In Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro’s Legacy (AEI Press, September 2003), AEI scholar Mark Falcoff discusses Cuba’s future after four decades of communism. Falcoff deals with Cuba as a country whose revolutionary legacy may well have permanently destroyed its viability as a nation-state. Most importantly, Falcoff argues that the debate over the forty-year U.S. trade embargo is largely irrelevant. The real question is what Cuba will represent once the embargo is lifted, for both itself and the United States.

Without a thriving sugar industry that once made it one of the most prosperous Latin American countries and without the annual $6 billion subsidy it received for thirty years from the former Soviet Union, Cuba today barely survives. Its own sugar industry is in ruins, and sugar itself is no longer a prized commodity. Relying on tourism and remittances from Cubans abroad, the country is no different than any other Caribbean nation.

What will Cuba live on once the embargo is lifted? And what will its deepening poverty mean for the United States, given its geographical proximity and America’s long tradition of granting asylum to Cubans who escape the island?