Change We Can Believe In

When the Cuban embargo was imposed, Barack Obama was not yet alive. It was 1960, four years before the British Invasion and with the construction of Mather House still 11 years off. Today, of course, Mr. Obama sits in the Oval Office, the Beatles have ascended into music history, and Mather has successfully taken its place on the beautiful neo-Georgian skyline of Cambridge—and yet we are still saddled with the Cuban embargo.

It should be clear that the embargo has failed. When it was imposed, there were hopes that economic sanctions might persuade the new revolutionary government to pursue democracy and capitalism. It is clear now that this was a pipe dream. Fidel Castro today is sickly and ill, but Cuba is no closer to democracy than when he was a charismatic young revolutionary. Indeed, his regime benefits from anti-American domestic sentiment that bolsters its popularity and distracts from the nation’s economic woes. Any national security rationale for American policy toward Cuba has evaporated. Despite its inclusion on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, in reality the only threat to America posed by the Castro regime is the ill will generated by the embargo elsewhere in Latin America.

If liberal, free market democracy is the goal, then President Obama’s new direction on Cuba is long overdue. American policy has long since discovered that the answer to undemocratic but unthreatening regimes in our post-Cold War world is engagement, dialogue, and trade, not sanctions, isolation, and hostility. The world’s largest communist country is one of our largest trading partners. The world’s largest absolute monarchy is a major oil supplier. Just as Levi jeans and Coca-Cola helped bring down the Berlin Wall, iPhones and Starbucks lattes might help bring about change in Cuba.

It is certainly the case that Cuba’s human rights record is decidedly mixed. So too, however, are the human rights records of China, Saudi Arabia, and countless other nations, and yet we maintain economic and political relationships with them. Of course, Cuba's geopolitical significance might be less than the aforementioned countries, but the principle remains identical. We should continue to press for democracy worldwide, and President Obama has made clear that the United States will do so in Cuba, but that should not be an obstacle to normalized relations.

The Cold War is now for the history books, and policies of containment should follow. There are no dominos falling to communism across the Caribbean, and describing Cuba today, like the State Department does, as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” alongside nations like Syria does not seem credible. One is murdering its citizens with sarin gas; the other is trying to keep 1950s Cadillacs running. As the President continues to press the Castro regime on its human rights abuses, we commend him for his courage in reshaping the relationship with Cuba. 55 years on, it is the right thing to do.