The insults and rhetoric coming out of Havana this month have sounded depressingly familiar: President Bush is “a common braggart” with a “stupid attitude,” and millions of Cubans would greet an American invasion--not that anybody’s talking about one--“with rifle in hand.”
The speaker was Castro--not the 80-year-old Fidel, but his 75-year-old brother Raul, who now appears to be leading the Cuban government while its longtime dictator recovers from intestinal surgery.
It’s hard to know what the immediate future holds for Cuba. Castro has been in power since he overthrew the Batista government 1959. He has outlasted nine American presidents, and although his rule must conclude at some point, he may yet recover from his current ailment and outlast a tenth.
At the very least, however, incapacitation or death can’t be far off. And even if Raul formally succeeds Fidel, it won’t be long before someone whose last name isn’t Castro leads Cuba.
The bottom line is that after decades of tense relations between the United States and Cuba, we’re finally entering a promising period of transition--and our goal in the weeks and months ahead should be to improve our ties to an island that has been an enemy for long enough. We ought to begin with a fundamental reassessment of our failed policy of economic isolation. Following decades of disappointment, it’s time for a new approach.
The U.S. embargo on Cuba may have served our interests during the Cold War, when Castro allowed his nation to become a client state of the Soviet Union. Today, however, it is a relic. The Soviets mounted the ash-heap of history some 15 years ago. There’s no Cuban Missile Crisis in the foreseeable future. Our global challenges are entirely different from what they were just a generation ago.
And yet we continue to act as if nothing has changed 90 miles south of Florida. In certain respects, nothing has changed: Cuba remains a totalitarian society that imprisons everyone from political dissidents who call for free markets to ordinary citizens who put up television antennae to watch American programming.
This lack of change, however, offers a compelling indictment of our own policy. The embargo’s main purpose, after all, has been to weaken the Castro regime economically and to help usher in democratic rule. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened. Just as protectionism doesn’t lead to prosperity at home, it doesn’t lead to liberty abroad.
As Cuba grapples with its coming transition, we should make clear that our quarrel isn’t with the Cuban people but rather with the leadership that they have had no say in choosing. Lifting the embargo even partially would send this message loudly and clearly. After all, Cuba’s inability to trade with the United States doesn’t hurt the Castro brothers--you can be sure that they have denied themselves nothing, even as most ordinary Cubans continue to live in poverty. Instead, the embargo hurts the common people, who have their consumer choices restricted and who do not benefit from any opportunity to sell goods to the world’s largest economy, even though it happens to be a next-door neighbor.
What’s more, free trade is a cornerstone of political freedom. President Bush has made this point again and again in speeches. “Democratic freedoms cannot flourish unless our hemisphere also builds a prosperity whose benefits are widely shared. And open trade is an essential foundation for that prosperity and that possibility,” he said a few years ago, in a speech to Latin American leaders. “Open trade reinforces the habits of liberty that sustain democracy over the long term.”
Those are wise words, and the White House would be wise to heed them. It has done this, in fact, in its successful pursuit of the Central American Free Trade Agreement and its successful or ongoing pursuit of free trade agreements with Chile, Peru, Ecuador and other South American countries. But for reasons that have almost entirely to do with domestic politics--i.e., a powerful lobby of Cuban-American organizations that view the embargo as absolutely necessary--it has refused to let these general principles apply to Cuba.
They surely do apply, and it’s time to think of creative ways to make them stick. In their absence, Cuba may not see democracy for an exceedingly long time--and we will have wasted a remarkable opportunity to change the island for the better.
Dean Kleckner is an Iowa farmer. Mr. Kleckner chairs Truth About Trade and Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org) and is past president of the American Farm Bureau.
News 
The insults and rhetoric coming out of Havana this month have sounded depressingly familiar: President Bush is “a common braggart” with a “stupid attitude,” and millions of Cubans would greet an American invasion--not that anybody’s talking about one--“with rifle in hand.”
