WASHINGTON -- Robert Pastor says that when he sees Israelis and Palestinians at each other's throats, he sometimes tells himself, ``Boy, this sure reminds of something.''

And well it should, for Pastor played a lead role in the deepest and broadest U.S. effort to normalize relations with Cuba since 1959, a campaign by President Jimmy Carter that achieved dramatic successes but eventually led to the chaos of the Mariel boatlift.

Today, he watches the Obama administration's gestures toward Havana with a measure of impatience and the sense that knowledge of the Carter administration's experience could help the new effort to improve relations -- this time with a new Castro at the helm in Havana.

``I am an inveterate optimist,'' he told El Nuevo Herald in an interview. And 78-year-old Raúl Castro, he added, ``is very much aware that he doesn't have a lot of time to secure the future of the revolution.''

Ending decades of animosity between Havana and Washington was not and will not be easy -- but needs to be done, Pastor argued in the interview and an unpublished academic paper in which he recounts the history and impact of Carter's Cuba initiative.

Pastor was just 30 years old when Carter was sworn into office Jan. 20, 1977, and appointed him to head the Western Hemisphere section of the White House's National Security Council, making him the president's top in-house advisor on Latin American affairs.

At least five U.S. presidents since John F. Kennedy tried, to some degree or another, and failed to negotiate an understanding with Fidel Castro. But Carter's vision was by far the most ambitious.

``Our objective is to set in motion a process which will lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations . . . and advance the interests of the United States with respect to . . . human rights; Cuba's foreign intervention; compensation for American expropriated property; and reduction of Cuban relations [political and military] with the Soviet Union,'' said a secret presidential directive that Carter signed just three weeks after his inauguration. At that time, ``foreign intervention'' referred largely to Cuban troops in Angola.

During several rounds of public and secret talks with Havana, Carter's various envoys even took up the thorniest of issues in the bilateral relations -- the full range of U.S. concerns over human rights in Cuba, lifting the U.S. trade embargo and returning the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo, Pastor recalled.

Carter's initiative sparked dramatic changes, he added:

• Castro freed 3,600 political prisoners, and about 1,000 left for the United States.

• The two countries opened diplomatic missions in each other's capitals, called Interests Sections because they fall short of being embassies.

• All restrictions on U.S. travel to Cuba were lifted from 1977-82, allowing even American tourists to go to the island.

• The U.S. Coast Guard and its Cuban counterpart began cooperation on drug interdiction and search-and-rescue operations.

• Cuba released 10 American prisoners, allowed U.S. officials to interview six others and permitted 450 dual Cuban-U.S. citizens to leave the island.

• Carter ordered the U.S. attorney general to ``take all necessary steps permitted by law'' to prevent Cuban exile attacks on the island.

• The U.S. military stopped flights over Cuba by SR-71 spy planes.

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