Juan J Lopez. Orbis. Volume 44, Issue 3, Summer 2000.
Whenever the question is raised as to the unilateral U.S. embargo on the Cuban government “works,” scholars and political critics usually answer no. A common argument is that it has failed to destroy Fidel Castro’s dictatorial regime and imposes unjustifiable costs on American firms in terms of forfeited businesses with Cuba. Critics of the embargo argue that engagement would be a more effective means to accomplish political liberalization and ultimate democratization in Cuba.
The question of whether economic sanctions work, however; cannot be answered without considering their objectives, which is to say the foreign policy goals that the sanctioning state expects to achieve. Although an imposer of sanctions may have more than one objective in a given case, the purposes of economic sanctions can be classified according to the main foreign policy goal sought.For example, Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Elliott have classified sanctions according to five categories depending on whether they are designed: (a) to change the target country’s policies in a modest way; (b) to change the target country’s policies in a major way; (c) to destabilize the target government; (d) to disrupt a minor military adventure; and/or (e) to impair the military potential of the target country. Additional objectives of economic sanctions noted by Lawrence Brady include: (a) to signal a target country of a resolve to resist its aggression; and (b) to signal a target country that its conduct is considered unacceptable and to raise the possibility that others will condemn it as well.
Currently, the most salient objectives mentioned in the discussion of U.S. sanctions against the Castro regime are to signal disapproval of Cuba’s violations of human rights and other reprehensible behavior, to change Cuban policies, to destabilize the Castro regime and hasten a transition to democracy, and perhaps to impair the military potential of Havana. The mere fact of the embargo is sufficient to fulfill the first and last goals. But what of the rest? Is there evidence to measure progress toward destabilizing Castro’s rule? The answer is yes, although critics and supporters of the embargo on Cuba have barely, if ever, addressed the relevant scholarly literature that provides important theoretical insights and empirical findings germane to whether the U.S. embargo should be maintained.
While the international relations literature about economic sanctions in general can help us to assess the utility of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, the Cuban case in turn provides data to help evaluate the effectiveness of unilateral economic sanctions. Two previously isolated bodies of theory and data can be brought to bear: the literature on economic sanctions as a means of fostering change in political regimes, and the extensive theoretical and empirical literature on transitions to democracy.
The argument here is that any critique of the U.S. embargo in terms of the usual ineffectiveness of unilateral sanctions to change policies or behaviors is misdirected for the simple reason that the U.S. embargo does not have this aim. Rather, its aim now is to bring about a regime change, i.e., to foster a transition to democracy in Cuba. And consistent with previous findings on the successes of economic sanctions in destabilizing target governments, the U.S. embargo is weakening the Castro dictatorship and thereby contributing to its eventual demise. To explain why the Castro government has not fallen would require a separate discussion beyond the scope of this article. However, a key factor in explaining its survival has been the unwillingness of the Clinton administration to complement the embargo with measures to intensify regime destabilization. Moreover, it is unreasonable to believe that engagement, that is, the establishment of diplomatic and economic relations with the Cuban government, will lead to political liberalization. Indeed, the hypothesis of the engagement thesis to the effect that economic development brings about democracy is refuted by strong evidence, and the assumption that foreign enterprises would promote political change in the host country is untenable.
Why Engagement Cannot Topple Regimes
Changing a target state’s policies or behavior as an objective of economic sanctions is important in the discussion of the U.S. embargo because this goal is implicit in one of the main criticisms of the embargo. For example, when USA Engage argues that unilateral economic sanctions are ineffective, the putative ineffectiveness is evaluated in terms of the utility of economic sanctions in changing the target’s policies. This is inevitably so because the hope for success is placed on inflicting high economic costs on the target. But such costs are not likely to be high in situations of unilateral sanctions, because other countries may readily supply the targeted state with the trade or loans denied it by the sanctioning state.
However, it is utterly unfounded to criticize the U.S. embargo of Cuba on these grounds because the major goal of the U.S. embargo at present is not behavioral change, but regime change. That goal was made explicit in the enactment and implementation of the Cuba Libertad (or Helms-Burton) Act of 1996. A key mechanism by which Helms-Burton is supposed to contribute to a democratic transition is by tightening the economic embargo and thus reducing the hard currency available to the Castro government. President Clinton, members of his administration, and congressional supporters of the measure have all emphasized the same justification.
