Minabere Ibelema
For about 55 years, the United States
did everything it could to topple or strangulate the communist regime in
Cuba. President after president — from John F. Kennedy through George
W. Bush — sustained the hostility. In fact, April 17 will mark the 55th
anniversary of the failed U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion to topple
Castro.
Then in 2014 President Barack Obama
declared that enough was enough and instituted a thaw in the
relationship. To further the thaw and minimise the chances of a refreeze
after his tenure, Obama undertook a three-day state visit to
Cuba,beginning two Sundays ago. It was the first time an American
president visited Cuba in about 90 years. And Cuba just happens to be
just 90 miles away from American shores.”
With wife and two daughters in tow,
Obama couldn’t have been more gracious: “I have come here to bury the
last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas. I have come here to extend
the hand of friendship to the Cuban people.“
The people in attendance applauded these
words, but the remarks apparently rankled a notable person who wasn’t
in attendance: the aged, ailing and retired leader of the communist
revolution, Fidel Castro.
Referring to Obama’s call for Cuba and
the United States to leave the rancorous history behind, Castro
snickered: “I suppose all of us were at risk of a heart attack upon
hearing these words from the president of the United States.”
That may have been true for those
Cubans, like himself, who are trapped by history and afraid of change.
However, unlike Castro, Obama refuses to be ensnared by history. “Since
1959, we’ve been shadow boxers in this battle of geopolitical politics
and personalities,” he said.“I know the history, but I refuse to be
trapped by it.”
The 89-year-old Fidel Castro fears, of
course, that the revolution he led in 1959 might come crumbling because
of rapprochement with the United States. After all, the US hostility —
especially the economic embargo —provided fodder for anti-imperialist
rhetoric. America was the bogeyman to blame for all that goes wrong,
just as George Orwell depicted in Animal Farm.
To ensure that the political and
economic system remained the same, Fidel Castro handed over to his
younger brother, Raul Castro, in 2008 when he fell severely ill. Though
an ardent communist himself, Raul isn’t Fidel. And so he almost
instantly began to institute some reforms, if not in the political
sphere at least in the economic. That provided enough opening for Obama
to slip in the diplomatic overtures that resulted in his state visit.
Obama took the opportunity of the visit
to press for more reforms, especially with regard to political
liberties. “It gives individuals the capacity to be catalysts,” he said,
suggesting the link between democracy and economic development. And
without such reforms, Cuba can only make limited progress even if U.S.
economic embargo is lifted, Obama said.
More than anything else, it was probably
this aspect of the speech that rankled Fidel Castro. “We do not need
for the empire to give us anything,” he wrote in a lengthy article in
the Communist newspaper Granma after Obama’s visit.
“Nobody should be under the illusion
that the people of this dignified and selfless country will renounce the
glory, the rights or the spiritual wealth they have gained with the
development of education, science and culture.”
Indeed, if Obama erred in the speech, it
was in not giving Fidel Castro his due for bringing a measure of
economic justice to the island. Nor was he explicit in noting the role
of the US economic strangulation in keeping Cuba down. But what he
articulated was more important: a vision of the future, a vision that
all Cubans — and Americans — should embrace.
Ironically, while Fidel Castro
ostensibly rejects Obama’s overture and criticises him for not giving
his regime its due, Obama’s critics in the United States see quite the
opposite: he is giving the Castros’ regime much too much credit. Most
notable among the U.S. critics are two presidential candidates of Cuban
parentage, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Rubio characterised Obama’s visit as a
disgrace to the United States. “This is an Obama presidential trip whose
ultimate results will be giving away legitimacy and money to an
anti-American regime that actively undermines our national security
interests and acts against our values every single day,” Rubio has said.
Cruz was just as scathing: “I cannot
wait as president to visit Cuba. But when I visit Cuba, it will be a
free Cuba. It will be a Cuba without Raúl Castro, without Fidel Castro.”
In other words, Cruz is determined to press on with the 55-year-old
hostility.
Castro, Rubio and Cruz are thus stuck in the clutch of history — from the opposite ends of the clutch.
Unfortunately, such ideological
imprisonment is all too common. Look around the world, and the
manifestations are all over, none more enduring than the ever bloody
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama had ambitiously declared his goal of
settling it during his tenure. But he has long given up in frustration,
subverted by those who cannot see an alternative to history.
Nigerians, don’t have to look at the
Middle East to see such burden of history at work. We are living it
every day, most manifestly in the activist quest for the resurrection of
Biafra. Chinua Achebe gave the cause a most rarefied articulation in
the jaundiced memoir, There Was a Country: A personal History of Biafra. Well, all memoirs are jaundiced, but some more so than others. Achebe’s stuck a nerve and infused life into latent angst.
The well-known saying is that “Those who
don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The saying —
variously attributed to philosophers Edmund Burke and George Santayana—
should be modified to refer to those who don’t learn the proper lesson.
As it is with Castro, Rubio and Cruz, so it is with our Biafra
advocates.
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