Havana Affair

Cuba is off my usual beat, but President Obama just gave a statement about resuming diplomatic relations with Cuba and reopening the US embassy in Havana (Cuba will also reopen its embassy in Washington). The embassy likely won’t look much different from the US interests section that already exists there; it will occupy the same physical space, and there won’t be a US ambassador to Cuba just yet.

This is a move that has been held up in part by Cuban refusals to guarantee that US diplomats would be free to move around Cuba and to speak with members of the political opposition, so presumably some kind of arrangement has been reached on that front. As somebody who thinks about history a fair amount, it’s hard to divorce the historic nature of this diplomatic thaw from the more practical policy considerations, but I am also of the opinion that policies that fail over five plus decades should probably be abandoned, and the policy of freezing Cuba out has pretty clearly failed to change anything there.

I was going to embed the live feed of Obama’s statement, but it’s over now because sometimes I am very, very slow at this stuff, so I’ll try to embed the video when it’s posted later on.

UPDATE: Here’s the video:

Vox has posted the letters that Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro exchanged to formally reopen relations, which don’t say much but are obviously of historic significance.