Tema: Lift the Cuba Embargo?

The good news is that Fidel says Havana is ready for talks with Washington. The bad news: the aging revolutionary probably remains more interested in monologue than dialogue.

Even the silver-tongued Obama can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Americas Summit: Missed Opportunity

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124018390302433097.html

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

If President Barack Obama's goal at the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend was to be better liked by the region's dictators and left-wing populists than his predecessor George W. Bush, the White House can chalk up a win.

If, on the other hand, the commander in chief sought to advance American ideals, things didn't go well. As the mainstream press reported, Mr. Obama seemed well received. But the freest country in the region took a beating from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales, and Nicaragua's Danny Ortega.

Ever since Bill Clinton organized the first Summit of the Americas in 1994 in Miami, this regional gathering has been in decline. It seemed to hit its nadir in 2005 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, when President Nestór Kirchner allowed Mr. Chávez and his revolutionary allies from around the region to hold a massive, American-flag burning hate-fest in a nearby stadium with the goal of humiliating Mr. Bush. This year things got even worse with the region's bullies hogging the limelight and Mr. Obama passing up a priceless opportunity to defend freedom.

Mr. Obama had to know that the meeting is used by the region's politicians to rally the base back home by showing that they can put Uncle Sam in his place. Realizing this, the American president might have arrived at the Port of Spain prepared to return their volley. They have, after all, tolerated and even encouraged for decades one of the most repressive regimes of the 20th century. In recent years, that repression has spread from Cuba to Venezuela, and today millions of Latin Americans live under tyranny. As the leader of the free world, Mr. Obama had the duty to speak out for these voiceless souls. In this he failed.

The subject of Cuba was a softball that the American president could have hit out of the park. He knew well in advance that his counterparts would pressure him to end the U.S. embargo. He even prepared for that fact a few days ahead of the summit by unconditionally lifting U.S. restrictions on travel and remittances to the island, and offering to allow U.S. telecom companies to bring technology to the backward island.

The Americas in the News

Think that helped cast the U.S. in a better light in the region? Fat chance. Raúl Castro responded on Friday from Venezuela with a long diatribe against the Yankee oppressor and a cool offer to negotiate on "equal" terms. In case you don't speak Cuban, I'll translate: The Castro brothers want credit from U.S. banks because they have defaulted on the rest of the world, and no one will lend to them anymore. They also want foreign aid from the World Bank.

Anyone who thinks that Raúl is ruminating over free elections is dreaming. Nevertheless, the Cuba suggestion to put "everything" on the table became the "news" of the summit. And while it is true that Mr. Obama mentioned political prisoners in his list of items that U.S. wants to negotiate, he could have done much more. Indeed, he could have called Raúl's bluff by putting the spotlight on the prisoners of conscience, by naming names. He could have talked about men like Afro-Cuban pacifist Oscar Elias Biscet, who has written eloquently about his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr., and today sits in jail for the crime of dissent.

The first black U.S. president could have named hundreds of others being held in inhumane conditions by the white dictator. He could have also asked Brazil's President Lula da Silva, Chile's President Michelle Bachelet and Mexico's Felipe Calderón where they stand on human rights for all Cubans. Imagine if Mr. Obama asked for a show of hands to find out who believes Cubans are less deserving of freedom than, say, the black majority in South Africa under apartheid or Chileans during the Pinochet dictatorship. Then again, that would be no way to win a popularity contest or to ingratiate yourself with American supporters who are lining up to do business in Cuba.

Instead the U.S. president simply floated down the summit river passively bouncing off whatever obstacles he encountered. The Chávez "gift" of the 1971 leftist revolutionary handbook "Open Veins of Latin America" followed by a suggestion of renewing ambassadorial relations was an insult to the American people. Granted, giving the Venezuelan attention would have been counterproductive. But Mr. Obama ought to have complained loudly about that country's aggression. It has supported Colombian terrorists, drug trafficking and Iran's nuclear ambitions. As former CIA director Michael Hayden told Fox News Sunday, "the behavior of President Chávez over the past years has been downright horrendous -- both internationally and with regard to what he's done internally inside Venezuela."

