Opinion
- Editorial- Commentary
Ronald Sanders
:
Tackling the embargo
CUBA'S President Raul Castro could help US President Barack Obama to end the 49-year-old trade embargo that the US has imposed on Cuba and to normalise relations between the two countries. To do so, he will have to implement measures to address human rights issues in Cuba, particularly the release of political detainees.
Reforming its approach to human rights would be difficult for Castro's government, and the required political will, as well as the dangers, should not be underestimated. But the problem should not be insurmountable.
While in the past, the Cuban government has been able to argue that political dissidents in Cuba were being organised and supported by US government agencies to overthrow the government, such arguments are now a thing of the past. They are as anachronistic as any arguments by anti-Castro groups in the US that Cuba's communism is a threat to the US or that Cuba is a terrorist state.
These latter claims have long been debunked by the US military who do not regard present-day Cuba as a threat to US security. Similarly, it should be pretty clear to the Cuban government that the US today poses no security threat to Cuba.
During last year's campaign for the US presidency, Obama said he would "grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances'', but that he would maintain the embargo as a whole until "a post-Fidel (Castro) government begins opening Cuba to democratic change''. Over the last few weeks he tried to make good on his pledge by including these measures in the 2009 spending bill. Basically, the bill cut off funding for the enforcement of restrictions on family travel and remittances.
US-Cuba relations look set to remain a domestic issue rather than a foreign policy concern despite a universal mood to end the anachronistic US embargo against Cuba that has included prohibiting Americans from visiting Cuba and restricting business that US companies and their subsidiaries in other countries could do there.
Battle lines are beginning to be drawn in the US between the diehard anti-Castro groups and those who regard the embargo as a failed effort and who want access to the Cuban market for US goods and services. A bipartisan group of US senators and interest groups is backing a bill that seeks to end all travel restrictions to the island.
What is clearly driving the sponsors of the Bill is recognition of the economic opportunities that Americans have lost and are continuing to lose in Cuba.
An economy in deep recession, such as the US, can hardly afford to ignore the opportunity that open sales to the Cuban market presents for creating employment and earning revenues.
A large number of US businesses-many of them the symbols of capitalism-have an estimated 5,000 products trademarked in Cuba waiting for the embargo to be lifted.
Among them are products such as Nike, Visa, Starbucks and that most American of all American symbols -McDonalds.
US businesses have been chomping at the bit to get into Cuba for some time, especially as they had to sit by while Canadian and European companies-and now Brazilian, Chinese and Indian ones-grab the opportunities created by the departure of Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Oil companies are reportedly also concerned that Cuba's state-run oil company has signed joint operating agreements with companies from several countries (including Russia) to explore waters that Cuban scientists claim could contain reserves of up to 20 billion barrels of oil.
I place little store in a March 30th letter written to President Obama by Senator Richard G Lugar, the ranking Republican on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he called on Obama to appoint a special envoy to initiate direct talks with the Cuban government on a limited range of subjects such as migration and drug interdiction, and in which he stressed "reform of our approach towards Cuba is a means to an end: the advancement of US security and foreign policy interests in the Western Hemisphere''. A special envoy with a wider mandate to normalise relations with Cuba is what is needed.
Sir Ronald Sanders a former Caribbean diplomat, now corporate executive, publishes widely on small states in the global community. Petroleumworld does not necessarily share these views.
This
commentary was originally published by Trinidad Express, Friday, April 10th 2009, Courtesy of the Jamaica Observer
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