George Will: Embargo helps Castro but ... (UPDATED)

And that is a big "but," the columnist writes in his latest column:

The embargo was imposed when Cuba was a salient of Soviet values and interests in this hemisphere. Today, Cuba is a sad, threadbare geopolitical irrelevancy. Far from threatening Castro's regime, the embargo has enabled Castro to exploit Cubans' debilitating mentality of taking comfort from victimhood — the habit, more than a century old, of blaming problems on others, first on Spain and then on the United States.

Those facts do not, however, by themselves make the case for ending the embargo without some reciprocal liberalization by (the other) Castro's regime. Granted, it is arguable that the embargo should be abandoned, or significantly eased, regardless of how the Cuban regime behaves, because the regime has much to fear from any increased permeation of Cuba by foreign commercial and intellectual presences.

Will goes on to dismantle the line of argument that holds that what is good for U.S. policy on China, is good enough for the policy on Cuba:

U.S. policy toward Cuba should, however, be conditioned, and perhaps haunted, by U.S. policy toward China. That policy was supposed to result in steady, slow-motion regime change through candid subversion in broad daylight. The premise has been that the cure for communism is commerce with the capitalist world. The assumption is that capitalism brings, because it requires, an ethic of trust and the rule of law in the form of promise-keeping (contracts). Also, the protection of private property gives individuals a sphere of sovereignty and whets their appetites for a politics of popular sovereignty.

This has been called "the Starbucks fallacy" (see James Mann's book "The China Fantasy"): When people become accustomed to many choices of coffee, they will demand many political choices. This doctrine may be being refuted by the emergence of a China that has become wealthier without becoming less authoritarian.

Cuba has negligible democratic traditions and no living experience with a culture of pluralism and persuasion. In Iraq, Russia and elsewhere, we have seen how decades of tyranny degrade a public's capacity for a democratic culture. We also have tested, and found questionable, the proposition that democratic institutions can precede and create such a culture.

Will may have gone too far in comparing Cuba with Iraq and Russia, which have nothing like the Cuban Constitution of 1940 to fall back on. But he is right: The embargo should not be lifted until the dictatorship proves that it is willing to make the neccessary transition to democracy. That must come first because as Will notes about China, there's no evidence it can work in reverse.

Will's column also addresses the money that Cuban exiles send back to the island. President Bush has tightened limits on such remittances — limits I hold should be lifted on humanitarian grounds.

Will poses a counter-argument:

The embargo is being partially vitiated by dollars — about a billion of them, equivalent to about 2 percent of Cuba's gross domestic product — sent to Cuba by the Cuban diaspora, 1.5 million strong. That diaspora supports the embargo, but dollar remittances from abroad can be spent only in government stores, so they accrue to the benefit of the regime.

UPDATED, March 9, 2008

RCAB offers another take on what the writer calls Will's "bigoted attack on Cubans."

The money quote:

At the same time, Cubans are also to blame, according to Will, for "Cuba [having] negligible democratic traditions, and no living experience with a culture of pluralism and persuasion." First, this is not true. The Cuban Republic (1902-1958) in 56 years elected 10 constitutional presidents and no Cuban was ever executed or imprisoned for his political beliefs before 1959. Yes, Cuban democratic traditions were fragile (thanks to the Platt Amendment and other usurpations) but they would certainly have become more robust if Eisenhower's State Department and The New York Times had not installed Fidel Castro in power and Kennedy and his "best and brightest" agreed to make the U.S. the guarantor of Communism on the island. But, there I go, again, acting like a typical Cuban and blaming others for fucking up my country.