Richard Feinberg, a former White House and State Department official, is one of them. Feinberg, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told NBC News last week that "our Cuba policy was a real obstacle in a broader informal battle for influence in Latin America against China". Such a zero-sum mentality is as bad as the US embargo. China's involvement in Cuba was never aimed at the US. Instead, it has always been based on mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.

While the US has failed to exert any influence on Cuba with its embargo, China has to some extent prompted Cuban leaders to experiment with economic reforms, including starting the Mariel special economic zone and privatizing part of the economy.

Unlike the US which still lives in the Cold War era, maintaining more than 1,000 military bases all over the world manned by hundreds of thousands of soldiers, China has no such ambition.

China had for years been urging the US to lift its embargo on Cuba to improve overall relations, and it was one of the first countries to welcome Obama's announcement.

Cuba is not and should not be a place for the US, China or Russia or any other country to jostle for geopolitical clout. If some Americans still suffer from such a mentality, they need to be awakened to fact that the Cold War ended a quarter century ago.

The author, based in Washington, is deputy editor of China Daily USA. chenweihua@chinadaily.com