Opinion The Castros Finally Hit the Jackpot Even if you oppose the isolation of Cuba, this is not a good trade.

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Candidate Barack Obama said that, as president, he would talk to anti-American dictators without precondition. He didn’t mention that he would also give them historic policy concessions without precondition.

His surprise unilateral change in the U.S. posture toward the Castro dictatorship came without even the pretense of serious promises by the Cubans to reform their kleptocratic, totalitarian rule.


The trade of Alan Gross, the American aid worker jailed in Cuba for the offense of trying to help Jewish Cubans get on the Internet, for three Cuban spies is understandable (we also got back one of our spies, and Cuba released several dozen political prisoners as a sweetener).

The rest of Obama’s sweeping revisions — diplomatic relations and the loosening of every economic sanction he can plausibly change on his own — are freely granted, no questions asked. It is quid with no pro quo. Even if you oppose the isolation of Cuba, this is not a good trade.

After waiting out 10 other U.S. presidents, the Castro regime finally hit the jackpot in Obama, whose beliefs about our Cuba policy probably don’t differ much from those of the average black-turtleneck-clad graduate student in Latin American studies.

Every dictator around the world must be waiting anxiously for a call or a postcard from Obama. The leader of the free world comes bearing gifts and understanding. He is willing to overlook human-rights abuses. And his idea of burnishing his legacy is to clinch deals with his country’s enemies.

Who helped negotiate the one with Cuba? Harry Truman had Dean Acheson. Richard Nixon had Henry Kissinger. Bush I had James Baker. Barack Obama has Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser who is his Castlereagh and has what it takes to collapse U.S. policy toward Cuba and get nothing in return.

There is no doubt that economic sanctions are a blunt and dubious instrument, and reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of levying them in a given instance (I’ve gone back and forth about the Cuban embargo over the years). But dictatorial regimes hate them for a reason. All things considered, these regimes want more economic wherewithal rather than less.

Obama’s olive branch to the Castros couldn’t be better-timed from the perspective of the family that has made a handsome business out of crushing its fellow Cubans. The regime is heavily dependent on the largesse of its ideological partner Venezuela, whose irrational, left-wing policies have helped send its economy spiraling toward default. Just as the Castro dictatorship faces the dire prospect of the collapse of Venezuela’s support, here comes El Yanqui to cushion the blow.

The Castro regime will take a cut of the increased trade, remittances and tourism that will spring from Obama’s concessions. Cuba obviously doesn’t have a free, or mostly free, or even remotely free, economy. Its economy is run by and for the government.

Consider tourism. The Cuban military has a enormous holding company called GAESA. One of its companies, Gaviota, operates an extensive network of hotels and resorts from which it earns a bonanza of foreign exchange, according to the strategic consultancy Stratfor. Imagine if the Pentagon owned the Radisson, Marriott and Hilton hotel chains. That is the Cuban tourism industry in a nutshell.

If tourism were the key to empowering and eventually liberating the Cuban people, the country would be a robust democracy by now. About a million Canadian tourists go to Cuba every year. In total, more than 2 million tourists visit annually, and yet the Castro regime is still standing.

Or consider exports. As Mauricio Claver-Carone, a director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, points out, we have sent $4 billion worth of agricultural and medical goods to Cuba since 2000. “All those sales by more than 250 privately owned U.S. companies,” he writes, “were made to only one buyer, the Castro government.”

It is true, of course, that the embargo — which Obama won’t lift on his own, at least not yet — hasn’t ended the Castro regime. On the other hand, there’s no reason to believe that lifting it will end the Castro regime, either. Our vast trade with China hasn’t made the government there any less repressive (the hope that economic advancement will change it over time if a very long-term play).

The Cuba embargo is condemned as a relic of the Cold War. But the root of the matter is the Cuban regime that is itself a relic, an inhuman jackboot left over from the era when people actually professed to believe in workers’ paradises.

Though there are holdout believers, still. The Nation is doing a trip to Cuba, perhaps because the journey to North Korea is too long. The liberal elite has often treated Fidel Castro as a cute, plucky figure of defiance, and even now, the Castro regime has determined apologists in the U.S. Congress.

If Cuba were a racist apartheid-style dictatorship rather than a Communist one, no one would be so eager to do business with it. Instead, the great and good celebrate as the welcome end of an era changes that will replenish the coffers of a Cold War regime that is stubbornly still standing.