Rapprochement with Cuba needs to go further

President Barack Obama’s announcement yesterday that the U.S. would re-establish diplomatic ties with Cuba marked the end of an inglorious episode of U.S. foreign policy. The change is a positive step, but we need to go further. The U.S. should acknowledge its half-century of aggression — overt and covert — and repeal the embargo that has helped stunt the island’s economy.

The rupture of diplomatic relations in January of 1961 was only the beginning of decades of various attempts to overthrow, destabilize and subvert the Cuban government. These ranged from the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 to various forms of sabotage directly orchestrated or fostered by the Central Intelligence Agency to assassination attempts against Fidel Castro that continued until President Richard Nixon finally put a stop to them. These CIA machinations have become the stuff of satire in popular culture: Jokes about the CIA’s exploding cigars abound. But it was no laughing matter. What failed in Cuba worked elsewhere, as the destabilization of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile — culminating in Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup and Allende’s death — attests.

In retrospect, our efforts to destabilize Cuba in the decades after the 1959 revolution are striking for their unremitting meanness. No forum was too petty, no sphere considered impenetrable, especially in the 1960s. From orchestrating Cuba’s expulsion from the Organization of American States in 1962 to enlisting writers to oppose the Cuban government in public forums such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom to hounding down the most meager economic transactions between the Cuban government and other countries of the “free” world, the U.S. overlooked no opportunity to derail the Cuban government. As the recent revelations of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s attempt to penetrate Cuba’s hip-hop music scene five years ago reminded us, the U.S. has left virtually no stone unturned. The point about these wrong-headed clandestine policies is not merely that they were ineffective or counterproductive — though they certainly were — but that they violated Cuban sovereignty.

In the U.S. arsenal, the economic embargo has been its most formidable weapon. Originally referred to as the Economic Denial Program, it began piecemeal in 1960, when the U.S. cut off annual purchases of Cuban sugar — known as the Cuban sugar quota — and prohibited U.S. exports to the island. It is the longest-running economic sanction we have ever perpetrated against another country. 

The damage caused by the embargo is hard to calculate, but its cruelty is evident. In the name of overthrowing the Cuban leadership, this policy has punished all Cubans. To be sure, the embargo alone is not responsible for the dire state of Cuba’s economy. Poor planning in the hands of both the Soviets and the Cubans shares blame. But the embargo managed to wreak havoc on Cuba’s economy, especially in two periods: the early 1960s, before Soviet support fully consolidated, and again in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse suddenly left Cuba floundering without its subsidies.

The early 1960s brought on epic struggles, as familiar food products became scarce, lines outside stores stretched around blocks and the U.S.-made machines that the island relied on broke down without replacements parts. Cubans tempered the hardships with revolutionary excitement and determination. Rallies were punctuated with slogans such as “We may lack soap, but we have plenty of courage.” Cuban workers eventually managed, saving materials or finding ingenious solutions to the chronic problem of replacement parts.

But by the 1990s, years of revolutionary fatigue and political bureaucracy had taken their toll. The food scarcity of the 1990s made Cubans’ lives very difficult, and the U.S. government bears responsibility. Over the past 25 years the economy has slowly improved, but a whole generation of Cubans has faced a daily struggle to put food on the table. While overt political aggression by the U.S. has only tended to shore up support for the revolution, economic sanctions have undermined it.

The economic embargo worked as intended: It brought ruination to the island. The intentional deprivation of the population represented a perverse and failed effort to force Cubans to rise up against their leaders — one that inflicted needless suffering on innocent people. For that reason, it was important that Obama recognized the cruel futility of trying to “push Cuba toward collapse” in his speech. Ending the embargo, unfortunately, is not up to the president; it requires congressional repeal. Both Obama and congressional representatives need to push for the end of a policy that has unjustifiably penalized an entire country.

After more than a half-century of enmity, we are finally standing on the threshold of a new era in U.S.-Cuban relations. The occasion should not only precipitate the end of the embargo but also inspire reflection. It’s a good time to remember our historical role. Not “proudly,” as Obama suggested in his speech, but with the somber recognition that a long, dark chapter in the history of our foreign policy is finally over.