Cuban Americans, like me, are asked for our opinion on the island constantly – by our friends and family, our bosses and doctors, our grocers and bartenders, as well as by total strangers.
That was true even before President Obama announced a rekindling of relations with Cuba in December, and it’s true this week, as John Kerry travels to Havana to raise the flag at the newly reopened American embassy, the first Secretary of State to visit since World War II.
Whenever anyone asks me for my thoughts on the renewed US-Cuba relations, I tend to take a deep breath and say: “It’s complicated.” I’m skeptical. I’m angry. I’m hopeful. When it comes to Cuba, I contain multitudes. How could it be otherwise?
How could I not hope that a new approach – any approach, really – by the US to Cuba be better than one that has delivered only stagnation for decades? Now that the decision has been made to improve relations, I can only hope that it can eventually lead to better lives for my family in Cuba and an opportunity for my two-year-old daughter to discover the place where I was born.
But for that longed-for openness to really stick, Cuba needs to stop treating civil rights as optional. I can’t possibly ignore that the Cuban government arrested 90 protesters during a peaceful march last Sunday, less than a month after it opened an embassy in Washington DC. In June alone, Cuba made some 630 political arrests, according to the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights. Also disturbing are reports that US legislators visiting the island since the thaw in relations have stopped visiting dissidents, as they did before December 17. That makes me question how invested the US is on not just bringing economic opportunity to Cuba but basic human rights as well, even as Kerry said that there are still many issues that divide the two governments, calling the ongoing effort to complete normalization “long and complex.”
I grew up in Miami, a place where if you were Cuban-American, there seemed to be only one acceptable way to feel about the nearly non-existent US-Cuba relationship: vindicated, because freezing out Fidel meant that we held some power to punish him and end his rule. I felt that way, too. For me, the pain that Cuban exiles feel about a lost homeland (mocked these days as passé) wasn’t a story I heard from my parents, but one I lived myself.
When my parents, my two sisters and I left Havana during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, I was eight, old enough to be told that we were leaving because we weren’t Communists and were religious, and that meant that our future there was already over. I was also old enough to feel torn from the world we left behind – torn from our tiny, two-room row house with no plumbing and from all our family but one uncle who already lived in Miami.
Gradually, though, it became clear that the US embargo against Cuba was at best futile and at worst a sham, especially in view of the billions of dollars that Cuban exiles send to our relatives every year and sales of US food and medicine to Cuba since 2000. I remember interviewing an official at the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami, who presented me with evidence that “our side” was winning: a report that the Cuban Navy had sunk two small boats because the government could no longer afford their upkeep. That this was considered progress in bringing about change in Cuba was depressing. That was 15 years ago.
But it remains to be seen whether diplomacy can do better. When Kerry raises the Stars and Stripes in Havana, millions of people around the world will see it as the final nail on the Cold War’s coffin, but for many Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits, it will be mark the beginning of the true test for the US as well as Cuba: whether the partnership can make lives of ordinary Cubans better through a true expansion of personal and civic freedoms and opportunity, and above all the right to choose their own destiny.
