Nitpicking on Cuba

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN a group of American oil executives meets with a delegation of Cubans in Mexico City? Terrible foreign policy, that’s what. The Treasury Department this month caused a minor and wholly unnecessary international incident when it warned the American-owned Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel in Mexico City that it was violating the U.S. Trading With the Enemy Act by hosting the meeting. Though the letter was a standard warning generated after Treasury read about the gathering in the newspapers, the hotel reacted by kicking out the Cubans -- in violation of Mexican antidiscrimination laws. Now the hotel faces prosecution, fines and even a possible shutdown.

Although there may be a case for “smart sanctions” against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, this is a classic case of dumb sanctions stupidly applied.

It would be easy to pin all the blame on Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. The office has a history of infuriating religious groups, Cuban Americans, U.S. tourists and aficionados of Cuban cigars with its strict and sometimes mindless enforcement of the comprehensive laws prohibiting almost anything that could conceivably bring Castro a buck. And it’s hard to see how forcing Cubans to move from one luxury Mexico City hotel to another has any value other than petty harassment. As usual, it’s American business, not the Castro regime, that suffers.

What’s even more frustrating is that the office has far more pressing things to do than persecute hapless American hoteliers. With a budget of $22 million and 125 employees, the office is in charge of enforcing U.S. economic sanctions against such horrid governments as Iran, Syria, North Korea and Zimbabwe, and combating drug traffickers, terrorists and arms merchants. In other words, people and countries that pose genuine national security threats. This is an office that ought to be picking its battles more carefully.

Treasury argues that it has a duty to enforce, and not interpret, U.S. law. In principle, that argument has some merit. But in practice, the office is behaving like the pathologically rigid police inspector Javert hounding poor Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables.”

Treasury is better off spending every available minute trying to find Saddam Hussein’s secret billion-dollar bank accounts that are reportedly funding the Iraqi insurgency and killing U.S. soldiers; freezing the assets of the Sudanese officials responsible for genocide in Darfur; and squeezing North Korea’s profits from drug trafficking and counterfeiting, which help pay for its nuclear weapons programs.

But the real the fault lies with Congress. It should rework Cuban policy to focus narrowly on keeping dollars and conventional and nonconventional weapons out of the hands of the Castro regime and easing the burden on American citizens and businesses. And most of all, lawmakers should at long last put an end to these punishing and counterproductive sanctions, which only punish and alienate the very people they’re intended to help.