It's Time For The U.S. To End Its Senseless Embargo Of Cuba - by Daniel Hanson, Dayne Batten & Harrison Ealey

Havana, Cuba

For the first time in more than fifty years, Cuban citizens can travel abroad without permission from their government.  The move, part of a broader reform package being phased in by Raul Castro, underscores the irrationality of America’s continuation of a five-decade old embargo.

While the embargo has been through several legal iterations in the intervening years, the general tenor of the U.S. position toward Cuba is a hardline not-in-my-backyard approach to communism a la the Monroe Doctrine.  The official position is outdated, hypocritical, and counterproductive.

The Cuban embargo was inaugurated by a Kennedy administration executive order in 1960 as a response to the confiscation of American property in Cuba under the newly installed Castro regime.

The current incarnation of the embargo – codified primarily in the Helms-Burton Act – aims at producing free markets and representative democracy in Cuba through economic sanctions, travel restrictions, and international legal penalties.

Since Fidel Castro abdicated power to his brother Raul in 2008, the government has undertaken more than 300 economic reforms designed to encourage enterprise, and restrictions have been lifted on property use, travel, farming, municipal governance, electronics access, and more.  Cuba is still a place of oppression and gross human rights abuse, but recent events would indicate the 11 million person nation is moving in the right direction.

Despite this progress, the U.S. spends massive amounts of money trying to keep illicit Cuban goods out of the United States.  At least 10 different agencies are responsible for enforcing different provisions of the embargo, and according to the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government devotes hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man hours to administering the embargo each year.

At the Miami International Airport, visitors arriving from a Cuban airport are seven times more likely to be stopped and subjected to further customs inspections than are visitors from other countries.  More than 70 percent of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control inspections each year are centered on rooting out smuggled Cuban goods even though the agency administers more than 20 other trade bans.  Government resources could be better spent on the enforcement of other sanctions, such as illicit drug trade from Columbia, rather than the search for contraband cigars and rum.

Note EU-Digest: Lifting the embargo and establishing normal trade relations would be an economic bonanza for both Cuba and the US . Its high  time to end this embargo which has far outlived its cold-war purpose..

Read more: It's Time For The U.S. To End Its Senseless Embargo Of Cuba - Forbes