Washington’s Cuba Policy Is Self-Sabotage

Get audio access with any FP subscription. Welcome to FP Free Week. To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, our entire site is completely unlocked this week only. Enjoy the article. Since January, when the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and cut Cuba off from the flow of Venezuelan oil that had long helped it function, Washington has pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign against Havana. The Trump administration hopes that sanctions and an effective fuel blockade can force Cuba’s leadership toward a negotiated economic and political opening that would turn the island into a dependent U.S. partner. In one respect, the pressure has already paid off. On June 18, Cuba’s National Assembly approved some 175 measures that together amount to the boldest departure from the economic order of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Private banks will now be allowed to operate in Cuba, real estate and state-owned enterprises will be opened to private and foreign capital, Cubans abroad can invest in the country, and most price controls will disappear. President Miguel Díaz-Canel cast the overhaul as a defense of socialism rather than an abandonment of it. Since January, when the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and cut Cuba off from the flow of Venezuelan oil that had long helped it function, Washington has pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign against Havana. The Trump administration hopes that sanctions and an effective fuel blockade can force Cuba’s leadership toward a negotiated economic and political opening that would turn the island into a dependent U.S. partner. In one respect, the pressure has already paid off. On June 18, Cuba’s National Assembly approved some 175 measures that together amount to the boldest departure from the economic order of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Private banks will now be allowed to operate in Cuba, real estate and state-owned enterprises will be opened to private and foreign capital, Cubans abroad can invest in the country, and most price controls will disappear. President Miguel Díaz-Canel cast the overhaul as a defense of socialism rather than an abandonment of it. U.S. President Donald Trump might conclude that maximum pressure is working—and that he should tighten the screws on Havana to achieve further changes. Just days after the reforms passed, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions on five Cuban entities, including the bank that handles most foreign business on the island. Yet, as the humanitarian toll from the U.S. pressure campaign on Cuba mounts, Washington’s strategy may end up undermining its own interests. The same pressure that produced Cuba’s recent economic opening is steadily destroying the conditions that the island needs to succeed. This month, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, held the Trump administration directly responsible for what he described as a humanitarian emergency in Cuba. According to his office, the survival rate for children with cancer has dropped from roughly 85 percent to 65 percent since the United States imposed fuel restrictions on the country in January. The resulting blackouts have destabilized the refrigeration and transport systems essential to medical supply chains. Infant mortality has doubled since then to almost 10 deaths per 1,000 live births, Türk said, and only about a third of essential medicines are available in the country. Fuel shortages have also choked the island’s food supply, cutting production by a reported 60 percent and leaving pregnant women and small children most exposed to malnutrition. By mid-May, daily blackouts in Cuba routinely exceeded 20 hours, hospitals were suspending surgeries, and millions of people lacked reliable access to clean water, according to Türk. He pointed out that sanctions designed to strangle entire sectors of an economy, with indiscriminate effects on the population—as is the case with U.S. sanctions on Cuba—are incompatible with international human rights law. Beyond the immediate human suffering caused by the U.S. blockade of Cuba, Washington’s strategy is self-defeating. Hardship imposed by a foreign siege rarely translates into anger at a local government. Even when discontent does grow, it tends to feed hostility toward the United States. The Cuban government has also shown itself effective at suppressing dissent. There is also a deeper, structural cost of the U.S. strategy. A productive future partnership between the United States and a stable Cuban government of any kind would rest on the foundations of a functioning society. But those foundations are precisely what the U.S. blockade is eroding. A market economy needs banks that can extend credit to entrepreneurs and foreign investors willing to risk U.S. penalties for doing business on a sanctioned island. It also requires a stable workforce. Energy shortages and the collapse of basic services are counterproductive. They have accelerat

Washington’s Cuba Policy Is Self-Sabotage

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