siuDE.com

Todd A. Kulhanek

It was an event that was heard around the world. A relic of the Cold War and an icon of leftist revolutionaries gave up the throne in communist Cuba.

For more than 50 years, Fidel Castro, the ruler of Cuba, has been a thorn in the sides of 10 U.S. administrations. He has been the target of numerous assassination plots, many of which were hatched right here in America.

He has been suppressing and oppressing his people from the beginning. For all the grandeur of his "revolutionary" talk and ideology, what he really achieved for his people was half a century of poverty and isolation.

Fidel was, and we can assume still is, unconcerned with the suffering of his people; his communist ideology and his power is all that matters to him. And through overt force, coercion and subversion, he made sure that his ideology was all that mattered to the Cuban people as well. The state for the sake of the state - that was his true mantra. Cuba's people were left to wallow in object poverty.

Post-WWII, anti-communist America abhorred the very idea of a communist nation just 90 miles off our coast, and so gave birth to a policy of embargo, forced isolation and repeated attempts to destabilize and assassinate.

The world has drastically changed since those policies were put into place, yet our position remarkably has not. The U.S. position on Cuba is without question beyond absurd. When one considers our current relations with countries like China (communist), and Vietnam (socialist), and that we fought wars with these nations, it is beyond logic or reason that we continue with these throw-back policies of embargo and forced isolation as a method to force political change in Cuba.

However, the real tragedy that involves Cuba lies with the American people and their complete intolerance of policy redirection in "mid-stream." The voters have always held politicians to an unrealistic intellectual (or possibly intestinal fortitude) standard. It makes it nearly impossible for officials to revise or abandon poor, outdated or even dangerous policy when new evidence comes to light.

A large amount of American voters see such revision or abandonment as "flip-flopping" or even as moral weakness. There is nothing so idiotic as to maintain a policy direction when most of the evidence points to a failed or plain wrongheaded doctrine.

However, this is exactly what we expect from our elected officials. The time to end this lunacy is now. No one is the better for our policies toward Cuba. Not us, and certainly not them.

Our politicians need to be given the latitude to say, "Folks, the Cold War is over, we won, so let us usher in the peace and extend the hand of friendship and cooperation to Cuba and her people."

If achieving the end of communism in Cuba is really our goal, there is little doubt that normalizing relations will have a far more dramatic (if not immediate) impact on destabilizing the regime, than has 50 years of isolation.

Sadly, our stubbornness, our irrational inflexibility has served us with the same results once again. The opportunity that presented the highest potential for impact (when Fidel announced his stepping down) has come and gone. But the window is not closed.

A U.S. initiative to normalize relations would pay enormous dividends to both Cubans and Americans. Freedom, massive investment and dramatically increased standard of living would be but a few of the things Cubans would realize.

As for Americans, aside for the satisfaction of doing the right thing and increased international credibility, an amazing vacation destination would be open to us. It would also remove the last breakwaters that prevent the return of so many Cuban refugees in Florida, especially Miami.

A free Cuba would provide two choices for these people: Either return to the country you say you love and have flag-waving parades over, or, put your Cuban flags away and embrace the country and society that took you in when you needed help and provided you your freedom and your livelihood.

Either way, these are opportunities that we should not pass up.

Kulhanek is a senior studying

paralegal studies and

administration of justice.

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