When it comes to Cuba, the deja view from Washington remains frustratingly familiar.
Last week’s talks on immigration between notably high-level American and Cuban officials in Havana showed promise. Such talks had been suspended for six years. The promise imploded into polemics and recriminations, however, after U.S. officials met with Cuban dissidents.
Explained a senior State Department official: “Worldwide we have a policy of reaching out. We’re not inclined to make exceptions to that.”
How principled. One dissident size fits all.
Indeed, why not treat Cuba precisely the same as every other off-shore sovereign with whom we’ve imposed a counterproductive Cold War embargo for 48 years? Obviously the Bush-Cheney playbook never noted that “helping” such dissidents helps neither the cause of normalized Cuban-American relations — and the economic, geo-political and humanitarian benefits inherently resulting — nor the dissidents.
And speaking of the embargo, here’s the take of Cuba’s internationally renown (“Generation Y”) blogger Yoani Sanchez, named by Time magazine as one of its “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2008:
“Far from suffocating the ruling class of the island, these trade restrictions create material difficulties for the population and feed the radicalization of the ideological discourse inside Cuba. The embargo has been an argument to justify the unproductive and inefficient state-run economy, including the total ruin of various sectors. Worse than that, it has been used to support the maxim: ‘In a country under siege, dissent is treason,’ which contributes to the lack of freedoms for my fellow citizens.”