Happy Anniversary!!!
The US embargo on Cuba, a monument to futility:
The world is much changed since the early days of 1962, but one thing has remained constant: The United States’ economic embargo on Cuba, a near-total trade ban that turned 50 on Tuesday.Supporters say it is a justified measure against a repressive Communist government that has never stopped being a thorn in Washington’s side. Critics call it a failed policy that has hurt ordinary Cubans instead of the government.
All acknowledge that it has not accomplished its core mission of toppling Fidel Castro or his brother and successor, Raúl.
“All this time has gone by, and yet we keep it in place,” said Wayne Smith, who was a young American diplomat in Havana in 1961 when relations were severed and who returned as the chief American diplomat after they were partially re-established under President Jimmy Carter. “We talk to the Russians, we talk to the Chinese, we have normal relations even with Vietnam,” Mr. Smith said. “We trade with all of them. So why not with Cuba?”
….
With just 90 miles of sea between Florida and Cuba, the United States would be a natural No. 1 trade partner and source of tourism.
The embargo is a constant talking point for island authorities, who blame it for shortages of everything from medical equipment to the concrete needed for highway construction. Cuba frequently fulminates against the “blockade” at the United Nations and demands the United States end its “genocidal” policy.
Hard to say, of course, but I suspect that the embargo is the #1 reason that the Castro regime remains in power. Eliminating the embargo would change the incentive structure for a lot of different actors in Cuba, not to mention deprive the regime of its chief talking point. Great work! I had hoped that the Obama administration would undertake a more forward looking Cuba policy, but combination of intransigent Congress, lack of vision, and electoral calculus meant that only marginal (though positive) work has been accomplished. I do wonder whether the eventual passing of Fidel and Raul will break the political ice in the United States.
…a couple more points:
1. Conservatives often bring up the South Africa comparison with regards to Cuba; a nasty (and to pre-empt any denials of the regime’s nastiness, see here) regime deserves sanctions whether or not those sanction contribute to regime change. Of course, conservatives didn’t actually make that argument about South African sanctions in the 1980s, and I suspect that if the apartheid regime had survived fifty years of multilateral sanctions, people might have started asking questions.
2. Whatever national security justification existed for the embargo obviously ended after 1989; indeed, a sensible administration with any degree of political freedom might well have attempted overtures to the Castro regime even prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the benefits to Cuba from trade would prospectively have been immense (setting aside for a moment the question of de-stabilization, which the Castro brothers might not have thought through).
3. The political failure of politicians from Southern states other than Florida to create a coalition to end the embargo remains surprising to me. Indeed, lots of people in Florida would stand to gain immensely from free trade with Cuba. I’m generally happy to go with interests as as sufficient reason for politician behavior, but it seems to me that this case also involves a lack of imagination.
4. I would guess that the single biggest beneficiary of the embargo on Cuba is the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which presumably sucks up a great deal of the tourism that Cuba would otherwise enjoy. Of course, there are good reasons to visit Puerto Rico anyway, but I’d be curious to see how the tourism industry in Puerto Rico changed in the 1960s, and also the extent, if any, to which Puerto Ricans have lobbied to maintain the embargo.
Certainly the historian of Cuba I am friends with absolutely argues that the embargo is Castro’s best friend.
Disagreeing with this sentiment is crazy talk of a very specific kind. I would not be surprised if the people who disagree with this sentiment are the exact same set of people who think that Tim Tebow is a competent NFL quarterback.
I don’t think Skip Bayless has opinions on the Cuba embargo.
But if he did, they would be edgy, proactive and totally in your face.
But they really need about ten percent more Rastafication before they can get biz-zay.
You also get a fair amount of disagreement with this statement from the left, arguing that the regimes legitimacy is based on the establishment of the welfare state etc. rather than resistance to the United States.
Certainly true.
One can have some sympathy with the Castro regime and recognize the fundamental truth of why it continues to exist.
Another explanation is that they are a bunch of dirty socialists with a fairly clear example right next door(Haiti) of an alternative form of engagement with the US.
Its worse, I mean at least with Tebow you can make an argument that on certain very limited metrics he’s a good young QB (QB rating, wins- a bad one but what have you, ypc, ypa etc)- there is no such case for the embargo.
Still, Fidel wanted the Sovs to go ahead and nuke us.
I’m gonna kinda go with the Fuck You school of IR.
