Cuba’s Coming Out Party
Cuba’s Coming Out Party
The road ahead for U.S.-Cuban relations is rocky, but at least it's new.
By Medea Benjamin, April 15, 2015.
For the small island country of Cuba, the Seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama marked a kind of “coming out” party.
Banned from the for-capitalists-only gatherings from the time they began in 1994, Cuba was not only invited to participate in the summit this year, it was the belle of the ball (albeit the “belle” was a shaky, 83-year-old Raul Castro, who lacks his brother Fidel’s charisma). Cuba’s presence was heralded in the speeches of every nation’s leader, and the handshake between President Obama and Raul Castro was the summit’s Kodak moment.
In Raul Castro’s long. 49-minute speech (in which he joked that because Cuba had been excluded from six prior summits, he deserved six times the recommended eight minutes), he gave a history lesson of past U.S. attacks on Cuba — from the Platt Amendment to supporting the dictator Fulgencio Batista to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the opening of the Guantanamo prison. But he was gracious to President Obama, saying he was not to blame for this legacy and calling him an “honest man” of humble origins.
President Obama certainly won praise throughout the summit for turning this page in the Cold War. Some leaders insisted on clarifying, however, that Cuba was not at the summit because of Obama’s nice gesture: Cuba was there because the leaders of Latin America insisted that there would not be another summit without Cuba. Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos, no lefty, recalled his position at the last summit, which he hosted, that Cuba must be invited to the next one. Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and others had threatened to boycott any new gathering without Cuba.
More:
http://fpif.org/cubas-coming-out-party/
