Enough with the Hostility

This past Wednesday, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that put an end to the Socialist camp in Europe — another wall that for over half a century separated Cuba from its nearest neighbor, the U.S. — began to fall. Although invisible, that wall created many tense situations between these two nations, with severe consequences for the Cuban economy and the freedoms of the people on the island. That wall also generated strong waves of migration toward the United States, which, with the Cuban Rafters Crisis in the 1990s, forced Washington to regulate the entry of Cubans into American territory.

The step taken yesterday by Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro to reestablish diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, which will end the economic embargo imposed by Washington in 1962 sooner rather than later, will lead to a new atmosphere of peace in Latin America. It will free the relations between this region and the U.S. from old political contradictions and allow them to begin on a path of wide-ranging and pluralistic collaboration.

Although a new debate has begun, we can envision the gradual disappearance of Latin America’s antagonistic positions — of those who closed ranks in a radical way in favor of Cuban Socialism or American capitalism, the cause of a confrontation that seemed to be eternal. Those who will gain the most from this process of understanding are the Cuban citizens, who live isolated in their country, in the United States, or in exile around the world; they will now be able to reunite with their families, go back to their homeland if they so desire, and seek prosperity wherever they see fit, without any wall separating them from their families.

What could be the last vestige of the Cold War is beginning to crumble, and we believe that anything that comes in the still-unpredictable future in Cuba will be more beneficial than any circumstance of the past 52 years, a time in which conflicts, espionage and threats between the two neighbors prevailed.