Dodging the Cuba Embargo

The plan of the Obama administration to allow a bit, if only a bit, more American travel to communist Cuba is but the latest example of its strategy of putting through by administrative action what it couldn’t get through the Congress. The New York Times caught the administration at one such attempt in respect of whether the government would pay for end-of-life counseling. The Congress had rejected it in the course of passing Obama care. Then the administration tried to sneak it through administratively until it was caught by the Times and reversed itself. It’s now trying to do something similar, make it easier for Americans to travel to the communist held island and also to send money there.

The Obama administration, according to the Miami Herald, is dismissing speculation that it “delayed the changes until after the November election because Democrats in Florida feared it would hurt them among Cuban-American voters — many of whom back tough sanctions against the Cuban regime.” The Herald was told that the demarche comes from an “interagency process that has concluded only in the last couple of days.” The Herald quotes an official as underscoring that the changes do not, as the Herald characterized it, lift the economic embargo and that tourist travel to Cuba remains illegal, “as does,” the Herald noted, “sending remittances to senior government or Communist party officials.” It quoted the White House as asserting that the changes do not require congressional approval and would be published at the Federal Register.

Well, whether or not they require congressional approval, the fact is that on the eve of the election, the Democrats in Congress were noisily trying to move toward easing the embargo of Cuba, which, in various forms, has been in place since the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The Democrats were hastening because in recent months it has become clear that the communist regime on the island is in a terrible cash crisis and desperate for an end to the embargo. But the then-chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, Howard Berman, a Democrat of California, delayed a vote on the matter until after the election. The reason was that it appeared unlikely he could get the scheme through even a Democratic-controlled committee.

No doubt the Democrats’ softness on Cuba was only a tiny part of the reason Americans revoked the party’s control of the House of Representatives. But they did vote in the Republicans, leading to the accession to the chairmanship of Foreign Affairs of one of the heroines of the struggle for a Free Cuba, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. It strikes us that a descent respect for the decision of the voters would, at that point, have given the administration pause in its rush to liberalize relations with Cuba. Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen herself was quoted by the Herald as assailing the revision of the rules the administration is proposing. “These changes will not aid in ushering in respect for human rights,” the Herald quoted her as saying. “And they certainly will not help the Cuban people free themselves from the tyranny that engulfs them. These changes undermine U.S. foreign policy and security objectives and will bring economic benefits to the Cuban regime.”

Clearly there are Democrats who disagree. The Herald quoted one of them, Congresswoman Castor of Tampa. She has been agitating for years for Mr. Obama to lift at least some of the embargo. But they haven’t been able to win the argument through the democratic process that gives us our Congress or through the legislative process, which is where the embargo was codified to start with. The Obama administration is sending a terrible signal when it ignores that process in tampering with a long-standing foreign policy like that of Cuba. The irony is that it is doing so under the claim that it wants to help bring about democracy.