Why Cuba is no longer a third rail in U.S. politics

This week President Barack Obama is in Cuba, the first commander in chief to visit the country since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. When Coolidge arrived in Cuba, The Saturday Evening Post's Beverly Smith Jr. later recalled, "The crowds were tremendous and enthusiastic. They cheered themselves hoarse for Presidente Coolidge. They pushed close to his car, blowing kisses, and throwing flowers."

During the late 1950s, that kind of trip would become politically impossible. Cuba became a focal point of U.S. foreign policy, a key element of a global political struggle with the Soviet Union.

Fidel Castro waged a guerilla war against Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed dictator, from 1956 until the fall of the corrupt and brutal government in 1959.

Castro, who established a socialist government and allied himself with the Soviets, faced many decades of efforts by U.S. administrations to oust him. Many elite Cubans fled the country and moved to Florida where they became a powerful political force and pressured U.S. politicians to resist interaction with Cuba, arguing that this remained a central front in the Cold War. 

Democrats were especially nervous given that many Cuban-Americans tended to vote Republican after a disastrous CIA operation in 1961, known as the Bay of Pigs, undertaken under President John F. Kennedy.

When he ran for president in 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton appealed to Cuban-Americans in Florida by promising to be tougher with the Castro government. "I think this administration," he said of President George H.W. Bush, "has missed a big opportunity to put the hammer down on Fidel Castro and Cuba" by not pushing for the Cuban Democracy Act, which strengthened the U.S. embargo against Cuba.