Hola Cuba

Twenty-five years after the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States faded into history, President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro have announced that they are going to “normalize” the relationship between the two countries. The U.S. will open an embassy in Cuba, allow credit cards issued by U.S. banks to work there and expand opportunities for Americans to travel there (which U.S. law prohibits for tourism but allows for a wide range of other activities, including family visits, journalism, research, trade, arts and culture exchanges).

U.S. companies will also be allowed to sell access to the Internet in Cuba. Without much of a stretch we can all imagine what it will mean for Cuba when more Cubans are able to join the global, networked culture, participate in its conversations, create their own and access all the world’s news, knowledge and ideas, including those of Cuban voices such as Havana blogger and human rights champion Yoani Sanchez. The web will be a powerful force for social and political transformation in Cuba, even if that takes still more time and demands more patience.

I’m sure this is a bitter day for Cuban Americans and exiles who remain opposed, to their core, to the communist economy and repressive dictatorship of Fidel and Raul Castro’s revolutionary Cuba.

But I don’t see this move as an endorsement of repression, which is hardly unique to Cuba. Rather, I see a long-overdue step toward a peaceful relationship that should have been solidified decades ago. Stubbornness on both sides prevented it and remains an obstacle. This is the first serious move toward Cuban-American peace in my lifetime. I am 47. The United States has not had an embassy in Cuba since the Cuban missile crisis in 1961.

A commercial embargo on trade with Cuba has yet to be lifted; and Cuba’s instruments of repression and human rights abuses have yet to be dismantled. But travel, dialog and an embrace of the future, not the past, should help both countries cross those bridges and close the book on the 20th Century. It’s about time.

Originally published at nach.com.