Brent Scowcroft: US-Cuba Embargo Makes No Sense

During a taping session for a new book I am involved with titled America and the World featuring the Washington Post's David Ignatius interviewing former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, I asked Brent Scowcroft whether he thought the US embargo of Cuba made any sense.

His answer was blunt. He said in foreign policy terms, "no" and implied that US-Cuba policy was a domestic issue, somewhat disdainfully in my view.

Watch the tape above, but this is what Brent Scowcroft said:

My answer on Cuba is Cuba is not a foreign policy question.

Cuba is a domestic issue.

In foreign policy, the embargo makes no sense.

It doesn't do anything.

It's quite clear we can not starve Cuba to death.

We learned that when the Soviet stopped subsidizing Cuba and they didn't collapse.

It's a domestic issue.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Comments

[walterlx]

Things are changing and it's nice to see some Washington policy-makers coming to see that the blockade of Cuba hasn't succeeded. It's time and overtime to normalize relations with our neighbor so that Cubans can freely visit friends and family here in the United States, and people from the United States can freely visit friends and family in Cuba.

Not long ago the New York Philharmonic went to North Korea to perform. Cuba is the only place on earth where people from the United States need a permission slip from the federal government to go for a visit. What are they so afraid that we'll see? How bad life supposedly is there? Of course Cuba has any number of problems, but somehow the society manages to work despite many obstacles.

Considering everything, Cuba and the United States cannot be equal. Cuba"s government certainly does limit democratic rights. But in a situation like David and Goliath, Cuba does what it feels it must to defend itself. Look at Iraq today and you can see what Cuba would look like if it were "liberated" by Washington.

For the past eight years I've operated a Yahoo news group focusing on Cuba, and everyone interested in having normal relations with Cuba is warmly welcomed to come and check it out. It's got over 80 thousand items in a free, easy-to-use database of information Cuba, the Cuba diaspora, and U.S. Cuban relations.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/