About a year ago, I started wondering if any of the Dem presidential candidates would have the courage to oppose the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba. I wasn’t optimistic.
For nearly four decades, the U.S. has sought to crush Fidel Castro’s brutal dictatorship with a trade embargo. So far, it hasn’t worked. The Cuban people are still suffering under a cruel communist regime and Castro uses the embargo as equal parts excuse and rallying cry, arguing that it’s our fault that Cuba does not have the food and medical supplies they need.
Defenders of the embargo, most notably Cuban-American families in South Florida, insist the policy must remain in place, despite its historic ineffectiveness. Considering Florida’s political significance (27 electoral votes), the embargo has stayed in place.
In Congress, there has been increasing political support — from Republicans and Democrats — to end the embargo, open Cuba to U.S. trade, expand the market for U.S. companies and farmers, and help influence the future of the island. Yet in the White House, every administration for the last four decades has rejected changes to the embargo out of fear of losing support in Florida.
It’s become something of a litmus test for me. I’ve been prepared to support any candidate who had the courage to admit the embargo hasn’t worked, but in my lifetime, no serious candidates have stepped up.
Political leaders know the policy is a failure. No one, from either party, can explain why we have robust trade with communist China, but we refuse to sell an ear of corn to communist Cuba. Even my favorite president, Bill Clinton, refused to touch the embargo.
So I’ve waited, wondering if I’ll ever see a presidential candidate brave enough to acknowledge reality, risk the wrath of Cuban-Americans in South Florida, and announce support for ending the Cuba embargo.
I had high hopes early on for Howard Dean, but he, too, let me down. Earlier this year, Dean said he supported easing the embargo “in return for human-rights concessions.” I was impressed and thought I had finally found a brave candidate I could respect and support. Six months later, however, Dean became the front-runner for the nomination, flip-flopped on his Cuban policy, and said he would enforce the embargo as his predecessors have. So much for Dean’s “straight talk.”
Last night, I’m pleased to report, I found a candidate with the courage to state the obvious. Wesley Clark announced that he opposes the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
At a CNN/Rock the Vote forum, a young man asked Clark a straightforward question. “[T]he U.S. imposes an ineffective and inhumane embargo against Cuba,” the questioner said. “If you were elected president, would you change this policy?”
Clark paused, presumably to wonder whether he was willing to write off Florida, and told the young man the truth.
“The way we won the Cold War was not by isolating Eastern Europe, but by engaging it,” Clark said. “We won the Cold War not just because we had great armed forces, but because we had the AFL-CIO, we had Citibank, and we had a Polish pope. And we reached out to Eastern Europe, and we connected with humanity. That’s why I’m against embargoes. They don’t work.”
After the applause died down, Clark continued. “When you isolate a country, you strengthen the dictators in it. If you want to change the dictators, you’ve got to open it up so ordinary people in those countries can see what they’re missing in the rest of the world, and gain strength and ideas from everybody else. And they’ll take control of their future. We’re not going to reward Fidel Castro, but we are going to make sure that Cubans have a democracy and they have the same rights as everybody else on this planet.”
I genuinely couldn’t believe my ears. I liked Clark before, but now I’m convinced. He’s my guy.
Clark is not exactly new to Latin-American affairs. Before becoming Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Clark was Commander in Chief of the United States Southern Command, Panama, where he was responsible for the direction of U.S. military activities in Latin America and the Caribbean. In other words, he knows of what he speaks.
Truth be told, Clark has opposed the embargo for a while. In July 2002, long before he was even thinking about running for president, Clark said, “The way to deal with Castro is to send Cuba American tourists, American goods and American farm products. There could be no better way to deal with this last vestigial form of Communism than to turn American business and American agriculture loose on them.”
Two months ago, in his first campaign stop as a candidate, Clark visited Miami and attracted huge crowds. A Miami Herald reporter asked about the embargo. While acknowledging that “there are a lot of complexities” to the issue, Clark admitted he favored engagement as a means to democratization. “If you look at the way we operated in Eastern Europe, we were effective in taking down communism because there was no embargo,” Clark said.
I wondered at the time if Clark would follow in Dean’s footsteps and flip-flop on the issue. Considering Florida’s importance, I almost expected Clark to explain that he had changed his mind as the campaign progressed.
The fact that he’s standing by his previous statements and is willing to end a foreign policy that clearly does not work, represents the best example of political courage I’ve seen in the campaign thus far.