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NY Times, Jan. 24, 2019
The Embargo on Cuba Failed. Let’s Move On.
By Nicholas Kristof
HAVANA — It has been 60 years since Fidel Castro marched into Havana, so
it’s time for both Cuba and the United States to grow up. Let’s let Cuba
be a normal country again.
Cuba is neither the demonic tyranny conjured by some conservatives nor
the heroic worker paradise romanticized by some on the left. It’s simply
a tired little country, no threat to anyone, with impressive health care
and education but a repressive police state and a dysfunctional economy.
Driving in from the airport, I saw billboards denouncing the American
economic embargo as the “longest genocide in history.” That’s
ridiculous. But the embargo itself is also absurd and counterproductive,
accomplishing nothing but hurting the Cuban people — whom we supposedly
aim to help.
After six decades, can’t we move on? Let’s drop the embargo but continue
to push Havana on improving human rights, and on dropping support for
other oppressive regimes, like those in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Let’s make room for nuance: Cuba impoverishes its citizens and denies
them political rights, but it does a good job providing basic education
and keeping people healthy. As I noted in my last column, on Cuba’s
health care system, Cuba’s official infant mortality rate is lower than
America’s (its real rate may or may not be).
I’m not a Cuba expert, and I don’t know how this country will evolve.
But Cuba has a new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who is associated with
experiments in opening up the economy. Fidel is gone and his brother
Raúl is fading from the scene.
Raúl Castro, in uniform, center, and Miguel Díaz-Canel, fourth from
right, at a celebration this month for the anniversary of the Cuban
revolution.CreditYamil Lage/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the 1960s, we were scared of Cuba. We feared that neighboring
countries would tumble like dominoes into the Communist bloc, and the
Soviet Union attempted to place on Cuba nuclear missiles that could have
threatened America. But today even as those fears have dissipated, our
policy has ossified.
President Barack Obama took the necessary step of re-establishing
diplomatic relations and easing the embargo, but President Trump
reversed course and tightened things up again out of knee-jerk hostility
to anything Cuban and anything Obaman.
Cuba is changing, albeit too slowly. About one-third of its labor force
is now in the private sector, and this is just about the only part of
the economy that is thriving. I stayed in one of the growing number of
Airbnbs in Havana, and people were friendly, even if governments are
not: When I said I was from the United States, I inevitably got a big
grin and a reference to a cousin in Miami or New York or Cleveland.
Plus, extra credit goes to a country that so lovingly preserves old
American cars. I rode in from the airport in a pink 1954 Cadillac.
In another sign of flexibility, Cuba recently hammered out a deal with
Major League Baseball that will allow Cuban players to travel legally to
the U.S. and play on American teams.
Yet, sadly, the Trump administration is threatening the deal.
Consider the persistence of North Korea and Cuba, and there’s an
argument that sanctions and isolation preserve regimes rather than
topple them. China teaches us not to be naïve about economic engagement
toppling dictators, but on balance tourists and investors would be more
of a force for change than a seventh decade of embargo.
Moreover, trade, tourism, travel and investment empower a business
community and an independent middle class. These are tools to
destabilize a police state and help ordinary Cubans, but we curtail
them. America blames the Castros for impoverishing the Cuban people, but
we’ve participated in that impoverishment as well.
Cuba’s government is not benign. It’s a dictatorship whose economic
mismanagement has hurt its people, and Human Rights Watch says it
“routinely relies on arbitrary detention to harass and intimidate
critics.” But it doesn’t normally execute them (or dismember them in
consulates abroad like our pal Saudi Arabia), and it tolerates some
criticism from brave bloggers like Yoani Sánchez.
It is revising its Constitution, and my hope is that over time — despite
ideologues in both Havana and the United States — relations will
continue to develop. Some American seniors who now winter in Florida
could become snowbirds in Cuba instead, relying on its health care, low
prices, great beaches and cheap labor. You can hire a home health care
aide for a month in Havana for the cost of one for a day in Florida.
That would benefit both sides. For 60 years we’ve been feuding, like the
Hatfields and the McCoys, in a conflict whose origins most Americans
don’t even remember clearly.
So come on. We should all be bored by a lifetime of mutual
recriminations and antagonisms. Let’s put aside the ideology, end the
embargo, tone down the propaganda and raise a mojito together.
I propose a toast to a new beginning.
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