Too bad Mr. Obama didn't have a copy of the late 1990s bestseller "The Perfect Latin American Idiot" as a gift for Mr. Chávez. Another way Mr. Obama could have neutralized the left would have been to announce a White House push for ratification of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. That didn't happen either. He only promised to talk some more, a strategy that will offend no one and accomplish nothing. It is a strategy that sums up, to date, Mr. Obama's foreign policy for the region.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

A solid critique of the unprincipled nature of Obama's foreign policy. He din’t defend democratic principles nor he complain about Chávez support of Colombian terrorists.

She hinted, but didn't mention directly how Obama brushed off Venezuela's threat to the US by saying they had a smaller military than ours. This remark should have Americans concerned about our security under this Administration of ours.
Instead of truly defending democratic principles, all he does is pal around with the most horrid examples of anti-democratic, anti-US leaders in a gutless hemisphere.

Obama must not forget Cuba still needs fixing
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Obama+must+forget+Cuba+still+needs+fixing/1518217/story.html

By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary Herald

If the Americans are going to open things up with Cuba--as U.S. President Barack Obama has hinted he may--the Cuban people had better get something out of it. That is, if a crisis is too good a thing to waste, so is 50 years of U. S. censure for a regime that has systematically violated the property and human rights of its own people.

It has also, let us not forget, been a bitterly hostile entity 90 miles off the Florida coast. At one time, it offered itself as a forward base for Soviet strategic nuclear weapons and as a Soviet proxy for adventuring in the Third World. Now, the regime's sins of commission against its North American neighbors have faded into irrelevancy with the end of the Cold War: It has little capacity to hurt us now. But, the good opinion of the late Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau notwithstanding, these were bad people.

Of significance today, is that there's no evidence the regime has changed since a failing Fidel Castro relinquished its reins to his brother Raul. Not only does the same melancholy socialism govern the Cuban economy now that Fidel established 50 years ago, it's still a police state.

Of course, Castro apologists blame the island's miserable economy on 50 years of the American trade boycott. They do so with tongue in cheek, however: Was not communism the way of the future, whose evolution would cause capitalism to crumble?

No doubt many a Cuban has wryly observed that what crumbled was Cuban communism, for lack of access to a capitalist market.

They would, however, have done so discreetly. Or at least, they would if they didn't want any trouble.

Always an oppressive government, it never took much to get locked up and Cuban adoption last year of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights has led to no second spring for those the state unjustly imprisoned.

American Spectator recently profiled a still-jailed dissident whose fate shows how horribly thin-skinned the regime is, not just about liberal-democratic agitation but something as non-ideological as abortion.

"Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet is a leading figure in Cuba's democracy movement . . . [but] has been confined to a prison cell for all but 36 days since 1999. He first drew the ire of the communist regime by exposing its use of infanticide and forced abortion."

Cuba does indeed have an exceptionally high abortion rate: The pro-life Johnston Archive, quoting UN sources, suggests it as much as one abortion for every two live births. Certainly, the number of live births has gone down from 166,000 in 1986, to around 113,000 in 2006. Anyway, in 1999 by way of protest, Biscet hung a Cuban flag upside down and was jailed for three years for "disrespecting patriotic symbols."

The timing of his release was unfortunate, in that it coincided with the so-called "Black Spring" crackdown on dissent. He had been out for all of a month, when he was rearrested with 90 other pro-democracy journalists and activists, and is now serving a 25-year sentence for "counter-revolutionary activities." According to American Spectator, he is held in a tiny, windowless cell, and denied most family visits as well as essential medicine and food. (The magazine reports he suffers from a variety of chronic ailments and is losing his eyesight.) But, he apparently still manages to write to supporters and won the notice of former president George W. Bush, who awarded him the presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. Along with 20 others arrested at the same time, Biscet remains in jail.

