Enforcing an Ugly Policy

A distant relative – let’s say the brother of a stepdaughter who will never read this – is in the Navy. I recently learned that he had been reassigned to Cuba. Immediately I thought the worst – “Guantanamo?” No, I was told – something much better. He would be on a ship that patrols the Cuban coast.

It reminded me that it takes people to carry out policy. The U.S. has been carrying out an ugly policy now since 1960 – that of denying the Cuban people the right to import the basic necessities of life. My step-nephew is being used to enforce the illegal embargo on that country. People try to smuggle goods into that country like food and medicine and computers. The U.S. says no-go.

Conservatives love to ridicule Cuba – look at how they drive old cars, how they don’t have new TV’s and computers. It’s an obvious point to them – failure of the Cuban economic system. There’s a certain amount of willful blindness required to be a conservative, and most who make these observations are probably only vaguely aware of the embargo. But for 45 years now, Cuba has been denied the most basic of human rights – the ability to freely engage in commerce with anyone of their choosing. Americans are not allowed to trade with Cubans, and any of us who visit Cuba are subject to prison sentences. Cuba, they tell us, is a police state.

It’s a mockery of reason. I’m fully aware that Cuba is a single-party state, that its government has eyes and ears everywhere, that people there know to behave or face punishment. What’s harder to see is that the Cuban government acts as if it has real enemies, and that it does. The U.S. has long attempted to subvert the island, has engaged in acts of terrorism, and for years engaged the Mafia in covert plots to kill its president. Twice the U.S. sponsored major invasions, one unsuccessful at the Bay of Pigs, another one thwarted only by JFK’s untimely death. Governments under such pressure as the U.S. has put on Cuba become highly paranoid, and develop the eyes and ears necessary to survive. The U.S. is in no small way responsible for repression on that island.

I’ve long thought that there is a simple solution to the problem of lack of freedom on the island of Cuba: humane treatment. Lift the embargo. Allow them to prosper, to enjoy the good things in life. The U.S. will never bring down that government for so long as that government is able to convince its people that it has a real enemy up north. Just like Bush, Castro has long used fear as a governing tool. If the U.S. were to behave itself, fear would subside, and freedom would find its way to the island.

The Cubans have another real fear. Prior to the 1959 revolution, the island was hardly a paradise. The Batista government was ruthless. Like so many Latin American countries, only a small percentage of the population enjoyed the good things in life. Most people were left without education and health care. Now they have those things, but lack individual freedom. Cubans rightly fear American-style freedom as a return to the old days of extremes. The government would like to be free to practice socialism, as is its right. Part of the reason that the American government has so long seen fit to punish the Cuban people is the fear of a good example. If Cubans were allowed to go their own way, soon to follow would be the Colombians and Bolivians and Nicaraguans … soon the U.S. would lose its plantation. Socialism is a viable alternative in developing countries, and has been shown to work in advanced countries too. That is the heart of U.S. paranoia – fear of a rising middle class, fear of not having a monopoly on the good life, fear of an alternative to state-subsidized corporate capitalism. Eisenhower must have seen early on that Castro represented a real threat – it was he who instigated the embargo.

Anyway, my step-nephew or whatever he is is on a nefarious mission carrying out an ugly policy. One can only hope that he comes away from it with a better grip on reality – that ugly policies require real people to carry them out, and that people really suffer and get hurt. More likely, he’ll never connect the dots, he’ll never see the U.S. as an agent of oppression. The American people could use a little bit of education about Cuba, and it could start with him.