{"id":41940,"date":"2015-02-12T12:05:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T17:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oncubamagazine.com\/?p=41940"},"modified":"2018-10-02T17:39:38","modified_gmt":"2018-10-02T21:39:38","slug":"17d-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/propositions\/17d-2\/","title":{"rendered":"17D"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>It was 6:58 a.m. when the phone rang<\/strong>. I was meditating and I jumped. I never put the phone on mute, in case of a family emergency. Startled, I answered without looking at the caller ID. A familiar voice, somewhat nervous and agitated, said to me, \u201cToday is the Day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Maybe if it had been an announcement, or a reminder that it was a special day\u2014an important meeting, a doctor\u2019s appointment, a trip\u2014I might have had to ask for a few minutes to catch my breath and jog my memory. But I\u2019d been waiting for more than 20 years for that moment, and that voice\u2014that voice was part of the process; that voice and I had traveled too much, talked too much, and worked too hard over the last 12 months for me not to know, at that precise instant, what was happening. \u201cThe President is going to speak at noon,\u201d the voice told me, hanging up without giving me time to react.<\/p>\n<p>A few minutes later, I began getting alerts on my cell phone: \u201cThe Cuban government has freed Alan Gross.\u201d I made a quick call to Washington and it was confirmed for me that the three Cubans who were still serving sentences in the United States also had been released. I raised my hands to my head and exhaled\u2026.<\/p>\n<p>What we saw afterward on television, in simultaneous broadcasts in the United States and Cuba, surprised all of us\u2026. Just like that, President Obama and President Ra\u00fal Castro talked and decided to set into motion the process of normalizing diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States. A historic moment\u2014a new era was dawning.<\/p>\n<p>The road to restoring diplomatic relations between our country and our adopted country is a long and rocky one. It depends on two distrustful governments, on the will of those in power, and on us, too. We would hope that wisdom and good intentions prevail among the negotiators.\u00a0 But the road to the reconciliation of our nation does not depend on natural or supernatural powers; it is much more intimate, and involves each and every one of us. And we are free to choose or dismiss it.<\/p>\n<p>Now it is up to us, the Cuban people, those in Cuba and those outside Cuba, to shed the demons of the past so that we can begin a process of reconciliation. The normalization, peace, well-being, prosperity, happiness, and future of Cuba (our country) depends not only on politicians, but also on the good faith, aspirations, unity, and self-determination of every single Cuban. \u201cToday is the Day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was 6:58 a.m. when the phone rang. I was meditating and I jumped. I never put the phone on mute, in case of a family emergency. Startled, I answered without looking at the caller ID. A familiar voice, somewhat nervous and agitated, said to me, \u201cToday is the Day.\u201d Maybe if it had been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[33566,7417],"class_list":["post-41940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-propositions"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>17D | OnCubaNews English<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/propositions\/17d-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"17D | OnCubaNews English\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It was 6:58 a.m. when the phone rang. 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