How to Trade With Cuba

By A. M. ROSENTHAL
The New York Times, October 27, 1995

American businesses eager to do business with Cuba
are pushing every pressure point they can to end the U.S.
embargo, except the one that might work. They refuse to
use their economic influence to pressure Fidel Castro to
give Cubans political and human rights.

All these businesses achieved their wealth through
the American system: free enterprise with political
democracy. Democratic capitalism: the combination has
been the key for them and American society.

By itself, capitalism can operate in a dictatorship.
It did in Nazi Germany, in Imperial Japan and in Saddam’s
Iraq. Now it is at work in China, overseen by the
Communists, and in a dozen other dictatorships.

The business executives involved know this. That’s
why they busily seek out new markets for capitalism in
dictatorships like China, like Cuba.

So some critical questions are at the heart of the
push for trade with Cuba. They have been at the heart of
every controversy on empowering dictatorships through
American economic might.

Once they were debated openly, passionately. Now they
are not even raised, not by the business community, not
by academics and journalists also trying to end the
embargo.

Do U.S. businesses have the moral and political right
to transfer the fruits of democratic capitalism, which
come from the efforts of the entire American population,
workers as well as C.E.O.’s, to strengthen a dictatorship
so that it can more efficiently control and persecute its
own entire population?

Or do they have the obligation to try to use the lure
of capitalist investment to bring some liberty to the
people of the dictatorships — who will be making for
Americans any profit they take out?

On Wednesday, President Castro demonstrated at The
New York Times the wit and intelligence that so entrance
the hundreds of American business leaders who make the
pilgrimage to Havana.

Charming — but not charming enough to erase memory.
The man sitting there committed the greatest crime any
revolutionary could. He asked for and got the help of
Cuba’s people to destroy the Batista dictatorship. Then
he brought them not freedom but another dictatorship —
fully equipped with firing squads, kangaroo courts,
political prisons, intellectual and political
suppression. One party, one leader, one mouth.

He uses truth and falsehood not as values in
themselves but as conveniences of the moment. He said
almost casually that yes, Amnesty International’s figures
of about 600 political prisoners in Cuba were correct but
that once there were thousands.

But for his original movement to be accepted by
Cubans as a revolution for freedom he had told them he
was not a Communist. He lied for years, until it suited
him to reveal himself as part of the international
Communist political and military apparatus.

When asked at The Times whether he would agree to an
opposition party or press, or a free election, steps that
would lead to virtually automatic lifting of the embargo
by the U.S., he told his personal truth: Never, a long,
polite stick them in your ear.

But he may not be able to hold out against liberties
as long as he wishes. As an effective economic weapon,
the embargo began just about 1990. Until then, Moscow
made up embargo losses with $5 billion in yearly economic
aid plus all the arms he could eat. And only in 1992 did
Washington close loopholes that allowed American
subsidiaries to do $500 million in trade with Cuba.

Cuba’s economy is at about 40 percent of what it was
a few years ago. The idea that economic pressures do not
work is a myth; they did against the Soviet Union,
Rhodesia, South Africa, Iraq and Serbia.

Mr. Castro can end Cuban suffering by his own
decision to agree to those freedoms he dismisses now.

This is the precise time for American business people
who want to trade with Cuba — and all who pressure
Washingon to end the embargo — to ask Mr. Castro
publicly to make it possible by permitting democratic
freedom to go with capitalist investment.

He will do no such thing as long as he knows
Americans put pressure only on their government, not him.
Even so, he may keep refusing out of fear of his own
people.

But either way, American businesses will at least and
at last be standing up for Cuban freedom, and for the
fountainhead of America’s power and their own: democracy
and capitalism, in combination.