As I write this article, the president of the United States, his family, members of a Congressional delegation, and representatives of American Fortune 500 companies are in Cuba on a historic visit. It is historic in that no other American president has visited Cuba since President Coolidge in 1928. Coolidge visited by warship and it took him three days. Obama did by Air Force One, the official presidential plane and, as he noted, it took three hours.

It is not just the physical nature of the trip that is pregnant with historical importance, but the fact that it did occur at all; that there has been a thawing of American-Cuban relations and that there is now a real possibility that the unproductive embargo that America by law has maintained against Cuba will one day come to a well-deserved end.

Of course, not everybody is happy with the visit. The Republicans, wallowing in their usual stupidity when it comes to obstructing everything that Barack Obama does, have opposed the warming relationship between America and Cuba. Many in the party, especially the Cuban exiles in Miami, do not believe that the Castros should be rewarded for creating the kind of Cuba that now exists. They point to the continued harassment of dissidents as clear reasons that relationship between the two countries should not be normalised. While the harassment of dissidents and the strictures against the press cannot be condoned, those who oppose the new friendship hardly have any alternative to defrosting the icy relationship between the two countries than what is being offered by the president.

It is true that the harassment and imprisonment of political dissidents have no place in the kind of world we are in today. Apart from left wing and right wing dictatorships that have arisen and died in Latin America over the years, Cuba is the only country that over the past 50 years has maintained a system of governance characterised by the brutal oppression of the dissenting voice, the cartelisation of public opinion, and the building of a bureaucratic ecosystem that has made Cuba into a closed society.

Closed societies by nature do not encourage innovation. Dissent and the offering of alternative opinions and world views are essential to the health of any progressive society. Yet, these are precisely the values that the Marxist-Leninist model of governance in Cuba has frustrated over the years. As a result, Cuba has not been a progressive society in the true sense of the word.

I know that this runs counter to the views of many who have romanticised the Cuban Revolution and who have been held in thrall by the Castros. They will point to the educational and health systems in the country which are of world standard. While this is not to be denied, especially in medicine, consider how much more progressive the country could have been if the hard boots of the Castro brothers were not on the necks of the Cuban people. Consider how much more advanced the country could have been if freedom of speech was encouraged and the Cuban people allowed, in an unfettered way, to work out their own salvation without the often messianic, narcissistic, and megalomaniacal hold of a centralised bureaucracy over their lives.

Can you imagine what Cuba could have become if its citizens were able to participate in the revolution in information and technology that has been sweeping the world? It has just been revealed that only about five per cent of the Cuban population is able to participate in this revolution. This is a revolution that one can believe in, not the arcane type seen in Cuba, where just a few elites determine the direction of a country of 11 million people.

I can applaud the overthrow of the Batista regime with its cruelty, repression of the people and its concentration of wealth into the hands of a few. But apart from some bright spots in Castro’s revolution, can anyone honestly say that Cubans have fared better under the Castros as far as repression and concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite are concerned?

Notwithstanding this, it must be stated that the American isolation of Cuba in the Western Hemisphere had to come to an end. Obama must be congratulated for seeking to end it. I would not even characterise his actions as bold since this should have been done before and it was axiomatic that such isolation was not even in the best interests of America.

Ever since the Kennedy’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion America has had a fetid relationship with Cuba. American foreign policy has gone far and wide in deposing left-wing regimes — such as Salvador Allende’s in Chile — yet it has failed in over 50 years to destroy or eliminate a communist regime just 90 miles from the southern tip of Florida.

Instead, it has opted to bully the country into submission by imposing a trade embargo that, from all indications, has never worked to achieve the desired results. In fact, the embargo has been the most important factor in perpetuating the reign of the Castros in Cuba. It has given them the convenient excuse to strengthen their grip on the island by pointing to security concerns against the implacable imperialists from the North. Every brutalisation of its citizens has been predicated on this perceived threat, yet US policymakers, in their desire to vilify the Cuban experiment, have been blinded in not seeing their own complicity in sustaining what they wished could go away.

It took the foresight of the first black president of the United States to see the folly of this policy and to do something about it. Truly, it was not boldness or bravery; greater acts of bravery have been done by statesmen in the world. But it is the right thing to do.

People like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are too blinded by a self-serving agenda to ever be honest enough to tell the American people that the lifting of sanctions and the ending of the immoral embargo is good for America. They are too steeped in their own ideological hatred of both the president and the Castros to see a good thing when it is staring them in the face.

But all well-thinking Americans must embrace the president’s move. The ending of the embargo is a categorical imperative whose time has come. We can only hope that the Republicans who control the Congress will recognise this and move with some alacrity in heeding the voice of this imperative. This will open up a new era of openness and prosperity in Cuba, and end once and for all the rein of Castroism over the minds of the people.

Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest and social commentator. Send comments to the Observer orstead6655@aol.com