Postagens populares

sábado, 15 de agosto de 2015

John Kerry urges democracy on Cuba in break with cold war 

The US and Cuba have decided to “stop being the prisoners of history”, John Kerry said on Friday as he watched the American flag being raised at the US embassy in Havana for the first time in more than five decades.

In a ceremony that laid to rest one of the last remnants of the cold war, Mr Kerry, who became the first US secretary of state to visit Cuba since 1945, called on the neighbouring countries to “push aside old barriers and pursue new possibilities”.

Striking a careful balance between the new outreach to the country’s authoritarian regime and US support for dissidents, Mr Kerry urged Cuba to pursue “genuine democracy” but said that “Cuba’s future is for Cubans to shape”.

The rich symbolism of Friday’s ceremony at the embassy was the culmination of the surprise decision taken in late December to normalise relations between two countries separated by only 90 miles of sea.

“US-Cuban relations have been suspended in the amber of cold war politics,” Mr Kerry said, arguing that the five-decade freeze had become an anomaly that somehow survived sweeping changes in the rest of the world.

“The United States has had 10 new presidents and in a united Germany the Berlin Wall is a fading memory, freed from Soviet shackles,” he said.

Only last week Mr Kerry had been in Hanoi to celebrate two decades of normalisation of relations between the US and Vietnam despite a bitter war he himself fought in that had “inflicted indelible scars on body and mind”.

In a minutely choreographed event, the US flag was delivered by the three US marines, now in their 70s, who had taken it down in 1961 when President Dwight Eisenhower announced he was breaking relations with Fidel Castro’s regime.


“We knew we were closing it up, but we had no idea as to all the particulars behind it,” Francis East, then a marine gunnery sergeant, told CNN about the day the flag came down. “I really did not think this day was ever going to happen.”

Mr Kerry spoke from a stage overlooking the Malecon seafront in Havana and was preceded by Richard Blanco, the poet laureate who was born to Cuban exiles and who celebrated in a specially written verse “the lucid blues of our shared horizon.”

US­Cuban relations have been suspended in the amber of cold war politics


  
The embassy building had been the site of one of the last great propaganda skirmishes of the cold war. In 2006, the Cuban government installed 138 flags outside what was then the US Interests Section in Havana, each with a white star to commemorate a Cuban victim of terrorism.

The “wall of flags” had another motive: to obscure an electronic billboard installed by the US government that was designed to broadcast news to the Cuban population.

Opponents of the US opening to Cuba criticised the absence of dissidents in the audience. “Their exclusion from this event has ensured it will be little more than a propaganda rally for the Castro regime,” said Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American senator who is running for the Republican presidential nomination.

US officials said that there was limited space at the embassy and that activists and other representatives of civil society had been invited to a larger event later in the day at the house of the US chief of mission.

Given the fierce passions that long surrounded Cuba in US politics, perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Obama’s administration’s rapprochement with Havana has been how politically painless it has been.

An opinion poll last month by Pew said that the majority in favour of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba had actually grown in the months since the policy was first announced in late December, with 73 per cent in favour, up from 63 per cent in January. Even among Republicans, 59 per cent supported lifting the trade embargo, which would require an act of Congress.


Nenhum comentário:

Postar um comentário