Is It Time to Lift the Cuban Embargo?

By J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

In the 1960s Washington hated Fidel Castro so much that the CIA fabricated seashells to explode when he was scuba-diving and a powder that would make his beard fall out. He and his beard survived all those barbs. Today the loathing has softened, but its spirit still animates America's punishing economic embargo against Cuba, now 32 years old. Virtually all commerce with the island is banned. Ships that trade with Cuba cannot visit American ports for six months. Most Americans are at least technically subject to prosecution for visiting there. Even the U.N. sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq permit it to buy food and medicine for humanitarian reasons; to get U.S. food and medicine to Castro's Cuba, someone has to donate it.

Does this make sense anymore? Except for flooding Florida with boat people, Cuba poses no threat to U.S. national security. It no longer has a nuclear- armed patron in Moscow buying anti-Yanqui mischief with $6 in billion annual aid. The whole world has passed by Fidel's moth-eaten socialism.

The Administration argues that isolating Castro is the best way to make him democratize, adopt market reforms and compensate Americans for property seized during the revolution. Other countries trade freely with Havana and have long , since struck compensation deals for their own seized assets. But with Cuba's economy in sugar shock -- the yields in cane fields have slumped to levels not seen since the 1920s -- the embargo's boosters hope it will break Castro's back. "Ending the embargo is his No. 1 foreign policy priority," says a U.S. official. And what Castro wants, Washington opposes.

But that logic ignores what the U.S. has learned about helping communist countries feel their way toward freedom -- and the booming American trade with other Marxist regimes. Washington is moving toward full trade and diplomatic ties with Vietnam, whose human-rights record is no better than Cuba's. It is holding extensive talks with North Korea, the worst troglodyte of all Stalinist regimes. And when Bill Clinton extended most-favored-nation tariff treatment to Beijing last May, he argued that "the best path for advancing freedom in China is for the United States to intensify and broaden its engagement with that nation." Why shouldn't he treat Cuba the same way? "I think the circumstances are different" is the best explanation he could manage last week.

The biggest difference is the strength of the conservative and wealthy Cuba lobby, which Clinton has courted since the campaign. Its leaders got Clinton to ratchet sanctions tighter as the price of accepting his new policy on boat people.

Most experts argue that the embargo allows Castro to blame the U.S. for his failures and should be modified or dropped. "The trade embargo," contends Harvard professor Jorge Dominguez, "should be seen as a tool, not an altar in front of which we kneel." But for now, Clinton shows no sign of standing up.