US and Cuba Swap Embassies: Victory of Diplomacy and Democracy
US and Cuba Swap Embassies: Victory of Diplomacy and Democracy
As Cuba and the United States continue down the road of reconciliation, they must still avoid the bumps.
By Arturo Lopez-Levy, July 15, 2015.
The governments of United States and Cuba are opening embassies this week in Havana and Washington. This is a major watershed in the road to full normalization of relations between the two states and the two societies. This is also a major win for democracy because the two governments are following the feelings of overwhelming majorities of their peoples. The steps taken by Presidents Obama and Castro give voice to strong trends in both societies in favor of peaceful and constructive U.S.-Cuba relations.
Let’s get history straight. The U.S.-Cuba opening of December 17 is not the product ofa few “Johnny-come-lately” businessmen and lobbyists. It was the victory of the Cuban people’s nationalist resistance against five decades of an embargo that still is counterproductive, immoral, and illegal according to international law. Since the times of President Kennedy, but particularly since the last year of the Johnson administration, every bright mind in the State Department considered the embargo a harmful burden to U.S. values and interests in the world. In 1996, the lawyers of the State Department warned Secretary Warren Christopher that the passing of the Helms-Burton would be damaging to U.S relations with its allies, its standing in international law, and the promotion of democracy in Cuba.
Together with the Cuban nationalists, multiple constituencies in the United States won the grassroots battle for a change of policy since the end of the 1990s. Of particular note have been the religious groups of the National Council of Churches, the American left, and the Cuban American moderates and progressives who took their cause into the heart of constituencies misinformed and indoctrinated about Cuba. Cuban Americans like Carlos Muniz and Luciano Nieves paid for their devotion to good relations between the two countries with their lives. After the end of the Clinton administration the pro-embargo position became increasingly unpopular among libertarians, farmers, and business groups in general. It was a matter of whetting the appetites of the U.S. business community to engage with Cuba, something that began to happen with the processes of economic reform and political liberalization launched by Raul Castro’s government since 2009.
Normalcy is a goal, but normalization is a process. After restoring diplomatic relations, Cuba and the United States need to address the damages caused by the embargo/blockade to Cuba and the nationalization of American properties without compensation by Fidel Castro’s government in the early 1960s. But the two countries should also not let these issues paralyze the agenda of normalization. Flag-raising acts and new diplomatic missions are more than symbolic. They open the gates for substantive relations between the two nations.
More:
http://fpif.org/us-and-cuba-swap-embassies-victory-of-diplomacy-and-democracy/
(As a reality check, compensation was offered. U.S. American property owners, completely unlike property owners living outside Cuba in other places, like Canada, Europe, etc., DID make settlement with Cuba long, LONG ago.
US owners opted to forget settling with compensation because the US government advised them not to "trade with the enemy" and many of them assumed the US would overthrow the people's government of Cuba and seize the vacated properties for the U.S. American owners who had immigrated to the US before matters were settled.)
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On edit, adding an article published a few years ago in Florida:
U.S. Wary Of Push To Buy Claims To Confiscated Property In Cuba
BILLY HOUSE The Tampa Tribune
Published: June 17, 2008 | Updated: May 18, 2013 at 05:29 PM
WASHINGTON - Estela Roberts and her family have always hoped they would be compensated one day for their property in Cuba seized after that country's 1959 revolution.
Roberts, 62, whose family eventually relocated to Miami and then to Tampa, still remembers her family's beautiful home in Havana, down to the "marble staircase with some ironwork."
Along with a summer home in Tarara, a small sugar plantation, a bank and a tobacco store, the total value of the family's confiscated property has been estimated to exceed $3 million. Decades later, Roberts and her siblings have yet to receive a dime; frozen relations between the United States and Cuba have prevented their claim from being resolved. Now, suddenly, they could become prime targets for speculators.
An orchestrated effort may be afoot to persuade people such as Roberts and companies in Florida and across the country to sell their decades-old claims, warns the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. Mauricio Tamargo, head of the commission, said his agency had begun to receive inquiries last summer from some claimants -- many with sizeable claims -- saying they had been offered payments for those holdings.
It is not illegal to sell or purchase these claims, Tamargo said, but the purpose of this sudden activity remains unclear to the government. As a result, the commission has put out an alert for potential sellers and buyers to beware. The warning comes as claimants and their descendants are losing faith that after nearly a half-century they will ever see their accounts settled between Washington and Havana.
. . .
http://tbo.com/news/central-tampa/2008/jun/17/na-speculators-seeking-to-purchase-cuba-claims-ar-132002/
= new reply since forum marked as read
