Kerry in Havana

The Cuban people aren’t familiar with the senator from Massachusetts, the first U.S. secretary of state to travel to the island in 70 years. The media have deliberately lowered the significance of the visit.

Since the beginning of the year, when talk began of Secretary of State John Kerry’s possible visit to Havana, U.S. and Cuban media like Granma, Cuba Debate, CNN and The New York Times have published articles that allude to the first trip of a U.S. foreign minister to the island “in 60 years.” This calculation suggests that a secretary of state, like Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles for example, traveled to Cuba in the 1950s during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

In reality, it wasn’t like that. The last two secretaries of state to travel to Cuba were Cordell Hull, in 1940, when he attended the Pan-American Foreign Ministers Conference in July of that year in Havana, and Edward Stettinius, secretary of state under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who traveled in 1945 after the democratic succession of power between Fulgencio Batista and Ramon Grau San Martin the previous year. In the 1950s, Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom visited the island many times, as did then-Vice President Richard Nixon in early 1955, after the elections that Batista’s government rigged and tried to project as democratically legitimate.

So Kerry’s trip to Cuba is the first of any secretary of state in 70 years. The two previous trips, made by Hull and Stettinius, occurred in the most democratic period in Cuba’s modern history, from the establishment of the 1940 constitution to the coup of 1952. They are the precedent framing Kerry’s visit and U.S. support for the Cuban democracy. Those 12 years that Cuba was closer to a democratic and sovereign state was when relations between the two countries were more normal, as difficult as it is for the current regime to recognize it.

This fact is not insignificant because, without refuting the intimacy between the U.S. and Cuba until 1960 when relations were broken, it gives diplomatic normalization a greater historical weight than many would think. Since Dec. 17, 2014, when Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced the re-establishment of political relations between the countries, there has been a clash of perceptions between the people involved in the deal that in some ways summarizes the symbolic dispute over the new bilateral era. Lessening or suppressing the importance of Kerry’s trip is part of this clash of perceptions.

The Obama administration, especially the State Department, have associated Obama’s diplomatic shift toward Havana with his legacy in foreign policy, not understanding this legacy of course as a rupture but as a reformulation of the traditional U.S. support for human rights in the hemisphere from a less interventionist perspective. On the other hand, the Cuban government has limited its expectations about Kerry’s visit and instead is emphasizing in the media the opening of an embassy in Washington. Hoisting the Cuban flag first in the capital of the empire, before they hoist their own flag in Havana, is an infantile way to celebrate this victory which, to top it off, is being attributed to Fidel Castro, the one who ruptured relations in 1960.

One way to verify the deliberate downgrading of Kerry’s visit is to follow the coverage of the event on the island’s official news. Up to a few days before the secretary of state’s arrival, the main print and electronic media hadn’t published a profile of the politician from Colorado and the senator from Massachusetts. Public ignorance about Kerry on the island is even more grave if you take into account some facts from his biography: He was a soldier in Vietnam in the 1960s, an opponent of the war in the 1970s, a practicing Catholic, George W. Bush’s opponent in the 2004 election, and critic of U.S. policy toward Latin America and Cuba.

Kerry’s religion is of high importance, as he is, along with Joe Biden, one of the Catholics closest to President Barack Obama. Pope Francis’ intervention in the process of diplomatic normalization is better understood through this Catholic connection with the current democratic administration. Also better understood is why President Obama and Pope Francis’ popularity rose correspondingly on the island: They are the only two global political figures rated positively by more than 80 percent of those interviewed in an independent survey by Bendixen and Amandi.

Until recently, in the electronic version of Granma, the search engine only showed four entries about Kerry: two about his formal encounters with [Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs] Bruno Rodriguez in Panama and later in Washington, another about the secretary’s meeting with the Palestinian ambassador, and another about the U.S. strategy against the Islamic State group, of which Cuba, along with Moscow and Tehran, seems to approve. The many unfavorable entries about the secretary of state, related to conflicts between Washington and Russia, Venezuela, Syria, and other allies of Havana, have been erased, although they can still be read on Cubadebate and Juventud Rebelde.

The official position of the Cuban government on the Islamic State group is part of the island’s foreign policy that is difficult to accommodate for the coalition headed by Secretary Kerry. Although the Cuban government recognizes that the Islamic State group is a “radical” or “extremist” group — Granma doesn’t use the word “terrorist” — and that they attack “cities and ethnic minorities in Iraq and Syria,” Havana continues to follow the Syrian government’s theory that the United States and Western powers have armed and supported the Islamic State group with the aim of subverting their ally Bashar al-Assad’s power. This type of shading in the media is part of Secretary Kerry’s welcome.

The majority of the Cuban population, who do not have Internet access and for more than half a century have been seeing a monstrous vision of the United States and its politicians, whether Democrat or Republican, will receive John Kerry without knowing who this first secretary of state to visit the island in 70 years is. Cuban officials are used to exalting the “culture” and “wisdom” of the Cuban people in their speeches. The intriguing thing is knowing to which sources of information this “wise” public, rigorously excluded from any major domestic or foreign decisions in the Cuban government, has access.