C
An understandable sentiment, but we shouldn’t be basing our foreign policy on sentiment. We should be basing it on our interests, and our values, and neither are being advanced by this policy.
Saddam had it coming, too. That doesn’t mean the Iraq War was a good idea.
Other people who like the Cuba embargo. Sugar producers.
This subject always reminds me of a big fat paper I wrote in college, in 1978, analyzing how the US would handle normalization of relations with Cuba which was certain to happen early in President Carter’s second term.
It certainly helps the regime remain, and certainly hurts both our and the regions economy. From a purely cultural, geographical, and economic point of view, Cuba cannot help but be dominated by the United States if its economy is open to us. We are simply too big, too productive, and too rich for Cuba not to be. In the same way that Taiwan and Korea will, inevitably, gravitate into China’s orbit due to its size and productive capacity, or Mexico and Canada must inevitably be friendly to the United State do to the size of our markets, so too must Cuba, and for similar reasons.
This is of course why Sweden is so closely allied to Russia, and Pakistan is such a friendly neighbour to India.
Pakistan is a state founded directly on religious animus which, as a result, has a long history of bloody conflicts with India, both justifying and strengthening their mutual hostility. That it has been run since its founding with cultural resistance of and military opposition to India as a stated goal of public policy has only bolstered this. Nor should the power of foreign intervention be under-estimated; our quite friendly Cold War relationship with Pakistan, undertaken largely to annoy India for its leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement, certainly played a role in strengthening this official animosity.
As to Sweden, it spent the whole Cold War in a position of diplomatically-mandated friendly neutrality towards the USSR for precisely the sort of economic and political considerations I mentioned in my first post. While the perennial weakness of the Russian economy has historically allowed them significant freedom of action, and Moscow’s penchant for exploitation of provinces and allies has justified greater suspicion in that relationship, Sweden has far greater economic and cultural ties to Russia than your comment suggests you realize. Perhaps the best proof of this beyond economic statistics is how common it is for Nords to speak Russian as a secondary language; if interaction with Russians wasn’t common, this wouldn’t be a useful skill.
One should also consider the issue of geography. Whereas the borders of the US, Canada, and Mexico, and of China and Korea are wide and generally easy to cross, and the maritime distances between Cuba and the US or China and Taiwan are insignificant, the Russo-Nordic borders are rough terrain plagued by bad weather that neither armies nor trade can easily traverse year-round. Instead most of their trade is carried out through the Baltic Sea, out of ports that are frozen from December to April on good years, and from November to May on bad ones. Attacking the Nordic countries overland is difficult, and attacking them oversea equally so is such confined, temperamental, seasonal waters. This geographic isolation, which is not present in the other relationships I mentioned, encourages more cultural distinctiveness and political autonomy than you typically see in imbalanced inter-state relationships.
I’d suspect issues of culture and relative strength also play a role. Russia isn’t nearly the regional cultural or military hegemon that the US and China are in their neighborhoods. Nor does it provide to the Nordics, as China does for Korea and Taiwan, a huge pool of cheap labor to encourage off-shoring of industrial jobs (and in any case, the Nords follow Germany’s model regarding industrial policy, which gives workers an actual say in how their factories are run, discouraging such practices). Outside of a few books written in the 18th century, ballet, and a handful of classical music which is largely irrelevant to modern culture, what has Russia really produced in the way of cultural goods? It is the consumption of such nationally-identified products that does the work of spreading influence. Lacking a robust and compelling culture that people want to participate in, Russia has always relied on force and ethnic paternalism to influence its neighbors. This has bred resentment, which in turn has made in more difficult for Russia to get what it wants from its neighbors, just as the embargo has for the US in Cuba.
Russia actually does have quite a few cultural exports and its influence is heavy in Central Asia and other former Soviet states. Even the Baltic States which are quite hostile in the political realm to Russia have a fair amount of Russian cultural influence. Among these influences are food, drama, film, literature, television, etc.
Among the compelling aspects of Russian culture that are popular among her neighbors are things like Nu pogodi, Viktor Tsoi, and KVN to just mention modern Russian language Soviet stuff. Of course Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, and Chekov also remain popular. Then of course there is borscht, pelmeni, and kvass. If you go to any store in a place like Bishkek you will see lots of products from Russia such as chocolate bars, potato chips, beer, etc.
I asked my historian of Cuba friend about the Puerto Rico issue. He said:
As ineffective as the embargo has been, and as much as it has contributed to the regime’s continuance, it has also wreaked enormous pain and havoc on the populace.
