The recent visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba has once again revived a debate within the United States concerning the existing U.S. trade embargo of the island. Although this restriction was only one of several subjects touched on by the Pontiff during his visit, and by no means the most important, it is perhaps understandable that the U.S. media tended to assign it a major spin. Since the Pope's departure, it is easy to sense a shifting of the ground beneath the existing policy to the extent that Fidel Castro's sympathizers in the media, the intellectual community, and churches have now been joined by libertarians, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and a number of other business groups.
To be sure, many in the business community are motivated less by their enthusiasm for trade with Cuba than by their frustration at our use (admittedly promiscuous) of economic embargoes in other parts of the world where the financial stakes are immeasurably higher. But a coalition for change that spans the ideological extremes does deserve to be taken seriously. What are the merits of its case?
Why an Embargo?
Before we address that question, a bit of background is in order. The U.S. trade and economic embargo on Cuba was imposed nearly forty years ago to raise the cost to the Soviet Union of keeping Castro afloat. In this the trade ban was highly successful since it forced Moscow to spend roughly $6 billion a year and may indeed have been a crucial factor in convincing Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders to revise their country's international role. The embargo also raised the costs to the Castro regime for its sponsorship of revolutionary movements in Latin America and elsewhere, though it is at least arguable that whatever sacrifices such a policy imposed the Cuban dictator was pleased to pass on to the Cuban people.
Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuban officials rarely referred to the U.S. embargo (or "blockade," as they like to call it) except to brag that it had little or no effect on the survival of their regime ("the revolution"). In some ways, this was true. Over time, much U.S.-made machinery for which spare parts were no longer obtainable was replaced by Soviet or Soviet bloc models; the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites picked up the Cuban sugar harvest, sometimes for as much as four times the world price. Until 1986, when Cuba unilaterally stopped payments on its hard currency loans, it traded freely with Western European, Latin American, and Asian countries. (Even now, it can still do so, though under far more stringent requirements, such as cash-and-carry usurious rates of interest.)
Since the collapse of the Soviet world order, Castro and his supporters, as well as their foreign sympathizers, have suddenly discovered the U.S. trade embargo as the first cause of all Cuba's ills, as if an economic system that works nowhere else in the world should miraculously do so on a tropical island organized more or less along the lines of 1970s Bulgaria. Although Cuban officials will readily admit that getting the U.S. embargo lifted is the number one foreign policy priority, arousing international sympathy for the Castro regime (and, what amounts to the same thing, provoking hostility toward the United States) may well be the real name of the game rather than achieving the stated objective. Insofar as the former is concerned, it must be conceded that the Cuban leadership has shown considerable initiative and creativity. A case in point: one Canadian visitor to a Cuban hospital was taken to the room of a young boy in the agonies of a fatal disease. The Canadian was told that the boy would die unless he could have a particular miracle drug available only in the United States. When the Canadian offered to pay for the drug, the Cuban officials shook their heads sadly and told him that the U.S. "blockade" would forbid its importation. The boy subsequently died. The Canadian is now convinced that Americans are sadists. [1]
Why Continue?
Authoritarian regimes subject to Western (or U.S.) economic sanctions are masters at stage-managing incidents of this type for the delectation of their foreign sympathizers or for the horrification of certified political innocents such as our Canadian. [2] (Remember Peter Arnett's disingenuous discovery of the "milk factory" in Iraq during the gulf war?) We hear similar, if somewhat muted, arguments in favor of lifting the embargo on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Muammar el-Qaddfi's Libya, and the Iran of the mullahs; namely trade embargoes hurt only the innocent. People tend to forget that economic sanctions are an invention of liberal statesmanship, a kind of peaceful alternative to the massive death and destruction caused by armed conflict. If trade embargoes are inhumane, the practice of bombing cities is infinitely more so.
Nonetheless, if embargoes are to be regarded as morally reprehensible, then it is difficult to see what instruments of persuasion are left in Western foreign policy except to deal with undemocratic and sometimes genocidal regimes on their own terms and hope to influence them through positive economic incentives. This is now the argument of those in the U.S. business community who wish to resume operations in Cuba. So far, however, economic engagement by other countries there--notably Spain, Canada, and Mexico--has yielded up no such influence.
Let us concede that U.S. policy towards Cuba looks odd to outsiders, even those normally well disposed to this country and its foreign policy. After all, the cold war is over, and Castro represents no threat to the United States or to Cuba's neighbors. Why continue a trade ban whose original raison d' tre no longer exists? This is a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.
In the first place, in the circumstances of today, it is highly unlikely that the United States would impose a trade embargo on Cuba. But since it is already in place, the United States needs an excuse to lift it, namely, that the political situation on the island has taken cognizance of the post cold war order. This means a release of all political prisoners; freedom of the press; an end to the harassment of dissidents, labor leaders, and professionals; freedom of assembly, and some movement toward normal and open political life. Until and unless some Cuban authority can provide that excuse, no U.S. administration will be willing to expend the political capital necessary to change current policy.
