Sunday 04 July 2004

Just when you thought that U.S. policy toward Cuba couldn't get any dumber, along comes President Bush with another grandstanding stunt that is doomed to backfire.

To punish Fidel Castro, the U.S. Treasury Department last week rolled out new rules sharply curtailing travel to Cuba by exiles living in the United States.

This would be the same crackerjack Treasury Department that admitted having six times as many agents pursuing violators of the Cuban embargo than it does tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

This is how you bring down Castro? By putting up a wall between Cuban Americans and their loved ones 90 miles away?

For the rest of us, it's almost impossible to conceive a circumstance in which our own government would so aggressively endeavor to fragment families.

Imagine being told you had to wait three years to go see an ailing parent or grandparent who lived in Ireland or Germany or even communist China. U.S. authorities would never stand in your way - unless the country was Cuba.

The futility of Bush's strategy is drearily obvious. But the cruelty and pure coldheartedness of it is astonishing - particularly from a president who so piously claims to be "pro-family," a president who describes himself as a "compassionate conservative."

The theory that Castro will topple from power if we strangle him economically is as moldy as it is discredited. The United States has been trying to strangle him since 1961 with an embargo that stands today as the worst foreign policy flop in the Western Hemisphere.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/070504L.shtml