| | |  Travel & Outdoors | December 2008 
The End of the End of the Revolution - 7
 Roger Cohen - New York Times
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TOWARD THE END of my stay, I traveled down to Santiago de Cuba in the southeast of the island. This is mythical territory: the land of the 1860s uprising against the Spanish; the site of the decisive U.S. intervention in 1898 that stole the fruits of that uprising; the city where Fidel and a band of followers attacked the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953 (61 dead among more than 100 insurgents); the home of the Sierra Maestra, where Fidel and Che waged guerrilla war between 1956 and 1958. It is here that the 50th anniversary will be formally celebrated on Jan. 1, although the precise location in Santiago is still secret. Whether Fidel will appear is also unknown. Most people say no.
A historian, Octavio Ambruster, showed me around the Moncada museum. The mustard yellow barracks were converted into a school after the revolution. The museum occupies a few rooms. Gruesome photographs abound of the slain in the July 26 attack. Most were tortured before execution. A front-page headline the following day in the Batista-era paper, Ataya, got it wrong: “Fidel Castro is dead.”
In fact he slipped away, only to be captured a few days later in the mountains. He was brought to trial and imprisoned, but not before he made a now legendary declaration: “Condemn me, it has no importance. History will absolve me.”
Will it? I don’t think so, but it may be gentler on him than the ruinous state of Cuba would suggest. Fidel is a brilliant, romantic and towering figure; as such, like his country, he tends to enchant even as the cost of that enchantment mounts. Ambruster told me that Fidel always called José Martí, the hero of the independence struggle against Spain, “the intellectual author of the Moncada assault.” Framing his revolution as being about independence — patria more than socialismo — and casting that independence as being above all from the United States, has been one of Fidel’s most ingenious ideas.
And how will history judge U.S. policy toward Fidel’s Cuba? Badly, I think, especially since the end of the cold war. If the embargo had come down then, back in 1989, I doubt the regime would have survived. But the grudges were too deep, and a mistake was made. Today the policy makes little sense. The United States dislikes Chávez but maintains diplomatic relations with Venezuela. I think Obama should add to the measures he has already announced by offering to open full diplomatic relations with Cuba immediately.
That would put pressure on Cuba and, if the offer were accepted, allow face-to-face negotiations to begin at a senior level. At these talks, Obama should not belabor democratic principles, at least not immediately, but should insist on the freeing of all political prisoners as a first step toward beginning to lift the embargo. The United States is not the European Union, which just normalized relations with Havana, although hundreds are still held in Cuban prisons for what they think.
Progress will not be easy. Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart, one of the re-elected Miami Republicans, told me, “We are very united, we will win the fights in Congress, and we will stop any moves to open commercial relations, trade financing or tourism with Cuba.” But Tony Lake, a senior foreign-policy adviser to Obama during the campaign, said, “With the new Democratic majority in Congress, and some clear Cuban gestures on human rights, you could get changes to Helms-Burton,” the legislation that has determined the shape of Cuban policy since 1996. Then the ball would be rolling with a momentum that the passing of generations should sustain.
Cuba is some way down Obama’s priority list. But early in his presidency, another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, did something that changed views of him in the hemisphere: he negotiated, against all the odds, the transfer of sovereignty over the Panama Canal to Panama. It seems clear enough that a breakthrough of similar proportions with Cuba would bring a major reconciliation with Latin America.
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