Six Lessons for Obama on How to Improve Relations With Cuba
“We’ve been engaged in a failed policy with Cuba for the last fifty years, and we need to change it,” Barack Obama declared as a presidential candidate in 2007. Just last November, Obama reiterated to...
View ArticleA New Deal With Cuba
Pick up the phone, Mr. President! Make the call!” That was Alan Gross’s demand when I visited him in a Havana prison a year ago, expressing his desperation at being seemingly abandoned by the...
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Cuba Libre
This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more,...
View ArticleObama Is Expected to Take Cuba Off List of Terror Sponsors
Panama—In late November 1981, President Ronald Reagan secretly dispatched Secretary of State Alexander Haig to Mexico to meet with a high-ranking Cuban official and tell him that Cuba’s role in...
View ArticleOur Man in Panama: How Obama’s Summitry Could Change Relations With Latin...
As the plane descends to Tocumen International airport in Panama City, passengers look down on dozens of ships anchored at the mouth of the Panama Canal, awaiting their turn to traverse the locks from...
View ArticleSignaling a New Era in Relations, the Cuban Embassy Reopens in Washington
In 1917, the Cuban government of General Mario Garcia Menocal commissioned construction of a regal mansion on upper 16th Street in Washington, DC, to house the Embassy of Cuba. It was that building...
View ArticleOur Man in Havana: John Kerry Begins a New Era
No one is the other to the other to the sea whether on hemmed island or vast continent —Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco, at the flag ceremony in Havana In the aftermath of inaugurating the reopened...
View ArticleWhy the State Department Finally Confirmed Augusto Pinochet’s Role in...
In the fall of 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz faced a formidable challenge: to convince President Ronald Reagan that the time had come to jettison his favorite anti-Communist dictator, Gen....
View ArticleWhy US-Cuba Normalization Is Accelerating
When Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Cuba last August to raise the Stars and Stripes over the newly reopened US Embassy, his entourage included Carlos Gutierrez, a prominent Cuban-American...
View ArticleCuba and the United States Play ‘Béisbol’ Diplomacy
When former president Jimmy Carter traveled to Havana in May 2002, he attended a Cuban all-star baseball game. Over the objections of his Secret Service agents, Carter joined Fidel Castro on the mound,...
View ArticleBarack Obama, Our Man in Havana
“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.” Thus did President Obama salute a historic...
View ArticleHow Obama’s ‘Declassified Diplomacy’ Could Aid the Cause of Justice in Argentina
On March 11, a group of prominent Argentine human-rights activists presented a poignant petition to the US Embassy in Buenos Aires. They asked for the cooperation of the US government to advance the...
View ArticleIs Normalization With Cuba Irreversible?
The day after President Obama ended his historic trip to Havana, Cubans turned on their TV sets and watched his surprise guest appearance in a skit on the popular weekly show Vivir del Cuento (Live by...
View ArticleJustice, Finally, for One of Pinochet’s Most Famous Victims
On June 13, just one day after the horrific massacre at the Pulse nightclub, legal proceedings began in Orlando, Florida, in a unique case of another major atrocity, committed far away and over four...
View ArticleWashington Knew Pinochet Ordered an Act of Terrorism on US Soil—but Did...
On the evening of January 21, 1987, the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, Clair George, sent a secure pouch to the State Department filled with “top secret” intelligence cables from the...
View ArticleNormalization of Relations With Cuba Is All But Irreversible Now
With just under 100 days remaining in office, President Obama has launched a final offensive to assure that his administration’s effort to normalize relations with Cuba will outlast his presidency and...
View ArticleAfter Fidel Castro, What Comes Next?
“Our enemies should not delude themselves,” Fidel Castro declared in “After Fidel: What?” the appropriately titled last chapter of his autobiography, Fidel Castro: My Life. “I die tomorrow and my...
View ArticleTrump Is Threatening to Roll Back Normalization With Cuba—Here’s What’s at Stake
“I am pleased to join in marking two years of progress since the historic decision made by the United States and Cuba to begin normalizing relations after decades of conflict and isolation,” President...
View ArticleTrump Threatens to Rescind Obama’s Cuba Engagement—and Activists Fight Back
At mid-day on May 29, the conservative media website The Daily Caller posted an “exclusive” story titled “Trump Set To Roll Back Obama’s Cuba Policies.” The article stated that the president was...
View ArticleNormalization With Cuba Has Been a Smashing Success—but Trump Wants to...
Imagine this utopian scenario: On Friday afternoon, President Trump walks up to the podium at the Manuel Artime Theater in Miami, where he is scheduled to announce his new, draconian, US policy toward...
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