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Abandon Cuban Embargo For Mutual Economic Gain

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 19, 2008

Cuba, hit by three hurricanes this season, is struggling through a new cycle of hard times. Its rich northern neighbor, Florida, is in recession and also could use some economic help.

Never have business and humanitarian reasons been stronger to drop the ineffective and costly embargo of the communist island.

The embargo began in 1961, when President-elect Barack Obama was a month old. The goal was to isolate and weaken Fidel Castro's regime. During the Cold War, the policy made strategic sense.

When Obama was 30, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Castro lost his main sponsor. If the embargo was ever going to work, the global power shift of the early 1990s gave it its best chance.

Many Cuban-Americans in Florida were anticipating either the collapse of the Cuban government or the overthrow of Castro. Neither came to pass.
Cubans suffered, many fled the island, but Castro held on. Most of the rest of the world ignored the U.S. embargo. Yet Castro managed to blame the United States for all his failures.

Meanwhile, he made close friends with China. Cuba is full of bicycles and other goods made in China, and even as the United States neglects the region, the Chinese are expanding their influence. Today's Cuba has strong ties with Venezuela and is getting cozy again with Russia.

In 2001, this page observed that the embargo was "becoming increasingly absurd and should be liberally amended or abandoned altogether."

But even with world opinion running against the embargo 99 to one and internal U.S. support faltering, President Bush in 2004 clamped down even harder. Family visits are limited to once every three years, and each U.S. household can send no more than $1,200 a year to all their Cuban loved ones.

It was exactly the wrong approach to build influence there that could encourage a democratic transformation.

"The policy has done the opposite of its intentions," says former Ambassador Vicki Huddleston, a former chief of the America Interests Section in Cuba who now works for the Brookings Institution.

"The embargo has punished the Cuban people and helped impoverish them," she tells us. "It made them totally dependent on the communist government."

She is right that the hurricane damage offers a good excuse to try a different, softer approach.

The United States should allow more agricultural exports. Travel restrictions should be relaxed. Tampa could become a major gateway for Cuban tourism and trade.

U.S. citizens should be allowed to send Cuban relatives as much money as they please, much of which they would spend to purchase U.S. goods.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has held firm, saying that there will be no relaxing of the embargo until Cuba releases political prisoners and arranges to hold fair elections.

If the policies of isolation and hostility were going to help the cause of freedom there, it would have happened by now.

A less belligerent relationship, first suggested by academics and romantics, is now being advocated by farmers, business owners, exporters and even pragmatic politicians.

Obama is 47. It's time for a change.

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