The World as It Is by Ben Rhodes

Author:Ben Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

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THE CANADIANS HAD GRACIOUSLY agreed to host us, and when Ricardo and I landed in Ottawa we were met at the gate by a pudgy man who made sure we got through immigration with no problem and escorted us to a waiting van. We asked no questions and were driven through a sun-splashed June day into the surrounding countryside, with empty roads rolling through dense forest—the Canadians had taken our request for discretion seriously. In a flat Canadian accent, the driver peppered us with trivia about Ottawa and the vacationing habits of people in this region, as if we were visiting tourists, before driving through a gate and up a winding driveway to a house with a large wraparound porch, which looked out over a lake dotted with the occasional kayak or fisherman.

We were shown into a room with a long table that looked as if it could seat at least twenty people. I took my things out of a backpack—a spiral notebook, a binder with talking points that anticipated the several hours of discussion. I was anxious, tired from waking before dawn to make the flight, and nervous because I had no idea where this was leading. I sipped from a water bottle and waited there to begin the highest-level negotiations between the governments of the United States and Cuba in decades.

Alejandro breezed into the room, trailed by three other Cubans, and took my hand with both of his, greeting me like an old friend. He was a big man who spoke and laughed loudly. Befitting the sense of mystery that comes with all things Cuban, he had apparently lost vision in one eye in a training accident while serving in Angola. With slightly thinning hair and black wire-rimmed glasses, he looked more like an academic than a colonel; in fact, he’d spent the previous years publishing works of history, including screeds against American imperialism and full-throated defenses of the Cuban Revolution.

He introduced the rest of his party, but the other two men barely spoke. One of them was older, with a permanent frown, the look of a man who had done many things on behalf of the Cuban security services over the years. The other was younger, spoke good English, and seemed to have a boundless curiosity about us. The interpreter was an elegant older woman named Juana who conveyed an air of having seen everything. And she had: She’d been Fidel’s translator for more than thirty years.

Alejandro began by saying that Cuba wanted this to be an open channel of communication. He gestured at the stoic older man sitting next to him who had participated in back-channel conversations with Americans in the 1990s, saying they’d learned from the past. He noted that Obama was respected in Cuba and in Latin America and emphasized that Raúl did not want to “damage Obama’s political capital”; instead, he wanted to offer him “political space” to improve the relationship. I responded in kind, saying that we wanted to

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