Posted on: Friday, March 23, 2001

Détente with Cuba is long overdue

You can tell when it's time to bury the hatchet when the soldiers who fought against each other begin swapping war stories.

That's happening this week in Cuba, where, in the run-up to the 40th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a fascinating conference has brought a delegation of 60 Americans, including Kennedy administration and CIA officials and even five members of the Bay of Pigs invasion force. Their counterparts include a Cuban vice president who commanded the defenders who defeated the invasion April 17-19.

We saw this kind of meeting beginning in the 1970s with American and Chinese soldiers who opposed each other in the Korean War, and then in the late 1980s between American and Vietnamese soldiers who battled in Vietnam.

By now, of course, the fact of a nation's communist leadership is not a good enough reason for an embargo and hostility between it and America. Diplomatic relations were restored with China in 1978 and Vietnam in 1995.

The key stumbling block to warming relations with Cuba is the virulently anti-Castro Cuban population concentrated in South Florida. An indication of their disproportionate political pull was the seven months it took to do the obviously right thing in sending the shipwrecked 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez home to his father.

But the intensity of the Cuban American hatred for Castro is easing with age. That's why Alfredo Duran, a member of the 2506 Brigade invasion force, is in Cuba with the American delegation. Emphasizing that there still are conditions that should be changed in Cuba, Duran added, "The Bay of Pigs occurred in the context of the Cold War. The Cold War is over."

It's long past time for détente to begin.