Cuba, and the Multi-Decade Failure of Economic Sanctions
A number of U.S. diplomats have recently fallen ill at the U.S. embassy in Havana. The speculation that the illnesses were somehow the result of a targeted attack engineered by the Cuban regime has ignited a decades-old debate about the small island nation. Lawmakers like Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) say that this shows we need a tougher stance towards Cuba until their authoritarian rulers change their ways.
Rubio's stance raises a basic question: How many more decades does the U.S.'s policy of economic isolation have to fail to produce results in Cuba until someone suggests something different?
The embargo, which prohibits almost all Cuban-American exchange, has been in place for well over fifty years. Since that time, Cuba has not seen the error of its ways and adopted democracy, capitalism, or both. The Cuban people have not risen up against their government and demanded better living conditions. Sanctions on Cuba haven't much sapped the legitimacy of the communist government. Why not? One reason is that the U.S. has made itself a justifiable scapegoat.
One theory behind the embargo has been that as economic conditions worsened, the regime would make concessions, both economically and democratically, to soften the economic blow of isolation from the U.S. Instead, Cuba's leaders can just point to the richest country in the world, just 90 miles away, and assign blame. That such finger-pointing is economically bankrupt (other people in other countries could easily trade with the Cubans if the people had any wealth to exchange) almost misses the point. The needless sanctions have gifted the Cuban leadership with a scapegoat that has been used to great effect over the years. False as the economics behind the blame-shifting are, Cuba's dictators have assigned fault to the U.S. when explaining the chronic shortages of food and supplies. The embargo has not weakened the regime, it has strengthened it.
The stunning hypocrisy of those who advocate for a tougher stance on Cuba should not be lost in the conversation either. Since when do politicians like Rubio, who claim to stand for free market capitalism, believe wholesale restrictions on the movement of goods and services will lead anyone in any nation to prosperity? Free marketeers should be championing investment in the expansion of the Cuban private sector, and promoting the virtues of a market economy.
Furthermore, what makes pro-democracy champions believe that a totalitarian regime would let any sanctions adversely impact them? As we have seen time and time again, across the world, dictators make living conditions worse for their people, so that they don’t have to deal with the consequences that come from sanctions. This means the Cuban embargo is compounding the misery imposed on the Cuban people by their government, and yet U.S. lawmakers, over fifty years later, still think it will one day make them sympathetic to our way of life.
All of this reveals a dark truth about the sanctions, and the practice of economic isolation as a political tool. Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn describes the approach to Cuba as “a medieval siege but with a modern PR apparatus attached to justify what is being done.” The key difference, Cockburn notes, is that these “sieges” are no longer targeted at single cities, but entire nations with dictatorial leaders who have no reason to be moved by the suffering of their citizens. We are intentionally making destitution more likely in hopes of making political change.
Cuba is not the only victim of this draconian tactic. For Iraq in the 1990s, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright claimed that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were an acceptable price to pay to try and delegitimize the Hussein regime. It didn’t, however, destabilize a regime that stayed in control for years, and until the U.S. government decided to overthrow it by force. We are also seeing the same in Syria. Our sanctions against the Assad regime are preventing the import of desperately-needed medical equipment to that country in the midst of its civil war.
Free market advocates recognize that intervention in the economy worsens life for those at the receiving end. Why can’t they recognize it when they are the perpetrators? Instead of using heavy-handed government tactics to create misery, and restricting the market, the so-called champions of limited government and the free market should practice what they preach. We should let the market be the engineer of social change, and end the embargo of goods and services going to nations like Cuba. While opening the U.S. up to Cuba won't alter the fact that Cuba's people presently don't have much to exchange with American producers, the possibility of trade with the world's most productive people would surely serve to reinforce their gradual adaptation of free markets.
Take China, for example. Both China and Cuba could be described decades ago as brutal Communist dictatorships. With China, however, the U.S. opened trade relations, and that decades-long relationship has created economic gains in both countries. China can now lay claim to being the top trading partner of the U.S. Additionally, China has made market-based reforms and is slowly liberalizing its economy. It is a long way away from being a full-fledged capitalist democracy, but it is certainly in a better place than Cuba.
Our lawmakers need to realize their own contradictions, and admit that the Cuba policy has failed. And they should learn from their mistakes in order to become better champions of the free market both at home and abroad. While a present lack of economic freedom in Cuba exists as a barrier to exchange between Americans and Cubans no matter what, it's crucial that the U.S. not in any way be seen as limiting the trade that always and everywhere improves those able to engage in it.
Being pro-market means being pro-market in all facets. Extolling the virtues of tight government control over exports and imports, even in the name of democracy promotion, is the opposite of this. Free marketeers need to be more confident that their ideology can work in practice abroad, and be more willing to put their money where their mouth is. The alternative has already resulted in death, suffering, and skepticism about our market-based economy. This decades-long, counterproductive campaign needs to end sooner rather than later.
