A goodbye kiss to the blockade

By
Manuel E. Yepe                                                                Read Spanish Version 

“The
embargo on Cuba has been in place for almost 50 years. Although it
may have been an appropriate policy response to the Cuban Revolution
in the milieu of the Cold War, the reality of the 21st century calls
for its abolishment.”

That assertion is made in an article
by Colonel Glenn Alex Crowther entitled “Kiss the Embargo Goodbye,”
published in the [February 2009] monthly newsletter of the Strategic
Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College, a branch of the
U.S. government’s Defense Department.

“It is time to kiss
the embargo goodbye, while maintaining an unyielding stance that
democracy is the only acceptable form of government in the Western
Hemisphere,” the article states, thereby reasserting a supposed
U.S. right, recognized by no one else, to determine what form of
government its neighbors should have.

According to Colonel
Crowther’s interpretation of the history of Cuba: “On January 1,
1959, in the wake of several notable victories by insurgents, the
dictator Batista fled Cuba for exile. His government, isolated from
both the Cuban people and the U.S. Government because of its
repressive policies, collapsed. Fidel arrived in Havana on January 9,
1959. He and his comrades took power in the face of a total
government vacuum.”

Crowther states that “the United
States initially responded in a conciliatory manner; however, mutual
antipathy prevented rapprochement. The United States responded with
support for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Cuba then allowed the
Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. Fidel also initiated
a policy of exporting revolution to the rest of the Western
Hemisphere and a few countries in Africa. His Argentine lieutenant,
Ernest ‘Che’ Guevara, promised ‘one, two, one hundred [sic]
Vietnams.’”

Later, according to Crowther, the triumph of
the Sandinistas against the dictator Somoza was the only confirmation
of the Cuban theory of a guerrilla focus, which, nonetheless, failed
in Nicaragua because the U.S. intervened to defeat the
revolutionaries, and it continued to intervene throughout Latin
America against all “fidelista-inspired revolutions.”

In
this context, “it was not surprising that the United States sought
to punish the Cuban regime. Among other responses, the United States
declared a commercial, economic and financial embargo on Cuba on
February 7, 1962.” The immediate justification “was the
expropriation of properties owned by U.S. corporations and citizens;
however the long-term goal was to destabilize Cuba and hopefully
cause regime change.”

The author asserts that because of the
support that the Soviet Union gave to Cuba, the blockade could not
overthrow the revolution, but it did succeed in doing great damage to
the Cubans and preventing them from providing “even more support to
world-wide revolutions.” During the Cold War, one of the tactics
used by the United States to wear down the USSR was to force it to
provide aid to Cuba, and that motive for the embargo has lessened
with the end of the Cold War.

In Crowther’s opinion, “the
only reasons for supporting the embargo” are: (1) to force Cuba to
reform and (2) to accede to the demands of the Cuban community in
Miami. They were the ones who argued in favor of the 1992 Torricelli
Law (the Cuban Democracy Act) and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act (Cuban
Liberty and Democracy Solidarity Act), aimed at bolstering the
blockade.

The first reason, the need to keep up the pressure
to force Cuba to reform, has “manifestly failed,” writes
Crowther. “Not only did the embargo fail,” the article states,
“but it is not in step with our policy towards other communist
regimes who were our opponents during the Cold War,” citing the
examples of China, Vietnam, and the Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea.

The second reason, the desire of Miami Cubans to
maintain the embargo, “has slowly gone the way of the Cold War,”
Crowther writes, and notes that the positions of the Cuban diaspora
regarding ties with their country of origin have become more
variegated.

He adds — as if it was a great discovery — that
the blockade increases the Cuban people’s mobilization against U.S.
intervention in their internal affairs, although he justifies this
with the old lies that portray the Cuban defensive actions as the
“tyranny” of “the Castro regime.”

Lifting the
blockade, he states, would project the U.S. before the international
community as “magnanimous and inclusive. Maintaining it makes us
look petty and vindictive to the rest of the world.”

The
article’s author, a Research Professor of National Security Studies
at the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, argues that “we
cannot convince anyone that Cuba is a threat to the United States,
nor can we make the case internationally that more of the same will
have a positive impact. Lifting the blockade would signal that we are
ready to try something different” to achieve change.

Crowther
assumes that as soon as the blockade is lifted the market for U.S.
goods and services will open up, and he dreams of a bourgeoisified
and consumerist society that will covet U.S. appliances and gadgets
— as happened “in Iraq in 2003.”

It is outrageous that
there are those who call for lifting the blockade, not because for a
half century it has been an unjustifiable crime committed against the
Cuban people, but rather because it has been ineffective in achieving
the foul aims that gave rise to it.

Manuel
E. Yepe Menéndez is a lawyer, an economist and a journalist. He
works as a professor at the Higher Institute for Foreign Relations in
Havana.

A
CubaNews translation by Will Reissner
Edited by Walter Lippmann.