fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Setting Realistic Goals for Cuba Policy

The proper goal for U.S. Cuba policy is to promote mutually beneficial and peaceful relations between our countries.
shutterstock_112151030

Gordon Adams warns supporters of normalization against setting unrealistic goals of political change in Cuba:

Maybe it would be better to say that recognition and economic relations with Cuba are good things in their own right. And maybe one day Cuba becomes a liberal democracy with a free economy. But that choice is not ours to make. It belongs to the Cuban people.

Adams is right that both sides of this debate have tended to advance competing arguments about which policy would more effectively promote political change in Cuba. While critics of the embargo are absolutely right that it is a useless and failed policy because it has clearly failed to achieve any of its goals, they risk falling into the trap of letting a different policy be judged by the unreasonable standard of bringing about Cuban regime change. The U.S. isn’t going to achieve regime change through punitive measures or engagement, but that shouldn’t be the goal in the first place.

The proper goal for U.S. Cuba policy is to promote mutually beneficial and peaceful relations between our countries. It is impossible for a policy rooted in outdated hostility to achieve that goal. Normalization is the first step towards establishing these relations in the interests of Cuba and the United States. It is also important to emphasize that pro-embargo hawks are concerned first and foremost with inflicting punishment on Cuba so long as it is under its current government. Bringing about the freedom of Cubans is not the purpose of the embargo, and given what we know about the political effects of such policies there is no way that it could be. Supporters of the embargo insist that they are interested in promoting freedom in Cuba, but this is the fallback excuse of hard-liners that no longer have any justification for their preferred policy. U.S. policy could have remained entirely unchanged for the next half century and it would have done nothing to make Cuba any more free than it is today. As Adams says, these things are not in our power, and we should stop presuming that they are.

Advertisement

Comments

Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here