The embargo on Cuba is sixty-four years old. It has outlived eleven presidents and every justification anyone ever gave for it. It was supposed to force a change in government. The government is still there. What changed is that eleven million people have spent their whole lives under an economic blockade, and right now they’re living through the worst of it: blackouts that last days, hospitals without basic medicine, families skipping meals. We did not cause all of Cuba’s problems. But we made every one of them worse, on purpose, as policy. There’s a name for punishing an entire population to pressure their government. It’s called collective punishment, and it’s a human rights violation when other countries do it, so it’s a human rights violation when we do it.
Almost every country on earth votes to condemn the blockade at the UN every single year. We lose that vote something like 187 to 2. Nobody in Washington can explain what the embargo has accomplished, because the answer is nothing, but ending it would take political courage and that’s been in short supply in both parties for a long time. Meanwhile Maine farmers and fishermen can’t sell to a market ninety miles off Florida, and Cuban families in this country jump through hoops just to send money home to their parents.
I’ll vote to repeal Helms-Burton, take Cuba off the terrorism list it never belonged on, restore diplomatic relations, and end the restrictions on travel, trade, and remittances. None of that is an endorsement of the Cuban government, which jails its critics and I’ll say so plainly. It’s an acknowledgment that starving ordinary people for six decades didn’t free anyone, and it isn’t going to start working in year sixty-five.