The Guardian view on US-Cuba relations: still a long way to go

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/23/the-guardian-view-on-us-cuba-relations-still-a-long-way-to-go

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Cuba is “a territory that God and nature intended to be part of the United States”, said the 19th-century American congressman Townsend Scudder, expressing a widely shared view among the nation’s elite at the time. President James Buchanan wanted to buy the island from Spain, Walt Whitman concluded that everything pointed to its annexation, while Senator Robert Toombs declared “Give us Cuba … and we shall command … all the wants of the human race”.

That overweening American sense of entitlement led to the Spanish-American war and to repeated US interventions in Cuba’s affairs over many decades. It was a cause of the Cuban revolution of 1959, and almost precipitated a nuclear world war in 1962. Then there was a half century of hostility, estrangement and sanctions as Washington, after trying and failing to kill Fidel Castro and bring down his regime, sought to punish and isolate Cuba. So the restoration of diplomatic relations, symbolised this week by the reopening of the American embassy in Havana and the raising of the Cuban flag over their mission in Washington, is obviously to be welcomed. It is, however, a formalisation rather than a transformation: the American interests section of the Swiss embassy was already the largest mission in Havana.

Full ties are still only on the horizon, with travel restrictions, the trade embargo and Guantánamo all issues to be resolved. The more fundamental problem is that historical and geopolitical realities never go away. They reassert themselves in new forms, and for Cuba, after any reconciliation as before, the essential interest will be the same as in the past – how to maintain the independence and sovereignty of a small country in the shadow of a mighty one. For the United States the reverse is true: how to escape the crippling legacy of arrogance and over-confidence that made it the worst of neighbours in the first place.

President Barack Obama, who deserves credit for this long-overdue improvement in relations, nevertheless has framed the change in a rhetoric that speaks of replacing the failed policies of the past with more successful ones in the future. But does this mean future policies that are more likely to bend Cuba to America’s will, or policies that leave Cuba alone to make its own decisions in its own way? That remains to be determined.

Can Cuba manage the combined forces of US capital and the desire of its people to enjoy a measure of the affluence that American investments promise, not least ones guided by the white Cuban diaspora in the United States? Investment is desirable, yet it would be a sad end for Cuba if it was to become just a Florida over the water.

Reconciliation with the United States will bring temptations for the ruling party, for the armed forces, which run much of the economy, for the middle classes and for ordinary people alike. Cuban opposition groups are already complaining that the American politicians streaming into Cuba in recent months are making a point of not seeing them, whereas in the past the opposite was the case. Human rights are important. Yet change in Cuba is Cuba’s business, not America’s. Cuba, after half a century under siege, needs to rethink its history, its revolution and its future. A wise United States will let it do so at its own pace.