A fresh start for Cuba, U.S.

Washington's party primaries are mercifully over. Speaking of irrelevant elections, Fidel Castro says he will not accept another term as president. At age 81, he is exhausted.

So is his island nation.

The United States and Cuba have one of those rare moments for a fresh start. The best first step begins with an end to the pointless U.S. economic embargo. Extend a hand beyond the frail dictator and reach into younger generations and the future.

The pervasive fatigue of a hardworking, hardscrabble nation is a dominant memory of a distant visit to Cuba. I spent a week there after a reporting trip to Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. In the midst of the Reagan administration's war in Central America, Havana and environs were ragged, but as safe as could be.

The Cuban countenance on the streets, in government offices and towns away from the capital city was one of weariness. Not one of malaise, anger or something more emotionally invested than being a night's sleep and a payday short of fully rested. An entire population looked as if it were coming off a graveyard shift at a mind-numbing factory.

Castro announced his exit because poor health and advanced age left him unable to govern — or rule, or impose his totalitarian will. Something like that. The description resonates because for all the excitement and curiosity of seeing a place closed to American travelers by the U.S. government, the immediate and lasting impression was one of exhausted people making do.

For grinding poverty, El Salvador and Honduras were searing. Cuba had a different feel, something reminiscent of Depression-era photos, of ill-housed, marginally employed and underpaid people holding life together.

Yes, I've seen Michael Moore's "Sicko." I know all the stories about the marvels of the health-care system. Most certainly, a tenacious Cuban revolutionary zeal dispatched medical and teaching corps to Africa and Latin America.

Yet life on the island remained a struggle, with too little money chasing too few goods. All the pre-revolutionary cars were a novelty. Anyone with a suitcase full of 1958 Chevy oil filters could make a fortune.

Worker housing had been through fits and starts. Early, stifling, balcony-less units were constructed by would-be neighbors on leave from their jobs. How would you like to live in an apartment built by the paper-shuffler in the next cubical?

Veradero Beach was beautiful, but there was an ambivalence about tourism, even though the old Mafia-run hotels, closed since the revolution, were being reopened. In Havana, I stayed along the sea wall, in the Hotel Riviera, dingy and dusty with cracked, peeling and broken everything. The padlocks were only recently off the front doors. Mobster Meyer Lansky had owned the place or operated the casino. Either way, a stingy buffet breakfast was served in a vast gambling hall where the clatter of roulette and the ricochets of dice had been silenced for a quarter-century.

Old rum and good cigars only go so far. And they were for the hard currency of the tourist trade. Faded pastel waterfront buildings along the Malecón were waiting to go condo 24 years ago. Life got harsher after the Soviet Union collapsed and subsidies imploded.

No one else was willing to pay inflated prices for Cuban sugar and write down the price of oil to keep a failed ideology alive. Even the stogies were being counterfeited with smuggled seeds planted in foreign soil. Castro eventually gave up his daily ration of Cohibas. Times change.

In that spirit, time is ripe for a new U.S. presidential administration to mend relations with Cuba. Get beyond a mewling deference to Florida politics and Miami's Little Havana.

The United States, with a fabricated war and indefensible prison camps, can claim no high moral ground. Approach a new relationship with humility, mindful of a history of extraordinary arrogance toward the island. Castro had the capacity to infuriate because the island had been regarded as U.S. property.

Cuba will find a fresh voice and clean-shaven face to represent its interests. Cuba Libre will translate to low-cost labor and reduced shipping, and 11 million people eager to engage a wider world.

Exploit the moment: End the embargo, end the travel ban.

Lance Dickie's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ldickie@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com