This is surely a most bold step taken by US President Barack Obama. By deciding he’s going to restore relations with Cuba this past week, Obama has taken a vital step towards correcting a longstanding wrong done by his country to its plucky little neighbour.

He is likely to face stiff opposition from Congress, which is packed with a Republican majority, among whom are a number of rabid anti-Fidelistas, those opposed to the very idea of doing anything that will please Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, or Raul, his younger brother who took over from him.

Though belated, it’s a courageous act and one that deserves praise. The Cold War is dead and buried, and all we are left with is the brooding and sulking of a frustrated Vladimir Putin. There is absolutely no reason, not even in imperial logic, why the blockade against Cuba, imposed by Dwight Eisenhower some 54 years ago, should be in place today, more than two decades after the Berlin Wall fell.

There has always been the strong voice of the Cuban exiles, based mainly in Miami, who have resisted any and all suggestions of rapprochement between Washington and Havana short of an overthrow of the Cuban government.

The old generation of Cuban exiles suffer bad bouts of nostalgia for things as they were before Fidel and his Los Barbados (the Bearded Ones) overthrew the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. These were rich merchants, hustlers and buccaneers profiting from the rot in Batista’s government.

The Americans, for their part, have not been able to swallow their pride, which was mortally wounded when a tiny little island only 150km from Miami, right under the nose of Uncle Sam, threw off the US yoke. Add to this the fact that Fidel wasted no opportunity to rub the Yankee imperialists the wrong way, be it in the UN General Assembly in New York or in his many public harangues in Havana.

An ill-fated invasion of exiles supported by the CIA did not help matters, nor did a crisis over Soviet Missiles installed on Cuban soil at the height of the Cold War. The liberation front on the African continent became another point of antagonistic encounter between the two Atlantic neighbours.

While Washington supported colonial powers and the apartheid regimes in Africa, Cuba supported African liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa.

It was arguably Cuba’s intervention in Angola from the mid-1970s that proved a turning point in the struggle against apartheid. The crowning moment of all came on that day in 1994 when Fidel Castro was seen going up the stairs of Union Building in Pretoria to witness the investiture of Madiba as South Africa’s first non-racial president.

Cuba became a pillar of the Non-Aligned Movement, demonstrating active solidarity by sending technical experts all over the Third World — agronomists, engineers, lecturers, doctors It is telling that Cuba alone has sent more doctors to help the countries of the South than the World Health Organisation or the G-8 countries put together.

Cuba is indeed providing medical training for young and poor Americans who cannot be trained by their own government.

It’s clear that Washington and Havana have, for the past 50 years, been operating at cross purpose, often clashing in theatres near and far. The casus belli has been the philosophical divide between the two: One is for the liberation of humankind; the other is for the gratification of the most powerful. The two will never see eye-to-eye.

But they can work together, and I suspect that this is what Obama and Raul have recognised. Now it is to be hoped that American tourists will flock to Cuba to trace the footsteps of the great author Ernest Hemingway, who lived and worked on the island.

And while this happening, we should hope the question of Guantanamo Bay will be sorted out so America’s illegal occupation of a part of the island — which has become a torture chamber — is ended. It’s not too much to hope for.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam.

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