Ricardo Castillo Story

Echoes of old hatred still linger in the U.S-Cuban community. They are hurt and alarmed at the fact that on July 20 the U.S. and Cuban governments will set up formal embassies as a start to thaw the Cold War between the two nations.

Surely old timers still think the Marxist-Leninist Castro revolution is alive and well. Certainly it has survived the ideals of Lenin and Mao. But both Russia and China welcomed long ago the winds of economic change and the fact that individuals, not governments, are the prime source of social evolution.

Contrary to the reticent old Cubans (“the marielitos,” given the 1981 mass migration of Cubans to the United States from Cuba’s Mariel port), everyone in the Mexican-U.S. diplomatic corps is celebrating the moves made both by Raúl Castro and Barack Obama to start the process towards amicability.

It’s good to see that President Obama does not eye Cuba as the backward nation most Republicans who oppose the diplomatic move want to see.

Cuba is a poor nation but the upside is that in their dictatorship the Castro brothers deemed education as the prime target and, as a result, Cuba is the only Latin American nation that boasts a 100 percent literacy rate. Not bad for a third-world nation.

In the midst of the U.S.-Cuban diplomatic war, no nation has tried harder to see what today has come to fruition as Mexico has been the go-between for decades. It’s odd to see nowadays that neither the United States nor Cuba needed Mexico to bring them together. But it’s good to see regardless.