Time to End the Cuban Embargo?

Posted by Scott Cavanagh
Ike was president and Beatlemania still another five years away. Marilyn Monroe was alive; Ronald Reagan was not yet the Governor of California--George W. Bush was 13. And Fidel Castro was beginning his reign as president and unchallenged dictator of Cuba.

That reign came to a close on Wednesday, when the Cuban leader announced that he was resigning from office. Forty-eight years is a long time no matter how you measure it, but put in modern terms, where public figures enter and leave the arena quickly--where Andy Warhol's prescient prediction that eventually everyone would be famous for 15 minutes seems to have come to pass--Castro's amazing tenure as Comrade #1 is all the more amazing.

Castro outlasted nine U. S. presidents and has outlived six. He survived the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of his Soviet protectors and 46 years of a total trade embargo by the world's greatest economic superpower. Now he is gone from the world stage. While the probable succession of Castro's 76-year old brother Raul, does not bring to mind the prospect of radical democratic change in the island nation, it is an opening--one that has not appeared in nearly half a century.

Has the embargo outlived its usefulness? Has decades of economic hardships, brought on primarily by our actions, produced any tangible results, other than handing Fidel a propaganda club with which to beat us about the head every time the embargo is mentioned?

The powerful Cuban-American community--particularly in Florida-- has fought successfully for years to prevent an open national dialogue on this issue. From the point of view of an expatriate Cuban living in the U.S., the continuation of the embargo makes sense-- to the rest of us, it is nothing more than a silly political football, to be tossed back and forth between the Cuban -American community and the American government every time mention is made of another strategy to deal with the Cuban problem.

Why don't we open trade with Cuba? How would opening up a country that has been living under the grip of communism for nearly five decades, produce worse results than the failed embargo? China is a Communist superpower with a nuclear arsenal--most of which is aimed at us. We grant them Most-Favored-Nation trading status and borrow millions off of them. We lost 53,000 American lives fighting Communism in Vietnam. Now that country is a trade partner and growing tourist destination. They are also unrepentant Communists.

Playing this game with Cuba--a country that sits less than 100 miles off of our shores--for political purposes, is a scenario that has really gotten old. Perhaps there are good arguments for continuing the sanctions, but I have yet to hear them. Nixon opened dialogue with the Soviets and they were gone in less than 20 years.
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