Cuba!

Charlie Rangel and Jeff Flake had a good op-ed in Saturday’s Washington Post about Cuba policy:

We should unite around a principle that Democrats and Republicans have long embraced, a principle that aided the West’s success in the Cold War: American openness is a source of strength, not a concession to dictatorships.

It is time to permit free travel to Cuba, as provided in legislation we have introduced. Open travel would create a “free flow of ideas” that “would promote democratization,” as dissident Oscar Espinosa Chepe wrote shortly after his release from prison in 2004. It would also bring humanitarian benefits to Cubans as family visits increase and travelers boost Cuba’s small but vital entrepreneurial sector.

Electoral politics should not prevent us from reaching out to 11 million neighbors who have lived under communism for 48 long years.

In a word, yes, yes, and yes. Although it’ll have no impact on this administration, anything that puts a dent in the insanity of US Cuba policy is remakably welcome. We’re currently pursuing a policy towards Cuba that a) reduces the chance of regime change, b) hurts both importers and exporters in the American South, which, as detailed in a recent Economist article, would benefit immensely from the opening of trade with Cuba, and c) hurts ordinary Cubans. I know that I’m not telling you anything new here, but that in itself is an astounding phenomenon. How odd is it that a policy that hurts almost everyone involved is barely even controversial on the American political scene?

The answer to the Cuba dilemma always comes down to Florida electoral votes. What’s less often asked, however, is why the Cuban exile community settled around the embargo policy. The Taiwanese-American community, for example, seems happy to invest in China, and while I know less of the Vietnamese exile community in the United States, I haven’t heard the argument that it posed much of an obstacle to the return of American investment to Vietnam. I do wonder whether the preferences of the Cuban exile community have more to do with the form that regime change takes, rather than regime change itself. Many of the exiles seem to continue to harbor fantasies about the return of property lost in the Revolution, and the sort of incremental regime change that economic and political openness towards Cuba would most likely facilitate is conversely least likely to result in compensation for lost property. A sudden counter-revolution, on the other hand, in which the exiles get to return as conquering heroes might produce better prospects for a return to 1959.

It’s an insane fantasy, which would be fine if it weren’t for the grip that the insanity has had on US policy.

Cross posted to TAPPED.