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Opinion Editorial
Monday, April 6, 1998
The Real Cause of Cuba's Poverty	Since 1960, the United States has imposed an almost total embargo on trade with Cuba by Americans. The initial purpose of the embargo was to punish Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro for seizing American-owned assets in Cuba. At the time, almost 70 percent of all Cuban exports, four-fifths of which was sugar, went to the U.S. However, many observers believe that the embargo actually helped push Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union, which came to his aid in the wake of the embargo. In the 1970s and 1980s, the embargo was maintained to retaliate against Cuba's support for Communist revolutionaries in Latin America and elsewhere. With the collapse of world Communism in the 1990s, however, Cuba has ceased its provocations. As a result, many people are now asking whether it is time to end the Cuban embargo. Ironically, the main beneficiary of the Cuban embargo is Castro himself, who has a convenient scapegoat to blame for the failure of his economic policies. Cuba still practices centralized economic planning and prohibits private ownership of property, leading to stagnant growth. This, rather than the U.S. embargo, is the real cause of Cuba's poverty, which is well documented in a recent report from the State Department's Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (available at http://www.state.gov). According to the report, Cuba was one of the most well developed countries in the world in 1959. Today it is one of the least, lagging behind even some of the poorer countries of Latin America. Daily food consumption in Cuba, as measured by calorie intake, has fallen 16 percent since Castro took power and is now well below other Latin American countries (see figure). Telephones, radios and autos per capita have remained at pre-Castro levels, while rising sharply almost everywhere else. Cubans' health and literacy are high, it is true, but they were already high before Castro. Thus the State Department report concludes, "Cuba has at best maintained what were already high levels of development in health and education, but at an extraordinary cost to the overall welfare of the Cuban people." The Organization of American States, which originally supported the Cuban embargo, lifted its sanctions in 1975. Since then, trade and commerce between Cuba and the rest of Latin America has grown steadily. In practice, this means that the only people now suffering from the embargo are American businessmen and investors who are deprived of the opportunity to profit from trade with Cuba. There is no longer any real rationale for the Cuban embargo. It is time to ditch it. Source: Bruce Bartlett (senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis), April 6, 1998. Home |  Support Us |  All Issues |  Social Security Debate Central |  Contact Us