Restore the Bridge to Cuba

Last week the Senate Appropriations Committee passed a bill to permit the sale of food and medicine to Cuba, and a similar bill is under consideration in the House of Representatives. The issue of doing business with Cuba is politically charged, but one whose time has come. Restoring a commercial bridge to Cuba now should ease tensions when Fidel Castro leaves the scene. Congress should approve the food and medicine sales. One, it makes good political sense, and, two, it would help American farmers and businesses.

In 1991, before the Cuba Democracy Act cut off all U.S. trade with Cuba, American exporters were shipping some $719 million in goods to the island annually, mostly food and medicine, through subsidiaries. Those lost sales now go to other countries. Foodstuffs alone produce $750 million for Cuba’s trade partners.

Bridging the business gap, however, is not the only reason why Congress should start taking positive steps to diminish the 40-year-old embargo against trade with Cuba. Selling food and medicine to ordinary Cubans is the humane thing to do.

Washington needs to look at the situation in light of dramatically changed circumstances. Back in the 1960s, Castro was rightfully punished by Washington for his complicity with the Soviets in 1962’s missile crisis. That crisis is history. Now Congress should look to the future, and that lies in trade and better relations.

Last year, the Senate approved a measure similar to the one now under consideration, but it was killed in a congressional conference committee under political pressure from Florida’s anti-Castro Cuban community. That lobby’s grip on Cuba policy had given Washington the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, legislation that pinches Castro but hurts U.S. trade partners a great deal more.

Some of those trade partners--including such good neighbors as Canada and Mexico--profit from investments in Cuba that, under U.S. law, American businesses are prohibited from undertaking. Now with the anti-Castro Miami Cubans chastened by developments in the Elian Gonzalez drama, the time could not be better to resolve the antipathies of a political past and take the initiative in relations with Havana. The potential benefits are clear.