| | |  Travel & Outdoors | December 2008 
The End of the End of the Revolution - 2
 Roger Cohen - New York Times
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WAYNE SMITH, WHO RAN the U.S. Interests Section under the Carter administration, has observed that “Cuba seems to have the same effect on American administrations that the full moon used to have on werewolves.” There is something about this proximate island, so beautiful yet so remote, so failed yet so stubborn, that militates against the exercise of U.S. reason.
It’s not just the humiliation of the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, when 1,500 C.I.A.-backed Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the nascent Castro regime. It’s not just the memory of the Soviet introduction in 1962 of missiles to the island that almost brought nuclear Armageddon. It’s not just the traded accusations of terrorism, the surrogate conflicts of the cold war from Angola to the Americas, the downed planes, the waves of immigrants, the human rights confrontations, the espionage imbroglios or the custody battles. It’s something deeper, and that something has its epicenter in Miami.
Just before the Obama victory, I lunched in the city’s Little Havana district with Alfredo Durán, a former president of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. Inevitably, we ate at the kitschy Versailles Restaurant, long a social hub of the Cuban-American community. Durán, who was imprisoned in Cuba for 18 months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is a man mellowed by age. Furious with Kennedy and the Democrats in the invasion’s aftermath — “there was a feeling we were sacrificed, left to eat possum in the swamps around the bay” — he decided after the cold war that anti-Fidel vitriol was a blind alley and the trade embargo counterproductive. Fellow veterans were furious; they stripped his photo from the premises of the veterans’ association.
“I say, ‘Lift the embargo unilaterally, put the onus on Cuba,’ ” Durán told me. “If we negotiate, what do we want from them? They have very little to give.”
As he spoke, a little ruckus erupted outside between Republicans and Democrats. Durán smiled: “You know, the only place Cuba still arouses passions is right outside this restaurant. Yet U.S. policy toward Cuba is stuck with old issues in Florida rather than logical strategy.”
The old Florida issues boil down to this: It’s a critical swing state with a significant Cuban-American vote, and a hard line toward Fidel has been a sure-fire political proposition. Once again this year, Miami’s three Cuban-American Congressional Republicans won re-election. And yet: their victory margins narrowed. Some 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Miami-Dade County went to Obama, a big bounce, 10 points better than John Kerry’s showing in 2004. Fifty-five percent of those under 29 voted for Obama.
Obama’s victory is particularly significant because he bucked conventional wisdom on Cuba during the campaign. He lambasted Bush’s “tough talk that never yields results.” He called for “a new strategy” centered on two immediate changes: the lifting of all travel restrictions for family visits (limited by Bush to one every three years) and the freeing up of family remittances (now no more than $300 a quarter for the receiving household). Obama also called for “direct diplomacy,” saying he would be prepared to lead it himself “at a time and place of my choosing,” provided U.S. interests and the “cause of freedom for the Cuban people” were advanced. He said his message to Fidel and Raúl would be: “If you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations.”
Three generations on from the revolution, being a Democrat is no longer equated by Cuban-Americans with being a Communist. The fixation on removing Fidel, the dreams of return and the raw anger of loss have faded. “We have gone from the politics of passion to the politics of reality,” Andy Gómez, an assistant provost at the University of Miami who left Cuba in 1961 at the age of 6, told me. “We are here for the long haul. We worry about the economy, health care. Next Christmas in Havana — that’s over.”
So could the convergence of a president who is as mestizo as countless Cubans, a new pragmatism in Miami’s Little Havana and the looming passing of Cuba’s revolutionary gerontocracy provide a framework for that elusive U.S.-Cuban reconciliation? Durán is hopeful. “I’m 71, and I know I’ll see the day,” he told me. “The day you can get in your speedboat in Coconut Grove after work and be in Havana at 9 p.m. for dinner.”
Nonsense, Jaime Suchlicki, a conservative Cuban historian who teaches in Miami, told me. Raúl is a Soviet admirer “and no Deng Xiaoping.” The Cuban situation — buoyed by Chinese, Venezuelan, Russian and Iranian support — is not desperate enough to force concessions. Every past rapprochement has turned to rancor. “Cuba is an absolute disaster, but it will not fall apart,” Suchlicki said.
Yet Cuba does stand at a fulcrum of generational shift, from those formed by Fidel to those who will hardly know him. Seizing this opportunity will require a measure of American humility. Obama has a strong sense of history and the historical moment. He would understand the deep roots of the conflict, going back to the U.S. military intervention in 1898 that left Cubans with the lingering sense that their own hard-won independence from Spain had been snatched from them. What followed were four years of direct U.S. rule and Cuba’s emergence as a nearly independent republic in 1902 — “nearly” because, under the Platt Amendment, the U.S. kept the right to intervene in the island’s affairs. It also got Cuba to cede in perpetuity a little thing called Guantánamo Bay, a 45-square-mile area in the southeast of the island.
“All this left a deep frustration in the popular imagination,” Fernando Rojas, the vice minister of culture, told me in Havana.
It is this history that has allowed Fidel to claim that his revolution was, in effect, a second war of independence. It is this history that has made the United States the enemy of choice for Cuba long after the exigencies of cold-war confrontation vanished.
This is the history that turns otherwise rational heads in both Washington and Havana, as if the full moon had got to them. My impression is that Obama has the cool temperament that can factor the charge of this past — similar to the heavy legacy of the C.I.A.-organized 1953 coup in Iran — into his diplomacy. Cuba is certainly ready for a change it can believe in.
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