US-Cuba pact ushers in peace

The simultaneous announcement that the United States and Cuba are restoring full diplomatic ties after 53 years is as historic as it can be. Both the neighbours have welcomed the news cheerfully. The Cubans have done it with ringing of the bells and excitedly crowding the streets. A prominent David-versus-Goliath confrontation, a relic of the Cold War era, is to end, making the world a somewhat better place to live.

The credit for this, as much as the Castro brothers Fidel and Raoul, should go to US President Barack Obama. He has done what his predecessor, George W bush could have done, but could not because circumstances altered with 9/11 and much else. Perhaps, destiny had willed that Bush Jr remain a war monger, what with his Afghanistan invasion that is about to end without gains and his misadventure in Iraq.

Those who grudged Obama a peace Nobel so early in his presidency, will now see some justification. Obama has made his moves in Iran as well, clutching the olive branch President Hassan Rouhani offered last year. Negotiations have raised fluctuating hopes. But if the US-Iran rapprochement succeeds, Obama will go down in the American history as a successful crusader for peace.

He has rightly announced end to an “outdated approach” and to a “rigid policy” that had encouraged Cubans’ being treated outcasts and has embittered the US’s relations with the Latin Americans. Happily, the subversion and regime change that the US attempted among the Left-leaning Latinos, Salvadore Allende’s Chile being the worst example, will now end. And Cuba, too, will hopefully go for democratic reforms that Obama has hinted.

Credit must also go to Canada and to Vatican that brokered the deal through 18 months of secret negotiations. For Americans in general, the Caribbean and South America, the security scare they have lived with will hopefully ebb.

For the Cubans, this is happening in the lifetime of Fidel Castro, whose coming to power in a coup in 1959 and move close to Moscow angered the Americans into snapping ties. Next three decades saw the American CIA devising various ways – quite unsuccessfully – to eliminate Fidel, including poisoning his swimming pool and putting explosives in his cigar. And Cubans contributed handsomely to the American defeat in Vietnam. In between came the missile crisis in 1963 between the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union that very nearly brought the world close to yet another war.

The Cubans can live a better life. President Raoul Castro has been quick in demanding that the economic sanctions must go. The Cubans have suffered heavily particularly since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. They can now hope for greater tourism.

And yes, American writer Ernest Hemingway, if he was alive, would have loved to return to Cuba, where he is an institution and an industry.

By: Mahendra Ved