Trade embargoes and tyranny toppling

By Brian Micklethwait | 5 August 2005

According to Keith Porter on the Globalization Issues Blog:

The full scale U.S. embargo of Cuba ended several years ago. With no fanfare or "fall of the Berlin Wall" celebration, a mighty flow of American goods is streaming into Cuban stores and kitchens.

US companies are not allowed to sell goods on credit to Cuba. But US food and agricultural products can be sold if Cuba pays cash. And now, Cuba is paying cash. The US government tightened this up somewhat last year, but now that USA-Cuba business is starting to be done in a bigger way, Bush-voting farm states are pushing for more liberalization.

US left-wingers have long said that the Cuba embargo is daft, while right-wingers have favoured it, on political grounds. But the embargo has not exactly worked the trick of toppling Castro, has it? If anything it has helped Castro, by confirming what he says about how hostile the USA is towards Cuba, and by keeping everyone's mind on where the next meal is going to come from. Surely, here is a case where the left is right, and the right is wrong.

At the bottom of the Porter piece there's a link to a piece by Christopher Farrell of BusinessWeek at the top of which the political case against trying to topple tyrannies with trade embargoes is put as well as you could ever hope to read it:

Economic sanctions won't bring down a Castro or end the regime of corrupt mullahs. But flooding a country with investment and trade might.

Perhaps one of the reasons why its is believed that trade embargoes do topple tyranny is that it is also believed that poverty causes rebellions against tyranny. It would probably be truer to say that people rebel when (a) they want to, and (b) they can afford to. So yes, poverty is a good start, because it angers people. But a slow accumulation of wealth that is felt to be too slow both stirs anger, by dashing rising hopes of a better life, while still giving people the little bit of economic leeway they need to be thinking beyond the bare necessities.

But what does most to fuel rebellion is the belief that things could, should and in due course, inevitably, will be done better. Once that idea catches hold, things can unravel very fast, as the collapse of the old USSR illustrates to perfection. And to help spread that idea, a trickle of highly priced and exotically packaged goods from the supposed sworn national enemy is probably the best rebellion-rousing economic policy of all.