Obama Vows Change On Cuba Policy
MSNBC: Now they have a problem: If Barack Obama follows through on campaign promises to ease restrictions on the island, he could chip away at the Castro brothers' best case for staying in power.
And if a new Democrat-dominated Congress takes Obama's moves even further, Cuban leaders may have a hard time maintaining their tight control over Cuban society.
"They'd have to throw out the whole script about American imperialism," said Phil Peters of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank.
Top Cuban ideologues are already worried.
"We have before us the immense challenge of how to face a new chapter in the cultural struggle against the enemy," Armando Hart, 78-year-old patriarch of Cuban communists, warned last week in Granma, the party newspaper.
If Cuban-Americans are allowed to visit more frequently and send more money to the island, it could spark "a new chapter in the ideological war between the Cuban revolution and imperialism," Hart wrote.
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The U.S. government's Cuba policy has been frozen in time since 1962, when it imposed the embargo with the aim of bringing down Fidel Castro's government at a time when U.S.-backed exiles mounted the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Soviet missiles in Cuba pushed the world close to nuclear war.
Sporadic congressional efforts to end the embargo since then have failed, largely due to the political influence of powerful Cuban exiles who insisted on isolating Cuba and trying to strangle its economy to force Castro out.
But Castro, now 82, remained in power until he ceded the presidency to his brother in February due to illness. And Raul Castro, 77, shows no sign of making any fundamental changes.
The embargo is "a policy that hasn't worked in nearly 50 years," said Wayne Smith, a former top U.S. diplomat to Havana and a Cuba fellow at John Hopkins' Center for International Policy. "It's stupid, it's counterproductive and there is no international support for it."
Obama has promised to lift limits that President George W. Bush tightened on Cuban-Americans wanting to visit and send money to relatives. He also says he's open to a dialogue with Raul Castro — something the Cuban president has indicated he would welcome.
