U.S. Should Lift Embargo on Cuba

Last week was the 45th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, an episode when belligerence overtook diplomacy and almost led to a Third World War. Few people seemed to have a memory of that. President Bush did give a speech at the State Department before a number of Cuban dissidents – but instead of drawing lessons from the incident, he urged 11.4 million residents in Caribbean’s largest island to embrace U.S.-style democracy when Castro eventually passed away.

Bush didn’t mention anything new in his speech last week — except the promise that the United States would sponsor an effort by non-governmental organizations to donate computers to Cuba, if the communist government would lift its ban on the Internet. The president was essentially trying to justify the economic and travel embargoes, a punishment on Castro’s dictatorship that has resulted in imprisonment of dissidents and state terrorism.

“Cuba’s regime uses the U.S. embargo as a scapegoat for Cuba’s miseries,” the president said, “As long as the regime maintains its monopoly over the political and economic life of the Cuban people, the United States will keep the embargo in place,”

Bush is at least correct in one point, that domestic political environment will block any change in U.S. policy. In recent years, the House has voted on occasion to lift the ban on travel to Cuba, but the Senate has resisted. The only substantive change in U.S. law was enacted almost seven years ago and permits the sale of agricultural and medical goods to Cuba under certain limited conditions.

It is also a fact, however, that 40 years of embargo did little to change, if not threaten, the communist regime on the Havana Island. The only way to help Cuba democratize, in my view, is to let it trade freely with the U.S.

Americans have already succeeded twice in employing this strategy - that dollars will make friends and expand the capitalist spirit, even in a communist environment. With the help of General Electric and Microsoft, China became a market economy in the 1980s and Vietnam in the 1990s.

Cuba’s economy has been staggering ever since the fallout of Soviet Union, its biggest patron, and the country needs to import capital and jobs to serve its highly educated population. While Bush wants to spend almost $50 million this year to promote democracy in Cuba, it seems puzzling to me why he can’t imagine benefits from sending a little commerce that way, too. The embargo, after all, has done nothing to shake the throne of the Castro regime.