By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on January 2, 2025 from Havana
Fidel and Jimmy Carter at the funeral of Pierre Trudeau. photo: National Post
On October 3, 2000, the first face-to-face meeting between Fidel Castro and James Carter took place. The Cuban leader and the former U.S. president were attending the funeral of Pierre Trudeau, the father of Canada’s current prime minister, at the Basilica of Notre Dame in old Montreal. A wave of wind and extreme cold chilled the exterior of the imposing building located in the Place d’Armes, where shortly before the coffin had passed, escorted by Trudeau’s relatives, international guests and thousands of Canadians.
While waiting for the religious service to begin, the two men chatted animatedly in a small room protected by a glass door. Outside, we journalists wondered what the two leaders would talk about so animatedly in the meeting that would dispute headlines at Trudeau’s funeral. Then we learned what the topic of the conversation was: the health problems affecting the Third World, particularly Africa, and the urgency of seeking solutions to save the lives of millions of people. Fidel was tactful enough not to address the historic U.S. dispute with Cuba, but invited Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to visit the island.
Carter, who died last Sunday at the age of 100, was not only the first former U.S. president to talk with Castro and visit Cuba on two occasions (2002 and 2011), but also the first president to express in writing, through an executive note, his willingness to move forward in a process that would culminate in the “normalization” of relations between the two countries. In September 1980, he even went so far as to convey to Fidel, through a secret emissary (Paul Austin, president of the Coca-Cola company), his desire to maintain a confidential direct contact at the highest level and spoke of the possibility of lifting the blockade that was punishing the Cuban people.
“Whoever, in the midst of the Cold War and in the depths of a sea of prejudice, was capable of trying to improve relations between the two countries, deserves respect,” said Fidel when he received Carter and his wife at Havana’s José Martí Airport on May 12, 2002.
The Cuban leader never forgot that during Carter’s term in office, the SR-71 spy planes over the island were suspended, interest offices were opened in Washington and Havana, numerous channels of communication were established to settle conflicts such as territorial water limits, and intense talks were held in secret between representatives of both countries to resolve the historic dispute. These events have been exhaustively recorded in the book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, by U.S. researchers William Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh.
“I think, in retrospect, knowing what I know since I left the White House, I should have gone ahead and been more flexible in dealing with Cuba, and established full diplomatic relations,” Carter said in an interview with researchers Leogrande and Kornbluh. Defeated by Ronald Reagan in the November 1980 election, Carter was unable to have a second term to do what he wanted, but he did express time and again his disagreement with his country’s blockade of the neighboring island.
“I would like [the blockade] to end today. There is no reason for the Cuban people to continue suffering.” These statements by Carter to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, in May 2009, prompted an extensive, almost confessional article by Fidel, the first and only one where he recounted his impressions of the Democrat and some unexpected revelations, such as the Cuban leader’s efforts to persuade Panama’s president, Omar Torrijos, to avoid extreme positions in the negotiation for the return of the canal. “Without talking to anyone in the United States,” Fidel wrote, ”I was able to predict to him that perhaps Carter was the only president of that country with whom an honorable agreement could be reached, without spilling a drop of blood.” Torrijos publicly thanked Fidel for his advice after the signing of the agreement that put an end to the U.S. presence in Panama.
While Carter wanted to overcome the conflict with Cuba, his advisors opportunistically recommended taking advantage of the negotiation, imposing as a bargaining chip the end of Cuba’s military presence in Angola, when the invasion of that country by the army of the racist regime that kept Nelson Mandela imprisoned for 27 years had already taken place. Fidel organized the defense together with the forces of the first president of independent Angola, Antonio Agostinho Neto.
“Neither would we leave Angola, nor would we suspend the aid already committed to the countries of Africa. Carter never went so far as to request it, but it is evident that many in the United States thought that way”, and Fidel added a few lines further on: ”We are not seeking unilateral advantages. Revolutionaries who act in this way do not survive their mistakes”.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English