Time to Retire America's Failed Cuba Policy by Sarah Stephens

[Demeter]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-stephens/time-to-retire-americas-_b_87344.html


This is the event that fifty years of U.S. policy was designed to stop. Fidel Castro has announced his retirement. He will be replaced in a peaceful succession, without the violent upheaval that U.S. policy makers have been predicting since the 1960s. Now that Fidel Castro has announced his retirement, it's time to retire our Cold War era Cuba policy. It failed. Every U.S. president since Eisenhower has tried to kill or topple Fidel Castro and replace Cuba's government and economic system with something more to our liking. They never succeeded. It was the express purpose of the U.S. embargo, with sanctions more comprehensive than any we impose on Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria to stop this transition. But it couldn't.

For years, the U.S. embargo has been rebuked in lop-sided votes in the U.N. General Assembly. On October 30, 2007, when we were last drubbed by a margin of 184 to 4 (and one abstention), not a single country in South America, Central America or the Caribbean supported our policy. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, three countries praised by President Bush one week earlier for their support of U.S. policy against Cuba, joined the condemnation -- so did Afghanistan, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, a nation whose democracy was born with the help of U.S. sanctions...
As the Cuba embargo sullies our image around the world, it undermines the national interest and our highest values here at home. The embargo sacrifices the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens to travel. It cruelly divides Cuban families on both sides of the Florida straits. Trade sanctions cost U.S. businesses about $1 billion annually, and deny U.S. citizens access to vaccines and other medical treatments. Enforcing the embargo drains resources from the war on terror. By isolating the American people from the Cuban people, we stop our citizens from doing what Americans do best; we can't offer Cubans our support or our ideas, and we're unable to benefit from what they could offer us.


Cubans by their nature have vastly divergent opinions, except on one fundamental point: it is Cubans living on the island -- not politicians in Washington, not their kinsmen in Miami -- who must decide for themselves what happens next in Cuba. They cherish their sovereignty, they reject violence and instability, and they want the United States to respect those values as much as they do, especially now that they can see a future past President Fidel Castro and beyond the 50th year of their revolution...Now would be a perfect time to send the long overdue signal that the United States is no threat to Cuba's national security, that we honor the aspirations of average Cubans, and that we are capable of having a constructive relationship with their government.

[tomreedtoon]

1. But what will we do without the Cuban emigree vote?

There is an army of Cubans...well, there's a lot of Cubans...well, there's a good sized number of old men sitting around in cafes in Little Havana...who are always talking about how they'll be gods when Castro falls. They can't wait to reverse fifty years of their island's life, and become plantation owners and night club owners, again, operating as the local assistants to the Mafia in running whorehouses and cigar factories with slave labor.

If we change our Cuban policy, we'll lose that massive Cuban vote in Miami of...oh, I dunno, six or seven hundred votes. That would devastate the Democratic Party. We need those anti-democratic Democratic voters on our side.

Sorry, I'm not rich enough to afford one of those blood-dripping sarcasm icons.

[Demeter]

2. They Shall Go the Way of All Flesh

Their children and grandchildren are American, and glad of it. The torch will not pass. This 50 year folly must end, along with the newer, more recent follies that BFEE has foisted upon the landscape.