Cuba and the Castros

Henry Louis Gomez, not unreasonably, says that the onus should be on the Cuban government, not the U.S., to shift policy gears:

No, you won’t be reading many columns in the mainstream media espousing the unpopular view that it’s the totalitarian dictatorship 90 miles to our south that should change, must change, before the United States modifies its stance. But then again, by now we should expect no less from them than contempt for our country and total awe and respect for its enemies.

I understand the sentiment. Far too many Americans are willing to look the other way on Cuba's transgressions and its horrible human rights record because the country enjoys high literacy rates and has socialized medicine, which to some people is the ultimate acid tests that separates the civilized from the unenlightened.

That said, waiting for Cuba to change before making a move gets us nowhere and strikes me as a policy more deeply rooted in personal animus against the Castro brothers than helping the Cuban people. We have to set the odious Fidel and Raul aside and instead focus on adopting an approach that will improve the standard of living for the average Cuban, who are forced to live in a de facto prison:

The confining shadow of Fidel’s tropical curtain, on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, was captured in the emptiness before me — of the Malecón, but even more so of the sea. I noticed over subsequent days that Cubans perched on the seafront wall rarely looked outward. When I asked Yoani Sánchez, a dissident blogger (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony), about this, she told me: “We live turned away from the sea because it does not connect us, it encloses us. There is no movement on it. People are not allowed to buy boats because if they had boats, they would go to Florida. We are left, as one of our poets put it, with the unhappy circumstance of water at every turn.”

What Cuba needs is more contact with the outside world, not less. The embargo only succeeds in impoverishing the Cuban people. Rather than undermining the Castros it only strengthens their hand by making the people even more dependent on the government. Worse, it hands the Cuban dictatorship an issue on which they can seize the moral highground and helps promote the sense that the island is locked in an ongoing struggle with the U.S. Perpetual crisis, let us remember, is the lifeblood of the state.

Just before the Obama victory, I lunched in the city’s Little Havana district with Alfredo Durán, a former president of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. Inevitably, we ate at the kitschy Versailles Restaurant, long a social hub of the Cuban-American community. Durán, who was imprisoned in Cuba for 18 months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is a man mellowed by age. Furious with Kennedy and the Democrats in the invasion’s aftermath — “there was a feeling we were sacrificed, left to eat possum in the swamps around the bay” — he decided after the cold war that anti-Fidel vitriol was a blind alley and the trade embargo counterproductive. Fellow veterans were furious; they stripped his photo from the premises of the veterans’ association.

“I say, ‘Lift the embargo unilaterally, put the onus on Cuba,’ ” Durán told me. “If we negotiate, what do we want from them? They have very little to give.”

Exactly. Imagine what would happen if the embargo was lifted tomorrow. Fidel and Raul would no longer be able to blame the country's ills on the big bad U.S. and would instead be more responsible for their own travails. It would be a huge public relations coup for Washington. More importantly, it could help revive the Cuban economy and improve the sad lot of its people.


Nothing would do more to undermine the Cuban government than Starbucks and MTV. Even if, like China, the Castro brothers hold on to power (which, purely from an actuarial standpoint is unlikely to continue from much longer) that should be a purely secondary concern to the state of the Cuban people. Exposure to Western goods and commerce would also help promote an exchange of ideas and better prepare the Cuban people for democracy when that day comes.

Let's remember who is the archaic socialist outpost here and which side stands for free people and free markets. We're the ones that should have nothing to fear from free exchange, not Havana.