By Democratic Socialists of America

Viralands.com

By Barbara Joye

“¡Cuba, si! ¡Yankee, no. ..sé!” is the joke Cubans tell each other as they try to figure out what President Obama’s plans for renewed US-Cuba relations will mean for them, according to the first speaker who addressed our group of 60 Nationreaders visiting Havana under the auspices of the magazine (licensed as a “people-to-people exchange”) five months after the historic announcement.

“Cuba, yes! Yankee. . . . I don’t know!” doesn’t mean that Cubans don’t know a lot about the United States, which intimately wove itself into the island’s history during two military occupations following the end of Cuba’s War of Independence, decades of economic domination, Mafia development of casinos and hotels (including the one we stayed in) and support for Batista’s dictatorship in the 1940s and ‘50’s – not to mention the impact of US culture through movies, tourism, and not least, baseball. But despite the jubilation Obama’s announcement reportedly set off in the streets of Havana, no one knows quite what to expect.

Source: ¡Cuba Si! ¡Yankee No. . .Sé! A Cuba Snapshot