Thomas Donlan of Barron’s explains in his latest editorial commentary why he believes the president’s recent change in Cuban policy could lead to good news.
Investing in Cuba could be highly profitable. Cubans need practically everything, and most of it is nearby in the U.S., where manufacturers, food companies, and retailers are looking for new markets. Major League Baseball needs more of Cuba’s best ballplayers. The question is whether the Cuban government will walk through the opening door.
Through Marxist mismanagement and bad economic policies, such as rationing and price controls, that government keeps Cubans poor. Cubans don’t drive those cute old cars because they like them but because they are too poor and too misruled to buy Volkswagens or Toyotas,
Cubans have been taught to blame their poverty on the American embargo, but the U.S. policy shift will let them see that only their government stands in the way of more freedom and prosperity.
President Obama has done everything he can to create a more rational Cuba policy. Further progress is now up to the 114th Congress, which takes office with Republican majorities in both houses. They can strike a blow for economic freedom, which is often the best path to political liberty.
But Republicans and Democrats have been too attentive to the more militant Cuban émigrés, even while they talk vainly about helping the Cuban people to better lives.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American Republican with presidential-sized ambition and a much smaller endowment of horse sense, is one of them. He denounced “the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people.”
Rubio may be right, but it will take time to see. Right now, the other view deserves a chance—perhaps a 54-year chance equal to the 54-year failure of the old policy.
