Whatever this thawing out period between the United States and Cuba turns into, it will be hard to forget the five decades of tension between the two powers.

President Obama made history this month when he shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro at the Summit of the Americas in Panama, an act which has displayed how very different the U.S. public’s reaction to expressing respect and cordiality toward a Cuban leader has become.

Twenty-one years ago, a Cuban-American lawyer named Magda Montiel Davis, upon meeting Fidel Castro in Cuba, gave the communist leader a kiss on the cheek, and subsequently suffered a bomb threat and a lot of sexually graphic hate mail.

The encounter, which was captured on video, was widely shown and her life was forever altered.

Perhaps what particularly peeved people about the incident was what she said to Castro, which was: “Fidel, I want to tell you something. Thank you for what you have done for my people. You have been a great teacher to me.”

In a passage of her memoir titled “Kissing Fidel,” excerpted in Miami’s WLRN site, Davis reflects on the chance event, asking herself: “Why would I -- a well-known member of the Cuban émigré community, a prosperous lawyer who was by almost any definition living The American Dream -- say such a thing?”

“My reasons were complex -- more complex than even I appreciated at the time,” she concedes, and brings up personal experience to illuminate her actions.

“I said this because when I was five or six, on the hilly slopes of Nuevo Vedado, a beggar woman cradling a baby in her arms had come to our door and all my mother had given her was a dented can of Pet’s Condensed Milk,” explains Davis.

Magda Montiel Davis recently spoke to the BBC about kissing Castro and its aftermath. Watch the video below.