Even if one accepts that the U.S. embargo should be judged in terms of its contribution to promoting a transition to democracy, its critics insist that engagement would be a more effective policy to achieve the-same end. So let us first consider whether their contention bears examination.
The nature of the Cuban regime is such that it is unjustified to think that engagement can induce the Castro government to implement political liberalization. Havana is controlled by hardliners, led by Fidel Castro himself, who oppose any change in the status quo. There are no regime “softliners” (those who believe that some degree of political liberalization is necessary for the dictatorship to endure) with sufficient power and autonomy to conduct negotiations concerning political liberalization with members of the moderate opposition. Were softliners in fact to emerge and display a willingness to negotiate with democratic moderates, they would be quickly eliminated or demoted by hardliners. It is important to add that the standard conception of softliners in the literature on transitions to democracy involves those advocating political liberalization, not economic reform, because some scholars attempting to conjure up moderates in the Cuban ruling elite count advocates of market reforms (even if very limited ones) as softliners. But a cogent example demonstrating that economic reformers in Cuba are not political softliners is Carlos Lage, Cuba’s minister of economy, who stated on September 2, 1999, that there is already a democracy in Cuba while at the same time advocating the influx of foreign investment.
The fact that the U.S. embargo has been in place since 1962 and the Cuban dictatorship has endured is taken by critics of the embargo as an indication that the economic sanctions have failed. Those who make this argument disregard the fact that, for a long time, Cuba has had diplomatic and commercial relations with most other countries. Not only have Latin American and European countries engaged the Cuban government in diplomatic and trade relations, but some leaders from these countries have tried many times to persuade the Cuban government to take steps toward political liberalization without the least success. In short, the Cuban government has failed to respond to positive inducements. For example, Havana has not accepted the offer of the European Union to establish an economic cooperation agreement that would facilitate trade, investments, and aid in exchange for Cuba’s respecting human rights and moving toward political liberalization. Both Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, the second in command in the ruling elite, have consistently rejected any negotiations to improve relations with the United States that would include preconditions involving Cuba’s domestic policies.
Likewise, the visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba, while it may have inspired slightly more tolerance for religious expression, has had no political impact to date. Nor have visits by government officials from many countries and other signs that “the world was opening up to Cuba” (as the pope observed) translated into political liberalization. On the contrary, in March 1999 the Cuban government established a law imposing up to twenty years in prison and other punishments on people who dared to exercise their rights of free speech. In the same month, the Cuban government tried four dissidents in a secret trial and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from three and one-half to five years. Their crime, for which they were first imprisoned in July 1997, was to author a document, “The Homeland Belongs to All,” that criticized the Castro government.
The engagement thesis also claims that economic development tends to promote democracy, an old hypothesis dating from the 1950s work of Seymour Martin Lipset. But the empirical evidence of the past fifty years suggests that this hypothesis is also false. Countries under dictatorial regimes are not more likely to experience a transition to democracy as they reach higher levels of economic development. Nevertheless, the idea that development generates democracy continues to be presented as if it were true and is one of the key arguments used by USA Engage to justify its opposition to the U.S. embargo.
Samuel Huntington has also argued that economic development produces democracy by creating new sources of wealth and power outside state control. However, if one considers the intervening mechanism between development and democracy in Huntington’s reasoning, one finds that, whatever its validity elsewhere, it does not hold up in the Cuban case. If increased wealth simply accrues to the state, as in Cuba, then (as Huntington himself acknowledges) the additional revenue merely increases the power of the state and makes no contribution to democratization.
