[NYTr] Dump the Cuban "Embargo"
 
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 17:27:28 -0600 (CST)

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
[More silly right-wing capitalists dreaming in Cuban... - NY Transfer]

Conde Nast Portfolio.com - Nov 22, 2007 (December, 2007 issue)
http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/2007/11/19/Cuba-Embargo-Reasons-to-End

Dump the Cuban Embargo:

Why it never worked and why we should end it

by Matthew Cooper

I'm in the U.S. Airways Shuttle Terminal at La Guardia. It's a late
night in October, and I run into a senior economic official from the
Clinton administration. We catch up on friends, and I tell him that I'm
working on a column about the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba and
what a disaster it's beenbfor Cuba and for the United States. The
official says this to me: "If someone had told supporters of the
embargo that after nearly 50 years, the Soviet Union would be gone;
Communism would be gone from Eastern Europe; China, while
Communist-controlled, would have 300 McDonald's and thriving
capitalism; that Cuba would be one of the only Marxist governments
left; and, oh, that Castro would still be alive, they might have
thought differently."

The American embargo of Cuba is one of those things that most of the
political elite in Washington privately acknowledge as a failure.
Publicly, they defend it because of fears that the Cuban American
community, famously concentrated in presidentially pivotal Florida,
will beat the tar out of them. In October, President Bush reiterated
his commitment to it in a speech to Cuban dissidents, and it's no
wonder that none of the leading presidential candidates has called for
abolishing the embargo, initiated in 1960 as Fidel Castro's regime
began confiscating U.S. assets. During the past 47 years, the embargo
has evolved into a slew of restrictions on travel and trade (see
slideshow), all designed to bring down Castro. And it's worked so well!
[Maybe not the "leading" presidential candidates -- unless you count
Ron Paul. But Christopher Dodd and Dennis Kucinich (hardly "leading"
have called for it.]

It's time to end the embargobunilaterally and completely. The policy
has been useless as a tool for cudgeling Castro, and it is hindering
opportunities for American industries from travel to banking to
agriculture, which is why there's no shortage of U.S. business groups
lobbying to ease it. Far from hurting the deplorable Communist regime,
the embargo has only given Castro an excuse to rail against Uncle Sam,
both to his own people and to the world. Every year, Cuba asks the
United Nations for a vote lifting the embargo. What happens? We usually
end up with a couple of superpowers like Palau and the Marshall Islands
standing with us. Last year, the vote was 183 to 4. The embargo makes
us look like an arrogant bully.

Sure, in the early days of the cold war, we persuaded other countries
to help us isolate Castro by severing trade ties with him. But in the
ensuing years, they've all fallen away. That's why you can buy and
smoke a fine Habana Cohiba pretty much anywhere but in the U.S.
Sanctions are hard enough to enforce when the world agrees on them, as
was the case with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. With Cuba, it's an embargo of
one, which is like a lone guy in Times Square on New Year's Eve
grumpily refusing to put on a party hat.

While we grouse, the world sells. Italian telecoms, French hotels, and
Korean automakers are more than happy to trade with an island 90 miles
off our shores. Of course, Cuba is not a huge market: The island is the
size of Pennsylvania, but its population is only 11 million and its
G.D.P. a mere $46 billion. By comparison, Vietnam, the last Communist
country with which we ended a dubious embargo, is 85 million strong,
with a G.D.P. of $262 billion. Selling to Cuba wouldn't slash our trade
deficit, but it wouldn't hurt us either.

Aside from hindering American business, the policy also keeps us from
having any political influence over the country, says my old friend
Julia Sweig, who is the foremost Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign
Relations. She's been to Cuba nearly 30 times and has escorted the
likes of the Blackstone Group's Pete Peterson to meet with Castro.
Reading her work and talking with her shaped my thinking for this
piece. "We're shooting ourselves in the foot," she says near her Dupont
Circle office.

Then there's the sheer intellectual dishonesty of the embargo. We trade
with the tyrants of Beijing and Damascus, so why not Havana? This
question has lingered at least since 1964, when then-secretary of state
Dean Rusk was asked why we were selling to the Soviets and not to the
Cubans: The Soviet Union was permanent, Rusk said, while Cuba was
"temporary." Oops.

