For the past 50 years our country has all but ignored Cuba's existence. We've placed a trade embargo on the island nation, only harming our own farmers and other exporters, and we've gone as far to place travel restrictions on the country, punishing Cuban-Americans and hindering our travel industry.
But Matt, you say, Cuba is communist!
Castro has locked away political prisoners and journalists, and committed numerous other human rights atrocities.
So has China, but we seem pretty content with not only filling our dollar stores with their kitsch but our Wal-Marts as well. We've even let them buy our treasury bonds. A lot of them, too.
It seems that so much of America is still lockstep in the late '50s and early '60s. Many of our schools are still relics of the early Cold War age, and our education system hasn't progressed much further either.
Likewise, our inane policy toward dealing with Cuba is still rooted in the Cold War directives of years past.
The Cold War is over, but we still seem stuck in a post-Cold War attitude. Actually, since the end of the Cold War, we've seemed stuck in a post-anything attitude. We've had post-USSR, post-Waco, post-Whitewater, post-Lewinsky, post-USS Cole, post-Sept. 11, post-Katrina, and now with the election of President Barack Obama, post-Bush. What first sparked my interest and later support in Obama was his promise to bring a new sense of purpose and resolve to change the world for the better.
Republicans, never a sanguine group to start out with, labeled Obama as too auspicious, and his followers too naïve.
Obama did have a hard sell, believing that our self-indulgent and excessive ways could be curved, if only for a year or two to re-establish our standing in the world by fixing the economic mess our financial hubris wrought. After all, America has always shined in moments of great causes, abstemiously shedding our inherent selfishness for the collective cause, the American cause.
And then we lose our momentum. Or, as a Swedish family friend recently explained to me, Americans seem intent on "surfing and then sleeping." We go all-in at the last possible notice and then simply leave. We give weapons to Afghan mujahedeen to fight the Soviets but then forget to build schools and clinics in the country, leaving the door open for the Taliban. We resolved ourselves to root out Osama bin Laden in the Hindu Kush Mountains but then decided Iraq was more important.
We locked Cuba out during the Cold War in an effort to contain the plague of communism but forgot to let them back in once the Cold War ended, and in effect, have still never escaped the Cold War paradigm.
As the Summit of the Americas convenes in the coming weeks, Obama, like his predecessors, will once again be confronted with the Cuba question.
The president should agree to open Cuba back up, if not for the thousands of Cuban-Americans who still have family on the island and the economic advantages of a new market, then signal America's new worldview: A nation that isn't post-anything but before-everything.
If not for those reasons, then certainly for the cigars.
Matthew Christ is a political science freshman. His column appears on Mondays.
