WASHINGTON -- In their near-fanatic focus on a small tree named Elian, the Miami Cubans may be jeopardizing their foreign policy forest.
That possibility lies in the fact that their stubborn unreasonableness could have the result of putting Cuba policy back on the table -- even if Saturday's dramatic events pretty much settle the matter of Elian.A rethinking of that policy is long overdue, of course. What has kept it from happening is that few politicians with clout -- and zero presidential candidates -- have dared defy the Miami Cubans, for fear of losing Florida's huge pool of electoral votes.
The Miami Cubans constitute a fairly small minority of the state's electorate. What they have enforced so far is the power of the single-issue constituency. A small, cohesive group willing to vote on the basis of a single criterion can often frustrate the desires of a larger group whose members care about a number of issues.
The Miami Cubans certainly qualify as that single-issue constituency. Castro is, for them, the embodiment of evil. Nothing remotely resembling a concession to him can be countenanced. The only thing worth discussing is how to bring him down. Any talk of ending the U.S. embargo against Cuba is the moral equivalent of cutting a deal with Satan.
That may be the principal reason the embargo remains in place after nearly four decades.
The policy, whatever its Cold War anti-communist value, hasn't made sense for years. It hasn't made sense in terms of our foreign policy interests. The rationale for clamping down on communist Cuba was that its international sponsors were using the island as a transshipment point for spreading communism in the hemisphere. Well, one of those sponsors, China, is now our trading partner. The other, the Soviet Union, has ceased to exist, and its chief remnant, Russia, has abandoned communism while we figure out ways to make it a player on the international economic scene. In
what conceivable way does Cuba remain a threat to our interests?
The embargo hasn't made sense in moral terms. Castro remains fit and sassy while the Cuban people suffer. Indeed the chief argument of the Miami Cubans for not allowing Elian Gonzalez to return to his father and Cuba is that Cuba is such an awful place: poor, oppressive and lacking in the opportunities the youngster would find in the United States.
But one of the reasons Cuba remains so poor -- and, I'm convinced, one of the reasons it remains both communist and beholden to Castro -- is the embargo. The embargo's effects include poorer-than-necessary health care, malnutrition and under-exploitation of one of Cuba's major assets: its potential for tourism. The United Nations and major human rights organizations have condemned the embargo repeatedly.
Perhaps the embargo's most conspicuous failure is that it hasn't worked in its own terms. Castro, now nearly 74, is as much in power today as he was when President John F. Kennedy imposed the embargo in 1961. He's more likely to die of old age than to be deposed by the embargo we persist in maintaining.
Nor is there much evidence the American people want to keep the embargo in place. It's there almost entirely because of the Miami Cubans who, as certified anti-communists and, in some cases, personal victims of expropriation of their property, have held the moral (or at least political) high ground.
But their behavior over the past four months may have offended enough people to embolden politicians to rethink our Cuba policy. I'm thinking not merely of the shameless exploitation of Elian -- they were doing it, of course, to prevent Castro from exploiting him! -- or their obviously sincere notion that to return the boy to Cuba is to condemn him to the hell he only recently -- and at the cost of a dead mother -- escaped.
I'm thinking, too, of the truly shabby treatment of the endlessly patient Janet Reno, who, like an ever-hopeful Charlie Brown, kept kicking at a football that's no longer there because Lucy -- in the person of Uncle Lazaro -- had snatched it away at the last second.
It was great sport for a while, but then sympathies began to flow toward the hapless Charlie.
Even if it's true that the Miami Cubans are losing sympathy and with it clout on their single most important issue, that doesn't mean that Castro is necessarily gaining sympathy.
My hope is that we'll at least be able to discuss our Cuba policy again. Just last week, the Congress asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to begin an official investigation of the impact of the embargo on U.S. and Cuban economic interests. The report is to be submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee by February 2001.
That's not a lot. But it's a start.
William Raspberry's e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com.