Surprise and delight prevailed in Havana following yesterday’s simultaneous announcement by both governments of the resumption of full diplomatic relations. Our man/woman (no by-line) from Le Figaro was there, as reported by the French newssite L’actualité.com.

Well, OK: half-surprise. It seems people there in Havana, at least, had been aware for weeks that some sort of breakthrough in US relations was coming. There is no explanation how they knew.

Further, those in the US now raging against Obama’s move are at least right in one respect: Raúl Castro’s government really wanted this:

The Revolution moves no one to dreams anymore on the Communist island. Even if the regime of Raúl Castro is not in danger, or even hard-pressed (contrary to the repeated proclamations from the Cubans in Miami), the Cuban president had been preparing for this opening to the US for a long time.

Actually, the American authorities might have been pursuing exactly the wrong strategy for all these decades:

As an old Cuban Communist Party cadre, Mirta, confided recently: “How could the American authorities have followed such a stupid policy for fifty years? If they had raised the embargo, normalized relations with Cuba, the regime would have crumbled all by itself.”

Note well that, in fact, the embargo is not raised: that’s something only Congress can do. In any case, according to this piece American culture has long ruled on Havana’s streets anyway, with “caps, glasses [meaning sun- ?] and gadgets” bearing some variation of the Stars & Stripes representing highest style. One has to wonder, though, exactly what sort of “gadgets” the Figaro reporter witnessed there, considering Cuba’s well-known reputation for being a virtual open-air museum of lovingly cared-for fifties-vintage American cars. PalmPilots, maybe? Transistor radios?

I’m afraid I now have to add my voice to those others critical of the Obama administration. But my particular objection concerns an issue not extensively raised heretofore: his spy-exchange policy.

The inspiration here comes – as it so often does these days – from a tweet:

RT @news_suisse Let's swap: Fidel #Castro will only free spy suspct in xchng 4 5 #Cuba spies held by US "like w/Russns" http://bit.ly/bu900P

July 31, 2010 10:06 am via Futuretweets V2ReplyRetweetFavorite

@EuroSavant

EuroSavant

The reference is to this article in the Swiss paper 24 Heures about ancient Cuban strongman Fidel Castro recently emerging in public to rail against his old bugbear, the US. Turns out the authorities there have been holding an American businessman for eight months now, whom they are still “investigating.” How convenient: maybe to get him back the US government would be willing to exchange five already-convicted Cuban spies, namely the so-called “Cuban Five” who were dispatched to Florida to infiltrate Cuban exile organizations, one of whom was then found guilty of “conspiracy to commit murder.”

Any six-year-old marble-trader (not to mention The Doors) could tell you what’s wrong with that deal: they want five of ours for just one of theirs! And why would Fidel believe that the US would even consider such an unequal transaction? Because no less than a month ago the Obama administration did accept precisely that in sending ten suspected spies back to Russia in exchange for only four in return! Shortly thereafter, VP Biden tried to downplay this disparity by asserting that “[w]e got back four really good ones.”

But anyone can see that that is far from true. In fact, all you need to do to disprove Biden’s assertion is examine the case of but one of those Russians, Anna Chapman (which, strangely, is precisely what Biden and his talk-show host Jay Leno then proceeded to do!). From the considerable value-added that has been derived from her already – like this, and also this – it’s clear that, in fact, Ms. Chapman alone should have been worth the return of ten of our own spies from Russian jails – at least.

But apparently Obama has rather less trading-savvy than any man-on-the-street, so the Russian spy exchange went through and Anna Chapman was gone – oh so irretrievably gone! That’s what makes Fidel think he can dangle a similarly lopsided sort of deal in front of US authorities and that they’ll go for it as well, but this sort of soft-headedness in the spy-horse-trading market has got to stop!

P.S. Interestingly, the latest English-language coverage I’ve been able to find so far on this Cuban spy issue, like this recent piece from the Associate Press, completely misses the agent-exchange point by focusing instead on Castro’s characterization of the treatment of one of those imprisoned Cuban spies by US authorities as “torture.”

That’s ridiculous! The United States does not “torture” – not like they do on the island of Cuba! Why, I can distinctly remember the last President, George W. Bush, saying precisely that.

I first caught sight of this news-piece from an on-line article in L’Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party. I know, sad but true – but L’Humanité to me is nothing more than just another entry in my “France” RSS feed, I swear! And anyway, somehow the same thing has also been covered on-line on the Fox News site (but not more mainstream sources, like the Washington Post or even the New York Times), working from a Reuters report (which the Fox editors actually kept strictly factual – no vituperations against the President here at all!). Anyway, it seems that President Obama took advantage of the meeting he had in the Oval Office with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister of Spain, on 13 October to ask him to tell his foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, to pass along a personal message to Cuba – actually, to “the Cuban authorities.” The message was basically that the US was working to improve relations with the island-nation, but “if they don’t take steps too, it’s going to be very hard for us to continue.”

Perusing L’Humanité will further inform you – as looking at the Fox News article will not – that the paper that originally broke this story, appropriately enough, was Spain’s El País. So let’s go there and take a look: we can also handle the Spanish beat here on EuroSavant, though we don’t do it often. (more…)

“Is history about to repeat itself?” asks Clément Daniez of the French newsmagazine Le Point in his article published on-line today, Russians and Americans Replay the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vladimiar Putin has already explicitly spoken of such a thing: last October (2007) he warned that Washington’s plan to set up an anti-missile shield in Europe, with the radar in the Czech Republic and the interceptor missiles themselves in Poland, was setting the stage for a similar sort of serious confrontation between the two world powers as occurred in October, 1962. Of course, in the meantime the Bush administration has gone ahead anyway, as Condoleezza Rice was in Prague on July 8 to sign the agreement with the Czech government for setting up the radar. (more…)

For all the fuss about Fidel Castro resigning his post as Cuba’s “president” in favor of his brother Raúl, it all signifies very little when it comes to the hard realities of everyday Cuban life. (Indeed, many outside observers are of the opinion that the switch means very little difference in who is running the state, but that’s another subject entirely – let’s see if I can manage to pass along some of that commentary.) The US embargo and restrictions on travel there make it difficult for American sources to gain much background on conditions on the island, but this is a journalistic gap that Europeans are able and willing to step in and fill. Éric Landal of Libération does that today with an article, Havana: Capital of System D, and sub-titled “Cuba. Despite derisory salaries, people try to provide for their needs.” (more…)