End the Cuba Embargo, reinstate Free Trade
On October 30, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly voted for the 32nd straight time to condemn the United States’s imposition of its trade embargo on Cuba. The embargo prohibits American citizens from purchasing Cuban goods, as well as vice versa, allowing only the export of food and medicine from the United States to the Caribbean island nation.
Why does this matter?
Taking advantage of this exception, Virginia has exported hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural produce to Cuba since at least 2013, when it earned around $60 million worth of exports in that year alone. In 2015, only about $40 million worth was exported to Cuba. However, this still made Virginia the state with the most exports to Cuba of any state in the union in both years. Virginia’s exports had slid down to $14 million by 2021 in the midst of the Covid-1- pandemic.
Why should the embargo be ended?
-It undermines American credibility and commitment to the rules-based international order. The result of the UN General Assembly vote this year was damning. 187 countries voted in favor of a resolution condemning the embargo while two, the US and Israel, voted against. For context, there are only 193 member states of the United Nations.
-Sanctions are a poor tool if policy changes are the end goal. According to former STRATFOR Vice President Reva Bhalla, as well as other academics, economic sanctions more often than not don’t bring about policy changes in the target countries. Sanctions are more likely to bolster an authoritarian regime rather than topple one, especially if the regime can successfully paint the sanctioning country as an aggressor. If sanctions are too severe, it can directly cause intense economic suffering on the target population, which could have major blowback effects for the sanctioning country; this could reinforce the policies of the targeted government rather than weakening them. If they don’t cause much of a disruption, it would damage the credibility of the sanctioning regime. Finding a “sweet spot” for sanctions is also infeasible; target countries may simply conclude that the benefits of complying with sanctions do not justify the costs of abandoning whatever authoritarian policy the sanctions are meant to counter.
-Our geopolitical interests are no longer being served by it. Cuba is an island of paramount strategic importance to the US. It’s roughly 90 miles away from Florida at its nearest point. It sits at a critical juncture between the mouth of the Mississippi River emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, meaning that to reach world markets ships carrying goods up and down the Mississippi and its arteries would have to pass by in the vicinity. At the same time, Cuba also sits at the major maritime crossroads between the US east coast and the Panama canal, linking it by sea with the Pacific Ocean.
Any foreign power that could gain a foothold in Cuba, such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, would have with it the ability to threaten vital US interests not only in its backyard, but the continental United States itself. Thus, the US needs a friendly regime in Cuba to maintain its vital strategic interests.
Now, the Cold War is over. The Cuban economy collapsed after the USSR was no longer able to deliver payments to Cuba due to the former’s dissolution. The economy has never fully recovered. Today, Cuba is a shell of a country, and with half the population of Florida with no land borders, it bears absolutely no threat to the US whatsoever.
Being so close to an economy worth $27 trillion, getting rid of the embargo could actually make the United States more, not less secure. The US would have far larger diplomatic, cultural, and economic leverage if trade, business, and political ties were to warm up significantly. Even if ties don’t warm up as expected, which is not the likeliest outcome given former President Barack Obama’s brief rapprochement, the United States will have lost nothing except its pride that should have disappeared with the end of the Cold War.
Cuba’s economy would also skyrocket as foreign direct investment and trade flows would expand greatly. As mentioned, Cuba sits at the juncture of critical trade routes, making it akin to similar strategically located economies like Hong Kong and Singapore. Even if the Cuban government did not enact any meaningful liberalization after the end of the embargo, its citizens would still be enormously better off given that countries like China still have had large government interventions on the market despite their liberalization decades ago.
To address concerns from embargo supporters like Marco Rubio, sanctions regarding the human rights abuses by the Cuban government can and should remain in place. These abuses do not, however, justify a blanket ban on trade that contribute more to the stunting of the economy than it does with bringing about a freer Cuba.
For these reasons, it’s time for a rethink of American policy towards one of our closest neighbors.