Under the Influence: Tangled Up in Cuba

As if absurdity weren't already the norm in U.S.-Cuba relations, three years ago the U.S. Interest Section, housed in a rectangular seven-story building in the Vedado district of Havana, began broadcasting a news ticker across its sixth-floor windows. The five-foot, red-orange lettering crept from one end of the building to the other, like anachronistic soldiers leftover from an ideological war settled long ago.

Unfortunately, however, nobody seems to have told either the Americans or the Cubans. In kind, Fidel Castro ordered a million people to march on the building in protest. The Cuban government proceeded to block the ticker's view with billboards in a -- let's be frank here -- childish, tit-for-tat battle. The story only underscored what has become a ludicrous diplomatic debacle between the two countries separated by barely 90 miles. ...