Foreign investment in Cuba occurs through joint ventures between multinational firms and local state enterprises, which, with rare exceptions, are the majority shareholders. Joint ventures employ only 1.3 percent of the working-age population, and the Cuban workers in these enterprises are subjected to special exploitation by the state. First, foreign firms cannot hire workers directly, because the state provides the work force through a special government employment agency (ACOREC). Secondly, the Cuban state exacts revenue from foreign investment through wage confiscation to the tune of $361 million per year, one of the largest (if not the largest) sources of government revenue. On average, the state receives from foreign investors $450 per month per worker but pays workers in Cuban pesos the equivalent of approximately $10 per month, an amount that hardly suffices for subsistence. Hence, foreign investment is not a mechanism for the generation of wealth and power among the population, but rather a subsidy that merely abets Havana’s exploitation of virtual slave labor and provides it with an important source of hard currency.
Such capitalism as Castro has been forced to accept since the halt of Soviet assistance, therefore, is strictly confined to enclaves in which the key actors and beneficiaries are foreign capitalists and the state. The very limited space that the government allowed, starting in 1993, for Cuban citizens to engage in private entrepreneurship has been substantially stifled since 1996. A crackdown on Cuban private businesses has driven thousands of these enterprises to close and intensified the difficulties for those who manage to continue operating. The Cuban government is free to permit more private-sector activity, for instance, among farmers, and the U.S. embargo does not prevent it from doing so. But the government refuses to do so for political reasons. Lifting the U.S. embargo would not lead to a significant expansion of market reforms in the domestic economy. It would only provide the state more windfall profits while fostering very little diffusion of wealth among citizens at large.
Foreign Capitalists as Promoters of Democracy
So much for the thesis that diplomatic and economic relationships “automatically” promote economic development and democracy. But there is a third aspect to the engagement thesis, which is that foreign enterprises serve directly to promote political change in the host country. Much was made, for instance, of the more liberal labor and racial policies of U.S. multinationals operating in South Africa during apartheid. But William Hawkins has argued in a recent article that foreign companies investing in countries ruled by dictatorships in fact tend to defend the dictatorships as a way of protecting their business interests. This phenomenon would seem to be even more likely in countries such as Cuba where foreign investment takes the form of joint ventures with the government. And foreign investors in Cuba do indeed seem to receive substantial concessions from the government, such as repatriation of 100 percent of profits. Foreign firms operate with a labor system that grossly exploits Cuban workers, and some enterprises have used property confiscated by the government from Americans and Cubans. Moreover, joint ventures violate laws to protect the natural environment–and do so with government consent. Thus, one likely result of the end of the dictatorship and the advent of a democratic government would be that foreign investors would find the agreements they made with the Castro regime changed or nullified. It is also possible that large fines would be imposed on foreign investors to clean up the environment and compensate workers for past wage confiscation. In addition, disappropriated Americans and Cubans would confront such investors with extensive claims.
Finally, foreign investors in Cuba would, after a political transition, likely face an angry political backlash. Many Cubans, both in exile and on the island, consider foreign investors to be collaborators of the dictatorship who help to lengthen the life of the Castro government and are partially responsible for prolonging the suffering of the Cuban people. One example indicating such resentment is a pamphlet dated March 1999 addressed to all foreign enterprises and circulated by a pro-democracy group in Cuba. Among the points made are that: (a) the foreign businesses are illegal and perpetuate the regime in power; (b) when the change toward democracy occurs, such businesses will be taken to court because of their illegal actions in alliance with Castro’s government; (c) businesses should not assume that the Cuban Communist regime can offer them any kind of security, because none of the documents signed by the present regime, their entities, or authorized third parties will be of any value after democracy exists; and (d) after being taken to court to clarify businesses’ legality, they will be free to operate on the island when there is a democratic legal system. In June 1999, Cuban-American lawyers went so far as to file a class-action suit in Florida against foreign investors in Cuba for violating international labor laws.
In sum, foreign entrepreneurs seem to have tied the fate of their businesses in Cuba to the survival of the dictatorship, prompting the observation by Jesus Zuniga that every foreign investor there ends up being a lobbyist for the Cuban government abroad. Moreover, in Cuba, foreign enterprises are not breeding grounds for democracy. Data from 1,023 interviews of recent exiles show that 75 percent of them consider that workers in foreign enterprises are subject to more control by the political police than is usual for the country.
