US Presidency
2016

And that short distance has been crossed by hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles on planes and makeshift rafts who came to America in pursuit of freedom and opportunity, sometimes leaving behind everything they owned and every person that they loved. Like so many people in both of our countries, my lifetime has spanned a time of isolation between us. The Cuban Revolution took place the same year that my father came to the United States from Kenya. The Bay of Pigs took place the year that I was born. The next year, the entire world held its breath, watching our two countries, as humanity came as close as we ever have to the horror of nuclear war. As the decades rolled by, our governments settled into a seemingly endless confrontation, fighting battles through proxies. In a world that remade itself time and again, one constant was the conflict between the United States and Cuba. I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.