It has to be good news that United States of America and Cuba are actually talking. The fifty odd years of hostility has outlived the Cold War and has frankly taken on the appearance of two elderly neighbours who fell out years ago and neither can quite remember why.

Of course I was 10 years old during the Cuban Missisle Crisis which is probably the closest we have come to Nuclear War. But really the hostility is as much to do with US gangster influence in pre-Revolutionary Havana and American humiliation at the Bay of Pigs.

Cuba has assumed the role of “bad guy”, way out of proportion to its influence. While Cuba remains one of those places that has barbed wire around its postage stamps, it is increasingly difficult to argue that it is somehow worse than USAs ally Saudi Arabia. Nor can it be all that influential in exporting “terrorism” thru South America. USA lost that moral high ground when it overthrew President Allende in Chile.

Arguably the Castro regime is not the most despotic administration on the island of Cuba. Guantanamo Bay remains a blight on the American Conscience.

What was it all about? Was it the Monroe Doctrine? Chicago Gangsters? Communism? Bay of Pigs? Che Guevara? Baseball? Missiles? Watergate “plumbers”? Poisoning Fidel Castro with a cigar? Court cases about sending refugee orphans back to grandparents in Cuba? Hanging Chads in Florida.

Fidel Castro has outlived all those Cold War warriors…Kruschev, Mao, Kennedy, Brezhnev, Thatcher, Nixon, Ceasescu, Reagan.

The dialogue between USA and Cuba is at least twenty five years overdue. Raoul Castro is remarkably dignified about it all. And in fairness to President Obama, he is….liberated from re-election worries…addressing some basic problems.

The Cuban right wing diaspora wont like it. The Florida Cubans seem an unlovely bunch who have just too much to say. They are not the stooges of USA. Rather successive American administrations have been the stooges of right wing Cuban exiles.

Yet I suspect much of the passive Cuban diaspora will welcome the development.

The Castro Government…the Revolution itself…is heading for a soft landing.

Oddly Obama has been neutralised domestically but he is pushing ahead with foreign iniatives. Iran….Cuba….

Hopefully Israel-Palestine is on the list.

The next two years might be interesting.

But what is a keyboard revolutionary to do with all those Ché Tshirts?