If Cuba is bad, it must be America's fault

Beware! The Castro apologists are out in force this morning.

Nitwits like labor union leader Steve Thornton, writing in the Hartford (Conn.) Courant:

Before Fidel Castro's revolution took hold in 1959, Cuba was America's brothel, a place where, as Arthur Schlesinger wrote, "my fellow countrymen reeled through the streets, picking up 14-year-old Cuban girls and tossing coins to make men scramble in the gutter." Fidel and his barbudos delivered their country from organized crime, official corruption and U.S. domination. They were determined to disprove President William Howard Taft's prediction that "the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally."

For 45 years, the United States has maintained an economic embargo on Cuba in an attempt to destabilize Fidel's government by strangling its people. But several have condemned this brutal tactic, including the United Nations and the late Pope Paul II. The U.S. blockade mentality has failed, as have assassination attempts, sabotage and invasion.

It may be time to engage this small island nation, whose leader has already outlasted nine U.S. presidents. One way is to recognize what we have in common, both the good and the bad. In Connecticut, that means politics, commerce and baseball.

(Note to Thornton and others who use that tired line: Fidel Castro has survived nine U.S. presidents because since he took power in 1959, there have been 12 presidential elections in the United States. In Cuba, there have been zero.)

And then there is Florida academic Paolo Spadoni, who argues in the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel that it's too much to ask for Cuba to release political prisoners and hold free elections:

Washington would be willing to lift the embargo and pursue re-engagement with Havana only if the latter were prepared to hold free and fair elections, respect human rights, release political prisoners, permit the creation of independent organizations, and embrace a market-oriented economic system. In other words, all Cuba has to change is everything it is today.

What are the chances that such a dramatic transformation will happen anytime soon?

Virtually zero.

But Cuba has not remained exactly the same over the past decade and a half. The Castro regime promoted some significant liberalizing economic reforms around the mid-1990s, and its attitude toward internal dissent has alternated between periods of harsh crackdowns to others of greater tolerance. And since Raul Castro became acting president last July, a debate has been taking place at different levels of Havana's government over potential economic changes to the island's socialist system. Last December, Raul even went so far as to propose negotiations with Washington for a normalization of relations.

Not surprisingly, the United States rejected the offer by reiterating that it will consider negotiations only when the Cuban regime opens democratically. Yet, for a country that has severed almost all ties with Cuba and has practically no leverage over developments on the island, putting forward the same rigid conditions for rapprochement that could never be met in the past is not a very effective approach.

To sum up, apologists like Spadoni and Thornton argue it's all America's fault that Cuba has a gulag, the people are hungry and the opposition is repressed. By trying to change all that, we only make it worse.