Tag Archives: Fidel Castro

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Handshake should be an ice breaker

The Obama-Castro handshake at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela has drawn plenty of chattering from the left and the right.

I’ve long thought the time had come for the United States to thaw its frozen relationship with a tiny island nation that no longer poses any serious threat to this country.

President Barack Obama shook the hand of Cuba’s President Raul Castro. It was a brief, spontaneous moment at the start of ceremonies honoring the life of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. That’s all it was.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/12/11/the_obama-castro_handshake_dont_stop_there_120920.html

Republican pols bristled at the moment. Democratic pols loved it.

For more than five decades, American presidents starting with Dwight Eisenhower have ignored Cuba, a country taken over in a revolution led by communist despot Fidel Castro, Raul’s older brother. The Castros overthrew an equally despicable tyrant and U.S. officials thought initially life would get better for Cubans. It didn’t.

Fidel Castro cozied up to the Soviet Union, allowing the Big Bear to introduce intercontinental ballistic missiles to the island. U.S. spy planes discovered them, President John Kennedy quarantined the island and threatened to blow the place to smithereens if the Cubans and Soviets didn’t take the missiles down; the other side blinked and the crisis was over.

Then the Soviet Union disintegrated. Cuban remains a communist dictatorship. But what precisely is the threat that Cuba presents to this country? None as far as I can see.

The United States maintains diplomatic relations with nations with equally dismal human rights records as Cuba. The People’s Republic of China comes to mind; Vietnam’s human rights record is pretty abysmal. We still have relations with Zimbabwe, yes?

A fleeting handshake between two leaders doesn’t amount to anything in the context of where the greeting occurred. Nelson Mandela fostered a feeling of forgiveness and compassion when he came out of prison in 1990. He had been held captive for 27 years because he fought for the rights of the black majority in his country.

I think it’s time for the United States — which has left some travel restrictions to Cuba — to finally open the door to full relations with a country that poses no threat to the world’s greatest military and economic power.

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Shaking hands with a foe? Stop the presses!

I can hear it now from the conservative media.

There he goes again, shaking hands with our enemies.

President Obama today took a moment at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service to shake hands with Cuban president Raul Castro, who was among the 100 or so heads of state and government who traveled to South Africa to honor the life of one of history’s greatest liberators.

Obama took his seat among the dignitaries and shook hands with a number of them. One of them happened to be Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the communist dictator who outlasted 10 U.S. presidents — all of whom sought to remove him from power in Cuba. The United States still has a trade embargo in place against Cuba, a nation we still regard as some kind of geopolitical threat — even though the Cold War ended more than two decades ago.

Then the commentators made an important point about Obama’s fleeting gesture of good will toward Castro: It is totally in keeping with the life of the man they all were gathered to honor.

I’ve said it here already, but it bears repeating. Nelson Mandela emerged from imprisonment in February 1990 with his head held high and his hand held out to those who held him captive. He could have fomented violence. He could have returned to freedom an angry man bent on revenge.

Instead, he reached out to his foes and said, in effect, “Let’s build a new nation together. I need you and you need me.”

No one on Earth — except Barack Obama and Raul Castro — know what they said to each other for all of about two seconds. It doesn’t matter. The nations still are at odds over a whole host of issues. The two men weren’t present in that massive Soweto stadium to argue with each other. They were there to honor a great man’s memory and his glorious life of reconciliation.