[After a mild
start, it ended up being a long, cold, wintry winter. But all winters end,
metaphorically as well as seasonally, and in this week’s series I’ve
AmericanStudied a few cultural and historical such American thaws—leading up to
this weekend post on one of our most recent warmings.]
Two posts of
mine to contextualize a recent warming—and a request for more perspectives!
In December, President
Obama announced a striking shift in America’s foreign policy, one not quite
as stunning as Nixon’s visit to China but in the same conversation: a thawing
of our half-century-long coldness toward our island neighbor of Cuba. In
response to this action, and more exactly to many of the over-simplified and
inaccurate critiques it received from American politicans and pundits, I wrote
a piece for my biweekly Talking Points Memo column, highlighting the 150
years of Cuban-American relations and history that such simplistic responses
forget or ignore. In that piece I engaged briefly with perhaps the single most
important figure in both Cuban and Cuban American history, José MartÃ; I would
thus argue that engaging more fully with his individual life and story, as
I tried to in this post, also offers important contexts and connections for
understanding the longstanding and unfolding relationship between these two
nations.
So those are two
places I would begin to contextualize and deepen our conversations about this
recent thaw and the relationship and history to which it connects. But what
about you? I would love to get more perspectives and voices, to hear other ways
that you would contextualize, analyze, understand, critique, and so on Obama’s decision,
our narratives of this neighboring nation, and any other relevant issues you’d
bring into the mix. So I’m going to cut this post short, in a symbolic but
genuine attempt to leave room for your own comments and responses. What do you
think?
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. You know
what to do!
No comments:
Post a Comment