His story is, alas, typical.

The U.S. has little to gain from maintaining its embargo on Cuba.

But Cuba has much to gain from it being lifted. That means now is the right moment to do something for Biscet, other Cubans who languish in Castro's squalid jails and the people themselves for whom the whole country is a prison.

Obama would like to further distance himself from previous administrations by initiating a symbolic rapprochement with America's old enemies, and declared himself much encouraged by Raul Castro's willingness to enter into discussions with Washington. He has talked the talk, saying Castro should release political prisoners and embrace democratic freedoms.

Having started well however, he will be judged on how he walks the walk: If enthusiasm for a symbolic foreign policy success he needs to bolster his reputation in an area of perceived weakness, leads to settling for anything the Castros offer, he will do a huge disservice to the regime's victims. And, the rest of the world would wonder why the U. S. invests so much effort so far from home to promote liberty, but shrinks from doing far less with more prospect of success, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

nhannaford@theherald.canwest.com

Bailing Out The Castro Regime?
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/21/communist-cuba-castro-opinions-contributors-bailout.html

Nestor Carbonell , 04.21.09, 12:30 PM EDT

Not unless Communist Cuba makes concrete democratic changes.

After 50 years of almost continuous antagonism between the U.S. and the Castro-Communist regime, there is a swelling desire in the U.S. and abroad to overcome this predicament through constructive engagement. Since this would not be the first time that engagement has been pursued, let us review the outcome of prior U.S. quests for a rapprochement with this regime, a regime that was expelled from the Organization of American States in 1962 because it had established a Marxist-Leninist tyranny declared incompatible with the inter-American system, had aligned itself with the Soviet bloc and had suppressed all human rights.

Despite a litany of crimes, interventions in the internal affairs of more than a dozen of Latin American countries, and threats to the peace and security of the hemisphere that culminated in the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy tried to seek an accommodation with Castro. On Sept. 23, 1963, U.S. Ambassador William H. Attwood secretly commenced negotiations in New York with the Cuban ambassador to the U.N., Carlos Lechuga.

A few days prior to Kennedy's assassination, a follow-up meeting was arranged with Castro in Havana. Negotiations were dropped almost simultaneously because several tons of war equipment that were shipped from Cuba to Venezuela's Marxist "Armed Forces of National Liberation" were uncovered by the local authorities.

In March 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced that the U.S. was "ready to move in a new direction," which could lead to normalizing relations with Cuba and the lifting of the then 14-year-old trade embargo. After almost one year of intense negotiations between Assistant Secretary of State William Rogers and Castro representatives, the U. S. called them off when 15,000 Cuban troops landed in Angola.

In March 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a presidential directive, stating: "I have concluded that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba." Interest Section offices were established in Havana and Washington, and a large number of Cuban political prisoners were released. Hopes for normalization were quashed when the Castro regime deployed troops to Ethiopia and, subsequently, unleashed the Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 refugees to Florida, including over 2,700 criminals and misfits.

President Reagan tried to engage the Castro regime. In November 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig met in Mexico with Cuban Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, and in March 1982, General Vernon Walter spoke with Castro in Havana. Negotiations stalled when Castro rejected U.S. trade and other concessions in exchange for ending Cuban military shipments to Central American guerrillas.

With the Cold War over, President Bill Clinton actively pursued constructive engagement with the Castro regime. He liberalized U.S.-Cuban remittances and travel to the island (as currently under way), and significantly expanded people-to-people exchanges. Castro foiled this quest for a rapprochement with a new rafter crisis in 1994 and when two Cuban MIG jet fighters shot down two unarmed civilian planes of "Brothers to the Rescue," which were flying over international waters in 1996 on a humanitarian mission.

The above examples of frustrated attempts to normalize relations with Communist Cuba reflect a pattern of deception on the part of Castro and his politburo--eager to obtain U.S. concessions without liberalizing the regime, feigning a desire to settle differences with the U.S., yet always scuttling negotiations and resuming their unyielding and contagious anti-Yankee defiance.

