Isn’t it past time to end 46-year Cuba embargo?
Published 5:29 pm Monday, March 3, 2008
By Staff
When you consider the relationships the United States enjoys with regimes from Saudi Arabia to China, how do we justify maintaining the 46-year trade embargo on Cuba?
Fidel Castro, 81, the strongman since the 1959 coup by his guerrilla army, is fading from the scene, his place taken by younger and somewhat more pragmatic brother Raul, 76.
This historic transition would seem to offer an opening to try something new.
Yet even though the embargo has probably had more effect on elections in Florida than on booting a repressive regime out of Havana, the Bush administration wasted no time in refusing any reconsideration.
If Washington clings steadfastly to the embargo, it risks alienating yet another generation of Cubans and pushing the Cuban government farther into the embrace of Venezuela, or even China.
The Soviet Union served as Cuba's economic benefactor until it collapsed in 1991.
In 1960, Cuba nationalized U.S. businesses, followed by the Bay of Pigs invasion and a break in diplomatic relations in 1961 and the embargo and Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
The U.S. made the trade embargo permanent in 1996.
Letting Americans travel freely to Cuba would encourage free speech that would undermine hard-liners.
Even 55 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami favor unrestricted travel, according to a survey Florida International University conducted last year.
President Bush has company in opposing any easing of travel restrictions. John McCain. And Hillary Clinton.
Conversely, Barack Obama said in the Miami Herald that, if elected President, "I will grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island."
Obama says a "democratic opening in Cuba is, and should be, the foremost objective of our policy … Cuban American connections to family in Cuba are not only a basic right in humanitarian terms, but also our best tool for helping to foster the beginnings of grassroots democracy on the island."
Ending the embargo and opening the door to Cubans winning the right to travel, trade, invest and own a business could pay dividends to a leader bold enough to forge a new path after 46 years.