By Brian Carnell

Friday, May 24, 2002

What with Jimmy Carter's visit to Cuba recently, there has been a lot of ink wasted on yet another round of debate over the interminable U.S. embargo against the island nation. None captured the perverse effects of the embargo as well a Matt Welch's, Foul Ball.

Welch's story chronicles the plight of Cuban baseball historian Severo Nieto who has alternately been screwed first by Fidel Castro and then by the embargo. The unholy combination still prevents Nieto from publishing the results of his 50 years of research into Cuban baseball.

Nieto is persona non grata to Castro because El Presidente would like to pretend that there were no worthy sports achievements in Cuba prior to the revolution. Although numerous books on Castro's own amateur baseball career and Cuba's post-revolutionary athletic success, Nieto is told his books cannot be published do to never-ending shortages of paper.

On the other hand, the embargo makes it all but impossible for Nieto to have regular contacts with American publishers who would love to publish what Castro will not.

This, in microcosm, highlights the main idiocy of the embargo -- the main beneficiary of the embargo is not freedom or democracy but rather Fidel Castro. As Welch writes,

Even though people are generally smart and jaded enough to tune out the government's propaganda, they don't have much of anything to replace it with, except for the odd BBC broadcast -- and contact with foreign tourists. Every conversation with an American about the U.S. undermines Fidel Castro by definition, because it surely contradicts the banal lies he and his media mouth on a daily basis.

Moreover, this works both ways as Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) put it, "Every citizen ought to have the right to see firsthand what mess [Castro] has made of that island."

The embargo against Cuba has been an abject failure that limits the freedom of Americans while never coming close to its objective of getting rid of Castro. The Cuban embargo should have been ended years ago.

Source:

Foul Ball. Matt Welch, Reason, June 2002.

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