After 50 years of perfect policy failure, the U.S. has a political opening to help a reforming Cuba prosper.

Obama’s Cuba Opportunity

By PHILIP PETERS

George Washington’s farewell address did more than warn against permanent alliances that could “entangle” our young Republic in the “ambition” and “rivalship” of others in ways that do not serve our national interest.

He warned equally against America making enemies. “Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all,” was his first principle. To engage in “permanent, inveterate antipathy” toward other powers would make us “subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives.”

If ever there was a case of “permanent, inveterate antipathy” in U.S. foreign policy, it is found in American policy toward Cuba. During the Cold War it was justified by a circumstance well beyond the first president’s 18th-century imagination: a close neighbor allied with a nuclear-armed Moscow dedicated to our demise.

But the policy lives on two decades after the Soviet Union’s own demise, serving no constructive purpose toward Cuba and harming U.S. relations in the hemisphere. With two years left to serve, President Obama has an opportunity to score a victory for his legacy and the national interest by putting U.S.-Cuba relations on a new course, beginning with an overhaul of the U.S. embargo.

For six years President Obama has shown little interest in Cuba, but at a fundraiser one year ago in Miami, he seemed to be searching for new options.

“We’ve started to see changes on the island,” the President said, and “we have to continue to update our policies” with a “creative” and “thoughtful” approach. “Keep in mind,” he added, “that when Castro came to power, I was just born. So the notion that the same policies that we put in place in 1961 would somehow still be as effective as they are today in the age of the Internet and Google and world travel doesn’t make sense.”

Indeed. Nor does it make sense to imagine that U.S. sanctions exert meaningful political pressure on the government comfortably in power in Havana for 55 years—or that those sanctions don’t in some measure hurt the Cuban people who cannot be held responsible for a revolution that rocked the Eisenhower Administration.

Barack Obama is the 11th U.S. president to face socialist Cuba. But he is the first who can see the next generation of Cuban leadership on the horizon, with Raul Castro committed to end his presidency in 2018. And he is the first to see a Cuba embarked on a wrenching process of internal change that is opening the economy, expanding personal autonomy, and even increasing some civil and economic liberties. Obama has a strategic opportunity afforded to none of his predecessors: to change U.S. policy in ways that complement positive changes in Cuba, enhancing the impact of Cuba’s reforms and encouraging further change ahead.

.....................

Read more: www.theamericanconservative.com