The Fifty Year Handshake

As retro rightists convulse over President Obama shaking hands--gasp!--with Raul Castro in South Africa,  I return to a late November theme...the difference that the assassination of President Kennedy made and continues to make.  Or in this case, the difference not traveled.

Both the two books I cited in my post here (and review in more detail here) confirm that in 1963 President Kennedy and Fidel Castro were in touch through intermediaries, looking for ways to return to a more normal nation-to-nation relationship.  Apparently a key element in Castro's receptiveness was JFK acknowledging that the Batista presidency was garbage and the Cuban revolution understandable.  JFK wanted a pledge that Cuba would stop trying to export revolution to other countries and some movement towards less dependence on Moscow.  Castro was himself interested in that last proposition.

The two leaders probably would have met after the 1964 election, had JFK been reelected, which he almost certainly would have been had he lived.  And this current idiocy would be fifty years quaint.

Maybe this is a reason the rabid right is so rabidly against evolution.  They can't evolve.