What to do with Castro's Cuba

On New Year’s Day 1959, Fidel Castro’s revolution established a socialist state in Cuba. In 1960, the United States under President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a trade embargo against the island nation and President John F. Kennedy broke off diplomatic relations the following year. More than five decades later, President Barack Obama has initiated a normalization of relations, explaining, “We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.”

That blithe dismissal of the last 54 years of containment policy toward Cuba contains more rhetoric than reason. For the first 30 of those years, the Soviet Union supported Cuba with billions of dollars in annual subsidies until it collapsed in 1991. Ten years later, Venezuela’s new Marxist leadership, floating on a national oil fortune, stepped in to save their communist ally.

But Cuba’s Caracas sugar daddy is going bust for the same reason that Cuba needs Venezuela’s support: the wealth-destroying capacities of a state-run economy. Caracas’ problem is not falling oil prices. The price per barrel is now higher than it was in 2000 when Hugo Chavez took power and started gifting oil to the Castro brothers. Even toilet paper has come into short supply through the miracle of socialist economic engineering.

So Cuba is not poor because of the U.S. trade embargo. The country is free to trade with everyone else on earth. Cuba is poor, and its people suffer for it, because their government restricts their wealth-creating liberties. With the Cuban revolution stripped of its foreign underwriters, now is arguably when the embargo is most likely to bring “a different result”—the Castros coming to their political senses.

But there was no sign of liberalization in 1991 when the Russian subsidies ended, even when Cuba’s gross domestic product fell by almost 50 percent over four years. Chavez didn’t come to the rescue for almost a decade. Given the history of Castro’s government imprisoning and killing tens of thousands of its people, friendless Cuba is less likely to go the pseudo-capitalist China route than it is to mimic North Korea: securely dominating a starving, helpless population.

The best argument for a new Cuba policy centers on the benefits of engagement. In The First Circle, Soviet literary dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed, “You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.” The context was different, of course, but the principle is the same. If we have no relations with Cuba, no diplomatic exchange, no trade, no cultural traffic, then we have nothing to withhold and no leverage. Even if most of the benefits go to the party apparatchiks, that would still be a benefit we could withdraw under a tougher administration in Washington.

But whether or not it is best for national security, regional stability, and Cuban liberty to continue the present policy of isolation is a democratic debate that should precede coordinated action from both ends of Pennsylvania Ave., not follow a sudden executive announcement.