Before I die I want to spend a summer evening at a baseball game in Havana. I first wanted to be a sportswriter after reading a piece by Tom Boswell of the Washington Post on baseball in Cuba, and since then all dreams of Cuba are filtered through joyful images of their sport. Last spring, Major League American baseball came to Havana in the form of the Baltimore Orioles. The commotion put the previous year's Papal visit into perspective. This was a landmark. Last September, David Hickey called for an end to the Cuban blockade while he was in Croke Park on All-Ireland day. People grumbled. Wrong place, wrong time etc. Yet if you knew of Cuban baseball and its place in the Cuban imagination, well, Croke Park was perfect.
I thought of Hickey this week as a six-year-old child, Elian Gonzales, spent the holiday as a tragic curiosity piece of the blockade. He has become the poster boy for Miami's rabid anti-Castro forces. In the torrent of bitter words, positive images of Cuba were hard to find. The child, fished from the sea on Thanksgiving Day last month, should logically and fairly have been returned to his father, Juan Miguel Gonzales, in Havana. Even under the United States' own two-faced "wet foot/dry foot" policy, wherein those Cubans apprehended at sea are returned and those apprehended on US soil are allowed to stay, Elian Gonzales should be at home by now. Instead, he is the latest victim of the US's bizarre cold war with Cuba.
Any discussion of Cuba within the US begins with mention of human rights. There is little doubt that in the past 18 months Cuba's record in this regard has declined still further. There is no justification for the suppression of free speech anywhere, but Cuba perhaps can come nearest to justification when it casts an eye over its history and that of its Caribbean neighbours. Cuba has always been a plaything of bigger powers. Screwed over by Spain, England and finally the US, which annexed the country when Spain refused to sell it. The pattern of relations was fixed by the Platt Amendment, which accorded the US the right to intervene militarily in Cuba's internal affairs. Since 1903 the US has kept a naval base in Guantanamo Bay as a symbol of its hegemony.
If Cubans doubt the mendacity of US intentions, they need only look at Grenada, Chile, Nicaragua, or any one of the list of places suffering heavy-footed American interference. They need only look at the malicious intent of the Cuba Democracy Act of 1992, or the Helms Burton act of 1996; they need only survey seven years' worth of UN votes condemning almost unanimously the continuing blockade. When it comes to Cuba, the US is beyond reason.
Destabilisation is the ultimate policy aim. The current tool is the stick of the denial of economic rights and the carrot of billions of dollars of reward if Fidel Castro is overthrown. That colours everything.
There have been signs late in the Clinton era that the White House is using the little flexibility remaining to it under the Helms Burton Act to improve relations between the two countries. Co-operation on drug patrols and regular flights to Havana from New York and LA were a start.
It is a fragile thing, however, and the furore surrounding the fate of Elian Gonzales has underlined how cheaply anti-Castro sentiment can buy big votes. The hectoring bulls are back in the china shop.
US policy on Cuba has been dictated for decades by the embittered middle-classes who fled Cuba in 1959 and immediately afterwards. This grouping has funded influential senators and congressmen so generously that it is difficult sometimes to hear anywhere a rational US voice on Cuba.
Comparisons with China confirm the Cuban suspicion that the US has no friends, only interests. China and its market is to be wooed by the siren song of dollars. China's human rights record is off the menu at the WTO. Virtually all candidates agree that China must be encouraged gently to change its ways, that embargoes are the wrong way to go; that trade is a lure.
Havana must sit and watch in bemusement.
It is more than a decade since the Berlin Wall came down and the economic prop that was the USSR collapsed. Somehow Cuba survived. We hear much about the 2,250 Cubans who made it to US shores this year on bits of flotsam and jetsam. It is a hinge of editorial discussion that when the US government held its first lottery for US visas, more than half-a-million of Cuba's 11 million inhabitants applied. Yet the point is that Cuba has survived, and will continue to do so. Blockades and the sly lure of wet foot/dry foot have failed.
The words are always bitter and in the US media, the argument is one-sided. So much of the goodness and reason of the Cuban revolution has been lost from view under the cloud of bitterness which the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis misadventures threw up.
THE story of Cuba has become the story of the US's relentless vengefulness. Americans never hear of an island which regained its land and industry; which slashed illiteracy rates and infant mortality rates to below those pertaining in US inner cities; which provided itself with an equitable health service; which gave itself a fine and free education service; which empowered women and which produced a system of day-care and childcare from which we could all learn.
Modern Cuba isn't going to foment revolution anywhere. It is too busy surviving. At the turn of the millennium, it is time that the US granted Cuba that right to survive.
President Clinton is, as ever, the slave of pragmatism and has stepped back, but things are changing anyway. Quietly, Pat Buchanan has switched sides in the argument, bringing an anti-embargo case to his campaign for the Reform Party nomination. At least the issue might get an airing.
Havana has changed too. This Christmas was a public holiday for the third year running. There was a TV link-up between stations in Cuba and Washington DC.
Castro - in his mid-70s now but prolix as ever - is coming to the end of his days and allowing the dollar to seep into his economy. Cuba and the US have to think carefully of the future of the region, have to plot how to avoid another Haitian-style bloodbath. The US is scoring points on the backs of six-year-olds. Only Cuba really seems to care.