A conflict between the Bush administration and Congress over travel to Cuba once again brings to light the hypocritical policies of the U.S. government. President Bush has called for stricter enforcement of the 39-year-old economic embargo against Cuba, and the U.S. Treasury Department is willingly complying by stepping up efforts to punish Americans who spend money in Cuba in violation of U.S. law. On the other hand, some members of Congress are now attempting to end the ban.
One obvious question, of course, is: Why is the U.S. government controlling what the American people do with their own money?
One answer U.S. officials give is that such control will help oust Fidel Castro from power. Hope springs eternal, but aren’t four decades of failure powerful circumstantial evidence that embargoes do not always achieve their purported end?
Another answer is that if Americans were allowed to spend money in Cuba, they would be supporting a tyrannical communist regime. Oh, does that mean that communism and tyranny in China, where Americans are permitted to spend their money, has disappeared?
Moreover, not every American is prohibited from spending money in Cuba. Cuban-Americans are permitted to send money to Cuban relatives and to travel to Cuba and spend money there. And the Treasury Department gives special licenses to some Americans that permit them to spend money in Cuba. Why does money spent in Cuba without U.S. government permission support communist tyranny while money spent with such permission doesn’t?
But of course, all this avoids the much more fundamental question that every American should have been asking for the past 40 years: Under what moral authority does any government control what its citizens do with their own money and their own travel plans?
Isn’t government control over economic and monetary activity a central element of a socialist economic system? For example, in Cuba, the government prohibits its citizens from freely traveling to the United States and prevents them from freely disposing of the limited funds that the state permits them to acquire. Cubans are prohibited from owning businesses, and just about everyone works for the state. (Imagine that — one giant Postal Service employing practically everyone in society!)
After the termination of the Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s, in order to avert a famine a few Cubans were permitted to become self-employed upon receiving a government-issued license, whereupon they were immediately subjected to income taxation to ensure that they didn’t become too wealthy. (Almost sounds like the Democratic Party platform, doesn’t it?)
How is such control by the Cuban government over the economic affairs of its citizens different in principle from the U.S. government’s control over travel and disposition of funds by U.S. citizens? Yes, it’s true that the U.S. government doesn’t directly ban travel to Cuba but instead only prevents Americans from spending money there. But isn’t that just a hypocritical sham that enables the U.S. government to profess a superficial devotion to people’s right to travel while effectively accomplishing the same result that the Cuban government accomplishes with its more direct controls? Make no mistake about it: Both governments — Cuban and U.S. — fiercely maintain that a proper role of government is to control where its citizens go and what they do with their own money.
Not only has Fidel Castro outlasted every U.S. president since 1960, despite the U.S. embargo (an embargo that he was effectively able to blame for his country’s economic woes), he has also maneuvered the U.S. government into exercising the same type of economic controls that he exercises over the Cuban people. That’s why Castro’s victory over U.S. officials for the past 40 years has been both political and ideological.
As our American ancestors understood so well, a free society entails the right of people to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth and to dispose of it any way they choose anywhere in the world. That’s why such infringements on individual liberty as income taxation, licensure, welfare-state programs, and passports were once nonexistent in American society. The absence of such controls was what it once meant to be an American, what it once meant to be free.