Cuba Embargo Reasons To End

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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 relative—brother Raúl, as opposed to nephew Tony—is in control. Indeed, in 2006, when the bearded one became ill and transferred power to Raúl, 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 standards—not 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 law—the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which strengthened the embargo—the next American president is actually forbidden from ending the embargo until Fidel and Raúl 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 things—maybe if, say, Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company (ultimately controlled by Hugo Chávez, 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.

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