Sanctions Designed to Force Regime Change
Economic sanctions meant to destabilize foreign governments often involve a superpower as the sanctioner and a small country as the target. Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott conclude that economic sanctions, accompanied by other policies, can be quite successful in undermining governments. In over half of the cases they considered, destabilization efforts were successful, but they emphasize that economic sanctions alone, unassisted by complementary measures, seldom succeed in this objective. Moreover, international cooperation is not important in determining the success of sanctions in destabilizing target governments. Hence, the unilateral nature of U.S. sanctions would not destroy their ability to undermine the Castro government. One is therefore justified in asking not only what effect the U.S. embargo has had, but also whether other American policies toward Cuba reinforce the impact of the embargo so as to bring about the demise of the dictatorship.
A corresponding observation exists in the literature on transitions to democracy, which indicates that dictatorships tend to fall when faced with crises, including economic ones. In a cross-national statistical study involving 139 countries from 1950 to 1990, the authors found that dictatorships are more likely to survive when their economies grow and more likely to be destabilized when they face economic distress. Another study found that in a data set of twenty-seven dictatorships, twenty-one experienced economic decline prior to transitions to democracy. All communist dictatorships in the set (Poland, Nicaragua, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) experienced economic deterioration or stagnant, low rates of growth in the years before the demise of the dictatorships.
A widespread observation among scholars of Eastern European politics is that a key factor underlying the pressures leading to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was economic deterioration. A declining standard of living decreased people’s tolerance for the regimes. As their situations grew worse, the populations became more aware of the failure of their own regimes to provide an acceptable level of prosperity. The connection between deterioration of economic performance and transitions to democracy has also been observed in Latin America, where decreases in standards of living preceded the wave of democratization during the 1980s. Poor economic performance contributes to the demise of dictatorships by provoking latent or active opposition to the regime among citizens and groups within civil society who blame the government for their poverty. It also reduces the benefits enjoyed by active supporters of the regime and its coalition allies. Even in cases where economic crises are not the main source of factional conflicts within the ruling elite, deterioration of economic performance tends to widen cleavages among the rulers.
Before the end of the Soviet subsidies to Cuba, economic pressure on the Castro government as a consequence of the embargo was not a significant challenge to the stability of the regime. Today, the economic embargo significantly reduces the amount of resources available to Havana, and the lower a country’s gross national product, the greater the impact of a setback. Carmelo Mesa-Lago estimates that in 1985 Cuba’s gross domestic product per capita was $334, similar to that of impoverished Haiti. By 1996, however, the Cuban GDP per capita had dropped to just $61.
With the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Cuban economy plummeted. From 1989 to 1993, Cuba’s global social product decreased by 45 percent. Cuba lost socialist economic aid of more than $6 billion annually. After 1994, the tumble of the economy stopped. From the low level at which the economy found itself in 1993, the government reported 0.7 percent growth for 1994, 2.5 percent for 1995, 7.8 percent for 1996, and 2.5 percent for 1997. Since then, the Cuban economy has stagnated. Despite some economic growth since 1994, the living conditions for the population have not improved and seem to have deteriorated further.
Searching for data on costs to the Cuban government from the U.S. embargo since the end of non-market economic relations between Cuba and Eastern European countries, one finds a number of indications that the costs are significant. Juan Triana Cordovi, the director of the Center for Studies of the Cuban Economy in Havana, says that the direct costs of the embargo on the Cuban economy for 1998 was $700 million–an amount larger than the net revenues to the government from tourism. According to a study by a European Union think tank, the Cuba Democracy Act of 1992 cost Cuba about $1 billion in its first year on the books. The 1996 Cuba Libertad Act has also discouraged investment in Cuba from countries other than the United States, with the result that foreign firms have canceled, frozen, or quietly deferred planned projects there. Finns that have ended their business in Cuba since the signing of that law include the Spanish firms Occidental Hotels and Paradores Nacionales; the Mexican firm Cemex, Grupo Domos, PEMEX, and Grupo Vitro; the Canadian firm Redpath; and the South African mining company Gencor. Carlos Lage, the economy minister in Cuba, acknowledges that Helms-Burton has slowed down foreign investment. The embargo also has curtailed income from U.S. sources. Despite the problems that Cuba continues to have in attracting foreign investment due to political and economic problems unrelated to the embargo, it is to be expected that if the United States were to lift its embargo a number of American firms would invest there. Lifting the embargo would also provide significant hard-currency earnings from American tourists to the Cuban government. It is estimated that an end to the embargo could quickly double the number of tourists traveling to the country.
