Victory for common sense as Obama reverses failed US policy and restores ties with Cuba

Students and teachers celebrate.

AT last, some common sense in US foreign policy from Barack Obama. After 50 years of failed policy, the President has shown some real political courage by announcing he will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba, suspended in 1961 when the US imposed embargoes and bans.

The announcement this week signalled the final end to the Cold War and came a few hours after Cuba released a US aid worker, Alan Gross, jailed for five years in the island nation of 11 million people only 140km off the coast of the US mainland.

Obama rightly ignored the fierce opposition of Republicans, particularly from Florida, the US state closest to Cuba, to talk directly with Cuban President Raul Castro about the release of Gross.

Raul is the 83-year-old brother of Fidel Castro and there is little doubt about old Fidel’s residual power. There was also a prisoner exchange of a US intelligence source and three Cuban intelligence agents.

I visited Cuba in May 2012 as part of a 10-day tourist visit to see first-hand one of the last bastions of a crumbling communist ideology that was holding back the country, part of Fidel Castro’s ageing legacy to his nation.

Because of the bans, it was impossible to fly directly from the US. I had to fly to Havana, Cuba’s capital, via the Bahamas and exit via Panama. This meant that when tourists left, Customs in the US never knew they had been there.

Obama has not lived up to expectations. Globally popular, he is unpopular at home. I hate to say this because I desperately wanted the first black US President to be a success.

US polls confirm his unpopularity; I am not alone in this view. Obama is not respected by political hardheads around the world; it is not just Russian President Vladimir Putin. If the US wants to be the globe’s policeman it has to have respect. A lack of respect is dangerous in the feudal wars that infect our planet.

This decision will make the world take ­notice.

I am in New York and the US news has been saturated with the Cuban announcement. The obvious point is clear; the US recognises communist China and Vietnam, so why not Cuba?

So what is the future of the ­regime in Cuba now that communism’s dream of world domination is long gone?

By opening the door to the US, the Cuban regime has spelled the end of communism.

Communications and investment will open up Cuban life and bring about an unstoppable push for change.

The change may take a few years to take full effect but, make no mistake, it will happen. The regime is dying from today.

My lasting impressions of ­Cubans are people who want freedom. They will be celebrating tonight.

As a tourism destination it is worth the effort to get there. The damaging 50-year-old US trade embargo — the longest in modern history — did not stop Cuba expanding its investment in tourism infrastructure, which saw tourism surpass sugar as the nation’s most significant source of hard currency 17 years ago.

Politically, Cuba remains an ideological inspiration to left-leaning Latin American presidents in Venezuela, Paraguay, Bolivia and Ecuador, and economically it has been slow to change.

Cuba continues to be condemned internationally for excluding its citizens from basic human rights. The Committee to Protect Journalists claimed four years ago that Cuba had the second highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world after the People’s Republic of China.

Nevertheless, the politics of Cuba has been changing.

Two years ago the government announced moves to legalise the buying and selling of private property. The sales of computers and mobile phones are increasing, but the economy is still unproductive.

The government plans moving 30 per cent of its workforce to the private sector, but the pace of change is painfully slow.

Economically, China and Vietnam have abandoned communism as envisaged by Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx.

Cuba will have to rapidly accelerate its reforms or go the way of the Soviet Union.

Australia’s largest trading partner, China, with the second biggest economy in the world, has modified its communist ideology to the point that neither comrades Lenin nor Marx would recognise it.

If it weren’t for the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, Australia would have gone into recession with the rest of the world during the global financial crisis.

So Australians owe a debt to China’s second revolution and the creation of a market economy by the Communist Party.

Marx must be turning in his grave.

Maybe Cuba will now follow China’s lead.