After 40 Years, Isn’t It About Time for a Sensible U.S.-Cuban Policy?

What is there about Cuba that causes the U.S. government to botch almost every action related to it? From the Bay of Pigs-- described as that rarest of all things, a perfect failure--to the Central Intelligence Agency’s comical efforts to give Fidel Castro exploding cigars, right up to the present. Take the case of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban boy whose mother and stepfather drowned in their attempt to reach America. What should have been treated as a simple child-custody case, with the boy returned without fanfare to his biological father, metastasized into an international incident.

However, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is belatedly trying to do the right thing: It announced last week that the boy should be returned to his father’s custody. Seeing this decision as a defeat, the same Cuban exiles who first politicized the case and demanded Gonzalez remain have organized demonstrations in Miami and initiated a series of legal maneuvers aimed at blocking implementation of the INS decision.

But whatever the final outcome, the case points up the contradictory nature of U.S. policy. Gonzalez, his mother and the others in the boat were among the thousands of Cubans who launch for Florida each year in everything from rafts to fast boats. But, as was brought home during the 1980 Mariel boat lift and, again, during the 1994 refugee crisis, the United States does not want any more floods of undocumented Cubans arriving in small boats. So determined are we to avoid such an outcome that the U.S. Coast Guard now picks up all Cubans it can lay hands on in international waters and sails them right back to Cuba.

Yet, the whole purpose of the U.S. embargo, and other economic sanctions, is to worsen the economic situation on the island, thus fueling the very conditions that cause people to head for the boats. The results of U.S. policy, in short, are the exact opposite of what the federal government says it wants. But Washington holds to it anyway.

President Bill Clinton’s explanations are as specious as the policy itself. Speaking to the National Assn. of Farm Broadcasters on Nov. 5, 1999, for example, he said the United States had to keep the embargo in place “to put pressure on the Castro regime to move more toward democracy.”

But virtually all Cuba’s religious leaders, and most of its dissidents, say it is the exact opposite. U.S. policy, they say, impedes rather than encourages movement toward a more open society. As Elizardo Sanchez, Cuba’s leading human-rights activist, has often asserted, “So long as the U.S. continues to pressure and threaten, the Cuban government will react defensively, demanding internal discipline and unity against the external threat. That is no way to create an atmosphere conducive to reforms. The U.S. could accomplish more by beginning to lift the embargo.”

Exactly. After all these years, Washington should have learned that while the U.S. embargo may, to some degree, complicate the economic problems Castro already has, it isn’t going to bring him down or force him to do anything.

Even more specious are Clinton’s claims that he has tried to improve relations with Cuba, only to have been rebuffed at every turn. In the same November speech, for example, he said he had already “bent over backward to try to reach out to them.”

In a press conference on July 2, 1998, Clinton claimed that his administration had tried “to engage Cuba in a way that would develop the kind of reciprocal movement that we see [with] China.”

Incredibly, in that same statement, he even described the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 as having been a “clear road map” for improving relations. But that’s certainly not the way Clinton described it in 1992, when he announced his support for it. Coming out of a dinner with right-wing exiles on April 23, 1992, Clinton, then a candidate for the presidency, said the act would give the United States the opportunity to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro.”

Sen. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), the act’s principal sponsor in 1992, when he was a congressman, was even more direct. During a debate on CNN’s “Crossfire” in December 1992, Torricelli said his legislation would bring about the end of Castro’s regime “within months.” Some road map for improving relations.

No, the hard fact is, the Clinton administration has never tried to improve relations with the Castro government. The Cold War is over. Cuba represents no threat to U.S. security. The objectives Washington does have--whether encouraging movement toward a more open society or discouraging another flood of boat people--could be better advanced by easing tensions and beginning a constructive dialogue with the Cuban government.

But the Clinton administration obviously has no intention of doing that; rather, it is now pushing a “people-to-people” approach, a matter of easing travel and expanding cultural exchanges, but with the intention, administration spokesmen emphasize, of undermining the existing Cuban government. That’s hardly the way to improve relations.

Still, eased travel controls and expanded cultural exchanges are welcome--and may, in time, help bring about more meaningful change. The more Americans who travel to Cuba and see Cuban reality, warts and all, for themselves, the greater will be the pressures from the U.S. public for a more sensible policy. After 40 years, isn’t it about time?