Contributor’s Viewpoint: The Clock Starts for Cuba

President Obama recently announced the United States would relax restrictions on travel and commerce with Cuba, look to open an embassy there, and explore the possibility of removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism. Though it will take an act of Congress to lift the full trade embargo, it is only a matter of time, a short time, before we do.

Those who oppose this policy argue that this action ignores the gross human rights violations perpetrated by the Cuban government. They further assert this will prop up a totalitarian regime on the verge of economic collapse and that there is no correlation between economic freedom and personal liberty. They are wrong. Freedom is coming to Cuba.

I have traveled to Cuba 30 times between 1998 and 2006 on a variety of cultural exchanges and humanitarian exchanges. The only reason I stopped going is I was warned I might be arrested and used as a hostage to obtain the release of Cuban spies held in the United States (like Alan Gross, the American just released). I believe Cuba is poised for real political freedom.

The first crack in the wall Castro built around Cuba came in the late 1990s when the Clinton administration eased travel restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba. Once it became clear Americans were not going to be prosecuted or fined for visiting there was a flood of American tourists. The Cuban government didn’t welcome that. Though it loved the tourist dollars, it viewed the influx of Americans as a threat. Instead of taking tourists on their orchestrated pro-Communist tours where visitors were meticulously insulated from the misery of the Cuban people and the repressive nature of the regime, Americans were mingling with Cubans, hiring locals as tour guides, eating and sleeping in their homes, and letting Cubans know America was not the bogeyman Fidel and Raul and their corrupt cronies told them we were.

The Cuban government even allowed some Cubans to rent rooms in their homes or serve food to foreigners, while taking the lion’s share of the profits. But soon it feared it had gone too far. It had lost too much control of the interaction between tourists, especially Americans, and its people. Cubans were obtaining cellphones and learning about the Internet.

The threat of the embargo was called Track One. The threat from American tourists was called Track Two, and the Cuban government used the U.S. invasion of Iraq to counter it. The limited freedoms it had allowed some Cubans to exercise were sharply curtailed. Cubans were arrested for talking to Americans in tourist hotels. In 2004 the government changed the currency from our dollar to its peso, but kept 20 percent of one’s money in the exchange, thereby making more money but limiting the desirability of a tourist coming. Odd that those claiming that more tourism will not result in undermining the regime do not recognize this historical fact.

There was another reason the government could afford the crackdown. Hugo Chavez became its ally and propped up its economy by shipping 100,000 barrels of subsidized oil to Cuba every day.

But the failed Cuban system still failed. The second crack came a few years after Fidel gave power to Raul. They eased the restrictions on the average Cuban having a business. Currently there are over 300,000 private enterprises operating in Cuba. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans now work in the private sector. When I first went to Cuba in 1998 I did not know anyone who worked legally in the private sector.

The frauds who used a failed utopian ideology to stay in power finally owned up that they had failed. As Fidel famously told The Atlantic in 2010, “the Cuban Model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

Raul publicly encouraged Cubans to criticize the government. Wow, the dictators in fatigues admitted they were the emperors with no clothes. How many millions had to suffer before those criminals understood this?

Political repression and the harassment of dissidents continues. However, as The New York Times editorial page pointed out last week, there are independent bloggers and journalists operating in Cuba, and the government recently pledged to open up Internet access. This was unthinkable 10 years ago. For several years the government has improved relations with both Catholic and Protestant churches, which in turn have achieved greater and greater influence with the people. Ask the 53 dissidents whom Cuba will release as part of this opening if they are freer now than they were in jail.

When I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s dictatorships ruled in almost every country in Latin America, as well as in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and Portugal. Yet today, these countries and most of those regions have vibrant democracies. Economic freedom empowered their people to attain political freedom. When people open their own businesses and make money, they empower themselves. When people in Cuba obtain access to technology, their government loses control of the storyline. When the embargo is lifted, they can no longer blame us. The more the Cuban people know, the more they will want to know.

For over 50 years this embargo has done nothing to enhance political freedom in Cuba. It has succeeded in hurting the average Cuban and provided a propaganda tool for the Castro dictatorship. It is in the playbook of every thug in power to justify the deprivations they inflict on their subjects, to have their scapegoats. Hitler had the Jews and Communists; Milosovic, the Croats and Bosnians; Hugo Chavez, the U.S.A.; ISIS, anyone who isn’t ISIS. We gave the Castros us, gift-wrapped. They made us the bogeyman responsible for Cuba’s travails.

Every year the embargo is denounced by every country in the world except Israel and the United States. It is a major issue, opposed by everyone, especially in Latin America. Even the majority, albeit a narrow one, of Cubans in our country oppose it. And every year that majority grows as members of the aged Cuban exile community in Miami die. For over 50 years they had the Cuban government collaborating in maintaining our estrangement, each side parroting the dead slogans of their youth. But the Cuban government just opted out.

The Cuban government knows it is risking a loss of power now. It will play this as a public relations coup to its people and hope it can figure out how to keep the lid on, because it knows this can lift the lid off. It will try to become like China, opening the economy but retaining sole political power (though China is less repressive now than 25 years ago — see the reaction to the Hong Kong demonstrators versus Tiananmen Square). By the way, please note we trade with China, a country still displaying photos of Mao, the biggest murderer in history.

The government is least popular in Havana. That’s because there the people can interact with tourists. In Havana, the underground market in satellite TVs, cellphones, and Internet access is far more prolific than in other parts of the country. Those who say more contact will not effect a change in Cuba are oblivious to the fact that when Cubans talk to Americans it advances the cause of freedom. That is the fact, no less than it was in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s when Ronald Reagan let American students study in the Soviet Union.

I cannot quantify how much greater freedom this will instantaneously translate into for Cubans, but 50-odd years ago we blundered into a policy that hurt the Cuban people, helped the Cuban power elite subjugate people, failed to dislodge a government that simply suffocated its people to survive, and left us ridiculed by the world. Does any intelligent person really believe less contact will help the Cuban people better their lives or achieve more freedom? More contact will enhance, not retard, our influence.

This is the third crack in the wall, accelerated by the collapse of oil prices, which has reduced Venezuela’s economic support. A few years ago, in an article I wrote for The Star, I said, “Years ago, I visited the sleepy town of Bayamo, renowned for the fact its 19th-century residents had burned it to the ground rather than let it be captured by their Spanish colonial masters. There is (or was) an enormous digital clock that overlooks the town square. It flashes the same time, though most of the bulbs don’t work so it is hard to know what time it was when it broke. My guide told me it was a gift from the Soviets in the 1960s. ‘How long has it been broken?’ I asked. ‘I never remember when it worked,’ he responded. My guide was in his 30s. The long-discredited Revolution still holds sway over this island frozen in time. All of Cuba anxiously waits for President Obama to start the clock.”

Mr. Obama has done just that.

A few years ago, my friend Amado was able to get out of Cuba. He had spent six weeks in a tiny jail cell for having my cellphone. His father got 18 months in jail for having $2 in U.S. currency. His grandfather got seven years for possession of two joints of marijuana. When a cop at J.F.K. Airport told him he could now say whatever he wanted, he shouted, “I hate Fidel Castro.”

Like most Cubans, he loved America. He died last May, but somewhere out there he is smiling.