If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes

It is the essence of identity and special interest politics that those who identify with a cause or make it the critical issue of their political support depend upon the comparative indifference of others for their success. It is not always, however, just another example of concentrated and visible benefits to a special interest at the diffused and thus largely invisible cost of the general population. Sometimes it also occurs that the benefits accrue not only to the special interest activists but to their putative enemies, as well.

Thus, America’s drug warriors serve to keep urban crime rates high and the international drug cartels in business. Similarly, the American Cuban population, despite their protestations to the contrary, have helped keep the Castro regime in power and the Cuban population poor by their continued insistence on keeping the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba in place. Ironically, they may well have been the most effective though unintentional supporters of Castro’s continued reign in post-Soviet Cuba.

Journalist Bella Thomas writes in (U.K.) Prospect Magazine that Castro’s continued political survival after the end of financial support from the Soviet Union owes primarily to the same fierce patriotic nationalism among Cuba’s remaining population that is also the driving force behind its U.S. expatriate community. Castro, she contends,

… was always a nationalist in communist clothing, and, throughout the 1990s, the communist references in his speeches were gradually replaced by nationalist ones.

The continuing hostilities with the US have played into Castro's hands. It was as an embattled nationalist leader of a small island, standing up to an aggressive, neighbouring superpower, that Castro preserved his revolutionary credentials most effectively. The shortcomings of life under his regime were, he argued, attributable mainly to the US embargo. Many swallowed the argument. He knew, too, how to capitalise on the latent anti-Americanism in Latin America, Europe and Canada to give his struggle more universal appeal.

In fact, the regime seems to act with zeal to ensure that the embargo continues. When it looks as if the US government might consider ending it, some heavy-handed Cuban act ensues that the status quo prevails. In 1996, when Clinton was keen to initiate rapprochement, the regime shot down two US planes manned by members of a Cuban exile group rescuing those escaping the island on rafts. When, in 2003, an influential cross-party lobby in the US seemed set to dismantle the embargo, the Cuban government promptly incarcerated 75 prisoners of conscience and executed three men who hijacked a tugboat with a view to getting to Miami.

Thomas doesn’t contend that the embargo is the only factor in play, and neither do I. It is, however, the single most effective psychological factor (Cuba does have, after all, most of the rest of the world to trade with) and the factor, sadly enough, most likely to ensure continued hostility between Cuba and the U.S. once Castro finally joins his communist comrades in the literal ash heap of history. Thomas again:

In their call for the US to keep its "hands off Cuba," western supporters of the Cuban regime seem to miss the irony that this, unfortunately, is precisely what the US is doing. Were the US to relax its embargo, the result would be a tidal wave of US capital, which the regime would be unlikely to survive. Many Cubans would grow richer and more demanding, and would no longer accept playing second fiddle to the tourists.

That’s just about exactly right. Cuban-American pressure to maintain the embargo is antithetical to the U.S.’s long term interests regarding Cuba. If insanity is, as Einstein suggested, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, the most sane policy the U.S. could adopt now would be to let free trade do what its absence has failed utterly to accomplish; namely, serve the best interests of both the Cuban people and the American public at large.