By John F. Di Leo –
Reflections on the Trump Administration's changes to our Cuba policy
In 1959, following six years of organized Marxist-Leninist rebellion, mostly run by Fidel and Raul Castro and their partner Che Guevera, the Battista government of Cuba was overthrown and Fidel Castro claimed dictatorial powers, which he eventually turned over to his brother Raul, in 2008.
The Castros spent their sixty years not only oppressing their people – robbing, raping, beating, imprisoning, torturing, and killing, as all communist governments do – but they also spent those years, particularly the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, spreading violent revolution across the third world. They spent thirty years as the might, partnered with the Kremlin’s money, leading revolutions in Africa, Central and South America, and Asia.
In all those years, many other formerly communist governments have changed people and philosophies. The Soviet Union broke up, and many of its former vassal states have embraced free markets and free people. Several others outside the Former Soviet Union have as well… but Cuba never did. Cuba is still run by Raul Castro, the mass murdering enforcer of the 26th of July Movement of the 1950s.
The man who rules Cuba doesn’t figuratively “have blood on his hands;” in this case, the term is applied literally.
The Obama Administration
The USA’s approach to the presence of a violent communist satellite 90 miles from our shores has changed back and forth over the years. We had nearly complete sanctions – no business commerce of any kind, almost no private personal travel at all – for most of those 60 years, but the Obama administration, being from the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, worked to undermine such sanctions, to the extent that they could, politically.
The public understands the original reason for our sanctions on Cuba; they remember the violence, the Stalinist stories of secret police and torture chambers, perhaps even the original murders and robberies, the original nationalization of American-owned property during the revolution. But the public has been fed a line – by celebrities, by Democrat politicians, and by the mass media – that those days are past, that the Cold War is over, so Cold War policies should go by the wayside.
What this line neglects to acknowledge is that only part of the Cold War is over, not the whole thing. The Soviet Union fell, but Cuba’s revolutionary communist government did not. So it’s not the same thing at all… but the political Right in the USA has not been as effective as has our political Left in making its case to the American people.
In many ways, Cuba is today the last hope for Marxism on earth. The Soviet experiment collapsed… the Chinese have found peace with a “joint venture” based socialism-capitalism fusion… but Cuba lives on, still every bit as Stalinist as it was in the 1960s.
So the Obama administration did what it could to soften our opposition to Cuba, painting it as a human rights issue: People are starving, why not allow generous Americans to send money to their relatives? People are poor, why not let generous Americans help them out? People want to work in resort hotels and casinos, why stop American tourists from giving them business?
In framing it this way, the Obama administration was able to sidestep the more critical human rights issues involved: The REASON that people are poor, people are hungry, people are starving, people are unemployed, is that they live in a communist command economy, with massive numbers of political prisoners, tortured and killed in government prisons, even today. The reason is that their government is concerned with maintaining its absolute power over an enslaved people, rather than being concerned with the people’s betterment.
But we don’t see this. The Obama administration obstructed our once-clear vision of the problems of Cuba, and rewrote policies. They reopened diplomatic relations, allowed cruise ships to call their ports, allowed more American tourists to travel their directly, allowed Americans to just send money.
It sounds so generous, it’s hard to oppose. If we believe in freedom, then shouldn’t we believe in allowing generous donors to make donations, any way they want? It all sounds so reasonable, so big-hearted, and so modern.
The Problem of Fungibility
The problem is, like so many political issues, this approach doesn’t tell the whole story.
The Cuban military owns the hotels, or tolerates semi-private ownership with massive taxation. So yes, a US hotel chain can open a hotel in Cuba, but their profits will be confiscated by the government.
One would assume that no sane business would want to operate on such terms, but they would, because of the nature of the modern global economy. A company that lacks a Cuban presence may lose business to a competitor that has a Cuban presence, so they will establish a hotel there, or a port call there, even though it will operate at a loss, just to gain market share.
The definition of fungibility is that money that goes into a fund can be thought of as financing everything else that the fund finances, even if you had different intentions, even if you disapprove of the use.
So, no matter what you target money for, in a command economy, that money will eventually go into a pool and be spent on whatever the government wants to spend money on. This is unavoidable.
Those taxes paid by the hotels, those port fees paid by the cruise ships, those convention hall event fees paid by associations visiting on business, those tourism dollars spent by individuals, those checks sent by American Cubans to their cousins back home in Cuba… what happens to all that money once it gets there?
The Cuban government takes it.
That’s really all there is to it. The Cuban government takes the money, in taxes and fees and other confiscations… employees are paid, and taxed… businesses earn fees for their dinners and hotel rooms and tours, and are taxed… every tax – up to 90% for businesses – is poured into the government’s treasury.
And what does the Cuban government spend its tax dollars on?
Tyranny.
Yes, we must use that word, because it is the right word, however unpleasant.
The Castro government has not changed: they still have soldiers listening at street corners for dissent. They still use the schools to teach global communism and Marxist economics. People still “disappear,” to be tortured in prisons or executed for crimes against the state, just for advocating liberty. Just like in the 1960s.
In Cuba, nothing has changed except the fact that their old gravy train – the Soviet Union – dried up in the early 1990s.
Ever since the fall of the USSR, Cuban communists have been trying to find a way to get Americans to replace Russia as their enabler. This would have been unthinkable forty years ago, but today, anything is possible, in a world gone mad, a world that has forgotten the laws of economics, and of reason and logic.
It should be self-evident that any money spent in or sent to Cuba just props up the Castro regime. This shouldn’t even need to be explained… but tragically, it does.
Every cent we spend there – from port calls by pleasure boats and cruise ships, to trade shows at Havana’s resorts, to cash that we wire to our cousins – every cent just goes to prop up the bloodthirsty regime a little longer.
Every tourist dollar and investment dollar enables Castro (and his hand-picked successors, already waiting in the wings) to keep running their prisons, to keep snatching people in the dark of night, to keep whipping and beating the innocent, to keep murdering the vocal.
The Cuban government is the diametric opposite to everything that we Americans believe government ought to be. It is unconscionable that we would even consider doing anything to prop it up further, when it should so clearly be close to its deathbed at last.
The Trump administration is now working to reverse at least some, possibly many, of the afore-mentioned Obama-era regulatory changes regarding Cuba. It’s high time, and the Trump administration is right to do so.
This is a challenge, from a PR perspective, for the reasons mentioned above. Many don’t remember why we put these sanctions on Cuba in the first place. Many don’t realize that the situations between Cuba and Russia are no longer analogous, since the Kremlin fell but the Castros did not.
And many do not realize that money is fungible, so our well-intentioned efforts cannot alleviate human rights abuses, they can only prop them up.
What we need to understand – specifically, what the Trump administration needs to better communicate – is that WE are the ones who have compassion for those suffering in Cuba, not the Left. We are the ones who understand not just THAT they suffer, but WHY they suffer.
And we are the ones who understand that we cannot send a suffering Cuban any salve for their wounds without providing the energy for their tormentors to keep inflicting those very wounds in the first place.
Sending money to Cuba doesn’t reduce human rights abuses; it IS a human rights abuse.
Compliments to the Trump administration for understanding this, and for having the courage to try to do the right thing.
The time to prop up a tyrannical government is never. When Cuba’s communist government falls and the people rise in freedom, that’s the time to restore trade with Cuba.
But not one day sooner.
Copyright 2017 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, actor, and writer. His columns are found regularly in Illinois Review.
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