Change on Cuba Policy
Obama administration announced some steps today to begin moving our Cuba policy in a more sensible direction:
– Lift all restrictions on transactions related to the travel of family members to Cuba.
– Remove restrictions on remittances to family members in Cuba.
– Authorize U.S. telecommunications network providers to enter into agreements to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite telecommunications facilities linking the United States and Cuba.
– License U.S. telecommunications service providers to enter into roaming service agreements with Cuba’s telecommunications service providers.
– License U.S. satellite radio and satellite television service providers to engage in transactions necessary to provide services to customers in Cuba.
– License persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to activate and pay U.S. and third-country service providers for telecommunications, satellite radio and satellite television services provided to individuals in Cuba.
– Authorize the donation of certain consumer telecommunication devices without a license.
– Add certain humanitarian items to the list of items eligible for export through licensing exceptions.
What they’ve done here, pretty clearly, is tightly target those measures where a clear case can be made that relaxing restrictions does much more to weaken the regime than anything else. That’s clever politics and probably a smart start. But the plain fact of the matter is that the whole embargo is based on faulty logic. Making the Cuban population as poor as possible isn’t going to bring democracy to the island, and the idea that a more prosperous Cuba could somehow become so prosperous as to pose a security threat to the United States is ridiculous. A Communist economy running without subsidies from the USSR is bound to be pretty poor no matter what, but there’s no reason for us to contribute to the situation.
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Passover and Sanctions
Daniel Drezner has a nice list of things Passover can teach us about international relations including this key point:
Sanctions against an autocratic regime will rarely yield significant concessions. To get the Pharaoh to let the Jews go, God imposes an escalating series of sanctions against Egypt. These sanctions crippled Egyptian agriculture, health, sanitation and, er, sunlight, inflicting great suffering against the Egyptian people. Not until the first-born male children are killed, however, does Pharaoh relent for a sufficiently long time for the Egyptians to make their escape. Not coincidentally, that plague is the only one to truly hurt the autocrat personally, as his son was killed in the plague as well. Compellence strategies would seem to have a greater chance of success if they target autocratic elites.
This is part of the reason that Ta-Nehisi Coates is right to slam Rep Bobby Rush for getting so lovey-dovey with Fidel Castro. The sanctions policy against Cuba is horribly misguided and has taken a terrible toll on innocent Cubans. But Castro personally is a dictator and a bad guy, and insofar as it’s possible to be hard on him personally rather than inflicting collective punishment on the entire population one should do so. I think there’s a limited amount that can be accomplished in this regard, but saying things like “It was almost like listening to an old friend” is not a promising start.
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