It’s Hard to Let Old Grudges Go
Sihanoukville, Cambodia, December 27th, 2014
Salaroche

Since Henry Kissinger’s secret first meeting with Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in July of 1971, the West hasn’t stopped dealing with China in a direct manner. And since Kissinger’s open meeting with Chairman Mao in 1972 the West has kept dealing with that country in a glaring wide-open way.

There have been important changes in that country since their first rapprochement with the West, although they haven’t come easy. There is a historical recurrence in the world’s ebb and flow of political tides and the Chinese case is no exception to it. Thus we saw that after Deng, Xiao Ping’s market overtures of the 70’s there followed the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. In spite of it, however, the West didn’t sever ties with China, which now translates into China being the second economy in the world, clearly poised to be No. 1 in the next decade or so.

At the same time, Western consumers have been enjoying the benefits of China’s low-cost exports, some western companies have enlarged their markets while setting base and improving their manufacturing on Chinese soil, and as it all has taken place large sectors of the Chinese population have raised their standards of living to quite considerable levels.

Old habits die hard, they say, but when it comes to China, taming the West’s post-WWII public dislike of authoritarian regimes seems to be paying dividends to all the countries involved. And I’m not talking about rose gardens here. We are all perfectly aware of the moral tradeoffs intrinsic in dealing with authoritarian regimes, but the West’s open-door policy towards China thus far seems to be working fine.

As the Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrations showed earlier this year, Beijing no longer seems eager to go back to Tiananmen times and one of the reasons for that stance is the specter of the financial difficulties that would befall China should it ever revert to those murderous days. No doubt the wellbeing of the whole country would be at stake if they ever did.

With all of the above in mind, the question that arises is: What are all those Cuban guys in Miami complaining about when staging demonstrations against Obama’s overtures toward Cuba? Is it all just a matter of obstinate ideologies from their part? Is it all a question of sheer inability to forget and forgive? Is it all just a matter of misplaced pride? A matter of ideological blindness?

Once again, the whole Miami-Cuban issue seems to be a sheer question of identity. Many of those Cuban expats have so much and for so long basked in their privileged anti-communist status that by now many of them have become arrogant and have trapped themselves into a black-and-white ideological view of US-Cuba relations whose only door out seems to be “our way or no way at all”.

Some of them claim they feel “betrayed” by Obama. Betrayed in what way? The US has been dealing with China for over 40 years now, did those Cuban guys ever felt betrayed because of that? Not at all. They only feel betrayed in their own misguided recalcitrant personal pride. They feel betrayed in their own misunderstood love of their own country of origin, which could be equivalent to telling their brothers on the island to “rot in hell unless you do as we wish”.

For the good fortune of everyone involved, however, the United States government doesn’t always have to abide by the wishes of some obstinate rightwing group of people, in spite of how justifiable their grievances may be regarding injustices that may have been committed against their friends or members of their families more than 50 years ago.

Many old Cubans have by now become so arrogant and one-track-minded that the first wish they have when they wake up and the last one they have when they go to bed is to one day witness the humiliation and incarceration of the Castro brothers. Anything short of realizing that wish seems perfectly unacceptable to them. It doesn’t really matter whether the Cuban people living on the island suffer because of their unwillingness to let the US open trade with Cuba. All that matters to them is to satisfy their insatiable desire for revenge.

While living in Paris in the early 80’s I went a few times to “La Scala”, a well-known nightclub where all kinds of good musicians used to play. On one occasion I had the pleasure of listening to a trio of Cuban singer-guitarists who impressed me with their vocal coordination. There is one song in particular I heard that night that has remained engraved in my memory, and the short refrain that I most remember used to say: “Cubano, dale la mano a tu hermano…” (Cuban, give your brother a hand)

With that song in mind, and as respectfully but straight-forwardly as possible, to my Cuban-American brethren I say: This is the 21st century, folks, and if you have built your Cuban-American identity exclusively around some deep-seated “anti-communist” bad memories of the distant past maybe it’s time for you to reinvent yourselves and start looking up to new future possibilities for Cuba for, if you don’t, you stand to be inevitably run over by the approaching train of changes and events to come.

Salaroche