Will this pattern change under the dual or solo leadership of Raul Castro--the ruthless party hierarch largely responsible for building the totalitarian military apparatus in Cuba? He has made conciliatory overtures to the U.S., yet he continues to harbor terrorists and support the authoritarian and expansionist design of his chief subsidizer, Hugo Chavez, with over 40,000 Cuban agents, including military and intelligence officers and indoctrinators, based in Venezuela.

Raul Castro has promised structural changes and open debate, but there are no signs of glasnost or perestroika in Cuba; no Chinese-type opening of the inefficient state-controlled economy; no dismantling of the apartheid system, which effectively bars the local population from entering tourist enclaves. A handful of political prisoners have been conditionally released, but more than 300 remain in prison under brutal conditions. Raul Castro has proposed swapping some of them for the five Cuban spies held in the U.S.

Relying primarily on military comrades from the Old Guard, the regime is gearing up to quell increasing discontent and demands for reforms. The dissidents, now more numerous and vocal than in the past, are constantly being harassed, and several high-level government officials, accused of deviationism and disloyalty, were recently purged and forced to repent, Stalin-style.

Notwithstanding these developments, there are those in the U.S. who contend that change in Cuba can be achieved without prodding, through soft diplomacy. They urge Washington to stop, rather that sharpen and intensify, direct support to the dissident movement on the island. And yet it was strong and sustained support to similar movements that helped bring about the democratic transition in Poland and the rest of the Soviet-bloc countries. Others recommend that the U.S. unconditionally lift the embargo on Cuba and give up its levers. That, in essence, is what the European Union did by dropping its sanctions in the vain hope that human rights would improve on the island.
Assuming that Washington will pursue a quid pro quo engagement with the Castro regime, a guarded approach is called for. The key objective from the U.S. side should be to pave the way for democracy in Cuba with tangible steps leading to free elections, and not to prop up the failed and bankrupt tyranny.

It is a tyranny that is striving to perpetuate itself through several means. First, by shoring up its standing with high-level negotiations in Washington and readmission to regional forums. Second, by harnessing plenty of dollars from herded American tourists to supplement Chavez's shrinking petro-subsidies. Third, by obtaining U.S.-backed credit lines along with access to international banks and monetary funds to facilitate the renegotiation or cancellation of its huge external debt of close to $30 billion, as recently reported by the Paris Club of creditors.

That is the bailout that the Castro regime is seeking--a bailout that, without concrete and irreversible measures for a democratic transition in Cuba, the U. S. must not support.

Néstor Carbonell is an international public affairs consultant; author of And The Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba, William Morrow, 1989; and Luces y Sombras de Cuba, Ediciones Universal, 2008.

Great column by Néstor Carbonell in Forbes that tells the 100% truth about the current situation in Cuba.

Néstor Carbonell time-line provide important historical information that all Americans should know.

Cuba's "bailout", by obtaining US-backed credit lines as well as the external debt of over $60 billion, will guarantee the continuation of the Castros regime, delaying instead of accelerating a transition to democracy.

Another excellent point by point editorial at Foreign Policy by Nestor Carbonell on the embargo.

Think Again: Engaging Cuba
Foreign Policy: Think Again: Engaging Cuba

By Nestor Carbonell
Posted April 2009

Why dealing with the Castro regime is a fool's errand.

“It’s Time for the U.S. to Reach out and Engage the Castro Regime.”

Watch out!Before embarking on any attempt at rapprochement with the Castro regime, U.S. President Barack Obama would be wise to review his predecessors' experiences.

Gerald Ford's negotiations with Fidel Castro's representatives had to be called off when 15,000 Cuban troops landed in Angola. Jimmy Carter's efforts led to the opening of interest sections in Havana and Washington, but hopes for normalization were quashed when the Castro regime deployed troops to Ethiopia and subsequently unleashed the Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 refugees to Florida, including more than 2,700 convicted criminals and misfits. Several foreign-policy experts called the boatlift an act of migratory aggression.

