About time

Certainly, it was what the Cuban people hoped for in 1978. President Jimmy Carter, sensing the futility and ineffectiveness of U.S. policy, pried open the Kennedy-era boycott door ever so slightly. I slipped through as a reporter to cover a trade mission from Baltimore and other east coast cities.

Then, like now, Cuba was a country suspended in time. The embargo had been in place since 1960, and despite large subsidies from the Soviet Union, the people were poor but certainly not ragged. Because this was a trip to develop business contacts, most of the delegation´s time was spent in meetings with government officials, who in a Communist country were also the corporate officials.

The opportunities to buy and sell — then and now — are remarkably similar. It was food, tourist services, banking and automobiles. Cuban cars in 1978 were relics from 1940-1950 and they still are. One import—exporter in the delegation was rebuffed in his bid to buy these antiques. Whether Cubans knew the collector value of the cars or simply needed transportation wasn´t clear.

What was obvious and surprising was the goodwill people had toward the United States. Nearly 20 years of propaganda by Fidel Castro´s police state apparatchiks wasn´t working very well, at least not by the sample of Cubans I met during my time in Havana and the nearby countryside. They were cautiously interested in me and the United States. The best way to put it is that they were coping.

Thirty-six years later, they are still coping and poor and proud. It was Cuba that sent 461 doctors, nurses and other medical personnel to Africa to help fight the Ebola scourge. It won 14 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics. It has a 100 percent literacy rate, according to the World Bank, which also reports that it has a lower childrenunder-5 mortality rate (6 percent) than the United States (7 percent).

If the country is down, it certainly isn´t out, and it should be clear that the time has come for a new approach to this country, just 90 miles south of Florida.

But it isn´t for the Republican Party which is again outraged that the president is acting presidential. With some notable exceptions — Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Rep. Mark Sanford from South Carolina — Republicans of all stripes, particularly those with presidential ambitions, embrace the status quo.

Never mind that after five decades of an embargo designed to topple the brothers Castro, they remain firmly in charge. The drive to keep this policy in place neatly fits the definition of insanity. Then again, this is the same Republican Party in control of the House of Representatives that voted 54 times to repeal, revise or gut the Affordable Care Act. None succeeded and wouldn´t with a Democratic Senate and president. Insanity? No, just politics, playing to the base.

What has been so striking about the prolonged Cuban embargo is the arbitrariness of it. Castro is a dictator of a communist police state and there is nothing romantic about the oppression that weighs on ordinary citizens or the Cuban government’s international support for mayhem. Even by the low bar set for dictators, Castro is a nasty piece of work.

But we deal with dozens of awful states. China is Communist and oppressive; it practices censorship and arbitrary detention. It´s essentially a dictatorship. Where´s the embargo?

Freedom House, a democracy watchdog, regularly identifies the world´s most oppressive countries, and we deal with most of them. On its latest list are Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Most have U.S. embassies.

Our failed strategy of isolating Cuba gave Castro just the foil he needed to excuse and often justify the country´s deplorable human rights record and substandard economy. One of the starkest findings during my reporting stint in the country was just how little there was for people to buy. The large city supermarkets were essentially empty.

Even with their low wages, people grum bled that there were so few ways to enrich their lives. And what was available, if it was available, was expensive: $22 for a bottle of rum, $1.10 for a pack of cigarettes, $1,200 for a black and white television set. And this is in 1978 dollars.

The government blamed the U.S. — partly true. The isolation we imposed suppressed a larger worldview, not as encompassing as North Korea certainly, but opaque, nonetheless.

What can happen now is capitalism. Markets and choices, fulfillment of expectations, and greater individual responsibility. What people in the street complained about in 1978 were the lines and rationing for basic goods. By lifting the embargo we pull away the blinders. People will find that free markets and openness work better than central planning. And if they create the demand for change from the bottom up that was supposed to happen with the embargo, the changes that Obama promised early in his administration and has finally delivered may accomplish what the State Department has long declared to be our goal: “Democratic and economic reforms and increased respect for human rights on the part of the Cuban Government.”