On the tarmac of Jose Marti Airport in Havana, Pope John Paul II’s message to the people and government of Cuba was as simple as it was powerful: “Open up.”
It’s a prescription that President Fidel Castro–and the United States government and the Cuban exile community–should follow if that country is going to find a peaceful way out of Communist economic failure and political oppression.
The Cuban people’s warm reception of the pope, and the massive open-air mass scheduled Sunday in Havana, are a momentous step in this opening-up process. Against the backdrop of 39 years of hermetic repression of any competing ideologies, including organized religion, this week’s images of the exuberant outpouring by Cuba’s faithful have taken on an almost hallucinogenic quality.
As expected, Pope John Paul II exhorted the U.S. to end its 38-year-old economic embargo against Cuba. It’s a policy that is archaic, useless and universally condemned. The U.S. should take the pope’s advice and open up economic and political relations with Cuba, at least to the extent of lifting the ban on sales of food and medicine to the long-suffering people of the island.
Contrary to the hackneyed litanies of some Cuban exile groups and their supporters in Congress, lifting the embargo would only accelerate Castro’s exit. If there’s anything a Communist regime can’t deal with, it is openness.
Even the limited economic reforms Castro has been forced to make since the massive Soviet subsidies dried up in the late 1980s are a step in the right direction. Increased foreign investment and tourism have whetted Cubans’ appetite for a better life, awakened individual entrepreneurship and opened their eyes to ideas and possibilities beyond their gray present.
The extent to which these limited reforms have spawned corruption, prostitution and other distortions demonstrates, if anything, the failure of half-measures. In his desperate attempt to bring in dollars while still retaining control of the economy and the government, Castro has gerrymandered a monster posing as an economic system.
A dual economy in which U.S. dollars are the only real currency–but few Cubans have access to them–has bred desperation and desperate measures. Even Cubans employed by foreign firms are still paid by the government in pesos, making pilfering and chiseling on the side a universal way of netting a few needed dollars. College-educated girls have an earning potential of $6 dollars a month, or about a fourth of what they can earn nightly by selling their bodies to foreign tourists.
Yet even in this choking atmosphere of government economic controls, the legendary entrepreneurship of Cubans struggles to survive. Storefront dining rooms are proliferating, along with hundreds of other micro-businesses. Imagine what opening up this wellhead of ambition and hard work could do for the economy.
Miami’s older-generation exile community, financially successful yet left deeply rancorous by all the might-have-beens of their painful diaspora, also needs to open up to a hard reality: The Cuba of their fond memories is gone, and no amount of verbal, economic or political pummeling of the island and its people is going to bring it back. Opening up travel links and connections between the two Cubas will do far more to push the process of democratic transition than hurling shortwave insults across the Florida Straits or dreaming up more ways of isolating and punishing the Cuban population.
Expectations were high for the pope’s visit and, indeed, it was a historic break in Cuba’s isolation. When he leaves Cuba Sunday night, though, it will be up to the three main players in Cuba’s long Communist tragedy to take the next step.
