Tom Hayden RIP

A year ago, on Radio WhoWhatWhy, I spoke with Tom Hayden about his passion and excitement at the opening up of Cuba.  This was the last time we spoke, after many years of conversations.

It has been sixty-two years since the Cuban Revolution began. Fifty-four years since the Bay of Pigs invasion. Fifty-three years since the Cuban missile crisis. Twenty-six years since the end of the Cold War, and fifteen years since the Elian Gonzalez incident. And it is just now that we are beginning a new relationships with our neighbor 90 miles away.

A significant part of our population has come of age with absolutely no knowledge of the history of the US / Cuba relationship, what the revolution was about, or what all the hostility has been about. And yet the history of that relationship with Cuba has been a kind of Rosetta Stone for understating the bias, the mistakes and domestic politics behind so much of American foreign policy from the mid 20th century until today.

Few have had the access to Cuba to provide the kind of clear and present perspective that Tom Hayden has he writes about that in Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters

My conversation with Tom Hayden:

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know

It’s hard to imagine that for young people growing up today, seeing the Middle East as the center of American military and foreign policy concerns, that for over fifty-years and eight Presidents, Cuba had been at the center of American concerns.

Ninety miles off America's shores, for the entirety of the cold war it represented the penultimate point where Americans and Soviets were eyeball to eyeball.

Today when celebrities travel to Cuba and some politicians try to make an issue of it, most people wonder what all the fuss is about? Is that progress, has Cuba really changed or is it a kind of collective Cuba fatigue or amnesia?

Julia Sweig is one of our nations reigning experts on Cuba and has just completed her second edition of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know.

My conversation with Julia Sweig:

Click here to listen on your iphone or ipad

Cuba and Bacardi

Every once in a while a family, a place and a cause come together to create a perfect storm that inexorably links there collective fate. Such was the case with the Mondavi's in the Napa Valley and with the Bacardi's in Cuba. Veteran NPR international correspondent Tom Gjelten, in his new book Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause takes a fresh look at the history of Cuba though the lens of the Bacardi family and in so doing shows us an island nation very different than fifty years of political sound bites.  

My conversation with Tom Gjelten:
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