The Castro obsession outlives Fidel

The rout of U.S.-backed forces in Afghanistan sends a clear message that the Cuban exiles who dream of regime change in Cuba via U.S. intervention never understood, that democracy cannot be exported or imposed at the point of a gun.

Three or four generations of Cuban Americans, those who have been loyal to the mindset of their parents and grandparents, have been agitating in the streets of Miami and Washington for what has been the default hope of anti-government U.S. exiles since 1959: U.S. military intervention.

The closest they got to their wish was the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, a CIA operation carried out by exile proxies. That failed adventure is known in the U.S. foreign policy establishment as “the perfect disaster.”

After that experience and the debacles in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, why would anyone in their right mind think the U.S. government would even consider another experiment in creating American-style democracy in a foreign land? Messianic missions lead in the end to mad dashes to the exits.

Asphyxiating the Cuban economy, which is the policy of the United States since Trump to this day, hurts the Cuban people.  The people on the island work, live, and subsist in that economy, not some other. It is a cruel policy that has been in place since the Kennedy administration and has accomplished nothing except further impoverish the people of Cuba. It has also earned the United States the virtually unanimous condemnation of the entire world expressed annually in UN votes when only Israel votes with the United States.

The only exception to this interminable hostile policy was the second Obama administration which began a process of opening toward Cuba, established diplomatic relations, liberalized travel, and offered a ray of hope for a better future for Cuba-U.S. relations and for the Cuban people. Trump, who delighted in undoing anything good Obama did, reestablished a hostile policy, even doubling down on the restrictions that had existed before Obama. Biden, which has reversed much of Trump’s nefarious policies, maintained Trump’s Cuba policy with an eye out to Florida politics, and added some (relatively insignificant sanctions) against Cuban officials in response to the clamor of exiles in the United States.

Here is a cautionary tale. The only other country that has suffered such a long economic war has been Haiti in the nineteenth century after their revolution, and it is one of the main reasons Haiti today is the definition of a failed state.

The reasons for these embargoes are similar. The Haitian revolution shook the dominant states of the nineteenth century which profited immensely from and depended on slavery to propel the Industrial Revolution, especially the British textile industry which imported massive quantities of cotton grown by slaves in the U.S. South. If the example of Haiti spread, the economic interests of the great powers would be hurt. They retaliated with a decades-long economic blockade that added to the country’s domestic woes of poor governance and economic disruption. The Cuban Revolution threatened U.S. dominance of the hemisphere, and retaliation was hard, swift, and longstanding. It added to the inherent problems of a state-centric economy in an underdeveloped country.

Supporters of the embargo use a fallacious binary argument. It is not the embargo that hurts the Cuban economy and thereby the people but the Cuban government itself. That’s a convenient argument if you have infinite tolerance for other people’s pain. The reality is that the embargo acts more as a comorbidity. People with underlying medical conditions like heart or kidney disease get sicker if they catch Covid-19. Inefficiencies inherent to the Cuban economic model are augmented by the embargo. Together they are a double whammy increasing the hardships faced by the population.

Democracy will not come to Cuba via Washington or Miami. Given this, to the fans of the embargo, I would ask how long do you want to press your knee on the neck of the Cuban people and for what? Out of spite?

It’s time for Cubans in the United States and other places of the diaspora to challenge the mainstream exile narrative as many others have done for decades, sometimes at great cost. Love for Cuba, for the Cuban people, for the sovereignty of the nation, is more important and noble than an obsessive hatred for the Cuban government and communism. We need to push Biden to return to the Obama policy rather than slavishly listen to the opportunistic Florida politicos like DeSantis, Rubio, Salazar and company.

When the United States preaches democracy for Cuba, and allows demonstrations proceed without government repression, it needs to look in the mirror. While Republican backers in a homicidal mood storm the Capitol and invent new schemes to deny Black and brown people democratic participation, the United States is in no position to give democracy lessons to anyone.

The repression of Black Lives demonstrators was more forceful than anything that happened in Cuba recently. Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida passed a new law targeted at Black Lives Matter that would impose jail and heavy fines for demonstrating on public roads. Yet when Cuban exiles took over state and federal highways, he looked the other way. Finally, I am confident that if we had comparable data, in any year more civilians are killed by police in the United States than in Cuba since the revolution.

To the United States, abandon what Miami Herald journalists Michael L. Krenn and Don Bohning called ‘The Castro Obsession.’  Fidel is no longer around but the obsession continues. Drop it. It has accomplished nothing except a vicious circle of hostility and more hostility, like the comic strip series ‘Spy versus Spy’ in Mad magazine.

Biden, learn from Obama, the man who saved your political career by embracing you as his vice president after you made what were construed as condescending, racially tinged comments about him. Ignore the Diaz-Balarts and the other bitter incorrigibles and assume the moral stature of a Nelson Mandela, who made peace with his enemies who imprisoned him for years on an island prison as well the rest of Black South African in the vast outdoor prison called apartheid.