Economic Decline and the Weakening of the Dictatorship
As the Cuban economy shrank in the 1990s, the loyalty to the regime among its own cadres and the quiescence of the population at large decreased as well. A report from the Central Commission of Cadres, created to help the Council of Ministers evaluate the work of the top levels of the nomenklatura, stated that problems with salaries continued to impair the motivation of cadres. In meetings to discuss the party’s platform for the fifth national congress held in the fall of 1997, Communist Party members in Havana reported that a surprising number of cadres openly criticized the platform, rather than rubber-stamping it as in the past, on the grounds that it had no solutions to the economic problems Cubans face every day. According to one party member, “People are saying they don’t see the government admitting anything wrong or taking any real steps to get us out of our crisis; they are at the end of their ropes, depressed.” The regime also appears to be having problems motivating the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). In a meeting of CDR leaders held in Santiago de Cuba on April 1997, the national leader criticized local cadres for abandoning their mission of maintaining surveillance in their blocks and neighborhoods.
Most ominous of all for the regime are indications of concern over the loyalty of military officers. With the deterioration of the economy, a key role for the Cuban military has been to run agricultural and business enterprises such as department stores and tourist resorts. Since 1991, the size of the Cuban military has been reduced by about half, most of its equipment is unusable, and about 70 percent of soldiers’ time is devoted to non-military labor. A colonel in the Cuban air force who defected to the United States in 1994 testified to a growing discontent among professional officers in the Cuban military because they have been forced to work in the agricultural sector. The view of this defector is consistent with other evidence of poor morale and disillusionment with the regime within the armed forces.
The economic decline during the 1990s also correlates with a surge of open opposition from civilian groups and the general population. Compared with the 1980s, for example, the development of civil society is remarkable in terms of the number of independent groups and the challenges they present to the government. One striking indicator was a fast held by several democratic activists for forty days in Havana during June and July 1999 to demand respect for human rights. In solidarity with those in Havana, fifty-four other fasting sites were established throughout Cuba, and 143 independent groups declared their support. About 2,000 other activists and 136 individuals from the general population visited the Havana site during the fast, and across the island 6,288 individuals signed visitors’ registers at the fasting centers.
This growth of civil society is not due to the implementation of enclave capitalism in Cuba. Members of independent groups are routinely fired from their jobs in state institutions or enterprises, cannot obtain employment in joint ventures, and are denied licenses to operate as individual entrepreneurs. Activists depend for their subsistence on family members, friends, and support from abroad. Survey data show widespread dissatisfaction with microeconomic conditions, which is leading to louder criticism of the government. Many activities of opposition, including food riots, have arisen spontaneously from civil society as people have reacted to deprivation. Neighborhood residents have joined together to demand that the government provide them with resources to alleviate critical shortages of food, water, medical supplies, or other essential needs. Government workers, as well as self-employed individuals, have resorted to collective action to defend their economic interests from government abuses.
Existing Complementary Measures Are Inadequate
The U.S. embargo thus weakens the Cuban dictatorship and is contributing to its eventual demise. But the embargo has to be supplemented by other measures to bring about a political transition. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain in depth Castro’s staying power, but one key factor is quite simply the Clinton administration’s desire to avoid a political transition in Cuba driven by groups in civil society and the population. That is, the administration does not want a messy, spontaneous political transition in Cuba along the lines of East Germany or Romania. Yet a transition from below is the only feasible mode of transition under the current regime.
The argument that the success of economic sanctions in destabilizing target governments depends on complementary measures concurs with the findings of Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliot, who consider covert actions and quasi-military activities. But still more possibilities exist, including provision of enough material assistance to encourage the growth of civil society and provide independent channels of news and information to most of the population. The Clinton administration has done none of the above.