We shouldn't wait for Cuban Communism to magically collapse before we
end the embargo; otherwise we'll miss out on the post-Fidel era. It
isn't going to be like Eastern Europe in 1989, when the region cast off
the shackles of Communism and swiftly embraced the free market.
Observers agree that the Cuban regime is going to outlive the
81-year-old Castro; that was the testimony of American intelligence
officials before the Senate earlier this year. Plus, like Uncle Junior
on The Sopranos, Fidel could hang on, still aspiring to set the tone
for the family business, even if his younger relativebbrother RaC:l, as
opposed to nephew Tonybis in control. Indeed, in 2006, when the bearded
one became ill and transferred power to RaC:l, nothing happened, despite
expectations that Communism would fall without Fidel's charisma.

The Cuban government is likely to linger partly because of the island's
limited history of democracy and partly because of raw repression, but
also because the regime has built up enough legitimacy that Cubans will
probably not revolt. They have seen a rise in literacy and health-care
standardsbnot as much as Michael Moore would have you believe, but real
improvements nonetheless, especially compared with the rest of Latin
America. If you want to imagine Cuba in five years, think of Vietnam,
not the Czech Republic; it will be a freer country, probably, but still
a Communist one.

Where does that leave us? Right now, Washington's position is what it
has always been: We'll talk about easing the embargo if the regime
agrees to dismantle itself. Under current lawbthe Helms-Burton Act of
1996, which strengthened the embargobthe next American president is
actually forbidden from ending the embargo until Fidel and RaC:l are out
of power. But even Miami's famously anti-Castro Cuban Americans are
starting to come around, something presidential candidates have yet to
notice. According to the latest poll of South Florida's Cuban
expatriates, conducted earlier this year, more than half still support
the embargo. But Cuban Americans who lived under Castro more recently
are much less supportive, and a majority want to lift the travel ban
that the Bush administration strengthened in 2004. One Cuban exile,
Carlos Saladrigas, an executive with Premier American Bank in Miami and
the co-chairman of the Cuba Study Group (which pushes for more openings
to Cuba but not a repeal of the embargo), says, "I used to be one of
those hard-liners, but over time I have come to understand things in a
different way."

Finding a different way won't be easy, but there is movement in
Congress. At a June meeting of anti-embargo representatives, which I
attended, there were mostly Democrats, including those who were once
voices in the wilderness, like Charlie Rangel, of New York, and Collin
Peterson, of Minnesota. Now they're the heads of the Ways and Means and
the Agriculture committees, respectively. One Republican
representative, Jo Ann Emerson, of Missouri, told the group, "It's my
hope that we can make a little more progress this year because common
sense is lacking in our dealings with the country of Cuba.... Trade and
opening of markets opens ideas and opens people's minds and will enable
us to build bridges that really haven't been there for 40-plus years
but that culturally are there."

She's right. But sadly, if the presidential candidates are to be
believed, there's no Nixon-to-China breakthrough coming. It'll take a
more dramatic example of the embargo's idiocy to change thingsbmaybe
if, say, Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company
(ultimately controlled by Hugo ChC!vez, a Castro pal), which has already
obtained rights to drill in Cuba's offshore reserves, discovers that
those reserves are oil-rich.

Capitalism is a good thing, and Karl Marx was wrong in saying its
cultural contradictions would inevitably lead to the system's demise.
But sooner or later, the U.S. embargo will collapse under its own
contradictions, and we'll stop ignoring Cuba. President William
McKinley, who launched the Spanish-American War (which liberated Cuba),
said we shared "the ties of singular intimacy" with the island nation.
It's time to retie them.

[Before joining CondC) Nast Portfolio, Matthew Cooper spent seven years
at Time, serving as deputy Washington bureau chief, White House
correspondent, and political editor of Time.com. From 1996 to 1999,
Cooper covered Washington for Newsweek. He also wrote the White House
Watch column for the New Republic, was Atlanta bureau chief for U.S.
News & World Report, and served as an editor at the Washington Monthly.
He has written for multiple publications, including the New York Times,
the Washington Post, Slate, and Los Angeles magazine. Cooper moonlights
as a stand-up comedian and was named Washington's funniest celebrity in
1998. He is a graduate of Columbia University and lives in Washington,
D.C. ]

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