December 3, 2000. Chicago
Tribune
Whoever moves into the White House in January will be the 10th president to
take office since Castro came to power, and the ninth since the United States
imposed an economic embargo against Cuba. During the 38 years that the embargo
has been in force, the Cold War has ended, the U.S. has patched up relations
with Vietnam and North Korea and even made diplomatic overtures to its former
arch-enemies in Iran and Libya.
Nearly every other country in the world has re-established economic and
political relations with Cuba.
It's tough to say what is more astonishing: Castro's long hold on power or
the American insistence on a policy of economic strangulation that doesn't work.
Not only has the embargo failed miserably, but it endures in a political
vacuum. Last Wednesday, a panel of the Council on Foreign Relations recommended
easing the embargo to facilitate a peaceful political transition on the island.
The panel is the latest addition to a long list of business and farm groups,
academics and government leaders, including Gov. George Ryan, who have spoken in
favor of easing the embargo or eliminating it altogether.
Privately, some State Department officials will admit that the embargo
against Cuba is really a domestic policy, to win the support of the fiercely
anti-Castro Cuban-American communities in Florida--or at least not incur their
wrath at election time. During the Elian Gonzalez debacle earlier this year, Al
Gore and George W. Bush put on a show of bipartisan pandering to hard-line
Cuban-Americans, and argued against sending the hapless kid home with his dad.
Rank-and-file Americans disagreed. A national backlash against the hard-line
Cubans following the Elian fiasco was credited with easing through Congress the
first attempt to soften the embargo against Cuba.
Ultimately, the move was more symbol than substance. The U.S. eased the ban
against the sale of food and medicines, but prohibited American financing of any
trade transactions. Thus the net impact is expected to be minimal.
If leaders in the next Congress can't get past their loathing of Castro,
they should try recognizing the dollars-and-cents sense of ending a policy that
is nothing but a relic from the Cold War. | 