Who will take the first step?

We’re at a point in time where many people realize that the current policies that keep the United States and Cuba isolated from each other are absurd and that something has to change.

But we’re also at a point where everybody seems determined to say they did not take the first step toward a process that would result someday in a normalization of relations between the two countries – a status that has not existed since the early days of President John F. Kennedy.

SO IT BECOMES difficult to say how this situation will play out. It likely will come down to who is willing to accept the most criticism from their loyal followers for doing the right thing – no matter how politically unpopular it will seem.

How else to consider the fact that U.S. and Cuban officials actually met on Monday.

An assistant secretary of state met with a Washington-based head of the Cuban interests section (since the two countries don’t have reciprocal ambassadors who can talk). In accordance with the security that people at this level of politics like to engage in, the meeting’s location is a secret.

But U.S. officials went out of their way to portray this meeting as no big deal, saying it was meant to hash out some details and answer any questions the Cuban government might have about President Barack Obama’s actions earlier this month to ease federal restrictions on people traveling to Cuba and sending money to their relatives who still live on the Caribbean island nation.

AS THEY PUT it, this is the second such meeting this month, and similar meetings were held during the days of President George W. Bush.

Nobody in their right mind is going to believe that the Bush years in any way brought the United States and Cuba closer to a normal relationship than they have had for the past five decades.

This is all about the fact that federal officials want to be able to say that it is the Castro government that made the concessions that made it possible for the two countries to engage in talks serious enough that they might bring an end someday to the trade embargo – that attempt by Kennedy and maintained by all presidents since to try to cut Cuba off from the rest of the world.

All it really does is give Cuba and Fidel Castro the talking points he uses to stir up ridiculous rhetoric about “imperialistic Yankees” picking on the island nation and driving it into poverty.

SO AT A time when various studies are showing that the oldest Cuban exiles are starting to show slight sympathy for the idea of measures that might allow them to someday visit their homelands (and younger Cubanos in this country wishing to come and go between the two nations at their convenience), U.S. officials these days are trying to figure out how to build a relationship without appearing that they’re bending over to accommodate the Castro regime.

In short, it’s about partisan rhetoric. U.S. officials are determined to claim our nation “the winner” in the five-decade “fight” against a Communist-influenced nation existing so close to the mainland (the distance between Havana and Miami is about the same as the distance between Chicago and Milwaukee).

Now if it sounds like I’m saying the United States is somehow being pigheaded in this matter, I’m not. The pigheaded blame is to be shared on both sides of this partisan fight.

It literally goes all the way up to the top with Fidel himself.

WHEN CURRENT CUBA President Raul Castro tossed out rhetoric implying Cuba might be willing to make some concessions in the long-standing gripe areas of human rights abuses, it was seen as a sign that Castro and Obama might someday have a meeting of the minds that could result in some progress.

Only to have Fidel come out a few days later and claim that people were misinterpreting his younger brother’s talk, and that Cuba has nothing to apologize for or to concede.

Apparently, Fidel Castro wants to “win” this longstanding fight just as much as the U.S. hardliners do. Perhaps it is his old age that has him thinking in terms of legacy. I’m sure the last thing he wants is for a new regime that goes out of its way to erase his memory from the island.

Be honest, if the hardliners of old were to get its way, the history books would record the Castro regime as some batch of gangsters who took control by force, only to be deposed by the forces of good (with U.S. support). They might even try to rewrite the books so that the past half-century would be an irrelevant time period altogether.

I STILL THINK the idea of restoring relations between the two nations is not only a worthwhile goal, it is a required one.

Continuing with the trade embargo these days comes across as the United States trying to pretend that Cuba does not really exist. The fact is that it does. We can’t change that fact. The rest of the world has largely accepted the idea that Cuba’s legitimate government turned Communist back in ’59.

The sooner the United States accepts that, the better off we’ll be. Because the status quo is absurd, almost as ridiculous as Fidel Castro’s rhetoric about how the United States is to blame for all his country’s faults.

-30-