US-Cuba detente: Time for Americans to wake up from Cold War
January 19, 2015, 6:24 am

US President Barack Obama announced on Dec 17 that he would pursue normalization of relations with Cuba, the island country only 144 kilometers from Key West in Florida, ending the 54-year-old US embargo, but many Americans are still living in the Cold War.

Though Obama’s decision has been applauded internationally, many within the US have criticized him for appeasing the communist government in Cuba and undermining the cause of freedom and democracy there. There have been plenty of op-eds on these lines in mainstream US media in the past four weeks.

Indeed, Obama faces a tough battle to make good his announcement, for he needs the help of Republican-controlled Congress to lift the embargo with powerful people such as Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American, standing in the way.

Having made three trips to Cuba in the past four years, I too am a critic of Obama, but for making the move far too late.

In 2004 as a state Senator from Illinois, Obama had criticized the “failed” US policy on Cuba. So when he became president in 2009, many hoped he would change it. But it took him six long years to make the move, to the disappointment of many. In a sense, Obama let the “failed” policy extend for six more years.

Residents listen to a televised speech by U.S. President Barack Obama, in Havana, capital of Cuba, on Dec. 17, 2014. Cuban leader Raul Castro confirmed in a special TV appearance that his government and the Obama Administration of the United States had agreed to reestablish the diplomatic relations between the two countries [Xinhua]

Obama is absolutely right as the rest of the world has known for a long time – that the US policy on Cuba has been a miserable failure. However, the new Cuba policy has not succeeded in awakening some Obama supporters from the Cold War. In fact, quite a few of them want to turn the new policy into one that increases US presence in Cuba to counter Chinese and Russian participation there.

Richard Feinberg, a former White House and State Department official, is one of them. Feinberg, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told NBC News last week that “our Cuba policy was a real obstacle in a broader informal battle for influence in Latin America against China”. Such a zero-sum mentality is as bad as the US embargo. China’s involvement in Cuba was never aimed at the US. Instead, it has always been based on mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.

While the US has failed to exert any influence on Cuba with its embargo, China has to some extent prompted Cuban leaders to experiment with economic reforms, including starting the Mariel special economic zone and privatizing part of the economy.

Unlike the US which still lives in the Cold War era, maintaining more than 1,000 military bases all over the world manned by hundreds of thousands of soldiers, China has no such ambition.

China had for years been urging the US to lift its embargo on Cuba to improve overall relations, and it was one of the first countries to welcome Obama’s announcement.

Cuba is not and should not be a place for the US, China or Russia or any other country to jostle for geopolitical clout. If some Americans still suffer from such a mentality, they need to be awakened to fact that the Cold War ended a quarter century ago.

This article first appeared in China Daily.