The sun is setting at last on America's Cuba ban

www.iht.com Adam Cohen Wednesday, January 15, 2003 A pointless policy   HAVANA Cuba's oddest tourist attraction may well be the Rincón de los Cretinos, or Corner of Cretins. Tucked into a dim hallway of the Museum of the Revolution, it features life-size caricatures of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The plaque beside Reagan reads, "Thanks you cretin for helping us to strengthen the revolution." The first President Bush is thanked for helping to "consolidate" the revolution.

It is great Communist kitsch, but also dead-on political commentary. America's hard-line Cuba policy, particularly the embargo on trade and tourism, is cruel to 11 million Cubans, who live in poverty as a result of the embargo. And it makes America look loutish to the world community, which has denounced the embargo in the United Nations for the last 11 years, most recently by a vote of 173 to 3.

The embargo is also inane strategically because it does just the opposite of what its supporters intend. By insulating Cuba from U.S. economic influence, and from most Americans, conservatives have indeed "strengthened" and "consolidated" Cuban Communism in the name of trying to pull it down.

Momentum is building fast to bring an end to Washington's benighted policies. Cuba watchers have long said that relations will not change until Fidel Castro, who is 76, departs. But now members of Congress, Republicans as well as Democrats, are vowing to undo the embargo, and they are taking aim at its cornerstone: the ban on tourism.

Cuba is a hot tourist spot these days - for Europeans and for 200,000 Americans a year, who go legally, under exceptions to the ban, and illegally. It has many of the usual tropical charms: enjoying moonlight and mojitos at the Hotel Nacional, chasing Hemingway's ghost around Old Havana. But what sets it apart is that in a world grown homogenous, it still delivers a frisson of exoticism, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

The revolution, and the four decades of embargo that followed, locked Cuba into a late-'50s freeze-frame. Many of the cars careering down Havana's streets are, famously, '57 Chevys. Few buildings are newer than the Riviera, the Miami Beach-style hotel where Rat Packers once roamed and Meyer Lansky ran the casino.

The embargo's most striking visual impact is that it has spared Cuba the detritus of U.S. capitalism. Havana's quaint Parquo Central has no golden arches or Starbucks. The Malecón, Havana's charming seafront boulevard - lined on one side by crumbling architectural gems, on the other by crashing waves - is billboard-free. It has as much Old World romance as any spot a traveler is likely to come upon.

To visit Cuba is to be a student of history, with a new set of lessons. Cubans see their engagement with the United States as part of a centuries-long struggle to throw off the colonial yoke - first Spain's, then America's.

Cubans view Castro's revolution, which deposed the U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, as less about Marxism than about finally winning self-determination. And they see the embargo, like the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA's many attempts on Castro's life, as a fit of pique by a superpower that hasn't forgiven the little island that slipped from its grasp.

For an administration that seeks "moral clarity" in foreign policy, the embargo offers anything but. Cuba is oppressive - it lacks freedom of speech and real elections - but is not much different than China and other nations that trade with the United States.

The embargo is especially wrongheaded in these complicated times. It hands more ammunition to critics who accuse Washington of flouting world opinion. And it particularly sets the United States back in Latin America, where two strategically vital nations - Venezuela and Brazil - now have leaders who see Castro as a compañero.

The embargo - and above all the travel ban - also frays America's own democratic principles. It makes no sense to protest Cubans' lack of freedom by depriving American citizens of theirs.

It is Miami's Cubans, of course, who are driving all this. The community is not as uniformly hard-line as it once was; young Cuban-Americans, in particular, are starting to speak out for normalization. But President George W. Bush still owes his win in Florida, and his presidency, to the Hands-Off-Elian-González crowd.

Things are different, however, in Congress. The bipartisan Cuba Working Group is pushing hard to end the embargo because it is the right thing to do, and because its members' constituents - farmers, factory hands, dockworkers - pay the price.

Congress eased the embargo in 2000, authorizing sales of food and medicine, on a cash basis only. Jeff Flake, a conservative Arizona Republican who opposes the embargo, expects the travel ban to unravel in the next year. "We're getting dangerously close to veto-proof majorities," he said.

The embargo's end will improve the lives of ordinary Cubans. It could even topple the current regime by unleashing the power of capitalism on a country that has long been protected from it. But these changes will come at the cost of an onslaught of American culture, lobbed from 90 miles away.

Which means that in these crazy times, when it's difficult to see even one step into the future in many parts of the world, in Cuba it is possible to see two: the end of the embargo and - just as inevitably - embargo nostalgia.