Relaxing the idiotic Cuban embargo: legislation awaits in Congress
February 25, 2009 at 7:52 am by Wayne Garcia
An 1,100-page budget bill starting to move forward in Congress has provisions that would relax the nearly 50-year-old Cuban embargo, our nation’s longest-lasting foreign policy mistake over the last half of the 20th Century. The Palm Beach Post reports:
The bill, which is expected to be voted on by the House on Wednesday, already has Cuban-American lawmakers balking.
The 2009 budget bill would:
• Prevent the U.S. government from spending any of its budget enforcing 2004 rules that keep Cuban Americans from visiting their homeland more than once every three years.
• Create a general travel license for Americans who sell food and medical supplies to Cuba.
• Let Cuba pay for the American produce it buys when the products arrive in Havana. Current law forces Cuba to pay up front before products leave U.S. ports.
• Require the U.S. Treasury Department to issue a report showing how much of its staff and funding is spent on enforcing the ban on travel to Cuba.
And there is a growing chorus that the embargo did not work and is not going to work. This from the Miami Herald:
MIAMI — The Obama administration should take “a serious look at U.S. sanctions towards Cuba,” Fareed Zakaria, CNN analyst and editor of Newsweek’s international editions, urged Tuesday at a foreign policy summit at Florida International University.
“We’ve had a policy of punitive sanctions, and the idea has been that we would topple Fidel Castro’s regime,” Zakaria said.
“Fidel Castro and his brother are the longest-lived heads of government in the world. Surely, that suggests the policy is not working.”
The United States has sustained a 47-year-old embargo that prohibits trade with the island.
Influential Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana declared recently that the embargo “has failed.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered a review of the embargo.
