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Restoring diplomatic ties would benefit both the United States and Cuba, and Latin America in general, if recent events are to go beyond being merely feel-good group photos to bookend U.S. President Barack Obama's second term.
With diplomatic ties restored and embassies reopened on Monday, Cuba's perseverance was vindicated, as the United States finally came around. That it took half a century for that to happen is a foreign policy aberration that historians will puzzle over for years to come.
To Washington, as for the average American, one may not care about closer U.S.-Cuba ties, but U.S. agricultural producers and manufacturers do, as the numerous trade missions beating a path to Havana have proven.
The U.S. industrial and services sectors are drooling at the thought of accessing a new, untapped market of 11 million consumers who are virtually next door and even somewhat culturally attuned.
Cuba's proximity, said Ernesto Wong, a Cuban-born, Caracas-based political observer and academic, makes it a "natural market" for the United States, especially its southern states.
What's more, with Brazil's financial help, Cuba is developing a special economic zone featuring a deep-water port that could transform the Caribbean nation into a regional shipping hub.
That market, however, is still off limits due to the U.S.-led trade embargo, which needs to be lifted if things are to substantially improve for Cubans, and trade is to flourish.
For Cuba, without lifting the embargo -- the first of several demands Cuba has made, including the U.S. withdrawal from Guantanamo Bay -- restoring ties and opening embassies will remain little more than a public relations feat, not a victory that can really help the island develop its economy and improve the life of its people.
Obama said that his country changes the failed policy and adopts this new method with the intention to "empower" Cuban people. However, without lifting the embargo, which has caused substantial costs to the Cuban economy and has deteriorated the living standards for Cubans, the Cuban people have to continue to suffer.
"Only the lifting of the economic, commercial and financial blockade, the return of the occupied territory in Guantanamo and the respect for Cuba's sovereignty will lend some meaning to the historic event that we are witnessing today," Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez said Monday.
For the region, Washington was trying to redeem its badly tarnished image in Latin America, where it has thrown its weight around like a feared neighborhood bully since at least the beginning of the last century.
Facing a "complex and disadvantageous" scenario in Latin America -- where U.S. presence has shrunk over the years -- Washington is scrambling to adopt new ways to reclaim its predominance in the Americas, and changing tack in Cuba is one way of doing that, said Wong.
But no one is under the illusion that the bully has been reformed, if the United States changed its attitude toward Cuba only for a diplomacy victory and as someone's political legacy, instead of making real and concrete movements to undo the wrongs that have been hurting and will continue to hurt the Cuban people's life.
The "challenge is huge," Rodriguez acknowledged, but the pay-off to bilateral cooperation will be nothing less than "peace, development, equity and stability in the continent." Enditem
