Why Obama was right to give Cuba a 'full bailout'

In 2004, then-State Sen. Barack Obama was asked about the half-century-old economic and political embargo of Cuba. He said, "I think it's time for us to end the embargo in Cuba — the Cuban embargo has failed to provide the sorts of rising standards of living and has squeezed the innocents in Cuba and utterly failed in the efforts to overthrow Castro, who has now been there since I was born, so it is time for us to acknowledge that this particular policy is available."

During the darkest days of his presidency, during the lost years of 2013 and 2014, you would probably be right to assume that President Obama would sneak off to an imaginary world inside his head and fantasize about the day when he'd be able to announce that the embargo was over, that the United States and Cuba were restoring diplomatic relations, and that years of secret negotiations had secured the release of an imprisoned American spy and an American aid worker. Indeed, if the "normalization" goes well, Obama might well burnish his legacy. You can question his judgment here, but if you want to know his motivation, look no further than the first paragraph of this post.

The Washington Post's editorial board slammed Obama for granting Cuba a "full bailout." It's true: Cuba needs the money it's going to get, badly, and it hasn't done much to earn it. But Obama didn't think Cuba needed to earn its way out of the locked box of an ideological dispute that had its origins in a war that, for all intents and purposes, no longer needs to be fought. (Communism is dead; the nuclear threat from Cuba is what exactly? And, hey: Castro apologized for that, sort of.)

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Cuba remains a dictatorial country that imprisons dissidents, gays, and journalists. Earlier this year, its leaders flirted with Vladimir Putin, offering to re-open the Lourdes signals intelligence post that helped the Soviet Union suck telephone and teletype traffic from Washington, D.C., during the Cold War. Its political leaders will avoid punishment for "choking their own people," as a disappointed Cuban-American friend of mine put it today.

But the U.S. will gain a neighbor it can trade with. Florida's economy will boom. Russia will effectively be banished from Latin America. Cuba is not China; there is every reason to expect that American culture will influence the development of Cuba's political system to a much greater degree than capitalism has encouraged China to experiment with political change. As James Fallows says:

The counter-argument is that the embargo has worked. It "marginalized" Cuba to the point of being puny. And being puny, it is powerless. The U.S. should have extracted far more concessions in exchange for giving Cuba everything it wanted. Cuba should not be rewarded, The Washington Post says, for denying freedom to its people.

But should Cubans be denied the full benefits of friendship and trade with the United States simply because Fidel and Raul Castro are bad? Why should they pay for the mistakes of their political leaders, especially when there is something significant the United States can do, unilaterally, to mitigate their suffering and encourage reforms on its own?