United States foreign policy is central to the life of every Cuban, enforcing the dearth of essentials and luxuries, from medicine to cosmetics to automobiles. With the exception of Cuba, the United States is the single largest trading partner of every Latin American country. Clearly, hacking these ties would create an economic hemorrhage in any Latin American nation. The U.S. embargo against Cuba, only mentioned in this country between glimpses of unbuttoned trousers and political cockfights, lacerates the Cuban people every day.
Although clothed in the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, the trade embargo is fundamentally a tool of economic imperialism. When President Bill Clinton, LAW '73, said that "the overarching goal of American policy must be to promote a peaceful transition to democracy on the island [of Cuba]," he wasn't telling the full truth. Clearly, Cuban-style democracy wouldn't qualify as "free" by most definitions. Yet other nations with far worse human-rights records, including Guatemala, China, Chile, and Indonesia, have received U.S. economic and political support despite their atrocities. Hiding behind the rhetoric of liberty in dealing with Cuba is supremely hypocritical. The real motive behind U.S.-Cuban policy is economic imperialism, not democracy.
American involvement with Cuba dates back to the Spanish-American War, when the United States forced Cuba to add an amendment to its constitution allowing the U.S. to intervene in Cuba's internal affairs. Political imperialism gradually gave way to economic imperialism. By the eve of the Cuban revolution, foreign corporations, with the complicity of Fulgencio Batista's repressive regime, owned the vast majority of Cuban assets. Consequently, the U.S. lent covert military support to dictator Batista from 1957 to 1959 by sending weapons and intelligence to fight Castro's rebel army. Even after the revolutionaries came to power in 1959, the CIA continued to sponsor a counter-revolutionary army within Cuba.
It's no wonder that in 1960, when the revolutionaries nationalized Cuba's extensive wealth, they failed to compensate U.S. companies, while corporations from nations that hadn't fought against the rebels were adequately paid. This seizure of property was the primary reason for the Cuban embargo. As Michael Ranneberger, the State Department's Coordinator for Cuban Affairs, said,"One of the major reasons for the imposition of the embargo was the Cuban Government's failure to compensate thousands of U.S. companies and individuals." In other words, the embargo is the vestige of an imperialistic policy, dating from 1901, which has been characterized by U.S.-backed dictators and the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Now that the "democracy defense" of the Cuban embargo has been exposed as a farce, what is left to defenders of the status quo policy? Cuba remains a communist nation, defying free trade laws, the trend toward global capitalism, and the U.S. corporate appetite for profit. One could say, in the rhetoric of the Cold War, that the U.S. is simply standing strong against the communist menace 90 miles from our shore. Yet it seems evident that the small island off the shore of Florida poses no security threat to the United States. More importantly, communism has been good to the Cuban people.
The infant mortality rate in Cuba is one of the lowest in the world (12 per 1,000 live births). Life expectancy in Cuba far exceeds that in the rest of Latin America (73.5 years as opposed to, for example, 64.3 years in Ecuador). The illiteracy rate has declined from 25 percent of the population before the revolution (mid-'50s) to 4 percent in the mid-'90s. It's important to note that all this was achieved without the support of the U.S., the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund. Perhaps Soviet support until 1989 compensated for the lack of global financial involvement—but it's doubtful. More importantly, Cuban farm workers now have access to potable water, decent housing, education, and health care at a rate almost unparalleled in the rest of Latin America. Before the revolution, Cuba had a higher GNP, but it was concentrated in the hands of the very rich. Today the wealth of Cuba benefits every Cuban.
Cuba is not an island paradise. Although the Cuban people have, on the whole, benefited from communism, the system is currently close to collapse. This is due primarily to the loss of its largest trading partner, the USSR, as well as to inherent economic inefficiencies. The lack of a free democracy in Cuba also remains an important issue—it's impossible to support a system that denies full freedom to its citizenry.
So what stance should the U.S. take toward Cuba? If we are truly interested in freedom, democracy, and prosperity, we must consider the best interests of the Cuban people. In order to regain prosperity and establish democracy, Cuba must make the transition from a state-planned economy under Castro to a market economy under a democratic government. This cannot happen as long as Castro and communism are synonymous with anti-imperialism—and they will remain synonymous as long as the embargo is in place. Cuba will need the help of economists in order to find a non-capitalist alternative to communism. While laissez-faire capitalism would wipe out all the gains achieved under communism, a non-capitalist market economy could create prosperity without poverty. It's time to eschew the hackneyed rhetoric extolling the virtues of capitalism, admit that communism has been far more beneficial to the majority of Cubans than rampant capitalism was before the revolution, and lift the Cuban embargo
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