No going back to mobster Cuba

IT was only a single airliner, but when its wheels touched the tarmac in the Cuban town of Santa Clara this week, it made history.  It was the first arrival of a US passenger plane since the 1960s and effectively ends the political isolation into which Washington threw Cuba after the communist takeover led by Fidel Castro. Indeed it could be argued that it also marked the final end of the Cold War. The airliner was not from one of the big US carriers but to prove this was not a half-hearted operation to resume air transport links,  the JetBlue flight brought US transport secretary Anthony Foxx. President Barack Obama resumed diplomatic ties with Cuba two years ago but Washington has fretted about the continued detention of political prisoners and the repression of the country’s leader Raul Castro, who succeeded his ailing brother Fidel in 2008. But the Obama administration has now authorized 10 US airlines to fly into Cuba. There could soon be over 100 flights a day. The flow is likely to be almost exclusively one-way since Cubans still face restrictions on traveling abroad.  There will be significant numbers of US businessmen anxious to cash in on the opportunities of a country whose economy has been crippled by incoherent communist controls. However, the greatest number of arrivals will be American tourists, allured by the charms of a country where much of the infrastructure and even the cars have been frozen in time for over 60 years. In the 1940s and 1950s, Cuba was a major US tourist destination. Vacationers flocked to the country’s beautiful beaches. Holiday resorts sprang up all over the island. But there was a dark side to this seeming vacation paradise. Fulgencio Batista, who was elected president in 1940 made himself dictator in 1952.  He turned out to be rather different from other Latin American despots. US mobsters established close links with his regime. They used the island as a staging post for their narcotics smuggling into the United States. They also took over the resorts, establishing casinos and prostitution. Batista also connived at the use of his jurisdiction for money-laundering and other illegal activities. In short, Cuba became a sink of corruption, run to a large degree by the American Mafia. Ordinary Cubans were treated with contempt by the mobsters and indeed by Batista himself whose secret police ran a reign of terror on the island, which in the end was not even concealed from vacationing Americans.  Successive US governments grumbled about the criminality in Cuba but did little positive to rein in the hoodlums. In the end, it was the Cubans themselves who took matters into their own hands. The revolution led by Castro overthrew the odious Batista and chased the mobsters off the island. All US possessions were nationalized and no compensation offered. It was this that caused president John F. Kennedy to plunge Cuba into the economic and political deepfreeze. However, there remain suspicions that his reaction and his subsequent backing for the failed Bay of Pigs counter-revolutionary invasion was also dictated by the Mafia, with whom some say that his administration appeared to have clandestine links. Cubans do not want the mobsters back. It is up to Washington this time to treat its close neighbor with proper respect and not allow it to again become a colony of depravity.