It’s A Gray Area:

Back on Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and installed his own government. People tend to forget that one of the main reasons Castro was successful was that Batista was generally despised by his own people.

As a result, most of the cities held by Batista’s forces were abandoned to Castro without a fight.

Unfortunately, as with the revolutions in Russia and France and many other countries, the new governments after the revolutions are often worse than the old ones. In many ways that was true in Cuba.

Of course, our country’s government was opposed to Castro’s government from the start, and has been consistently opposed to it ever since.

But our decades-long embargo has not punished Castro or his government — he himself is doing just fine financially, thank you very much. In fact, that policy, which is aimed at deposing Castro, has been so “successful” that he is now the longest-reigning head of state in the world!

But unfortunately, our embargo does continue to punish the Cuban people. Accordingly, it is long since time to change our policy and normalize our relationships with Cuba.

Today, the United States is virtually the only country in the world that persists in the economic embargo of Cuba.

Big tour ships from Brazil, Canada and many countries in Europe regularly make stops in Havana, and Cuban cigars and other products are widely available in commercial markets in virtually all other countries but ours. And, ironically enough, our dollars are the de facto currency in Cuba for most non-governmental transactions.

We dissolved our trade and travel embargoes on China in 1979 and Vietnam in 1995. Why? Because as a practical matter we decided that bringing these nations into the mainstream of the global economy would at least moderate their regimes and maybe even nudge them toward democracy. In doing so we realized that the best ambassadors for our institutions and our way of life are the free flow of goods, services, people and ideas between our country and theirs.

As a direct result of that enlightened policy, China is far more free today both economically and socially than it was when we reestablished relations, and it has even become a host of the Olympic Games. And although Vietnam still has a long way to go in human rights issues, its government has loosened its grip on power in many economic areas.