Castro told Ted Kennedy 40 years ago that Cuba was ready for change | Mark Schneider (Crisis Group Senior VP) and Robert Hunter

A secretary of state told an audience in Houston that the United States was ready to consider ending its policy of isolating Cuba. Three days later, a senator introduced legislation to revoke the presidential proclamation establishing the trade embargo against Cuba. The year was 1975, the secretary of state was Henry Kissinger, and the senator was Edward M. Kennedy. The presidential proclamation had been issued by his brother, President John F. Kennedy, 13 years earlier.

Two months earlier — 40 years ago — as members of Senator Kennedy’s staff, we had traveled to Havana to meet Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro to lay the groundwork for a potential trip by Kennedy, seeding the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuba, as the senator had urged five years earlier. Kissinger personally blessed the trip.

Virtually every recent action taken by President Obama to relax travel, financial, and commercial restrictions on Cuba was included in Kennedy’s bill, introduced on March 4, 1975, which also would have triggered negotiations on normalization. At the time, it would have gone further by legislating an end to the embargo.

FULL ARTICLE (Boston Globe)

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