Cuba has always been a fantasy. Can it ever be something close to normal?

Many years ago, I stumbled across an old book of photographs titledHavana 1933, by Walker Evans. The images were a revelation to me, a stark contrast to the sanitized tales of pre-revolutionary Cuba I’d heard from my parents. In their Cuba, there was no poverty, or repression, no fear, no racism. Why, there was barely a dictatorship! Never had I heard anything about what I saw documented so unsparingly in Evan’s photographs: families sleeping in the streets, their clothes in shreds, straw hats torn and unprotecting of the sun,guajiros looking for work on the doorsteps of Havana’s indifferent mansions.

 Cuba, then. Photographs: Walker Evans (Havana 1933)

There may be two sides to every story, but when it comes to Cuba, neither the Miami exiles nor their counterparts on the island officially permit you to take the side that disagrees with them. You’re either with them or against them – un hermano, or a traitor. Nothing in-between. Is it any wonder then that, until a secret deal announced on Wednesday, the calcified mentalities regarding Cuba have kept US foreign policy frozen in time?

It is this very intransigence on both sides of the Straits of Florida – the Miami exiles who revile Castro as well as the diehard revolutionaries on the island, both unhappy with this unexpected turn of events – that reveals the false dichotomy between the two. A thunderstorm erupts in Miami one hour, and coasts over Havana the next. The temperature of the sea is the same. So is the aroma of the star jasmine and the mango trees when they’re in season. A sensual conspiracy fuels a virulent nostalgia, and the Cuban propensity for exaggeration ensures that it never dies. If every exile who claimed to have the deed to his ranch on the island actually produced it, the joke goes, Cuba would be the size of Brazil.

Now try to imagine for a moment the excitement of the Cuban people in 1959 when the charismatic barbudo, Fidel Castro, and his band of ragtag rebels managed to pull off the impossible: getting rid of the dictator Fulgencio Batista and ushering in – or so everyone expected – a new era in Cuba; a Cuba free of the corruption, violence and cronyism that had pockmarked its history since before its Wars of Independence, and radically divided the haves and the have-nots. It’s impossible to exaggerate the hope Castro engendered in those early months in power, before the Realpolitik of the Revolution kicked in. Who didn’t want sovereignty, free healthcare or universal literacy? The truth, unfortunately, turned out to be a far cry from this utopia. As early as 1961, Castro threw down the gauntlet in a famous speech to the island’s intellectuals: Within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.

For years, Castro blamed the US embargo – a senseless policy if there ever was one, and I’m relieved to finally see it start to go – for Cuba’s economic troubles, never accepting responsibility for his own erratic, ill-conceived decisions that helped run the country aground. This became painfully evident after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union and the drastic depletion of the Revolution’s hefty subsidies along with it. What ensued were terrible times – euphemistically called the Special Period – during which many Cubans went hungry. In a desperate bid for foreign currency, Castro threw open the doors to tourism and its attendant problems, including glaring socioeconomic disparities that brought on rampant prostitution, black market hustling and more corruption.

Sound familiar?

In 2011, when I returned to Cuba after a long absence, I kept hearing the phraseCerraron la bolsa, meaning, roughly, that the government was bankrupt – not just financially, but morally and spiritually. The beacon that the Cuban Revolution once represented to the world and to oppressed peoples everywhere (many the victims of US foreign policies in Latin America and elsewhere) had dimmed considerably. Cubans wanted an end to what had become for them an interminable gerontocracy. Now, after more than 50 years of intractable political animosity, it’s difficult to imagine a cooperative future. But it’s easy enough to hope, with Wednesday’s first step toward the normalization of relations between the US and Cuba, that the healing can begin on both shores of this failed, costly experiment – and that the thunderstorm will pass.