With the Cold War over, President Bill Clinton tried anew to improve U.S. relations with Cuba, fostering people-to-people contacts. These efforts were foiled by a crisis of refugee rafters in 1994 and again in 1996 when Cuban jet fighters shot down two unarmed planes flying over international waters on a humanitarian mission.

The circumstances have changed since then, but the Cuban regime (now under the dual leadership of the Castro brothers) essentially remains the same. So, at the very least, caution and a step-by-step approach are called for in any new attempt to engage with this wily regime, which has managed to exploit naivité and signs of weakness to its advantage.

“The Embargo Is a Failure.”

Depends. Some would say the embargo hasn't worked because Cuba's totalitarian regime remains in power. But it's also exhausted and weaker. The regime today faces disgruntled apparatchiks, cracks within its system, a critical economic and financial situation, and growing restlessness and dissent among the population.

The embargo is the only leverage the United States has to ensure a democratic transition, if not under the Castro brothers, then with their successors. Why give up something for nothing? The European Union did that by unilaterally lifting its diplomatic sanctions against the Cuban regime, but Europe's hopes for human rights improvements have so far been in vain. Despite striking out yet again during his trip to Havana last month, European commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, Louis Michel, said that "Cuba-EU relations may go very far." He also hailed the importance of boosting collaboration between both sides. All this while more than 300 Cuban political prisoners remain behind bars under brutal conditions.

Cuba today is virtually bankrupt, with a huge external debt it is unable to serve or repay. According to the Paris Club group of creditors, Cuba owes close to $30 billion to its trading partners -- the second-highest level of indebtedness reported by the group. Given the sharp decline in oil prices, it is unlikely that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez will be able to maintain the current level of subsidies and other financial assistance granted to Cuba (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually).

Under these circumstances, the Castro regime has embarked on a charm offensive with a single objective in mind: a U.S. bailout. The regime is looking to Uncle Sam for additional dollars via American tourists, plus commercial lines of credit and access to international banks and monetary funds for the renegotiation or cancellation of its external debt. That is leverage the United States could guardedly use -- not to provide life support to a battered tyranny, but to secure meaningful changes that will hasten the democratization of Cuba.

“Raúl Castro Is More Pragmatic Than His Brother.”

Wishful thinking. Remember that Raúl Castro was largely responsible for building the totalitarian-military apparatus in Cuba. He has promised reforms, but those reforms have been more cosmetic than real. Cubans can now legally go to hotels they cannot afford and buy computers without access to the Internet. Farmers have been leased state-owned land, but without the necessary capital, fertilizers, technology, and tools to make it productive.

Raúl Castro said he would encourage open debate, yet dissidents are constantly harassed and detained. Even several high-level government officials, accused by Raúl as deviationists, were recently purged and forced to repent, Stalin-style. The current Politburo has been largely militarized, with key members of the old guard loyal to Raúl. Lacking the grip and charisma of his brother, he fears the "reformists" who are starting to emerge, hence Raúl's interest in shoring up his prestige and authority with high-level negotiations with Washington and the readmission of Cuba to the Organization of American States and other international forums. He is only looking for concessions that will prop up his internal standing, not real change.

“The Embargo Allows the Regime to Blame the U.S. for Cuba’s Problems.”

Who cares? The Castros have never needed help in coming up with reasons to blame Yankee imperialism or the CIA for any criticism or discontent on the island. Dissidents are constantly being accused of serving the enemy (the United States). Even Spain -- a staunch Castro supporter -- was recently lashed by the ailing ruler for helping the "genocide empire" with its anti-Cuba policy.

But it is safe to say that most Cubans long ago realized that the main cause of their calamity is not the external U.S. embargo, but the internal government blockade. Except among the government nomenklatura, there is very little animosity toward Americans in Cuba. The dream of most Cubans today, absent a change that will unshackle them, is to reach Miami, one way or another, to renew their lives with freedom and opportunities to prosper.

