U.S. flag raising in Havana reveals old wounds run deep

It may have been 54 years since the American flag was last seen waving above the U.S. embassy in Havana, but mixed reactions to Friday’s flag-raising ceremony revealed that the scars of Cuba’s brutal past run deep — and won’t heal overnight.

“It’s a bittersweet day,” said David Gomez, political director of advocacy group #CubaNow. “It’s overdue. It’s something that should’ve happened a long time ago.”

SLIDESHOW: Flag-raising ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba >>

Gomez and his organization support normalizing relations between the two countries, including lifting the U.S.’s longstanding economic embargo against the communist island nation. But he knows that not all Cuban-Americans feel the same way, particularly those who came to the U.S. as exiles of Fidel Castro’s brutal regime.

“You have people who left behind their families, everything. You can’t tell people to put that kind of history behind them,” Gomez said. “It’s an emotional charge and I don’t blame them.”

“But at the same time, we don’t get anywhere by disengaging,” he continued.

A December report from the Pew Research Center, published following the unveiling of President Obama’s new Cuba policy, showed that disagreement within the Cuban-American community over ending the embargo largely falls along generational lines. As the percentage of Cuban-Americans who arrived in the U.S. after 1990 has grown (as of 2013, that was 56 percent of Cuban immigrants), so too has the percentage who want to end the embargo. A 2014 survey by Florida International University found, for example, that 68 percent of Cubans living in Miami — and 80 percent of recent arrivals — supported reinstating U.S.-Cuban relations.

Yet the majority’s willingness to make nice with Cuba isn’t exactly echoed by the loudest voices in the community. On Friday, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., born in Cuba and the first Cuban-American elected to Congress, took to Twitter and CNN to protest the U.S. embassy.

And while, in Havana, Secretary of State John Kerry was declaring that “the time has come for us to move in a more promising direction, Marco Rubio was delivering a speech at the Foreign Policy Initiative in New York City. The Florida senator contended that the White House's approach to Cuba, as well as its push for lightening sanctions against Iran, “represent the convergence of nearly every flawed strategic, moral, and economic notion that has driven President Obama’s foreign policy, and as such are emblematic of so many of the crises he has worsened around the world.”

Ahead of his speech, the Republican presidential hopeful tweeted, “President Obama has rewarded the Castro regime for its repressive tactics and persistent, patient opposition to American interests.”

Recent Amnesty International reports confirm that the repressive laws that drove more than a million people out of Cuba under Castro’s rule are still being used to restrict expression and punish political dissidents today. But, the nongovernmental organization argues, if the U.S. wants to change this, lifting the embargo would be a good first step.

“The whole criminal code is designed to restrict freedom of expression and association, under the framework that the Cuban state is under attack,” Marselha Goncalves Margerin, one of Amnesty International’s Latin America experts, told Yahoo News, noting that the implementation of the laws in question coincided with the enforcement of the U.S. embargo. “So if there’s no longer an attack on national security, these laws will eventually stop being used,” she said.

But, Margerin clarified, that won’t happen without international pressure.

“It’s naive to expect that a country that for decades has imprisoned individuals for expressing dissent is just going to stop overnight,” she said. “But once you are able to open things up, people will be able to visit and see for themselves.”

Margerin pointed to the recent news that the home rental network Airbnb is planning to set up shop in Cuba as a sign of the tourism to come.

“Do you think it’s in the interest of the Cuban government to do acts of repudiation in front of dissidents’ houses for everyone to see?” she asked, referring to government-orchestrated scenes of harassment and public humiliation against political opponents. “You’re opening up the country to more scrutiny.”

But, as Gomez noted, first Congress would have to pass legislation to end the decades-long embargo.

“I understand why some people would want to celebrate,” he said, referring to the flag raising. “But it’s important to remember this is one step forward on a long road.”

Related video: