Still some hardball to play in baseball crazy Cuba
by Roger Repohl One of the many dashed hopes contrasting the Obama campaign with the Obama administration has been that of a fresh and open approach by the United States government toward Cuba. Two months after his inauguration, President Obama rescinded the Bush-era restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ travel to Cuba and on sending dollars to their relatives there, and immediately got this response from Cuban President Raul Castro: “We are willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about.” Such a disarmingly frank overture yielded exactly nothing. Things have remained just the way they’ve been for half a century, with Cuba strangling from an economic embargo that has only served to stiffen its ideological stance: a little Cold War going on long after the big Cold War had ended. Last week, the Cuban government announced that 52 of its 167 political prisoners would be released, and on Tuesday the first six of them were reunited with their families and left for exile in Spain. It was not the United States, stuck in its unbending demand for unilateral social and political change, that arranged…
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