In early June of this year in Sao Paulo, Brazil at a conference on Latin America hosted by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's foreign policy advisor, Marco Aurelio Garcia, I gave a panel presentation. I started by quoting from President John F. Kennedy's discussions with Jean Daniel, one of his chosen envoys to Cuba's President Fidel Castro in 1963 in both leaders' efforts to seek better relations between their two countries after the harrowing experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Both leaders knew, as did their third partner in the process, Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, that they had come close to exterminating the human race in October and that such an event must not occur again. So all three were working towards a more peaceful world. The words I quoted from President Kennedy were really quite stunning. They were these:

"I believe that there is no country in the world, including all the African regions, including any and all of the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime…."

An extraordinary admission by a courageous president—a president who in the summer of 1963 was intent on ending the Cold War, on a rapprochement with Cuba, on dealing equitably with Indonesia, and on pulling out all U.S. troops from Vietnam. He was assassinated that fall, of course, and all these positive moves were stopped. Some, like Vietnam, were even put in reverse with terrible consequences.

With regard to Cuba by the end of the Cheney/Bush administration, not much had changed since President Kennedy's assassination. Washington still engaged in the same nonsensical policy toward Cuba that it practiced in 1963. If anything the policy under the Cheney/Bush regime became even more draconian, more idiotic, more senseless, no longer backdropped by the security concerns of the Cold War, essentially catering to the narrow-minded politics of a few Cuban-Americans principally in Dade County, Florida. .

Today, it is well past time to change.

With the new administration of President Obama, momentum for such change is building rapidly in Washington. Attempted spoiling actions such as the FBI's deciding recently to reveal Cuban spies, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's invitation to Washington of the infamous Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Chris Simmons to brief lawmakers on "hordes of Cuban spies", and the general expression by a few of opposition to any new policy toward Cuba, will not halt that momentum. These are futile actions by an increasingly frightened minority of Americans who have had a stranglehold on U.S.-Cuba policy. That grip is being undone simply by the reality of an utterly bankrupt policy.

But more importantly, the American people are fed up with special interest groups running their country. They are fed up with being told they cannot travel to Cuba. They are fed up, as the polls strikingly demonstrate, with a feckless, spineless, leaderless Congress. They are fed up with incompetent government, period.

It's about time.

-- Lawrence Wilkerson