Cuba revisited

After reading an opinion article in the Deseret News by Robert Bennett I have thought more about Cuba.  Here is the link and the article:


http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865618584/Finally-good-possibilities-with-Cuba.html




President Obama’s decision to renew diplomatic relations with Cuba has stirred a great deal of commentary, with some saying, “We should have done this long ago,” and others insisting, “No, it’s a sellout to tyrants.” I disagree with both statements. To get a better understanding of the situation, let’s look at America’s relationship with Cuba from a historical perspective, starting with the first American president likely to have been concerned about it: Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson’s most significant presidential act was the Louisiana Purchase. It gave us a huge amount of land west of the Mississippi River and made New Orleans one of America’s most important ports. It was an enormous boon to our economy when grain raised in the Mississippi basin moved down the river and through New Orleans on its way to Great Britain, where farmers were leaving the land and moving to cities at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Ships sailing from New Orleans to Europe had to pass Cuba on their way. A foreign nation holding Cuba — Spain, at the time — could use it as a military base to disrupt this traffic and close off access to world trade for the entire Mississippi basin. American officials from Jefferson on were very uncomfortable with the idea of such a strategically placed foreign outpost in the Caribbean. When the Spanish-American War created an opportunity to make Cuba an independent nation and change the equation, we did so. A suitably grateful Cuba became a reliable American ally.
In the 1950s, an ineffective and corrupt Cuban government was overthrown by Fidel Castro. It was hoped that he would also be friendly to America, but he had other plans. A communist, he allied himself with the Soviet Union, which subsidized Cuba’s economy while Castro established a brutal dictatorship at home and built up a wide network of subversive cells throughout South America. What we had feared might be a potential forward base for Spain in the Western Hemisphere became a real one for the Soviet Union.
Sen. John Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower administration for being too timid on the subject of Cuba. As president, he tried to invade it, but he failed. The next year, contemptuous of Kennedy’s capability, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev tried to put a missile base in Cuba, one from which he could strike any city in America. He also failed, stopped by a U.S. naval blockade at perhaps the tensest moment of the Cold War. After that, a quiet agreement: The Soviet Union would continue to support Castro but would not put missiles in Cuba; America would not invade it.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Castro desperately needed a new patron. He found one in Hugo Chavez, the dictatorial president of Venezuela. Chavez had plenty of oil money and a desire to bring other South American countries into his orbit. He agreed to prop up the disastrous Cuban economy while Castro continued to spread anti-Americanism throughout Latin America.
But now Chavez is dead, world oil prices are dropping and Venezuela is nearly broke. The Castro brothers, with no place to turn, need us more than we need them. President Obama has far more leverage in determining what the new relationship with Cuba will be than he would have had he acted earlier. Normalizing diplomatic relations also takes away the Castros’ most powerful rhetorical tool — the claim that everything wrong in Cuba is America’s fault.
The devil is always in the details, but if we act wisely, it is possible that America can use this moment to make good things happen in our relationship with Cuba.