Editor’s note: For another view on this topic see Counterpoint: In Cuba, Trump Pursues the Right Goals the Wrong Way.
The Trump administration announced last week that it will tighten a range of sanctions against Cuba to punish its communist rulers for human rights abuses and its support for other repressive regimes in Latin America. Cuba suffers under one of the world’s worst governments, but the administration’s action will only compound the failures of past U.S. policy.
In a speech commemorating the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the president’s security advisor John Bolton said the administration would allow U.S. citizens to sue foreign entities or people who are “trafficking” in property expropriated from U.S. citizens after the Castro regime seized power in 1959. The administration will also curb the freedom of Americans to travel to Cuba or to send remittances there.
The Cuban government is no friend of liberty or the United States. It systematically abuses human rights and suppresses dissent. Its brand of socialism has wrecked what was once one of Latin America’s more dynamic economies, resulting in shortages of food, electricity and other staples. Its security agents have propped up other failing regimes in the region, including Venezuela.
The United States has maintained an almost total trade, investment and travel embargo against Cuba since the early 1960s. The embargo has failed to change the nature of the Cuban regime or to blunt its ability to sow repression abroad. In fact, the embargo has arguably strengthened the hand of the government by giving the Castro brothers an excuse over the years for the homegrown failures of communism.
Meanwhile the embargo has made Cubans even poorer while cutting them off from normal contact with Americans. Travel restrictions imposed earlier by the Trump administration have resulted in fewer Americans patronizing the privately run guesthouses and restaurants in Cuba, where U.S. dollars were more likely to go directly to ordinary Cubans. Instead, the administration’s restrictions have steered U.S. visitors to cruise ships, where onshore facilities in Cuban tend to be dominated by the government.
Back at home, U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba have restricted the freedom of Americans to travel where they want and to sell their goods in foreign markets. Since 2000, Congress has allowed limited sales of U.S. farm goods and medical supplies to Cuba, but the island could be an even larger market for U.S. exporters.
Our embargo against Cuba is disproportional and inconsistent. Russia and China pose more of a strategic challenge to the United States than Cuba, yet Americans are much freer to travel to, trade with, and invest in either of those countries. And we have normal trade and diplomatic relations with Vietnam, a communist state that we fought a hot war with less than 50 years ago.
The Trump administration’s move to allow Americans to sue over the use of confiscated property is an effort to right real injustices inflicted by the Castro regime. Based on the Helms-Burton Act from the 1990s, the administration action would target foreign entities that are currently making use of property wrongfully taken from Americans. While the injustice is real, the law is legally flawed because it allows U.S. courts to rule on actions by parties who were not U.S. citizens and were not in the United States when the alleged offense took place. The law perversely punishes, not the Castro regime itself, but our commercial allies such as Canada and the European Union.
The Obama administration sought to modify Cuba’s behavior by easing the embargo and re-establishing diplomatic ties with the Cuban regime. President Obama even schmoozed with Raul Castro at a baseball game during a trip to Cuba in March 2016. Relaxing the embargo and opening the embassy were positive steps, but the direct contact with Cuba’s communist leaders did nothing to encourage any fundamental change in the regime.
The right approach toward Cuba would be to keep its government at arm’s length but not its people. The U.S. government should let Americans trade with Cuba and travel there freely, just as they can almost everywhere else in the world, while maintaining more direct pressure on its government to respect the rights of its citizens and those in other nations struggling for their own freedom.
