美国应与古巴关系正常化

For a long time I kept my views on US policy towards Cuba a secret from my family.

很长一段时间以来，我一直对家人隐瞒我对美国对古巴政策的看法。

My parents were both born on the island, and I grew up hearing tAles of how their families had escaped the newly entrenched regime of Fidel Castro in 1959.

我父母均出生于古巴，我从小就听父母讲述他们的家人是如何逃离了菲德尔•卡斯特罗(Fidel Castro)在1959年建立的新政权。

Throughout my childhood — I was born in Florida two decades after Mr Castro assumed power — I especially loved the stories of the underground network run by my maternal grandfather to help his capitalist friends flee to the US in the early 1960s — stories occasionally told to me directly by those same friends. On my father’s side two uncles were Operación Pedro Pan kids, sent to the US on flights with other orphaned children, later to be reunited with their parents and elder siblings.

我于卡斯特罗上台20年后出生于美国佛罗里达。我小时候最爱听的，就是上世纪60年代初我外公组织地下网络、帮助他的资本主义朋友逃到美国的故事——这些故事有时是由亲历者本人讲给我听的。在我父亲那边，有两个叔叔是“彼得潘行动”(Operación Pedro Pan)儿童，他们和其他与父母失散的小孩一道搭乘飞机被送往美国，后来再与自己的父母和哥哥姐姐团聚。

I am not unusual. The first generation of Cuban-Americans born in the US to that particular class of Cuban émigrés spent its youth inundated with such stories — many true, some doubtless inflated by time and myth. With them also came our anti-Castro indoctrination, which started earlier than we could speak.

我的经历并不特殊。具有这种特定类型的古巴移民家庭背景、且在美国出生的第一代古巴裔美国人，小时候都听过无数这样的故事——许多故事是真实的，也有一些因为时间和杜撰的关系无疑被掺入了水分。伴随这些故事的，还有反卡斯特罗思想的灌输，这些早在我们会说话之前就开始了。

When I reached late adolescence, and started shedding my parents’ and grandparents’ beliefs to develop some of my own, I had a hunch that I would find their views all wrong.

到我接近成年，开始摆脱父母和祖辈的观念影响、形成我自己观点的时候，我产生了一种预感：我可能会发现他们的观点全都是错的。

But my hunch was wrong because their views were half right. That the Castro regime deserves unqualified condemnation is not a belief that must be exclusively rooted in the emotional trauma of the exile experience. Objective facts point to the same conclusion.

但我的预感错了，因为他们的观点有一半是对的。卡斯特罗政权应该受到无条件谴责，并非只有流亡经历带来的情感创伤才会产生这样的观念。客观事实也指向同样的结论。

What the facts show is that Cuba, more than 50 years after La Revolución, has an appalling human rights record, pays its citizens the equivalent of barely more than $20 a month, rations food, restricts property rights severely and threatens political dissidents with jail.

事实显示，在距离古巴革命(La Revolución)已有50多年的今天，古巴的人权记录令人发指，付给民众的月薪仅略高于20美元，食品实行配给，房屋产权受到严格限制，政治异见者面临监禁威胁。

Unabashed leftwing apologists for the Cuban statist model are harder to find now than in the decades immediately following Mr Castro’s assent, though they still exist, most reliably in Hollywood. For example, in 2008 the actor, Sean Penn, interviewed Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and successor as president, for The Nation magazine – and mixed ignorance with obsequiousness into a pungent stewpot of journalistic incompetence.

如今，比起卡斯特罗刚刚上台时，公然为古巴的中央集权模式辩护的左翼人士更难找了。不过，这样的人依然存在，最保准存在的地方就是好莱坞。比如说，在2008年，演员西恩•潘(Sean Penn)为《国家》杂志(The Nation)采访了菲德尔的弟弟、接替他担任总统的劳尔•卡斯特罗(Raúl Castro)。采访者无知又大拍马屁，不遗余力地表现自己在新闻方面的无能。

Pundits and politicians are subtler but often still misguided. Acknowledging Cuba’s poverty, they nonetheless point to its gains in healthcare while failing to note the chronic medicinal shortages or defecting doctors. Or they talk about the country’s high literacy rate, ignoring the repression of a free media and the censorship of internet usage and controversial books. They blame the US embargo and travel restrictions for cutting off Cubans from the world and thus preventing contact with democratic ideas, forgetting the millions of Canadians and Europeans that visit the island each year.

