US Should End Six Decades of Ineffective Sanctions on Cuba

By Anwar A. Khan*

HAVANA TIMES – Decreed in February 1962 and still in place today, US sanctions against Cuba is one of the world’s longest-running boycotts by one country against another.

The embargo against Cuba prevents US businesses, and businesses organized under US law or majority-owned by US citizens, from conducting trade with Cuban interests.

The six-decade old trade ban…

Objective: Regime change

Executive order 3447 signed by John F Kennedy on February 3, 1962, proclaimed “an embargo upon all trade between the United States and Cuba,” citing the island nation’s “alignment with the communist powers.”

On the eve of the embargo’s entry into force on February 7, Kennedy ordered for himself a shipment of 1,200 Cuban cigars – a product since illegal for US citizens.

John Kavulich, president of the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, said the goal of such embargos — publicly at least — is “a change in behavior of the regime.”

In recent years, Washington has justified the sanctions by pointing to rights violations by Havana and its support for the government of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.

Cuba has not budged on either issue.

Expanded

“Not only the justification has evolved, but also the types of actions” taken against Cuba, said Alina Lopez Hernandez, a Cuban researcher and editorial writer.

“For as long as it was bilateral, it was easier for Cuba,” she said. It was a subject “barely mentioned (by the Cuban government) in the first three decades of the revolution” when Havana had Soviet backing.

But since the Torricelli laws and Helms-Burton laws of 1992 and 1996 that ramped up the punitive measures, companies and foreign banks operating in Cuba have faced harsh penalties for doing business there.

“With these two laws (the embargo) lost its bilateral character, it became externalized and became a blockade,” said Lopez.

The Cuban government, which also uses the term blockade, estimates its economy has been damaged to the extent of more than US$150 billion.

Since 2000, food has been excluded from the sanctions, but Cuba must pay cash.

Thirty years of UN opprobrium

Every year since 1992, Cuba has presented a motion condemning the sanctions at the UN General Assembly. The first time, 59 countries voted for it, now nearly all are in favor.

Only the United States and Israel vote consistently against the motion, except in 2016 under a brief period of diplomatic detente under then-President Barack Obama when the US abstained.

The Helms-Burton act, said Ric Herrero of the Cuba Study Group, “was intended to create an international embargo against Cuba.”

But the UN’s consistent rejection shows how this has been “a resounding failure.”

US policy towards Cuba has been dictated by internal politics ever since the end of the Cold War, when Cuba lost strategic value, said Herrero.

The US blockade has contributed to making life hard for many Cubans.

Traditionally, the electoral weight of Florida — a state that can sway US elections and has a strong presence of Cuban immigrants – has stood in the way of relaxation.

However, “the Democrats are not competitive right now in Florida so there’s no real expectation the Democrats are going to win Florida,” Herrero said.

The pressure, instead, is coming from New Jersey and its Democratic polity – shrewd or crafty management of public affairs. 

Even Obama, who had relaxed some sanctions, could not lift them entirely due to the Helms Burton law which interdicts any president from changing the embargo by decree.

The Internal blockade

In Cuba, it is called an “internal blockade” — “the bureaucracy, excessive centralization, the lack of incentives for producers,” said economist Omar Everleny Perez.

“Economically, the (US) blockade is one of the causes of the situation in Cuba, but not the only one.”

Unable to produce what it needs, the island nation imports 80 percent of what it consumes.

Steps to liberalize the private sector have come late and have been slow to change the situation on the ground, with much of the economy still in state hands.

Alina Lopez says, “internal policies weigh more on the situation of Cuba than the US blockade, because the strengthening of the embargo dates back to the 1990s but the bad policies are historic, they date back to the 1960s.

Some critics of the embargo say that it helps the Cuban government more than it hurts, by providing it with a bogeyman for all of Cuba’s misfortunes. Hillary Clinton publicly shared the view that the embargo helps the Castros, saying that “It is my personal belief that the Castros do not want to see an end to the embargo and do not want to see normalization with the United States, because they would lose all of their excuses for what hasn’t happened in Cuba in the last 50 years.” Clinton said in the same interview that “we’re open to changing with them.”

In a 2005 interview, George P. Shultz, who served as Secretary of State under Reagan, called the embargo “insane.” Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies, criticized the embargo in a June 2009 article:

“The embargo has been a failure by every measure. It has not changed the course or nature of the Cuban government. It has not liberated a single Cuban citizen. In fact, the embargo has made the Cuban people a bit more impoverished, without making them one bit freer. At the same time, it has deprived Americans of their freedom to travel and has cost US farmers and other producers billions of dollars of potential exports.”

In June 2009, Venezuelan commentator Moisés Naím wrote in Newsweek: “The embargo is the perfect example used by anti-United States everywhere to expose the hypocrisy of a superpower that punishes a small island while cozying to dictators elsewhere.”

Some US business leaders openly call for an end to the embargo. They argue, as long as the embargo continues, non-US foreign businesses in Cuba that violate the embargo, do not have to compete with US businesses, and thus, will have a head start when and if the embargo is lifted.

On May 15, 2002, former President Jimmy Carter spoke in Havana, calling for an end to the embargo, saying “Our two nations have been trapped in a destructive state of belligerence for 42 years, and it is time for us to change our relationship.” US bishops also called for an end to the embargo on Cuba.

But the embargo has never been effective at achieving its principal purpose: forcing Cuba’s revolutionary regime out of power or bending it to Washington’s will.

It is high time that America join the rest of the world in establishing free trade with Cuba and end the ineffective sanctions that have cost lives and economic growth for both nations. The US government must realize that, if their goal is to push for a more democratic, more liberalized Cuba, what has not worked for 60 years will not work now or in the future. The US must seek a more humane, diplomatic means of pursuing American worth and concerns.

*The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centered figures, current and international affairs

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