Peter Yarrow, John McAuliff and then Prime Minister Phan Van Khai
On April 30, 1975, I arrived in Hanoi for the first of over fifty visits. Literally as the last US ambassador closed one door in South Vietnam, I and four other American peace activists opened another in the soon to be reunified country.
The experience of the next two weeks in northern Vietnam, and a first visit to Ho Chi Minh City three years later, both made on behalf of the Quaker led American Friends Service Committee, focused my next twenty years on overcoming the legacies of the war.
I discovered that for southern and central Vietnamese, peace was liberation for many, occupation for some. The immense human cost of war was replaced by the lesser but still real suffering of reeducation camps, dispossession and exile.
Both countries wasted precious opportunities to quickly heal the physical and psychic wounds of war. Vietnam rebuffed an early Carter Administration effort through the Woodcock Commission to normalize relations and end our embargo because its leaders felt the US was obliged to fulfill its Paris Peace Agreement commitment of reconstruction aid. Later the Carter Administration rebuffed Vietnam’s readiness to normalize because it interfered with the strategy to align with China against the Soviet Union.
Although there were positive initiatives during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, the primary result was a lost decade and a half. Bill Clinton, with the help of Vietnam veteran Senators Kerry and McCain, rapidly transformed the bilateral relationship. (A tragic byproduct of the delay was a decade of civil war in Cambodia in which the US and China sided with the remnants of the Khmer Rouge to try to unseat the government and undermine the economic infrastructure that were being rebuilt with Vietnamese and Soviet assistance.)
As I worked with US educational institutions, foundations and non-governmental organizations to lay the private groundwork for bilateral official reconciliation, I witnessed (and may have assisted at the edges) Vietnam to transform itself economically and socially. Experimental steps in provision of land to those who farmed it and a family-based economy of manufacturing and trade, enabled the country to evolve from near famine and rationed poverty into food exporter, and one of the most robust economies and stable societies of Southeast Asia. The process of economic reform accelerated dramatically when the US embargo ended. Today we are Vietnam’s largest trading partner, a leading foreign investor, and the biggest source of tourists after adjacent China.
Strategically we have found common interests. Unlike other countries in the region, Vietnam faces no problem of religiously based extremism or terrorism and shares with us a preoccupation about the growing power of China. The US does not agree with Vietnam’s political system, state controlled media and repression of political dissidents. However this is the subject of normal diplomatic dialogue not of moralizing lectures and sanctions. The growth of personal freedoms and civil society and the increasingly active and independent National Assembly argue for the value of domestically defined democratic renovation, despite the historical dominance of a single Communist party ruling through semi-controlled elections.
Today I spend most of my time seeking a similar path to reconciliation between the US and Cuba. My touchstone is Ho Chi Minh’s slogan that, “nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” Ho was speaking of national not individual freedom, and failure to appreciate that perspective is the perennial failing of large powerful countries toward neighbors, not least the US.
In his opening remarks at the Summit of the Americas, President Barack Obama made a rare if not unprecedented official pledge, “I think it's important to recognize, given historic suspicions, that the United States' policy should not be interference in other countries.”
He also spoke, as he had in Europe and Turkey and in that week’s radio address, of new international relationships based on “mutual respect”.
Yet even Obama does not fully escape the prevailing assumption that the US is entitled, even obliged, to force Cuba to accommodate US views on democracy and human rights. We still would have an embargo and no relations with Vietnam, and for that matter with China, had such requirements for internal political change been conditions for normalization, or had US policy depended on agreement from political leaders in the exile community.
The US vainly appeals for regional support in its crusade to maintain a standard of democracy in the Hemisphere through leveraging Cuba, blithely ignoring that these same countries have made clear that the first step towards encouraging a more democratic Cuba must be the unconditional end of an interventionist US embargo.
Even the most sophisticated US leaders and media seem tone deaf to, if not dismissive of, regional voices. Our neighbors see US rhetoric about democracy as the persistent justification for decades of aggression, not to mention a large amount of hypocrisy. Many believe real American motives lie in our economic and strategic interests and unconscious assumption of hegemony. Cuba in particular sees US preaching about democracy within the context of a century of conflict over political and economic self-determination.
President Obama has taken a very admirable humanitarian step by ending all restrictions on remittances and travel by Cuban Americans. However he should not expect undue gratitude from Havana or the Hemisphere for terminating a peculiar policy that subjugated normal family relationships to political ends.
Obama should now use the same authority to allow equally unlimited travel by Americans for educational, religious, humanitarian and cultural purposes. This additional step would more substantively increase understanding and trust in both countries and, as with Vietnam, contribute to the process of healing and normalization.
The President should also urge Congress to adopt pending legislation to end restrictions on travel to Cuba by all Americans. Setting the example of restoring an important human right to our own people provides the moral basis for urging Cuba to make a comparable gesture for freedom of travel by abolishing exit visas that restrict the freedom to travel of its people.
The author is founder and executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, a non-governmental organization based in Dobbs Ferry, NY