Sanctions against Cuba work

OPINION:

Cuba’s kleptocratic military junta, with billions of dollars in cash reserves, pleads penury while Cubans living in extreme poverty die because of a lack of lifesaving medications. Meanwhile, regime elites live the good life, visiting Europe and the United States.

Through its conglomerate GAESA, the Cuban dictatorship’s military has $18 billion in bank accounts, more than the foreign reserves of Costa Rica, Uruguay and Panama.

Eighty-nine percent of the Cuban population lives in extreme poverty. Although the Cuban regime claims it has no money, Cubans die, and the government uses the misery it has manufactured on the island to sell the lie. This includes a failure to purchase lifesaving drugs.

Reports that emerged in 2024 show approximately 146 patients dying daily in Cuba because of a lack of such medications. Government pharmacies have a shortage of 63 key pharmaceuticals, yet keeping these essential drugs available to Cubans would cost only $43 million annually.

Extreme poverty rates in Costa Rica, Uruguay and Panama are far lower than those recorded in Cuba. Costa Rica has an extreme poverty rate of 1.3%, Uruguay’s is 0.2% and Panama’s is 3.7%, according to Our World in Data. Uruguay is doing substantially better than even the United States, which has a 1.2% rate of extreme poverty.

Extreme poverty coincides with the absence of the rule of law

What is the difference between these three Latin American countries and Cuba? The main one is the rule of law index, on which Cuba does not even register. Other Latin American countries, despite challenges, have democratic institutions, including independent judiciaries. This has been absent in Cuba since 1959.

From 1899 to 1959, Cuba had an independent supreme court. Over half a century, Cuba developed a multiparty system, competitive elections, a free press, a modern public health system and a strong labor movement. From 1902 to 1952, 17 Cuban presidents were elected in multiparty elections. This resulted in socioeconomic achievements that placed pre-1959 Cuba at the top of Latin American indexes, outperforming Castro’s Cuba.

Cuban democracy ended on March 10, 1952, when Fulgencio Batista disrupted the constitutional order. Nevertheless, the judiciary maintained independence.

Fidel Castro vowed to restore democracy and condemned Batista’s dictatorship. Instead, once in power, Castro imposed a communist dictatorship. (Before assuming power, he worked with the KGB to establish a police state.)

Rule of law versus rule by law

At the start of the Cuban revolution, Castro abolished the rule of law — a system by which laws are independently decided, equally enforced, publicly disseminated and compliant with international human rights standards — and replaced it with “rule by law,” which considers the governing authorities to be above the law, with the authority to enact and execute laws as they see fit, regardless of the impact on people’s larger liberties.

In their 2006 monograph on corruption in Cuba, Sergio Diaz-Briquetz and Jorge Perez-Lopez cited the formula “Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion - Accountability.” The communist dictatorship in Cuba has monopoly control over all aspects of life, and the military dictatorship has total discretion over how to allocate resources — and zero accountability.

Cuba’s regime is a kleptocracy

Cuba, under the Castro regime, is a kleptocracy. It is organized corruption on a grand scale, done by political leaders for their personal enrichment and maintenance of power. This is why they use front people connected to regime elites to run “private” businesses.

Havana also plunders the resources of other countries, including Venezuela. It infiltrates governing structures and transnational criminal networks to enrich itself and pursue ideological objectives to export its political model.

“In many respects, Cuba can be accurately characterized as a violent criminal organization masquerading as a government,” former Defense Intelligence Agency Officer Christopher Simmons testified to Congress in 2012.

The positive role of sanctions

Loosening U.S. sanctions and providing this criminal enterprise with more resources has resulted in subjugation, first of the Nicaraguan people in 1979, during the Carter administration, and then of the Venezuelan people in 1999, during the Clinton administration.

Hard-line policies during the Reagan-Bush years brought a democratic renaissance to Nicaragua under Violeta Chamorro in 1990, reducing Havana’s negative influence in Latin America and coinciding with a democratic wave in the region.

President Obama’s December 2014 thaw coincided with the expansion in subsequent years of the Cuban military’s control of the Cuban economy. Havana also successfully assisted Daniel Ortega’s return to power and Nicaragua’s becoming a “full-blown dictatorship” from 2014 to 2016, despite Washington maintaining a free trade agreement with Managua.

History demonstrates that sanctions work to constrain Havana’s ambitions and protect U.S. taxpayers. That’s why the Center for a Free Cuba, along with other individuals and groups, continues to argue for a humanitarian corridor to directly assist Cubans on the island while not benefiting the kleptocrats who oppress them.

• John Suarez is a human rights activist and executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba and a former program officer for Latin America Programs at Freedom House.