By Robert Schlesinger
NEW YORK — Fidel Castro’s decision to step aside as maximum leader of Cuba is probably classified as a “foreign” news story on Websites today, but it could just as easily be classified as domestic — meaning political.
The Big Three presidential candidates have undoubtedly all released statements exhorting the island nation to use the opportunity to transition to “free and fair” elections. If any of them publicly entertain the notion of lifting the U.S. embargo without including as preconditions said elections and an essential de-Castr-ation of the government, I’ll give up my secret stash of Havana cigars.
(Note to the NSA, CIA and FBI: Of course I don’t have a secret stash of Havana cigars, I would never break the law, much less admit to it online; note to cigar aficionados prepared to go through my trash in the unlikely event I’m proven wrong: If I did have a secret stash of Havanas, I wouldn’t toss them any more than Barack Obama will set aside his fundraising apparatus in favor of public financing.)
But the bottom line regarding Cuba is this: The embargo has long, long since outlived its usefulness (if it ever existed) as a foreign policy tool, and exists solely for reasons having to do with domestic politics.
If you doubt that, consider the case of a Communist dictatorship with a brutal human rights record and with little hope for democracy in site. The U.S. has open trade with this country — China. To answer why keep in mind these numbers: 1.3 billion and 910,000. The former number is the population of China, according to the CIA (huh, I thought it was more); the latter is the Cuban population in Florida and New Jersey. The U.S. has diametrically opposite approaches to the two countries because of domestic political concerns: the U.S. business lobby wants access to that market and its slave labor-cheap exports; Cuba is a lesser market, however, but the Cubans who fled the country in the wake of Castro’s take-over founded a powerful domestic lobby concentrated in a couple of key states.
(It also puts the myth to the political notion of “Hispanic voters” in this country — neither Puerto Ricans nor Mexicans particularly care about Cuba, while Cuban-American interests don’t particularly line up with those other groups.)
As a result we are told that trading with China is important because the spread of commerce will hasten the spread of freedom and democracy. At the same time we are told that we daren’t trade with Cuba because the spread of commerce would only reward and sustain the dastardly regime.
As to the notion that the embargo has any practical utility consider that it is rapidly approaching it’s 50th anniversary. If that’s not enough, my friend Steve Clemons has been doing good work on Cuba today over at his blog, The Washington Note.
Steve writes:
I think that one of the realities that needs to be confronted is that when I was in Havana, I met some Israelis involved with managing Cuban citrus groves. I saw a Benetton store in the new Havana. I saw Chinese selling major port infrastructure loading equipment to Cuba. British Petroleum was having a cocktail party on the roof of my hotel. Tourism is high.
There is always a sense of leverage that the US thinks it has — but that leverage is now mostly fictional — as Cuba has found other thoroughfares for growth.
We need to stop thinking that we have “leverage.” The whole point of Anya Landau French’s article is that US policy failed and that the embargo has failed — so let’s drop the fiction about the US having leverage in the embargo.
The only leverage America has on lifting or maintaining the embargo is with an aging, Castro-obsessed, reactionary population in Miami that thankfully is being taken over by a more rational contingent of Cuban-Americans who have either rethought their views or who just don’t carry the same views as their elders in their younger portfolios of experience.
Agreed.
