George,

The Obama administration has just opened the door to Cuba a crack, and Raul Castro has responded positively. I hope the process of reconciliation goes well. I have a couple of small personal recollections of the early days of the U.S. relationship with Castro-era Cuba. Perhaps they will help people who came in late to better understand the present situation, and why some of us on the left have been so distressed for so long. It did not have to turn out this way. Rabid and unthinking anti-communism abetted by a politically cohesive anti-Castro exile community have kept the natural relationship from forming for two generations.

1. I was a sophomore in college on New Year's day 1959, when Castro's irregulars entered Havana and Batista fled. Fulgencio Batista headed what had become a thoroughly corrupt and brutal government--but it ought to be remembered that for 25 years the U.S. government (and U.S. organized crime) had helped keep him in power until, a year earlier, Eisenhower started to cut him loose. American tourism stopped, because of the turmoil and State Department warnings.

Anyway, early in 1959 we learned that Cuba was actively encouraging tourism, offering inducements like bargain rates and official assistance. So some friends of mine went to Havana for Spring Break. They came back glowing with enthusiasm. They had a great time, been treated extremely well by tourism staff, and told to tell their friends that the new government was eager to have a good relationship with the U.S.

2. A few years later I became friends with Harvey Schwartz, who was a Vice President of the American Sugar Refining Company (Domino Sugar). I asked him about the company's view of having its properties in Cuba nationalized. He told me that in his view, they deserved it.

The workers in the vast cane fields had been kept down, by the company and by a very complicit government--very low wages, minimal education, scant health care. With nationalization, in his view, the Castro government was taking strong action to address those conditions in the most direct way.

Harvey also told me that the sugar company had long anticipated the eventual loss of their Cuban land, and had for years been investing in cane fields as well as beet-growing land in the American west. Further, they were compensated by the federal government for the loss.

Yet the expropriations of American interests was the basis for a series of embargoes--which forced the Cubans to look for markets for their sugar elsewhere, and which the Russians were pleased to exploit. (Batista, by the way, had been backed by the Cuban Communist Party for most of his tenure. In the era prior to the Cold War, it was not an issue for the U.S.)

3. In the mid-sixties I got to know Lee Lockwood. He was a Life Magazine photographer, and had come to know Fidel Castro in the mountains while on assignment. He admired him greatly, and produced stories and a book on the revolution and its aftermath, Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel. Among the things Lee spoke about was the vast social upheaval that greatly improved the lives of the large underclass while driving a devastating proportion of the educated class into exile in the U.S. These families became an active political force here, sustaining the chill. Castro did not help things, certainly, but some of the psychology of that expatriate generation may have been a desire for justification. They needed Cuba diminished to prove that they had been right to leave.

Anyway, it is now 50 years, Fidel is fading from the scene, and it is long since time to move on.

Dave Sagarin (April 22, 2009)