It’s also a poignant reminder of the extent to which the dysfunctional U.S.-Cuban relationship has been mothballed all these years, and must still be modernized.  Note that the White House is trumpeting its first direct-mail letter, not its first Snapchat, to the Cuban people.  Pictures like the one above, of Yarza holding a print-out of Obama’s message as she awaited opening the real thing, only underscored the disconnect between the state of bilateral communications and communication technologies, between 90 miles of separation and 56 years of stubborn isolation. 

Poignant too is the fact that Yarza wrote her letters in the first place.  She learned her English in American-run schools, the Associated Press reports, before Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution tore the intimate ties between Cuba and the U.S. asunder. 

Fidel himself wrote a letter to the United States in 1940, around the time that Ileana Yarza was born.  He addressed it to, of all people, the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Identifying himself as a 12-year-old Cuban with bad English (he may actually have been 14), he asked FDR for a $10 bill and offered to provide access to his country’s iron mines to help construct American ships. 

Here’s what the future Cuban president and American archenemy said, in part (misspellings included):

Mr. Franklin Roosvelt, President of the United States.  My good friend Roosvelt: I don’t know very English, but I know as much as write to you.  I like to hear the radio, and I am very happy, because I heard in it, that you will be President for a new (periodo) I am twelve years old.  I am a boy but I think very much but I do not think that I am writing to the President of the United States.  If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american, in the letter, because never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them. …  I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American. ( Thank you very much) Good by.  Your friend, Fidel Castro If you want iron to make your ships I will show to you the bigest (minas) of iron of the land.  They are in Mayarí, Oriente Cuba. 

Fidel never received a personal response from the U.S. president, let alone $10 (he did get a reply from the U.S. embassy).  His correspondence with America, you might say, was only just beginning, and would soon take a much darker tone.  Seventy-six years later, Fidel’s country will be receiving the U.S. president himself. 

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