To sanction or not to sanction? That’s the dilemma. The embargo on Cuba, declared by John F. Kennedy in 1962, is usually cited as an example of the failure of economic sanctions. The decades pass, we awaken each day and the dinosaur is still standing at the foot of the bed. In those years, in the midst of the Cold War, the United States stopped buying sugar from Cuba and selling it everything else. Almost simultaneously, several Latin American countries broke relations with Havana, egged on by Washington, who watched with concern the increase of Cuban subversion in the region.
It was the era when Cuba sent troops abroad or attempted to oust Latin American governments by force, exemplified at the time by Che Guevara’s failed adventure in Bolivia, while Washington in turn tried to kill Fidel Castro and put an end to his regime, a Soviet satellite that had emerged a few kilometers from Florida in 1959.
That happened during the administration of Gen. Ike Eisenhower, the same president who had acted (or overacted) against the communists and the nationalization of Anglo-American businesses in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), the year when — grudgingly, it must be said — he replaced the French in Indochina after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu at the hands of the Vietnamese communists, a foretelling of what would happen to the United States two decades later.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson, fearful of the reactions of the bellicose Cuban neighbor to whom, sotto voce, he imputed Kennedy’s death (he lived and died convinced of that, as he told his speech writer Leo Janos and others), and resigned to coexist with Moscow’s appendix stuck to his side, desisted from trying to liquidate or overthrow Castro and opted for “containing” him.
Containment was a Cold War tool that consisted of three hostile but legitimate and visible measures: economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and intense adverse propaganda. The working theory was that those three weapons of harassment, applied firmly for a long time, could lead to the implosion of the enemy State. It was an alternative to direct violence and military confrontation.
Naturally, to contain the adversary required continuity in the White House’s strategy, a huge budget and the exclusive dedication of a notable number of functionaries and agents,but none of that was possible long-range in a political system such as the American, founded on elections held every two years for the House, every four years for the presidency and the governorships, and every six, interspersed, for the Senate.
“Electoral reason” ended up on top, and the newcomers to government brought new solutions for the old conflicts or new conflicts to which they could devote themselves frantically, because there was no political upside to trying to solve old rifts that were given up for lost. U.S. society lived with an eye to the future — changes, innovation, inventions — and was not capable of sustaining long-range efforts anchored in the past.
The defeat in Vietnam was the turning point. The United States emerged very battered and demoralized. Nixon acknowledged the failure and sought relations with China, hand in hand with Henry Kissinger, a fellow convinced of the virtues of realpolitik and the inconvenience of principles.
But it was Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, who discarded the policy of diplomatic isolation of Cuba by dismantling the O.A.S. resolutions and continuing to sell the Castro brothers American cars manufactured in Argentina, a practice begun by Nixon. Later, Jimmy Carter finished the job by opening in Havana a U.S. “Interests Section,” which was the way to reestablish relations.
The myth of the embargo
From that point on, the containment of Cuba ceased to exist and Cuba established diplomatic and commercial relationships with almost the whole world. Little by little, the objective of terminating the dictatorship was pushed aside (the last serious proposition was made by Gen. Alexander Haig, a White House aide), although some tireless exiles, led by Jorge Mas Canosa, managed to start Radio-TV Martí during the Reagan administration and lobbied Bush’s Congress into approving the Torricelli Law and, later, in the Clinton years, the so-called Helms-Burton Law. That was an excellent legislative tool … if only someone in the White House had wanted to use it to the fullest, as insisted by Cuban-American Representative Lincoln Díaz-Balart, a key person in the approval and codification of that bill.
Nevertheless, in 1989, when the Berlin Wall was toppled, or in 1991, when the USSR, the communist camp in Europe, and even Marxism as a theoretical reference disappeared, it would have been relatively easy for George Bush Sr. or especially his successor, Bill Clinton, who had two clear opportunities to reprise the old Cuban dispute (the Rafters Crisis of 1994 and the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996) and put an end to the Castros’ tyranny — for which they could have counted on Yeltsin’s and the Russians’ discreet support.
But both decided to cling to the comfy idea that Cuba’s dictatorship was obsolete and discredited and would collapse someday under the weight of its own incompetence or maybe after the aged Castro brothers disappeared.
In reality, the political reasoning concealed a selfish calculation; it was a very old dispute, without handles in the social panorama of the 1990s, whose worst aspects had been locally discounted. To put an end to the Cuban dictatorship carried certain risks and trying to do it lacked political cost-effectiveness.
That was probably true. George Bush Sr. did not easily benefit from the invasion into Panama in 1989, to remove from circulation an unpleasant dictator like Noriega. Shortly thereafter, he lost the election to Clinton. Then came Chávez and the anti-American and anti-West mob of 21st-Century Socialism, but Washington insisted on seeing them “as a nuisance, not as a danger,” so as not to have to confront the problem. Better to sweep them under the rug, not to fight them, all the more so when the challenge came from apparently insignificant nations.
What were the consequences of leaving the Cuban dictatorship alive and well? The irrefutable Argentine historian Juan Bautista (Tata) Yofre, after examining hundreds of documents and reading and listening to numerous testimonies, summarizes them in the title of one of his books: “It Was Cuba.”
In reality, it is Cuba. The island of the Brothers Castro is responsible for the existence of one and a half million Venezuelan exiles, narco-states in Venezuela and Bolivia, a pseudo-democracy in Nicaragua, and even an FMLN government in El Salvador, indirectly supported by Havana, while in Colombia the FARC sharpen their teeth in preparation to seize power by other means.At the same time, Iran has an untold presence in the Americas, hand-carried to the region by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.
None of this would have happened if the Cuban dictatorship had been excised, an objective that disappeared gradually from U.S. strategy and never existed among the intentions of Spanish-American democrats. (I remember the bitterness with which Carlos Andrés Pérez, in the final days of his life as an exile in Miami, recalled the naiveté of thinking that Fidel Castro had at one time been his friend.)
To sum up: in reality, the economic sanctions didn’t fail. The politicians who should have implemented them failed. They grew tired. They changed their objectives. It is something that happens to democracies that are subject to electoral swaying. The Castros — after all, the bosses in a monomaniacal dictatorship — remained alone on the boxing ring and continued to fight “against yanqui imperialism,” even though that futile exercise has a lot of shadow boxing. That’s where we stand right now.
Published in Spanish by El Blog de Montaner on Saturday August 12th, 2017
