THOUGH AGONISINGLY too slow, Washington and Havana now seem set to move on a constructive path for restoring USA-Cuba relations half a decade after the dawn of the Cuban Revolution.

It would be a most remarkable moment of our time should both the aging, retired revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, and the comparatively young and dynamic President Barack Obama, both legends in their own right, bear witness to the ceremony of normalisation of Havana-Washington diplomatic relations.

Do not hold your breath that Washington’s unprecedented trade, financial and economic embargo, imposed against Cuba 47 years ago, may be lifted before Obama engages America’s voters for a second presidential term. Nor should this possibility, remote as it appears, be ruled out before the 2012 election.

In politics, all things are possible. A lot of backroom talks, consistent within folding strategies, are being pursued, some with minimum of media coverage. Like, for example, last week’s meeting in Havana between the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Bisa Williams, and Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Dagoberto Rodriguez.

It was the first such ‘high-level’ talks since America’s unprecedented imposition 47 years ago of a most costly, punitive trade, financial and economic embargo against that small, defiant Caribbean nation.

Significantly, that meeting occurred while Williams was in Havana to discuss the likely resumption of direct postal services between Cuba and the USA, and within weeks of the not surprising decision by Obama to renew the embargo for another year.

As a consequence of provisions in the draconian ‘Helms-Burton Bill’, a US President requires congressional approval of ‘democratic’ changes in Cuba prior to termination of the embargo.

Embargo ‘roadmap’
With the rise of the Obama presidency, Democrats control of both the House of Representatives and Senate, plus political and economic developments globally, and specifically the changing political landscape in the Latin America-Caribbean region, there are increasing optimism by leaders of Congress that the USA is working with a ‘roadmap’ for ending the embargo on Cuba.

Having extended the embargo for another year, President Obama made clear his “willingness” to open dialogue with Cuba’s leaders, while signalling his expectation of Cuba making “some significant moves (code words for what the US regards as ‘democratic elections’)” prior to termination of the embargo.

In Havana, President Raoul Castro has welcomed what was termed “positive signals” from President Obama, but stressed that Cuba’s openness to negotiations rules out ‘preconditions’.

That was an indirect reminder that Washington should not expect Cuba to change its governance system — a sovereign right it has defended for half a century — in order to secure termination of the US embargo.

Nevertheless, events and developments, some with minimum media coverage, continue to take place. Apart from the recent ‘high-level’ Williams-Rodriguez meeting in Havana, the Obama administration has given the green light for US telecommunication corporations to trade in satellite and cellular services. Those developments coincide with arrangements being finalised to resume direct mail services between the two countries, and come against the backdrop of some initiatives taken under the previous George Bush administration, such as permitting the sale, on a cash basis, of US agricultural exports to Cuba. According to a recent Inter-Press Service report, this trade between the two “political enemies” had soared to some US$700 million last year.

Last week, Congressman Charles Rangel (an old friend of the Caribbean) and two congressional colleagues, Barbara Lee (Democrat) and Jeff Lake (Republican) released a report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) that points to a ‘roadmap’ strategy for ending what has been clearly established as America’s acknowledged ‘failed policy’ of five decades of embargo against that small Caribbean nation.

The embargo was intended to squeeze the revolutionary blood out of not just the Castro brothers and Cuba’s Communist Party, but the masses of Cubans, and isolate Cuba from among the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

However, is not Cuba but the USA that was to experience, over the years, the humiliation of isolation in this hemisphere, as Latin American and Caribbean nations methodically moved to establish diplomatic ties with Havana.

The precedent to bring Cuba out of the diplomatic cold had been courageously established by a quartet of CARICOM states — Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana — that created history of their own by joint relations with Havana.

Hopes are rising amid some light, after decades of political ‘darkness’ in USA-Cuba relations.