A Policy Towards Cuba That Serves U.S. Interests

No. 384 November 2, 2000 A Policy toward Cuba That Serves U.S. Interests by Philip Peters Executive Summary More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin those sectors have gained experience with mar- Wall, Fidel Castro remains in charge in Havana, kets and augmented their earnings. despising capitalism, taunting the Cuban- Cuban Americans have increasingly joined American community in Miami, theorizing this discussion, as a younger generation of exiles about the evils of globalization, and keeping up values contact with the island and some first- with every imaginable statistic about Cuba. He generation exiles begin to question the effective- has been in power for 41 years, outlasting U.S. ness of the trade embargo. The Elián González strategies from the Bay of Pigs in the early 1960s crisis fueled doubts about the embargo when the to the tightened economic sanctions of the young boy’s plight captured American attention 1990s. and weakened the pro-embargo hard-line posi- As Castro remains in control, new conditions tion in public and congressional opinion. have led to a reexamination of U.S. policy. Cuba’s The wide array of U.S. sanctions has failed to threat to hemispheric security ended when the promote change in Cuba and has allowed Castro Soviet Union dissolved, Soviet military support to reinforce his arguments that the United States disappeared, and Cuban support for revolution- promotes economic deprivation in Cuba and ary movements in Latin America ended. As seeks to abridge Cuban sovereignty. It is time for American sanctions have increased, Cuban dissi- the United States to turn to economic engage- dents and religious authorities have increasingly ment. Whether or not the embargo is lifted com- voiced their opposition to the embargo and to pletely, a policy that respects the rights of policies that seek to isolate Cuba. Economic Americans to trade with, invest in, and travel to reforms in Cuba are still incipient, but small Cuba would more effectively serve U.S. interests enterprise, foreign investment, incentive-based in post-Soviet Cuba: defending human rights, agriculture, and other changes have had impor- helping the Cuban people, and connecting with tant impacts: they helped the economy survive the generation of Cubans that will govern that its post-Soviet crisis, and Cubans working in country in the early 21st century. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Philip Peters is vice president of the Lexington Institute, where he publishes field research on the Cuban economy. He served in the State Department during the Reagan and Bush administrations. The virtual Castro, Fidel’s father, died in 1956 at age 80, collapse of Why Has Socialism after a rural life that was surely harder than Survived? that of his son. Latin America’s There are other reasons why Cuban radical left in the When Soviet communism fell, it was socialism survived its post-Soviet crisis and widely predicted that Cuba’s island socialism seems stable today in spite of persistent 1990s limited would soon follow. The CIA prepared for economic hardships. Castro’s political Cuba’s capacity high-level defections. Analysts pored over opposition does not begin to compare with for “inter- Cuba’s trade and financial accounts looking the Solidarity movement in Poland or the for signs the economy would hit rock bot- Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia. nationalism.” tom. By 1992 power blackouts were wide- Cuba’s dissident community is small and spread, fuel shortages were making Havana’s not well-known inside Cuba; its ranks of streets almost devoid of vehicular traffic, and current and potential activists are thinned production in all sectors was in a nosedive. regularly by emigration; and it is not sup- Cuban data show a 37 percent drop in gross ported by the kind of large public demon- domestic product per capita between 1989 strations that occurred in Eastern Europe. and 1993. Shiploads of heavy Chinese bicy- Castro’s government, unlike the postwar cles with brand names such as “Forever” and governments in Eastern Europe, was not “Flying Pigeon” (which Cubans call chivos,or imposed by the Soviets; Castro’s revolu- goats) were arriving, soon to become a com- tionary movement replaced a regime that mon mode of transportation. Cubans generally repudiated. This still Cuba’s destiny seemed a matter of simple earns Castro a measure of deference, if not arithmetic: the loss of a Soviet subsidy that genuine political support, even among amounted to one-fourth of Cuba’s national Cubans who oppose his policies. “He’s like income, the loss of Eastern bloc trading part- a grandfather,” a Cuban professional told ners that had accounted for three-fourths of me. “He may be wrong, but he still deserves Cuba’s imports and exports, and the ineffi- respect.” ciencies and perverse incentives of the social- Since the early 1990s Cuba has adjusted ist economic structure seemed sure to add up domestic policies to ease social and