Audacity absent on Cuba

OPINION:

“Experience keeps a dear school,” said Benjamin Franklin, “but fools will learn in no other.” But if someone who will learn only from painful experience is a fool, what do you call someone who won’t learn from painful experience? Answer: a supporter of our Cuba policy.

For nearly a half-century, the United States has maintained an economic embargo in an effort to dislodge Fidel Castro from power. The 81-year-old dictator has easily outlasted a succession of American presidents bent on his political demise. Even today, with the dictator incapacitated by poor health, his regime looks more durable than the British monarchy.

A plausible conclusion is that if our boycott didn’t achieve its purpose in the 20th century, it will not do so in the 21st. Yet it remains firm, unchallenged by Republicans or Democrats.

Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, recently reopened the Cuba policy discussion with an op-ed column in the Miami Herald that accused President Bush of “blundering,” stressed the need to “help the Cuban people become less dependent on the Castro regime and promised to “grant Cuban-Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island.”

This may sound like a bold and refreshing attempt to overhaul our Cuba policy. In fact, it’s a cheerful embrace of a strategy that has proved futile year after year. The crucial message of his article is not how much Mr. Obama would change Mr. Bush’s approach, but how little.

The rules against travel to Cuba, long part of our policy, have grown tighter under Mr. Bush. This crackdown has gotten a strange reception among Cuban-Americans. A poll last year of those in South Florida found only 28 percent disapprove of Mr. Bush’s overall Cuba policy, but 45 percent oppose his efforts to keep them from visiting or sending money to relatives there.

Anyone who expected the Democratic takeover of Congress to make a difference on Cuba must have been hallucinating. House Democrats have done everything possible to show they can match anyone for blind obstinacy.

In past years, under Republican control, the House voted several times to make it easier for U.S. farmers to sell their crops in Cuba. But when a similar bill came to a floor vote this year, it was trounced. A bill to ease the travel rules hasn’t even received a committee hearing.

By supporting more travel, Mr. Obama proved himself to be less timid than Hillary Clinton, who shuns the idea. But even his proposal offers less than meets the eye. He does not suggest anything so revolutionary as, say, letting all Americans decide for themselves whether to visit Castro’s tropical prison isle. He would allow only Cuban-Americans to go, or send money.

As for our vain effort to starve Havana into submission, Mr. Obama says he would be willing to “ease” the blockade — not lift it, merely ease it — only if, after Fidel is gone, the “government begins opening Cuba to democratic change.” Well, imagine that.

It’s not bad enough that the embargo has been the diplomatic equivalent of the Chicago Cubs — an infallible loser for an astonishing length of time. It’s also at odds with our approach to most other communist governments, most notably China. There, we trust that over time, commerce and contact with the West will undermine state control and foster freedom. The experience of recent years validates that belief. Yet the U.S. government takes the position that any policy appropriate to China cannot possibly work in Cuba.

The explanation for this lapse in logic is political. Cuban-Americans mostly support the embargo, and they are a small but active voting bloc in Florida — a state that can easily decide a presidential election (as in 2000). So both parties are leery of challenging the status quo.

Mr. Obama’s proposal would be notable if it risked losing votes among Cuban-Americans. In fact, it roughly approximates the position taken by John Kerry in 2004.

It may not be a shock to find that the Illinois senator, who vows to change the way Washington works, plans no such change in how Washington works on Cuba. But it does suggest that the only place to find Mr. Obama and audacity in close proximity is on the cover of his book.

Steve Chapman is a nationally syndicated columnist.