Christopher Sabatini objects to the Trump administration’s destructive Cuba policy:
The Trump administration’s effort to bring about the end of Cuba’s repressive government by squeezing the island’s economy promises only more suffering for Cuban citizens, who are already struggling under Fidel Castro’s failed economic project.
The White House is hurting the very people — ordinary Cubans — it claims to support. Not only are their potential sources of independent income (and, with it, political independence) drying up, so is their access to food — and their hopes for the future.
Trump’s foreign policy is notoriously erratic in many respects, but there has been a cruel consistency in his use of economic warfare in a vain attempt to bludgeon other governments into doing what he wants. In every case, the victims of the policy are the ordinary people of the targeted country, and the administration’s ostensible goals are never reached. If there is one U.S. policy that ought to have demonstrated the futility and cruelty of economic warfare, it should be the failed embargo policy of the last six decades, but for reasons of ideology and electoral politics our government remains committed to a policy that we all know to be a failure. Trump’s reversal of much of the opening with Cuba that began under his predecessor is not as destructive as the “maximum pressure” campaigns against Venezuela and Iran, but it needlessly harms the people of Cuba.
Limiting Americans’ travel to Cuba is an absurd and arbitrary restriction that interferes with our own freedom and deprives businesses in Cuba of much-needed dollars. Sabatini comments on the effect that this will have on tourism in the country:
By the White House’s own admission, these policies will reduce by half the number of American tourists visiting the island. That number last year was 600,000. American tourists had been helping to support the private restaurants, shops and the approximately 20,000 Airbnb’s that have sprung up in recent years.
The increased pressure on Cuba is supposed to compel the government to abandon its support for Maduro in Venezuela, but that seems unlikely to happen. Just as economic warfare against Venezuela hasn’t forced Maduro from power, neither will additional pressure force Cuba to give up on Maduro. In both countries, the civilian population will pay the price for our government’s coercive policies, and the only thing that the U.S. will succeed in doing is making them even poorer.