专家和政客比较委婉，但他们的观点往往仍然受到了误导。在承认古巴贫困的同时，他们又指出古巴在医疗保障方面的进步，却未能看到古巴长期面临医疗资源不足以及医生大量叛逃至国外的问题。或者他们会谈论古巴的高识字率，却无视古巴对媒体自由的压制、对互联网和争议性图书的审查。他们指责美国的禁运和旅行限制导致古巴与世界脱节、无从接触到民主思想，却忘了每年都有数百万加拿大人和欧洲人到访古巴。

And that is just the left in America — don’t ask me about the dopey hordes wearing Che Guevara T-shirts in the capitals of Europe.

而这还只是美国左翼——别问我怎么看欧洲各国首都那些穿着切•格瓦拉(Che Guevara) T恤衫的傻帽们。

But at least the left, despite its infuriating instinct to romanticise a tragedy, displays a usefully cosmopolitan bent and ultimately arrives at the correct solution for how the US should deal with Cuba: allow travel and trade, hope for the best but expect nothing and move on. After all, relative to Cuba, how much attention does the US give to the domestic politics of, say, the Dominican Republic?

尽管老是让人恼火地想把悲剧浪漫化，但左翼至少展现出了一种有益的世界主义倾向，并最终在美国应如何与古巴打交道的问题上得出了正确的解决办法，即：应允许民众赴古巴旅行、与古巴进行贸易往来，怀着最美好的愿望、但不抱任何期望，保持向前看。毕竟，跟古巴相比，美国对比如多米尼加共和国的国内政治又投入了多少关注呢？

The right has the reverse problem: accurately depicting a hateful regime but stubbornly clinging to a policy whose inefficacy — either in weakening the same regime or improving the average Cuban’s lot — is beyond doubt.

右翼有相反的问题：他们对这个令人憎恶的政权的描述是准确的，但他们固执坚持一项政策，而无论对削弱卡斯特罗政权，还是改善古巴老百姓命运，这项政策的无效都毋庸置疑。

Where I part ways with the right and with my family’s earlier generations — hey, I said they were only half right — is in my opposition to the embargo and the general isolation of Cuba. I have less to say about the right’s obstinacy than about the left’s inanities, but only because a more obvious rebuttal needs fewer words.

我与右翼人士和我家老一辈人（嘿，我说过他们只有一半是对的）观点分歧之处在于，我反对禁运和对古巴的整体孤立。相对于左翼人士的愚蠢，我对右翼人士的固执更没有什么可说的，但这只是因为更显而易见的反驳需要的话语更少。

If surveys are right, many Cuban-Americans of my generation find themselves in the same position as me: no love for the Castros or the leftwing view that romanticises them; no love for isolationist policy and the rightwing view that embraces it; but lots of love for a colourful family that I never wanted to upset at the dinner table by revealing my anti-embargo apostasy.

如果调查结果可信的话，我这一代的许多古巴裔美国人都跟我立场一致：既不喜欢卡斯特罗和浪漫化卡斯特罗政权的左翼人士，也不喜欢美国对古巴的孤立政策和拥护这一政策的右翼人士，但我们深爱我们丰富多彩的家庭，我永远都不希望在饭桌上告诉他们，我倒向了反对禁运政策的阵营，那会让他们难过。

For all my immense familial pride, I simply find it strange that Cuba remains a focal point of American foreign policy. During a week in which the Russian rouble collapsed and North Korean hackers stared down the American film industry, the dominant headlines were about US dealings with an impoverished, non-threatening country of 11m people.

尽管我对自己的家庭深感自豪，但我就是觉得这一点很奇怪：古巴怎么会依然是美国外交政策的一个焦点？在卢布暴跌、朝鲜黑客把美国电影业吓得魂飞魄散的一周里，占据媒体头条的却是美国将如何对待贫穷、毫无威胁力、仅有1100万人口的古巴。

A good enough reason to normalise diplomacy is that the issue should cease to matter. And selfishly I would like one less topic to awkwardly avoid when I visit family in the holidays.

古巴问题应该不再成为问题了，这一点已经为美国促成与古巴关系正常化提供了足够充分的理由。我还有一点私心，那就是，我希望在与家人团聚、欢度节日的时候，能够少一个需要我尴尬逃避的话题。

The writer is US editor of the FT’s Alphaville blog

本文作者是英国《金融时报》Alphaville博客的美国编辑。