In the second place, the embargo is perhaps the only instrument left to the United States to influence events in Cuba in a positive direction. Concretely, to the extent that Castro cannot replace the Soviet subsidy, he is forced to devolve economic power to individual Cubans. This has already happened to some degree, starting with the legalization of the holding of dollars and continuing through the creation of several hundred categories of self-employment. Unfortunately, because as yet no Cuban can employ another Cuban except in family-run home restaurants (paladares), the infant private sector is severely limited in its extent and impact, both in economic and sociological terms. Were Castro to take this next, crucial step, he would, in effect, be willing the rebirth of Cuban civil society and, with it, the germs of a pluralistic political order.
Because Castro and his associates, good Marxists all, understand this point well, they have been reluctant to authorize further steps toward economic reform. For them, power, rather than the prosperity or well-being of the ordinary Cuban, is the ultimate objective. Reports persist that a fierce battle is being waged within Castro's entourage between "reformers" and "hard-liners," with the latter conceding ground to the former only under extreme duress. Those same reports affirm that the recent infusion of dollars from foreign tourism and investment has weakened the hand of advocates of further reform.
Thus, in Cuba at least, "constructive engagement," far from persuading the regime to liberalize, has given it a new lease on life. A lifting of the U.S. embargo could well consolidate the victory of hard-liners. It would also create a new business lobby in the United States, such as already exists in Canada, Spain, and Mexico, whose purpose would be to deny (or defend) the Castro regime's violations of human and labor rights.
Admittedly, many uncertainties in the Cuban situation remain. Even if persistent U.S. pressures eventually succeed in tilting the playing field in favor of the reformers, there is no guarantee that concessions made by the Castro regime to its people under duress might not be precipitously withdrawn once its unwanted political fruits became manifest. Such a reversal has happened with farmers' markets.
Conversely, the infusion of dollars into the island in the form of remittances from Cubans abroad has destabilized the regime to the extent of creating a new class that is economically independent of the government and the Communist Party. And the dollars brought in by European, Canadian, and Latin American tourism may be fueling a growing black market whose full economic extent--even to the point of financing illegal small businesses--is still unclear.
Food and Medicine
Perhaps the most newsworthy consequence of the Pope's visit from the point of view of the United States has been the introduction of a bill in Congress cosponsored by Representative Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) This legislation would lift the existing embargo on the sale of food and medicine to Cuba. It exploits a widespread misconception about U.S. policy; namely, the United States forbids the sale of medicine to the island. This is not the case. Rather, the sale of pharmaceuticals to Cuba is subject to certain restrictions regarding ultimate use. The State Department will readily license the transfer of such drugs to a credible third party willing to monitor their end use--say, the Roman Catholic Church, the Pan American Health Organization, or a diplomat from a friendly country.
The purpose of this restriction is to prevent Castro from reexporting the drugs to gain dollars for other purposes; from using them in the mistreatment of political prisoners, particularly in psychiatric hospitals; and from diverting medicines from the United States into dollar-only stores or from using them for the benefit of foreigners who come to Cuba for medical treatment (a new source of dollar earnings). All that Dodd-Torres would do would be to relieve Castro of these inconveniences.
The case against food sales is a bit more complicated. At first glance, it is difficult to see why the United States maintains such an embargo at all: Cuba is in no position to buy anything. But thanks to existing programs that subsidize the export of American agricultural products, any country, regardless of its creditworthiness or lack of it, can run up an enormous debt at the expense of the American taxpayer. The best way to deal with this problem is to lift the embargo on food sales but render Cuba ineligible for such export credits until it satisfies certain minimal conditions of political liberalization.
At the same time, the United States could show its humanitarian concern for the Cuban people by making available U.S. food assistance under Title II of P.L. 480 (Food for Peace), with appropriate conditions to ensure that the aid is distributed directly to the Cuban people, possibly through the Catholic Church or through non-governmental organizations such as Caritas. This plan has the double advantage of helping those in Cuba who most need help and of strengthening nongovernmental organizations on the island, such as the Catholic Church.
The principal weakness of U.S. policy toward Cuba is the widespread notion that it is based on a desire for vengeance and is intended to punish ordinary people there. This is clearly not the case. But until our legislation becomes a bit more creative and our public diplomacy more assertive, Castro's friends here and abroad will occupy a moral high ground that they have not earned and do not deserve.
Notes
- I am summarizing here a conversation I had three years ago with a Canadian businessman. I subsequently discussed it with Richard Nuccio, who was then President Clinton's chief advisor on Cuban policy. Mr. Nuccio told me that he had met with the Cuban minister of public health some time earlier and had asked him for a list of life-saving pharmaceuticals manufactured only in the United States and/or unavailable from U.S. subsidiaries overseas, with a promise to expedite their sale. The same applies for spare parts for life-saving machinery such as that used for kidney dialysis. "Many months have passed," he remarked, "and I'm still waiting for that list."
- Another example is the totally misleading report published in the Washington Post on February 23, 1998, which places virtually the entire responsibility for the collapse of the Cuban health care system on the United States.
Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
