Cubans ‘Want Our Help,’ Trump Says, but American Law Mandates That the Embargo Stays Until Communism Goes

President Trump is floating the idea of a “friendly takeover” of Cuba as “very high level” talks are underway with the communist government. Before relations can be normalized and the American embargo lifted, though, Havana will have to meet requirements of the Helms-Burton Act — and there’s no loophole for a presidential waiver of the 1996 law.Mr. Trump has offered help to former dictatorships like Syria and Venezuela as they transition from socialist totalitarianism. Yet Helms-Burton requires the horse to come before the cart in Cuba. The Pearl of the Antilles needs to have a functioning, “democratically elected government” before America’s embargo can be lifted.The Helms-Burton Act, also known as the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity or Libertad Act, made President Kennedy’s embargo federal law instead of an executive decree. This prevents Mr. Trump from lifting any elements of what leftists have called “a blockade” since the policy’s imposition.“Blockade” is a word Kennedy never used for a practical reason: Blockading a country is an act of war. Reaching for his diplomatic thesaurus, the 35th president deployed the U.S. Navy to enforce a “quarantine” during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, putting steel behind the “embargo” he’d declared eight months prior.Thirty years after Kennedy’s death, Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican of North Carolina and now gone, co-sponsored Libertad to “tighten the noose,” advocating resistance to communism in moral terms as Kennedy had. Critics of the embargo, Helms said, favored “selfish” American business interests over liberty for Cubans.After the USSR fell, anti-communists feared that President Clinton or a successor would make concessions that helped Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro, cling to power. They sought to keep the pressure on until the citizens on what Kennedy called “that imprisoned island” regained their natural rights.It seemed inevitable by the mid-1990s that the wave of freedom that washed away the Berlin Wall would soon reach Cuba’s shores. Castro, though, refused to be swept onto “the ash heap of history,” which President Reagan predicted was Marxist-Leninism’s fate.Libertad aimed to push Havana’s junta to its dusty destiny, but the legislation was blocked by a Democratic filibuster. That changed in February 1996, when Cuban MiGs shot down two unarmed planes on a mission of mercy. Four members of the Brothers to the Rescue, who helped Cubans escaping Castro on rafts, were slain.“This shooting of civilian aircraft out of the air,” President Clinton said, “was a flagrant violation of international law. It is wrong and the United States will not tolerate it.” Enough of Mr. Clinton’s Democrats shifted against Castro that Helms-Burton passed the Senate 74 to 22, and the president signed it into law.In the 30 years since, Cuba has met only one of Libertad’s conditions — and not by design: The Act says that the island’s government cannot include any members of the Castro family. Fidel died in 2016. His brother, Raul, succeeded him before transferring power to the current head of the Communist Party, Miguel Diaz-Canel, in 2018.Libertad’s other requirements are nowhere near being met. These include respecting civil liberties and human rights, moving toward a free-market economy, and fair elections. Cuba is also required to release all political prisoners, cease cooperation with America’s enemies, respect press freedom, allow “the establishment of independent trade unions,” and extradite fugitives sought by Washington. What little flexibility Libertad gives presidents is in Title III. That section regulates travel, remittances, commercial relations, and financial transactions. President Obama used that authority to ease some of those punitive measures in 2013; Mr. Trump reimposed them in 2019.Settling the property claims of American citizens is another requirement for Cuba. The Supreme Court is now hearing arguments on whether the Act allows ExxonMobil to recover assets seized by the Castro regime in 1959 and now controlled by a state-owned conglomerate, Corporación Cimex.“They have no money,” Mr. Trump said Friday, nor oil, nor food, “and it’s really, right now, a nation in deep trouble and they want our help.” Mr. Trump can’t make those necessities flow alone. The embargo stands unless Congress repeals Helms-Burton — or, more to the point, until Cuba sweeps its entire communist system onto the ash heap where it belongs.

Cubans ‘Want Our Help,’ Trump Says, but American Law Mandates That the Embargo Stays Until Communism Goes

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