Re: The South Africa/Cuba comparison, I should like to point out that applying sanctions to a capitalistic remnant of the british empire that very much desires to be part of global trade and to acquire international legitimacy is VERY DIFFERENT from applying them to a nation ruled by a revolutionary movement that isn’t afraid to pursue autarky as a source of national pride and that thinks capitalism can go fuck itself.
Yeah and punishing people for not being on the lowest rung of the ladder of your capitalist system isn’t exactly proving anything either.
South Africa and Cuba are very different. But, not for the reasons you state. South Africa was hardly a remnant of the British Empire after the Nats won in 1948 and imposed apartheid. The Afrikaners dominated the politics of the country from that time on. It was also far less capitalist under apartheid then it is today under the ANC. Much of the economy was dominated by para-state organizations that had a heavy hand of government in the actual control of key industries.
Cuba was not trying to pursue autarky. They want and have always wanted normal trade with the US. They have normal trade with the rest of the world. They have been heavily dependent upon trade with the rest of the world. Even under their most revolutionary stage they were not advocating complete self-reliance. Most notably they needed to import oil from the USSR which they got through a barter agreement in exchange for sugar. They also did not develop their own arms industry.
In reality South Africa was much more autarkic than Cuba. Only the US refused to trade with Cuba. South Africa had international sanctions that forced it to develop its own arms industry, an alternative to oil (Sasol), and other industries. Although given the dominance of the government in these industries it was not anything like the version of neo-liberal capitalism that currently reigns in both the US and South Africa.
In my IR studies, I find that trade is usually pretty symptomatic rather than the cause of IR problems. If anything, the embargo has proven that Cuba can survive without the US- the regime was competent enough to feed its people, expand its educational programs, and build a communist Caribbean island variant of a modern country.
I think it is a bit naive to think that the end of the US embargo would be the end or the beginning of the end of the Castro regime. Raul has already begun a liberalization program, and the people of Cuba can get those consumer goods from exactly the same place we get them- Asia. The embargo ending wouldn’t mean that Cuba would get flooded with American stuff either. They still have customs in Cuba.
There is a real possibility that Cuba would get flooded with American tourists, but the other crappy Gulf resorts already exist, and people hate change. If it became a problem they could always limit the amount of Americans coming to the island.
In short, I think it’s pretty short-sighted to underestimate the popular support of the Castros in Cuba. They are the first independent leaders in Cuban history. Once you get further down into your Chernenkos and Andropovs then you can look and see if the revolution is on its last legs. But American leaders seem to think Cuba looks at Haiti or Jamaica or the Dominican Republic and is jealous.
I wouldn’t say it’d be the end of the regime, but overtime it would lead to a coinciding of interests and an interdependence that would make the nature of the regime irrelevant. It is a mistake of ego for people to think that the only way to dominate a country is through direct military conquest. Canada and Mexico will never be a threat to the US, and will continue to be friendly towards us, due to our proximity and the relative differences in military and cultural capacity. It’s the same way with Cuba; give trade and normalized relations, they would no more want to be in conflict with us that any other Caribbean state. This would lead, if not to a direct influence on their policy making process, at the very least a natural felicity towards our preferences on their part.
I suspect this has become an issue of ego for US politicians, however. Kennedy and the other cold-war presidents presidents would rather have seen Cuba bend the knee under our power than wield genuine influence over them because humans who feel they hold a position of relatively vast power often sacrifice accomplishing their goal for the sake of such emotional satisfaction. We saw a similar mindset in play during Bush Jr’s unilateral approach to Iraq War/War on Terror diplomacy. Modern-day politicians continue the policy out of simple inertia and a refusal to admit that Cuba deserves to be treated like any other State.
I suspect that the embargo against Cuba will remain until Cuban emigre politics in the US changes. This is unlikely to happen for a while. It happened among the Vietnamese population in the US, but Ho died in 1969 and capitalist reform has been official policy since the 1980s. When Cuban American businessmen want to trade in Cuba and start to challenge the current leadership of Cuban-American organizations then you will see movement to lift the embargo. Until then there is no group that has any interest in changing the policy. Like US policy towards Israel and some other foreign policy concerns there is a well organized lobby on one side and no effective opposition on the other side.
I think the aging of the Cuban population in Florida will be the key development. Younger Cuban-Americans have politics that are very different from that of their parents and grandparents.
Also, cigars. Too.