President Obama went forward with his planned speech to the Cuban people despite the deadly terrorist attacks in Brussels, telling the crowd of Cubans that he was there to turn the final page on the Cold War.
“I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he said Tuesday during an address to a packed house at the Gran Teatro in Havana, which included President Raul Castro.
Focusing on his hope for a better future for both countries, he said the period of Cuba’s isolation has spanned his entire lifetime but has only served to hurt the Cuban people.
“The Cuban revolution took place the same year that my father came to the United States from Kenya,” he noted. “The Bay of Pigs took place the year that I was born.”
In many ways, he said, the United States and Cuba are like two brothers who have been estranged for many years.
“Even as we hare the same blood,” he said. “That’s why I believe our grandchildren will look back to this period of isolation as an aberration – just one chapter in a longer story of family and friendship.”
Obama once again called on Congress to end the trade embargo with Cuba and expressed his belief that the beginning of the diplomatic and trade thaw would help usher in new changes to the island nation.
Sprinkling his remarks with Spanish, he appealed to the young people of Cuba to work for change on the communist island, and he called on Castro to lift restrictions on the freedom of expression and assembly.
From talking to Castro during his visit, he said he knows the Cuban leader does not fear “a threat from the United States,” and told him “you need not fear the different voices of the Cuban people” and their capacity to assemble and express different political opinions.
“We cannot and should not ignore the very real differences we have on how we organize our governments, our economies and our societies,” he cautioned.
But the Cuban and American people also share many similarities, he said, citing love for families, baseball as the national past-time, and for millions, the Catholic faith.
While the two countries still have an uphill climb to truly normalize diplomatic and economic ties, he cited progress with agreements on health care, agriculture, education and law enforcement, as well as the reestablishment of mail service and commercial flights between Cuba and the U.S.
The embargo, he asserted, was only hurting the Cuban people. When critics ask why he began the process to renew ties a little more than a year ago, he said there is no better time than the present.
“I’ve always believed in what Martin Luther King Jr. called the fierce urgency of now,” he said. “We should not fear change, we should embrace it.”