There is evidence that the diffusion of news and information from independent sources played a pivotal role in Eastern European transitions. Pronouncements from democratic activists directed at the population (dissidents were interviewed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty [RFE/RL], and their samizdat publications were used in broadcasts), information about activities of opposition groups, and news about the initial demonstrations must have been crucial in generating a widespread feeling of political efficacy among citizens that encouraged them to participate in protests demanding democratization.
East Germans had ready access to West German television and radio broadcasts. In Czechoslovakia, Radio Free Europe was jammed in the cities, but the BBC, Radio Free Europe, and other Western radio stations were easily received outside the cities, and sometimes it was possible to listen to foreign broadcasts within cities. In Czechoslovakia, Western radio broadcasts ceased to be jammed before the surge of demonstrations in November 1989. In Romania, foreign radio broadcasts were not jammed.
In comparison with Cuba, independent channels of communication in Eastern European countries had a much more extensive reach. Concomitantly, one finds a low sense of political efficacy in the Cuban population, something that constitutes a key obstacle to a transition. One possible channel of independent communication is independent publications produced and distributed within Cuba. However, such publications are practically nonexistent at present, probably due to the extreme shortages of money, equipment, and paper in the hands of democratic activists.
To be sure, section 170 (g) of the Cuba Democracy Act and section 109 of the Cuba Libertad Act call for appropriations to support democratization in Cuba. The budgeted allocation is about $3 million per year, administered by the USAID Cuba Program, but activists in Cuba receive only a fraction of the assistance. Substantial amounts are spent on projects in the United States that are irrelevant for bringing about a transition, such as the planning of free elections once a transition takes place. Moreover, the amount of funds the U.S. government provides for assistance to democracy-building efforts in Cuba is tiny by comparison to other cases of U.S. support for such efforts. Consider that the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 allocated $1.5 million per year to provide assistance to political prisoners and their families and promote human rights, and an additional $40 million per year to finance activities to end the apartheid system.
Besides samizdat publications, another source of independent communication is foreign radio and television broadcasts. In Cuba, almost everyone has a radio or television at home. Yet, the reception of foreign television broadcasts is practically nil. Of the foreign radio stations that manage to reach Cuba, the U.S.,sponsored Radio Marti has by far the largest audience, but its broadcasts are severely jammed. Interviews in four Cuban cities in September 1998 indicated that only 9 percent of the population listened regularly to Radio Marti. It is possible to improve its reach substantially at a modest cost, for example, by increasing the power of transmitters and broadcasting in more frequencies. But at present, Radio Marti broadcasts on just one AM frequency and three short-wave frequencies. By contrast, RFE/RL used as many as thirty short-wave frequencies to broadcast in Russian during the evening and usually twelve frequencies at other times. For broadcasts in Polish and Czech, RFE/RL typically used eight frequencies for each language.
The transmitters of Radio Marti are also much weaker than those of RFE/RL. Until November 1999, Radio Marti’s AM broadcasts used two transmitters of fifty kilowatts each, and only at night was it allowed to combine the two AM transmitters to use 100 kilowatts. In November 1999, it was announced that the AM broadcasts of Radio Marti would start using a 100-kilowatt transmitter. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty used a 150-kilowatt transmitter for AM broadcasts to Poland and Czechoslovakia. For short-wave broadcasts, Radio Marti uses 250-kilowatt transmitters. Since the 1980s, the international trend has been to use 500-kilowatt transmitters for short-wave frequencies. In an initiative under the Reagan administration, Congress in 1985 authorized funding to install six 500-kilowatt transmitters, and RFE/RL started to use 500-kilowatt transmitters before 1989. The use of 500-kilowatt transmitters can achieve at least 50 percent channel effectiveness in a jammed environment, which is considered a reliable broadcast signal.