“Cultural Exchanges and Tourism Can Hasten Political Change.”

If only. Cultural exchanges would be great if U.S. students, professors, intellectuals, scientists, and artists enjoyed in Cuba the same rights of mobility and expression that their Cuban counterparts are granted in the United States. As for tourism, more than 15 million tourists have gone to Cuba in the last 10 years, primarily from Canada and Europe. They have had no discernable impact on the regime, other than providing hard currency, and have had very limited interaction with the local population. Under the existing system, a kind of apartheid on the Caribbean, Cubans are barred from entering tourist enclaves (most of them are outside Havana) and penalized for engaging in discussions or accepting publications deemed counterrevolutionary. In any forthcoming negotiations, attempts should be made to remove these barriers.

“Cuba Is No Longer a Threat to the United States.”

Don't be so sure. The fact that Cuba, without Soviet backing, is no longer a direct military threat does not make the regime that rules the island a benign dictatorship. Its biotechnology capability, developed in conjunction with Iran, and its close relationship with North Korea pose serious concerns. Cuba continues to harbor terrorists from ETA, FARC, and ELN, as well as U.S.-convicted criminals and fugitives.

Cuban officials have been indicted in the past for trafficking drugs from the island to the United States, and today, according to the Miami Herald's summary of a report by the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, "Cuba is doing little to stop drug smuggling, and … its cooperation with U.S. efforts is sporadic and limited." Most ominous is the Castro regime's continued support of Chávez's authoritarian and expansionist government with some 40,000 Cubans in Venezuela, including intelligence and military officers and educational "indoctrinators." For many populists in Latin America, Castro's Cuba remains an attractive and contagious symbol of anti-U.S. defiance.

“U.S. Engagement with the Castro Regime Is the Best Hope for a Democratic Cuba.”

Not at all. The hope lies primarily with the silent majority on the island, which is no longer so silent. It includes the brave members of the dissident and human rights movements who remain at the vanguard; the political prisoners who from their cells remain undaunted; the wives of those prisoners parading and demanding the release of their loved ones; intellectuals challenging the Communist Party's rewrite of Cuban history; the priest who sent an open letter to Raúl Castro demanding drastic reforms; tourism workers objecting to stifling taxes; comedians making fun of the government; bloggers debunking the lies spread by the regime; and the Cubans who, during a recent art fair in Havana, went up to the podium, shouted "Freedom!", and were warmly applauded by the audience.

This surging dissident movement, conscious of its rights and determined to be the protagonist of Cuba’s future, needs to be encouraged and supported by the United States and others as Solidarity was in Poland: with sufficient funds and tools for civic, peaceful resistance, and with enlightening radio and TV transmissions that can overcome the regime's jamming and provide the same impetus for change that Radio Free Europe did in the 1980s.

This dissident movement, part of the larger civil society, will eventually coalesce with reformists from within the government's ranks and pave the way for a democratic transition in Cuba. Forget the Castro brothers; these are the Cubans the United States must engage with.
Nestor Carbonell is an international public affairs consultant and author of And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba and Luces y Sombras de Cuba.

Should the Cuban Embargo Be Lifted?
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/29/should_the_cuban_embargo_be_lifted_96232.html

ByAlvaro Vargas Llosa
Real Clear Politics
April 29, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Most Americans seem to reject the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. According to a Washington Post/ABC poll, 57 percent of Americans now oppose the policy. A survey by Bendixen & Associates shows that only 42 percent of Cuban-Americans continue to back it.

I have been conflicted on this issue for years. Until not long ago, I favored the embargo. As an advocate for free trade, I would normally have called such a measure an unacceptable restriction on the freedom of people to trade with whomever they pleased. But I thought that trading with a regime that had killed, jailed, exiled or muzzled countless of its citizens for decades was not a worthy objective, as it would also preserve that dictatorship. Any transaction with Cuba would also benefit the government. After all, the authorities were already skimming 20 percent of the remittances from Cuban-Americans and 90 percent of the salary paid to Cubans by non-American foreign investors.

