Stop Punishing Cuba's People: Lift the Embargo

The flag-raising ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Havana marks the successful conclusion of what Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called the "first stage" in the process of normalizing relations.

Now comes the hard part.

Myriad other issues still divide Washington and Havana, but none is more consequential that the U.S. economic embargo -- or, as the Cubans call it, el bloqueo, the blockade.

Since President John F. Kennedy imposed it in 1961, the embargo has been the centerpiece of Washington's policy of hostility, and remains today the oldest and most comprehensive set of U.S. economic sanctions against any country in the world.

The embargo's original purpose was straightforward: to make the Cuban economy scream--to use Cuba's economic dependence on the United States to plunge it into a crisis so severe that the Cuban people would rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro's revolutionary government. "If they are hungry, they will throw Castro out," President Eisenhower surmised when first contemplating economic sanctions.

. . . Thirty years later, when the collapse of the Soviet Union revived hopes in Washington that Fidel Castro's government could be overthrown, Congressman Robert Torricelli sponsored the Cuban Democracy Act to tighten the embargo in order to "wreak havoc on that island." But regime change remained beyond the horizon of the possible, leaving punishment for punishment's sake as the only real rationale for the embargo.

Read more at Newsday. . .

William M. LeoGrande is professor of government at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the co-author with Peter Kornbluh of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. A new, updated edition will be published this October by the University of North Carolina Press.