The ineffectiveness of Radio and TV Marti has therefore resulted from a deliberate policy decision of the U.S. executive. This is an instance of a long-term pattern in the policies of the Clinton administration toward the Castro government, a pattern that points to a desire to maintain stability in Cuba rather than to foster a transition to democracy. During his first term, Clinton was moving toward the lifting or weakening of the U.S. embargo. He opposed the Helms-Burton bill, but then decided to back it after the Cuban air force shot down two small, unarmed U.S. civilian aircraft in international air space on February 24, 1996, killing the four men who piloted the planes. Title III of the Helms-Burton Act has never been implemented, and Title IV only in desultory fashion. Together, they aim at hindering foreign investment in properties confiscated from Americans or Cubans by the Castro government. Manifold evidence of the involvement of Cuba in drug trafficking has been dismissed, and the Clinton administration has sought a “partnership” with the Cuban government in the fight against drugs. The Clinton administration has looked favorably on efforts to improve the relations between the United States and the Castro regime. For example, when Illinois governor George Ryan went to Cuba in October 1999 with the intention of helping to end the U.S. economic embargo, the director of the Office of Cuban Affairs at the U.S. State Department sent a message to him saying that the State Department was “very pleased” with his visit. Likewise, the Cuba point man on the National Security Council told him that President Clinton was “delighted” with his visit to Cuba.
Statements by Clinton administration officials match their actions and indicate their desire to prevent the collapse of the dictatorship in Cuba. Nor is it unprecedented for American administrations to prefer stability to democracy in Latin America. On September 28, 1998, Michael Kosak, then the principal officer at the U.S. Interest Section in Havana, had this to say about U.S. policy toward Cuba:
Today, however, our primary concern is the one that did not exist twenty years ago. That is the issue of stability. If there is instability in Cuba, United States interests are directly implicated. The geography of the two countries is such that economic failure, political discord or civil disorder in Cuba produces potentially hundreds of thousands of migrants in the Florida straits in a very short period of time.
In his remarks, Kosak stated that chaos can only be avoided if there is negotiation between political reformers in the regime and members of the opposition. But there are no political reformers in the regime. Thus, the apparent conclusion that emerges from Kosak’s remarks is that a push by civil society for a transition to democracy, as occurred in East Germany and Czechoslovakia (where there were no political reformers in the regime to negotiate a transition with members of the opposition), would be chaotic in Cuba and should not be promoted by the U.S. government. Similarly, Michael Ranneberger, then head of the Cuba desk at the State Department, stated in a speech given at Tulane University in November 1998 that an unstable and chaotic transition in Cuba would be against the interests of the United States.
Conclusions
The debate over the effectiveness of the U.S. embargo on Cuba has paid little attention to the scholarly literature on economic sanctions and transitions to democracy. One consequence is that critics of the embargo base their arguments on hypotheses that are empirically wrong or that misconstrue scholarly findings. Supporters of the embargo, in turn, do a poor job of exposing the flaws in the anti-embargo arguments. But in fact, the hypotheses used by engagement advocates to criticize the U.S. embargo are untenable. There is strong historical evidence that economic development does not lead to democracy. Foreign investors in Cuba are more likely to become supporters of the dictatorship rather than agents of political change. Foreign capitalists at the time of the transition to democracy will face legal and political problems that will likely entail considerable financial losses and impair their ability to continue to do business in Cuba. And the desire of some American firms to establish businesses in Cuba now, seeking to get a hold on the market in preparation for the post-transition period, is shortsighted and apparently based on misunderstandings of the economic and political factors involved.
Given the nature of the Cuban dictatorship, neither engagement nor the embargo by itself will move the Castro government toward political liberalization. But unilateral economic sanctions can be effective by reaffirming a commitment to international norms of democracy and justice and by weakening the Castro government and promoting a change of regime. The U.S. sanctions impose serious economic costs on the Castro dictatorship, and the deterioration of the Cuban economy in the 1990s can be clearly linked both to the marked development of independent groups that challenge the government and to the increase in overt opposition on the part of the general population. Moreover, there is reason to believe that Cuba’s economic problems have generated serious discontent within the Communist Party’s own cadres, including military officers.
Still, the U.S. embargo itself is not sufficient to bring about the demise of Castro. It is apparent that supplementary measures are needed to achieve a political transition along the lines urged by Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott. The bottom line, therefore, is that communism survives to this day in large part because of the unwillingness of the U.S. executive to implement those supplementary measures that would foster the development of civil society there and spark public protests to demand democratization. On the contrary, officials in the Clinton administration have labored actively to avoid such a collapse, in stark contradiction to their public discourse.