Ah that pesky embargo—sorry anti-embargo crowd, it’s been a success, in more ways than one, not the least of which is that so far, U.S. taxpayers have not been left holding the tab for Cuba’s debt delinquency.
Torricelli: After meeting Castro, I have no regrets choking Cuba
Good ole commie days1989
By Robert Torricelli
The death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro raises once again the issue of the American embargo. It’s a controversial law that for five decades has been more misunderstood and misrepresented than anything I’ve experienced in public life.
I authored the law strengthening the U.S. embargo under President George H.W. Bush when I was in Congress, so a little perspective is in order as we ponder Castro’s passing and what he meant to U.S.-Cuba relations.
Among my first memories as a child growing up in Franklin Lakes were of the U.S. and the USSR teetering on the brink of nuclear war. Only recently have we learned just how close we came to global destruction. Poor communication required the Kremlin to give launch authority to local Soviet commanders. Castro urged a Soviet nuclear attack if American forces landed on his shores. We now know that those weapons were operational. This was Fidel Castro.
I met him in the spring of 1990 in his sprawling home by Havana Harbor. What I imagined to be an exchange of pleasantries quickly became a rambling four-hour conversation. It was a tour de force. I doubted that I’d ever see him again and I thought that I had nothing to lose.
I dove right in:
Did you kill JFK? “Not in my interest,” Castro said. President Johnson was worse for Cuba, he said.
And how did you know that the landing would be at the Bay of Pigs? “U.S. spy planes had been flying over it for days,” he said.
Did you always intend to create a Communist government? “I never heard of the term,” applied to the Revolution, he said. President Nixon, Castro told me, walked out of the Harlem Hotel where they had a pleasant conversation and told the press that “I was a Communist.”
Hours before our conversation, I had met political prisoners who had been incarcerated for four decades. One noted that the day of my visit was the first time the steel panels had been removed from his jailhouse windows, allowing him to see the sun. This was Fidel Castro.
Cuba had become more than an island prison. Basic freedoms were denied and generations were lost in abject poverty. A land — rich from farming and fishing — with a strong and entrepreneurial people had been diminished to importing food, while filling the streets with unemployed youth and teenage prostitutes. This was Fidel Castro.
No amount of poverty was enough to thwart Castro’s ambitions. Throughout the 1980s he continued to fund revolutions in Africa and Latin America. Thousands died from his armaments in Marxist insurrections while his island starved. This was Fidel Castro.
This was the reality of the Castro that I met in 1990. When I left that day, I decided to be part of the solution. Within two years, President Bush signed (under political pressure from then-Gov. Bill Clinton) the Cuban Democracy Act.
It was a simple plan. It plugged the holes in the original restrictions put in place by President Kennedy, but barriers to communication were lifted. The U.S. would deny Castro hard currency — some $720 million in subsidiary trade — to prop up the regime and cause internal pressure for reform by flooding the island with rising expectations through open communication.
There were almost immediately problems with the plan. Castro refused all American efforts to increase communication (news bureaus, reopening telephone cable, etc.) and later Venezuela under the Chavez regime began shipping subsidized oil, giving Castro a new source for hard currency by reselling it.
People ask me all the time whether I have any regrets about sponsoring the bill. The Cuban economy contracted and Castro remained with no breakthrough in political reform. The legislation, however, was not without its impact.
From the date of enactment of the Cuban Democracy Act, Cuba never again led an international insurgency. The wars in Central America came to an end. Cuba withdrew from Africa. The legislation didn’t produce a free Cuba but untold thousands of lives were saved by ending Castro’s foreign adventures.
No regrets.
Robert Torricelli, a Democrat, represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate (1997-2003) and House of Representatives (1983-1997).
