Progress isn’t easy, and sometimes it isn’t

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examine on April 23, 2018. “We need to go forward, but progress isn’t always a straight line or a smooth path.” Barack Obama victory speech, November 7, 2012 How to explain our current political whipsaw? You go to sleep one night knowing 6,000 delegates to this weekend’s federal […]

“Without haste but without pause”

My most recent article — with John Kirk — for World Financial Review on the state of U.S-Cuba relations in the Age of Obama: “Ending the embargo remains the sine qua non for improving US–Cuba relations. While only Congress can eliminate it, Obama is doing his best to eviscerate its provisions. Before he left for […]

Time for American policy makers to walk a mile in Cuban shoes

By John Kirk and Stephen Kimber On Dec. 17, 2014, President Barack Obama went on television to declare the United States was unilaterally ending America’s “outdated approach [to Cuba] that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests.” So why do so many American politicians and commentators still persist in arguing the U.S. has been […]

Canada’s Cuba connections run deep, and Cuba won’t forget

In the spring of 2013, U.S. and Cuban negotiators needed a neutral location for secret talks that would lead — 18 months later— to the stunning, Dec. 17, 2014, announcement the world’s two “closest of enemies” were re-establishing relations. The only thing they could agree on initially, however, was that those talks should take place […]