A Times Editorial

Trade logic

In the case of China, Republican leaders argued that trade promotes democratization and opens doors. They should see that the same applies to ending the embargo against Cuba.

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 10, 2000

Republican leaders in Congress have argued persuasively that normalizing trade relations with China will nudge that Communist country toward greater freedoms. So why are those same congressional leaders rejecting those arguments as they apply to our closest Communist neighbor, Cuba?

The simple answer is interest-group politics. Politicians in Florida and Washington in both parties apparently haven't noticed the shift in public opinion that was under way even before the Elian Gonzalez case exposed the anti-Castro fanatics in Miami as a clamorous, implacable faction that provides Fidel Castro with the perfect foil.

For decades, leaders of the large Cuban exile community in South Florida have effectively held much of Washington hostage to their pro-embargo stance. Any suggestion the economic sanctions might be lifted -- even loosened to allow such humanitarian imports as food and medicine -- has met almost hysterical resistance from the Cuban-American National Foundation and Cuban-American lawmakers.

They don't seem to care that the embargo has hurt the Cuban people while helping Castro by giving him a scapegoat for the economic misery in Cuba.

For the past three years, George Nethercutt, R-Wash., a conservative member of the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, has been trying to move Congress away from this futile policy. This year, probably as a consequence of the debate on China, Nethercutt has been successful in attaching an amendment to the agriculture appropriations bill that would allow Cuba and other sanctioned countries to buy food and medicine from the United States. But Cuban-American U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, is vowing to defeat it. Same old story.

Nethercutt defends his measure using the same sensible arguments Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott used to persuade fellow senators to open America to trade with China: Trade promotes democratization and opens doors.

A transition from an authoritarian state to a capitalist democracy won't happen in Cuba overnight, but commercial interaction works on a closed society like waves on a boulder, eventually wearing it down and cracking it open at its fault lines.

Selling food and medicine to the residents of Cuba may very well cause Castro more internal trouble than the embargo ever has. What is certain is that such sales would relieve Cuban suffering and benefit American farmers.

Our government has been hanging on to this embargo for nearly 40 years, hoping against hope that inflicting such misery and isolation would spark a revolt against Castro. That hasn't happened, and there's no sign it's going to.

In general, the better approach to states in which human rights are violated is to engage them, give their people a lifeline to the outside world and wait for market forces and the inexorable push of human desire for freedom to take their course. If it's the right prescription for China, it's the right one for Cuba, too.

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