NINE presidents and more than 40 years after the United States first
decided it would try to starve Cuban communists into submission with an
economic and food embargo, many of America’s farm and political leaders
are having second thoughts.
Call it a “Canada moment.” In an age when the pressures are
predominantly to have Canada adopt American values and political
positions, the Cuba issue offers a rare glimpse of America moving
toward Canadian sensibilities.
Canada has traditionally avoided using food as a political weapon. The
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Americans have embraced it.
“Food is a weapon,” U.S. agriculture secretary Earl Butz said in 1974
in the most blunt public articulation of the policy. “It is now one of
the principal tools in our negotiating kits.”
The Cuban embargo, imposed by John F. Kennedy in 1961, is the
longest-standing manifestation of that attitude.
This week, a gaggle of U.S. leaders gather in Washington to argue that
a continuation of the trade embargo against Cuba is wrong-headed. It is
ineffective and morally wrong to deny food to people because of how
they or their government think.
Remarkably, a leader of the anti-embargo movement is the conservative
American Farm Bureau Federation, often considered the agrarian wing of
the Republican Party. Although Republican and Democratic presidents
alike have supported the embargo, Republicans have been the most
aggressively anti-Fidel Castro and anti-communist (Kennedy’s Cuban
obsession notwithstanding).
George W. Bush has had an anti-Castro thread throughout his career and
brother Jeb, governor of Florida, depends on the anti-Castro fanaticism
of Miami Cuban expatriates for his political base.
Yet farm bureau president Bob Stallman is co-chairing a Washington
meeting to lobby for an end to Cuba’s isolation.
“Embargoes are wrong philosophically, morally and economically,” he
told the Sept. 17 summit. “They punish America’s farmers, not foreign
governments.”
True, there is significant self-interest in that statement, since it
supposes an end to the embargo would bring new markets for American
food exports. But Cuba is a small and poor country. New sales
opportunities would be almost insignificant in the context of total
American exports.
The key in this is the shifting ideological and moral outlook.
Stallman said that using food as a weapon through embargoes lacks moral
and philosophical legitimacy. This sounds like a latter-day conversion
to Canada’s view of the place of food in diplomacy.
While the Americans and their allies were trying to isolate Communist
China in 1961, Canada under Tory John Diefenbaker was selling them
wheat and winning Third World friends.
Under Liberals Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, aid for and trade
with Cuba continued even as the Americans sought to destroy the regime.
While Republican Ronald Reagan funded an army trying to overthrow the
leftist Nicaraguan government in the early 1980s, Canada continued to
trade and help build the Nicaraguan dairy herd.
Canada has traditionally taken the view that food should be excluded
from the arsenal of diplomatic, political and economic warfare. In
2002, the United States appears poised to belatedly accept that logic,
at least for Cuba.
