Ambassador Ramirez, the Cuban ambassador to India reflects on the troubled history of Cuba U.S relations.

Next year will mark a half-century since the Bay of Pigs, the failed assault on Fidel Castro’s young regime in Cuba that helped ignite the long cold war across the Straits of Florida. Although Castro himself has largely disappeared from the public stage, replaced at the helm by his brother Raúl, most Americans still think of Cuba as the dictatorship that time forgot – a poor, sweltering island of rusted 1950s-era automobiles that clings against all sense to the decaying vestiges of Communist orthodoxy.