political to economic collapse and a change of gov- pressures. The Catholic Church has been ernment. given slightly greater space in which to con- Washington tried to accelerate this process duct its pastoral and charitable work, leading in 1992 and 1996 by twice enacting new laws to to higher attendance at masses and a vastly tighten the embargo. Rep. Dan Burton of expanded capacity to deliver food and social Indiana predicted in 1996 that, “in a few short services throughout Cuba. A series of limited years, there will be freedom, democracy, and market-based reforms—mainly in small enter- human rights in Cuba, and we’ll all go down prise, agriculture, and foreign investment— there and have a good time.”1 has produced a modest recovery that is But the collapse never came. For the first improving living standards and beginning to time, Cuba’s communists, isolated from the erode the state’s dominance in the economy. political contagion that swept Eastern Finally, as will be discussed below, hard- Europe, seemed to benefit from being so far line U.S. policies designed to bring Fidel from their socialist allies and so close to the Castro down have backfired. Those policies United States. Economic hardship produced place him in the world political limelight, migrants but sparked no revolt. The nomen- renew his claim to victimhood, reinforce klatura has remained cohesive. Castro him- many of his favorite nationalist arguments, self, reported by Dan Rather in 1996 to be “in and miss opportunities to influence Cuba’s visibly poor health,” seems as healthy today future by blocking free interaction with as any 74 year old.2It bears noting that Angel American society. 2 made do without live ammunition, and The End of the infantry units began to cultivate crops for Cuban Threat their own consumption. In 1998 a Pentagon report described the capabilities of the Immediately following the fall of the Revolutionary Armed Forces as “residual” Berlin Wall, the United States focused not on and “defensive” and judged that Cuba did Cuba but on Eastern Europe and the disinte- not represent a national security threat.3 grating Soviet Union, where sweeping change The virtual collapse of Latin America’s commanded attention and the stakes were radical left in the 1990s also limited Cuba’s high. At the time, Havana was making no sig- capacity for “internationalism.” Left-of-cen- nificant overtures to Washington or to the ter parties dreamed no longer of building world at large. The Cuban-American voices socialism but of carving out areas of influ- that had long shaped a bipartisan policy con- ence in the region’s new economic policy sensus were urging a steady course. Those consensus, which is built on a smaller state conditions combined to keep in place the and market reforms. El Salvador’s FMLN policies the United States had pursued guerrillas signed a peace treaty, formed a toward Cuba during the Cold War. political party, and won seats in the legisla- The centerpiece of those policies, the ture. Since losing power in a 1990 election, Castro claimed to trade embargo, was instituted by President the leaders of Nicaragua’s Frente Sandinista be carrying on John F. Kennedy in 1962 in response to the have dedicated themselves to venality and the “unfinished mass expropriation of U.S.-owned properties infighting but have not talked of a return to by the revolutionary government. Over time, armed struggle. The guerrillas wreaking revolution” the embargo’s core purpose was to exact a havoc in Colombia have their origins in the begun by José price for Cuba’s “socialist international- Marxist left but are funded by drug traffick- Martí and other ism”—Havana’s alliance with the Soviet ers and articulate no clear ideology. To the Union, its decades of political and military extent that Venezuela’s president Hugo heroes of the support for Marxist revolutionary move- Chávez threatens democracy, it is as a pop- 19th-century ments in the Americas, and its sending ulist caudillo at home, not as a Marxist with troops to Africa. cross-border military ambitions. independence Hence, the embargo was an understand- It may be that Castro still wishes that he movement. able response to Cuba’s threat to hemispher- could find and support serious Marxist revo- ic security. Aimed equally at the Soviet Union lutionaries in the Americas. Yet the change in and Cuba, the embargo was designed to Cuba’s international conduct constitutes a make this Soviet satellite as expensive as pos- sizable benefit for U.S. security interests and sible for Moscow to maintain by denying a fundamental change in the equation that Cuba an economic relationship with the long guided U.S. policy. Today Washington United States. Any hardship inflicted by the still has grievances with Cuba—human rights embargo on the Cuban people was seen as an is at the top of the list4—but the remaining unfortunate but unavoidable result of security issues are mainly possibilities, such American security concerns.

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