Yesterday, the United States and Cuba agreed to restore diplomatic relations and deepen bilateral dialogue in order to end the economic and commercial blockade between Washington and Havana, which has been in effect for the last 53 years. It is a historic decision that Latin America received with unwavering joy.
Despite the announcement about the thaw, which formally marks the end of the Cold War, and which shocked the world, this was the result of several months of intense and secret negotiations arbitrated by Pope Francis and encouraged by the government of Canada.
With this initiative, President Barack Obama inscribed his name with golden letters into world history, showing courage to confront the prejudices and imperial schemes that have been overtaken by economic and political realities emerging from a world that has become a global village.
President Raul Castro had the historical distinction of announcing to his people the virtual end to the blockade, and the start of reconciliation with its powerful neighbor and the vast group of exiled compatriots on U.S. soil and in other nations.
The floodgates of understanding were opened with Cuba’s release of U.S. contractor Alan Gross, along with a spy who had spent 20 years in prison; and by Washington’s release of three Cuban prisoners accused of spying.
Obama has had the courage to recognize that “isolation will not work,” and that the blockade against Cuba “causes enormous human and economic damage,” and thus he immediately announced that his government would lift economic and travel restrictions.
With his successful mediation, Pope Francis has fulfilled the sublime request of the deceased Pope John Paul II during his historic visit to Havana: “May Cuba … open itself up to the world, and may the world open itself up to Cuba.”
It is with undaunted enthusiasm that the Dominican government and its people receive the good news about the beginning of the end of the blockade against Cuba, and the restoration of diplomatic relations between the homeland of José Martí and Abraham Lincoln.
As a citizen of the United States and a Democratic Socialist , I have long opposed the U.S. embargo on heroic little socialist Cuba. Even when the Cuban government fell short of international standards of liberty and democracy that did not explain the implacable hostility of the American ruling class. They also saw fit to assist an assassination plot against Salvador Allende of Chile, soon after he was elected president of Chile by popular vote. Our ruling class had no quarrel with the fascist regime of Pinochet( his crimes against his own people are still being investigated. A few living accomplices of the right-wing dictator know where ALL the tortured-executed bodies of Allende supporters are buried.)
Whole books have documented the support of the CIA for bloody right-wing tyrannies all around the world.
No, the basis for the implacable hostility to Cuba was the political base in Miami of reactionary Cuban exiles – who still dream of recovering their justly socialized PRIVATE PROPERTY. And to be sure, the U.S. ruling class has pronounced anathema on the very ideal of SOCIALISM anywhere in the world. ” It can’t work “, their despicable intellectual representatives argue. But, of course, they will not even tolerate SOCIALISM as a social experiment. They must sabotage and vilify it from the very start. The Russian Bolsheviks encountered this purely malignant attitude of capitalist governments in 1917. Was it so unprincipled and criminal of Lenin to withdraw Russian troops from the imperialist slaughter of the Great War ? To cancel Czarist debts ? To form a government of workers and peasants ?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the American ruling class- as Vladimir Putin pointed out – was triumphant. But the idea that SOCIALISM was dead-and History had ended-was quite delusional.
Only a political stooge and idiot will believe that the American ruling class are all just sentimental slobs for FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY everywhere.
No, not even here in the USA. Recall the stolen presidential election in 2000. And today a reactionary Republican Senate and a reactionary Republican House represent US-the common people of America ? No way, Jose !
( http://radicalrons.blogspot.com/ )