The AP ran a story today titled, “US-Cuba immigration talks under cloud of mistrust.” The course of the article makes the current US-Cuba relationship and future prospects look pretty dismal. But we had always expected progress to be slow, and mutual recriminations do not disappear overnight. I, for one, am not discouraged. Still, one cannot argue with the sequence of events:
“Things seemed far more positive last September, when Bisa Williams stayed on in Cuba after the mail talks for unannounced meetings with senior officials and toured a government agricultural facility. The visit raised hopes of a new beginning for relations under Obama, who has said he wanted to extend a hand of friendship – but it has been all downhill since then.
“In November, the State Department expressed concern after reputed Cuban security officials briefly detained a well-known blogger, Yoani Sanchez. Obama later personally responded to a series of questions that Sanchez posted on her Web site, raising her profile and angering Cuban officials.
“Havana held military exercises soon after that a senior army official said were designed to counter a possible U.S. attack. More recently, Cuban leaders have been highly critical of Obama’s performance at climate talks in Copenhagen, suspicious of U.S. policy in Latin America, and downright apoplectic about Cuba’s inclusion on a list of alleged state sponsors of terrorism.
“In December, Fidel Castro wrote in an essay that Obama’s ‘friendly smile and African-American face’ are masking Washington’s sinister designs on Latin America. Cuba’s foreign minister called the U.S. president an ‘imperial and arrogant’ liar. Castro even criticized U.S. relief efforts in quake-devastated Haiti, accusing Washington of sending troops to ‘occupy Haitian territory.'”
And then, of course, there is the detention of the American citizen in Havana (Alan Gross: to Cuba, a spy, to the United States, a government contractor) to consider, and the U.S. refusal to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
There is all this, but yet the migration talks go on. And a higher U.S. official than has been sent in years will be present to participate in them. Not huge, but it’s something.
