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PREVIEW: Cuba still under longest trade embargo in history

By Isaac Risco Feb 4, 2012, 6:06 GMT

A handout picture provided on 04 February 2012 by Cubadebate of former Cuban President Fidel Castro, presenting his memories \'Guerrillero del tiempo\' (time guerrilla man), during a public event in Havana, Cuba, 03 February 2012. EPA/ROBERTO CHILE/CUBADEBATE

Havana - Half a century has gone by with a near total US embargo on trade with Cuba, but it appears to have done little to change Havana's policies as Washington had intended.

Long after the end of the Cold War, Cuba - just 150 kilometres off the US state of Florida - remains a communist country. It is everyday Cubans who suffer the hardships in daily life caused by the blockade, as the embargo is known on the island.

The Havana regime often uses the embargo and the perceived threat from the north as tools to justify its own measures, which according to critics violate citizens' fundamental freedoms - the very rights that Washington says it is trying to promote in Cuba.

Cuban President Raul Castro recently vowed to maintain the one-party system in Cuba, which bans any political organization beyond the Cuban Communist Party.

In line with the discourse of his brother and predecessor, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Raul Castro spoke of Cuba as a 'besieged fortress' and slammed the United States for 'imperialist' interference in Cuban affairs.

The history of the embargo is a fateful escalation of tension at the height of the Cold War.

Fidel Castro made an alliance with the Soviet Union that granted the island protection against Washington, but led the country to unprecedented isolation.

Earlier economic sanctions were expanded by President John Kennedy to a near total trade embargo on February 7, 1962. Largely unchanged except for some exeptions for agricultural and medical goods, the embargo is by now the longest in history.

The United States became wary of Cuba's young revolutionaries after the first summary trials and executions, shortly after Castro's forces ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959.

Cuba's agrarian reform law, asset nationalizations and initial overtures to the Soviet Union then fuelled fears of a communist enclave just off US shores.

The United States responded to the nationalization of foreign oil refineries in Cuba by halting US purchases of Cuban sugar. Havana replied by expropriating all US property on the island. US president Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) then decreed a partial embargo in October 1960.

The break in diplomatic relations was followed, after Kennedy took office in 1961, by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles supported by Washington. Kennedy (1961-63) expanded Eisenhower's sanctions to a near-total embargo in February 1962.

Fidel Castro himself later admitted that his own confrontational policies were counterproductive. In his 1987 book, The Closest of Enemies, US diplomat Wayne S Smith cited Castro as saying that he wished he had done some things differently.

In a conversation with Smith, a diplomat who served at the US embassy from 1958-61 and returned to Havana as chief of mission at the US Interests Section from 1979-82, Castro years later voiced regret for failing to recognize sooner the importance of building and preserving 'bridges' with the United States.

'I may have burnt some bridges too hastily,' he said, at a time when Havana tried to rebuild ties with Washington.

The embargo has been hardened several times since. The 1992 Torricelli Act made the sanctions part of US law and made lifting them conditional on human rights and democracy in Cuba.

Cuba claims that the blockade has cost it more than 100 billion dollars.

In 2009, US President Barack Obama approved measures to make it easier for Cuban-Americans to travel to the island and send remittances. But other US citizens are still banned from visiting Cuba and face hefty fines if they do so except under very limited circumstances.

The embargo, which has been condemned 20 times by the UN General Assembly, only had the support of the United States and Israel last year in the most recent vote.

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