Eventually, I admitted to myself that there was an intolerable inconsistency in my thinking. No democracy based on liberty should tell its citizens what country to visit or whom to trade with, regardless of the government under which they live. Even though the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, would obtain a political victory in the very short run, the embargo could no longer be justified.

But this is not the reasoning coming from the most vocal critics of U.S. sanctions these days. Many of them fail to even mention the fraud that is a system which bases its legitimacy on the renunciation of capitalism and at the same time implores capitalism to come to its rescue. There is also an endearing hypocrisy among those who decry the embargo but devote hardly any time to denouncing the island's half-century tyranny under the Castros.

Another risible subterfuge attributes the catastrophe that is Cuba's economy on Washington's decision to cut off economic relations in 1962 after a wave of expropriations against American interests. The amnesiacs conveniently forget that in 1958, Cuba's socioeconomic condition was similar to Spain's and Portugal's and the standard of living of its citizens was behind only those of Argentines and Uruguayans in Latin America. Many of the critics also seem to suffer what French writer Jean-Francois Revel used to call "moral hemiplegia" -- a tendency to see fault only on one side of the political spectrum: I never heard Cuba's champions complain about sanctions against right-wing dictatorships.
Sometimes, sanctions work, sometimes they don't. A study by Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, Kimberly Elliot and Barbara Oegg titled "Economic Sanctions Reconsidered" analyzes dozens of cases of sanctions since World War I. In about a third of them, they worked either because they helped to topple the regime (South Africa) or because they forced the dictator to make major concessions (Libya). Archbishop Desmond Tutu told me a few months ago in San Francisco that he was convinced that international sanctions were crucial in defeating apartheid in his home country. In the cases in which the embargo worked, the sanctions were applied by many countries and the affected regimes were already severely discredited or weakened.

In the cases in which sanctions have not worked -- Saddam Hussein between 1990 and 2003, and North Korea today -- the dictatorships were able to isolate themselves from the effects and concentrate them on the population. In some countries, a certain sense of pride helped defend the government against foreign sanctions -- which is why the measures applied by the Soviet Union against Yugoslavia in 1948, China in 1960 and Albania in 1961 were largely useless.

In the case of Cuba, the Castro regime has been able to whip up a nationalist sentiment against the U.S. embargo. More significantly, it has managed to offset much of the effects over the years in large part because the Soviets subsidized the island for three decades, because the regime welcomed Canadian, Mexican and European capital after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and because Venezuela is its new patron.

But these arguments against the U.S. embargo are mostly practical. Ultimately, the argument against the sanctions is a moral one. It is not acceptable for a government to abolish individual choice in matters of trade and travel. The only acceptable form of economic embargo is when citizens, not governments, decide not do business with a dictatorship, be that of Burma, Zimbabwe or Cuba.

Álvaro Vargas Llosa is a Bolivian writer and political commentator on international affairs with emphasis on Latin America. In this article, that by coincidence has the same title than the one written by Bert Corzo, he exposes the moral reasons for abandoning the embargo. Until recently he was in favor to keep the embargo.

I've never understood why Cuba is always able to "blame" the U.S. embargo for everything the embargo does. At the beginning of the embargo, there was some immediate dislocation and adjustments, but in relatively short order things were back to normal; other trading partners (communist block) rush in and fill the gaps. For over 30 years the embargo was a non issue. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Castros regime received support from ideological bedfellows such as the USSR, China, Venezuela and Iran and there is already plenty of tourism income from the other major countries of the world.

You don’t need to look further; here you have the answer from the “horse” mouth:

“It is necessary to impose financial, economic and material restrictions to dictatorships, so that they will not take roots for long years….Diplomatic and morals measures do not work against dictatorships, because these make fun of the Governments and the population”.- Fidel Castro

(Excerpt from the book “Fidel Castro and Human Rights”, Editora Política, Havana, Cuba, 1988)