain and continue to perfect socialism, not destroy it,” Cuban President Raul Castro has affirmed. The first problem to hit the new situation is the reluctance of certain right-wing US politicians to see an American ambassador dispatched to Havana. Many suspect that Obama's engagement policy is a new strategy designed to overthrow the socialist political system put in place by the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Washington has provided safe haven for Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, for example. Cuba in turn has given shelter to African-American political activists wanted in the US, such as Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army. The conventional view among many Republican lawmakers in the US is that the time is not right for re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. However, certain entrepreneurs in American business circles are lobbying hard for Congress to lift the Helms-Burton Act that codified parts of the US economic blockade against the island. Nevertheless, many congressmen argue that the end of Fidel Castro's presidency has not changed history or the official Marxist ideology of the Caribbean nation. The Cuban-born chairwoman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, was the first Cuban-American to be elected to the US Congress, for example, and she is hostile to moves to re-establish relations with Cuba. She would like to see the US withdraw from the United Nations refugee agency, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), since “Israel is the only country on the Commission's permanent agenda, while abuses by rogue regimes like Cuba, China and Syria are ignored.” Ros-Lehtinen's maternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews and were especially active in Cuba's relatively small Jewish community before immigrating to the US and settling in Florida where the largest community of Cuban-Americans in the US resides. Cuba and the US restored diplomatic relations on 20 July after the severance of the ties in 1961when then US president Dwight Eisenhower took the unilateral decision. Eisenhower also committed $13.1 million to the CIA to plan Castro's political demise. Today, powerful people like Ros-Lehtinen stand in the way of restoring relations between the two countries. Born Ileana Ros y Adato, it is hard for Cuban-Americans of her ilk to forget the 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion of the island by the US. The incident presents painful memories to many Americans, and not just right-wing Cuban-Americans. The then US secretary of state Christian Herter proclaimed that Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution was “following faithfully the Bolshevik pattern.” Ros-Lehtinen was the first Republican in the House to support same-sex marriage, but in spite of her liberal views on some social issues she is among the staunchest members of Congress in opposing the normalisation of relations between Cuba and the US. She backs continued US sanctions against Cuba and claims that her support of same-sex marriage stems from her “coming from Cuba, losing my homeland to communism, seeing the state control everything – I'm a person that believes in individual liberties and not having the government control everything.” Individuals like Ros-Lehtinen and other high-profile Cuban-American politicians and business people can be a thorn in the flesh of Cuba and a hindrance to the normalisation of relations between Cuba and the US. Ros-Lehtinen also endorses imposing sanctions on Venezuela, arguing for what she calls the punishment of the “thugs of the [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro's regime for brutally repressing and violating the human rights of those seeking to exercise their basic freedoms of speech and assembly in Venezuela.” The latter country is a close ally of Cuba. She has spearheaded attempts at slashing US aid to developing countries, advocating the cutting of aid through the State Department, the Peace Corps, the Asia Foundation, the US Institute of Peace, and the East-West Centre and the cutting of aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. A major contributor to Ros-Lehtinen's political campaigns has been Irving Moskowitz, a notorious Zionist who covers much of the cost of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The deeper problem embedded in Cuban-American culture and focused geographically on Florida is that a majority of older, first-generation Cuban-Americans is vociferously against normalising relations with Cuba. The younger, second and third generations, however, are more accepting of the idea. “Young Cuban-Americans want a new beginning. They respect Cuba as a sovereign nation and as a socialist country,” First Secretary of the Cuban embassy in Cairo Alexander Pellicer Moraga told Al-Ahram Weekly. “On 14 August, US Secretary of State John Kerry will pay an official visit to Cuba, the first by a US secretary of state since 1945. Many thought that after the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991 Cuba would follow suit. But we have survived the US sanctions, and we have made great strides in the fields of health and education, which are internationally acclaimed as some of the world's finest,” Pellicer Moraga said.
