CUBA: The Economist´s view in 1960
ON THE ROCKS
October 22nd 1960
If Hurricane Nikita has subsided, the Fidel squall blows gustily. On Wednesday, the foundering relationship between the United States and Cuba was all but swamped by the State Department’s announcement of the prohibition of exports to Cuba. Briefly, the embargo, which has been hinted at for some weeks, will affect all exports except medicines and some food. Cuba’s purchases from the United States have lately amounted to something less than $300 million a year. This is roughly half what they were before the revolution; and one of the ways in which the State Department justifies the ban is that Cuba has discriminated against American goods. If every dollar-short country that has discriminated against American goods had been treated in this way, the United States would not have much trade left.
The embargo is bound to have two immediate and harmful results: it will offend a great many Latin Americans who, however much they disapprove of Castro, dislike even more the use of economic pressure for political ends. It will also, as Mr Mueller, the US Secretary of Commerce seemed to admit on Wednesday, push Cuba further into Moscow’s arms. Its utility will depend on the soundness of the State Department’s conviction that if Cuba is squeezed hard enough, Dr Castro will be forced out by his own people. Certainly, in the last few weeks, internal opposition to the regime has grown more active. Small groups of guerrilla fighters in central and eastern Cuba have been captured, and a number of rebels, among them three Americans, have been executed after military trials. But far from helping an incipient opposition, the United States’ embargo may well have the opposite effect. Dr Castro’s supporters are already in an embattled frame of mind, which an atmosphere of siege can only stiffen.
Shortly before the ban, the State Department had put its case against Cuba before the United Nations. In a 10,000 word document it answered point-by-point the vigorous critique of American policy that Dr Castro had delivered to the General Assembly a couple of weeks before. Seldom has a quarrel been so well or so publicly documented. But as much old, and some new, evidence is churned out, the only thing that is proved is how irreconcilable the two points of view are. It is hard now to see a way out. Above all, the United States view that things must be made to get worse in Cuba before they can get better is far from convincing; they might, after all, just go on getting very much worse.
