Rethinking relationships abroad

By our opinion

On January 8, 1959, Fidel Castro's rebel forces entered Cuba's capitol city of Havana. By February of that year, Castro was declared the country's prime minister, and things between the United States and Cuba haven't been the same since.

Now members of our student body are returning from a semester spent abroad in Cuba. The experiences of a unique place and culture will undoubtedly last another group of lucky students a lifetime. However, we shouldn't reconsider our country's relationship with Cuba just because we can appreciate its rich culture.

Even if it was the most boring place on earth, we would still have a responsibility to reconsider policies created half a century ago.

Between the seizure of American private property, the suspicious nationalizing of industry in the context of a paranoid Cold War environment and the growth of the anti-Castro movement in Miami, Florida, every American president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has taken a hard line toward Cuba.

Today, most of us here associate Cuba with the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and those illegal cigars we're only allowed to buy in Canada. Though the Cold War officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, another cold war continues today just south of Florida.

If our ideological struggle with global communism taught us anything, besides how to create a formulaic spy plot, it's that nothing is more effective in usurping less than democratic governments than opening up trade.

Since the Spanish-American War of 1898, America's relationship with our neighbor to the south has largely been defined by either the politics of domination or the politics of the cold shoulder.

Between 1900 and 1959, America's decisions to intervene in Cuban politics and call in the Marines whenever someone we didn't particularly like became powerful created the situation that empowered Castro in the first place. Today, our economic embargo of the country only served to strengthen Fidel and now the current Cuban leader Raul Castro.

While still on the campaign trail, President-elect Barack Obama promised to lift the restriction on Americans to visit immediate family members in Cuba, as well as indicating his openness to meeting with Raul Castro.

With Obama's inauguration set for Jan. 20, a new age of relations between our two countries is closer than ever to becoming a reality.

Whether the Cuba-United States policies of the 20th century were right or wrong is a matter for you, the reader, to consider. What matters today is what policy our century, our generation, should pursue. Though we like to think of politics as representative, too often foreign policy is a distortion of reality.

If Americans want to fly to Havana, invest in Cuban businesses and smoke Cuban cigars, more power to them. And if Cubans want to trade with or travel to America, they should have the option to do so. Such a relationship would benefit both countries.

Under Obama's presidency, we hope the relations between the United States and Cuba will be reconsidered. Our own university has fostered an amicable relationship with the country, and this alone could be a microcosm of the possibilities to come.

The last hundred years of American foreign relations should provide plenty of insight into the effects of political intervention. We here at The Santa Clara hope that 2009 will be the year our foreign policy stops treating the world like a giant American sandbox.

As our own Santa Clara students arrive from a place that many of us deem forbidden, the warm reception our students received while there seemed to signal promise toward more positive future relations between our countries.

As we look forward to our new president, we hope that the United States rebuilds global relationships that have been tarnished in past years.

Even though Cuba and the United States differ in political ideology, there is no reason that there should not be discussion between the two countries, as well as the chance for families to visit their loved ones. The Santa Clara students who are lucky enough to experience the lively culture because of an academic agreement are few. Their positive experiences in Cuba shed light that foreign relations between countries should be examples that despite differences, people can get along.