Fair: Earnest Engagement
In her March 30 column “Reprehensible Rapprochement,” Sarah Perez ’17 wrote that President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba came despite continued abuses by the Cuban government and an overall United States policy of weakness and appeasement. She accurately highlights the challenges facing Cuba’s more than 11 million people, including severe economic stagnation, crumbling infrastructure and the arrests of political protestors even as Obama arrived on the island. Perez voices an understandable frustration with the pace of meaningful change since December 2014, when the two nations first moved to normalize relations. However, concerns over the visible progress of rapprochement today miss the long-term advantages that engagement provides in the post-Castro era.