I would be photographed by the Cuban government laying a wreath here, in the middle of Cuba’s revolutionary square. It was not an image that would go down well in Florida, or parts of Capitol Hill. To reject it, though, would have been playing the part of the ugly American, pressed into an insult of Cuban dignity. I took the wreath and looked up at Martí, the one figure in Cuba’s history revered on both sides of the Florida Straits. “To the memory of José Martí,” I said, “who is beloved in both the United States and Cuba.”
