What Cubans expect from Obama

By
Manuel E. Yepe                                                                  Read Spanish Version

From
WalterLippmann.com

As
expected, Barack Obama’s electoral win has raised new questions all
over the world given the United States of America’s place in the
current system of international relations.
We would be hard
pressed to find a region or country whose links with the superpower
are not important to their domestic and foreign policies.

That
a non-white, non-WASP American has been elected president of the U.S.
for the first time in history goes beyond the superpower’s global
policy or any consideration related to Obama’s skin color or ethnic
group. What matters is that it raises hopes for an end of the
ferocious hostilities toward the revolutionary project embraced by
our people as the crowning achievement of an independence struggle
started 140 years ago against Spanish colonialism.

As we
Cubans know only too well from our own hard experience, the facts and
promises underlying this historic event –should they be fulfilled–
would inevitably lead to a counterattack by the big financial and
industrial/military corporations whose grim interests would be
affected.

In order to defend both the status quo and their
privileges, they not only count on the power of their weapons, but
also on their tight grip on the media and most cultural and
educational means, which they use to mess with people’s minds and
fool them into acting against their most elementary interests and
rights within the framework of a legal and social order ruled by
money and the marketplace which makes it sure that their wealth
prevails over natural human aspirations of peace, solidarity and
equality.

We Cubans have reason to expect that a
president-elect who has promised change, himself an expression of
change in the correlation of political forces right on the powerful
neighbor’s ground, will pave the way for a new stage in the
relationship between Havana and Washington.

However, we are
aware that in order to keep the promise he made to the popular
movements and middle-class families who gave him their vote, Obama
would have to stand up to the same U.S. reactionary attitudes that
have hindered the development of the Cuban Revolution for half a
century.

If we follow that logic, this means a spectacular
shift in the state of affairs between Cuba and the U.S. as we have
known them throughout the 20th century and the first years of the
21st.

And for such things to become real in the Caribbean
region, the U.S. must give up not only its age-old ambition to have a
say in the island’s fate, but also its thirst for global dominance.
This is because Cuba cannot turn its back on longstanding commitments
made to the Third World and the poor from rich nations whose
solidarity has been in the final analysis its principal means of
support to fight and resist for the last 50 years.

Obama’s
victory can be attributed to millions of African Americans — an
ethnic group who suffered from a slave trade that remained legal
until 1865, followed by a century of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux
Klan’s terrorist outrages capped later on by the violent repressive
action against the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, from which Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and many other leaders of stature
came up.

We Cubans, of course, had no right to vote in this
election, but the fact that we have been victims of the same cruel
policies makes it clear to us that this victory of the American
people could give rise to a period of goodwill, peace and neighborly
gestures in the region and fuel democratization in international
relations.

Cuba only seeks respect for its independence from
Washington when the new government takes over on January 20,
2009.

It has been repeatedly said that Cuba’s support of
Obama’s candidacy stemmed from a wish to see the end of the economic
blockade or the release of the five heroic Cuban antiterrorists who
were convicted to unjust prison sentences in the U.S. more than ten
years ago. Or perhaps from hopes that a different administration
could put a stop to the attacks on and threats to the island and make
it possible to devote all human and material resources to the Cuban
people’s economic and social development. Or to spread to the full
the profoundly democratic character of the Cuban socialist project,
without any hostile, powerful neighbor interfering in its domestic
and foreign affairs.

Valid though they may be, all these
reasons fit into a single hope: that by express wish of the American
people a U.S. government be elected that respects Cuba’s
independence.

Manuel
E. Yepe Menéndez is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He is a
professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in
Havana. He was Cuba’s ambassador to Romania, general director of the
Prensa Latina agency; vice president of the Cuban Institute of Radio
and Television; founder and national director of the Technological
Information System (TIPS) of the United Nations Program for
Development in Cuba, and secretary of the Cuban Movement for the
Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples.

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2229.html
A
CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann