Ernesto at Penúltimos Días has posted a fantastic column Reynel Cesar Aguilera of Montreal, Canada.  It's a very important defense of the trade embargo on Cuba.  I have taken the liberty of translating the original Spanish.  Here it is:

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One of the oft-repeated arguments against the embargo is that it has not worked. Fifty years of Castrism are --for advocates of its lifting-- a testament to the failure of a policy of which they are only willing to accept a perfect result, or rather, the fall of the Castro brothers and the explicit acknowledgment by them, if possible in front of television cameras, that they were defeated because they did not have the opportunity to trade with the United States, or obtain credit from its banks. 

Set aside the old adage that the perfect is the enemy of the good, forget that in politics as in life, there are no optimal outcomes, let’s disregard the incontrovertible fact that humanity has spent thousands of years struggling unsuccessfully against cancer with nobody thinking about abandoning that struggle, or assessing its treatment on the basis of a perfect cure. Let us avoid asking ourselves why, if the embargo has not worked, the Castros now cry out for its lifting, after having laughed for the past several decades while repeating the motto that "to consume what the country produces is to make a homeland" and "for us there is more than plenty with the selfless help of the socialist camp"? 

Let us ignore such minutiae and consider the possibility that the embargo has worked. Consider, for example, that thanks to that measure the Soviets were forced to spend more than $2 billion annually in Cuba; an amount that was never a surplus for them and prevented them from investing in truly strategic areas of its economy, an error that cost them dearly later on. Let us entertain the possibility that thanks to the embargo in the U.S. --and in some neighboring countries-- a tourism industry flourished that otherwise would never have existed. Let’s recognize that the embargo has served to expose the rampant economic inefficiencies of Castrism and led to repression as the only way to hide it. Two things that combined to make way for what is probably --without prejudice and despite constant denigration-- one of the most successful waves of migration in the history of a nation of immigrants. Let us consider also the idea that the embargo is one of the fundamental causes of the aging technology in Castro's army. Or that this is one of the few real bargaining chips that exists when sitting at the negotiating table with the Castros, and the only obstacle preventing the recycling of Castroite henchmen into a new "business class".

Discard all these possibilities and there remains a very important one, that is, to my way of thinking, the one dictatorship actually loses sleep over: the embargo is a law and the U.S. is a country of laws. Lifting the embargo means dealing a devastating blow to the entire legal infrastructure that has permitted for decades something much more important, to Cubans, than a way to know about and penalize American or foreign companies that violate this law: the dismantling of the most powerful tool that will exist at the moment of tracking down the personal fortune of Fidel Castro. 

Not long ago this instrument allowed the U.S. government, without violating its own laws (something which in that country is paid for dearly), to discover and expose a small part ($3.9 billion) of a giant money laundering scheme in which the involvement of the Castro brothers was demonstrated, as well as that of a Swiss bank. The ramifications of that network became so complex (from a political point of view) that the U.S. government decided, against the opinion of many analysts, to bury the matter or make it appear that way. At the time, the response of the regime in Havana, as cynical as any gangster’s, was to impose the famous 20% tax on remittances.

The recent exchanges between the U.S. administration with the Castro regime call to our attention two things: one is the President Obama’s reference to such an insignificant detail in the grand scheme of things, as this tax of 20%, the other being the angry response from Fidel Castro to what has gained such speed (this idea of conversation without restrictions), which he must have ordered Raúl to launch. One possible explanation for this rebuff by the tyrant is that in his feverish mind --or in reality, nobody knows-- the words of the American president have been a reminder that sounded more or less like this: "We caught you laundering money, we got you stealing from your people, we fined one of your associates, we buried the issue and your response was to continue stealing from your own. If you want to talk, begin by ending that, by removing the 20% ".

If Cuban history has demonstrated something in the last fifty years, it’s that the Castro brothers couldn’t care a whit for the welfare of the people. The only hint of logic that one can find in this half century of Castroite outrages is that of two brothers clinging to power, and of a family that’s not willing to give it up. Something that is forgotten by those who favor the vaunted lifting of the embargo.

For Cubans it’s very important that the embargo remains as a tool with which to help track down and eventually recover the Castro family fortune. With the two previous tyrants, that could not be done. Gerardo and Fulgencio escaped, but the world today is very different and with Fidel there exists the possibility --remote, it's true, but at least a chance-- to do something that should have been done long ago: the return of one of those fortunes to the country from which it was stolen.

Reynel Cesar Aguilera Montreal