Florida’s Out of Reach for Democrats. So Why Don’t They End the Embargo on Cuba?
A failed policy is held up by politics, but the politics are changing.
This week, the United Nations General Assembly — where the countries of the world can all voice their opinions about various issues in non-binding, symbolic resolutions — voted to oppose the United States’s embargo towards Cuba.
The vote was predictably lopsided, with 187 countries voting to oppose the embargo and just 2 — the United States and Israel (which doesn’t even have such an embargo on Cuba itself) — opposing it. That means almost all of America’s friends and allies, too decided to vote against the embargo.
For years, the United States has insisted that the embargo on Cuba — which includes restrictions not just on trade but also on travel for its own citizens — is a matter of freedom.
Former President Trump, explaining why he wanted to reimpose the embargo after former President Obama started to lift it, said that he wanted to "affirm our ironclad solidarity with the Cuban people and our eternal conviction that freedom will prevail over the sinister forces of communism and evil in many different forms.”
And yet no serious policymaker, academic, think tanker, or anyone else really thinks that America’s unilateral embargo on Cuba will topple the government there and bring in a Jeffersonian democracy.
The truth is that the embargo is mostly a legacy of Florida’s electoral college votes. The state has long been a pivotal swing vote for presidential elections, and a powerful Cuban diaspora residing there views the embargo as an essential tool to punish the hated Castro government there.
For many electoral cycles, it made sense for both parties to placate this diaspora and maintain the embargo. But thanks to Florida’s drift to the right, it’s starting to make less sense for Democrats to go along with this plan.
In 2016, Florida narrowly voted for Trump — who won 49.1% to Hillary Clinton’s 47.8%. In the 2018 gubernatorial race, Republican Ron DeSantis only narrowly edged out Democrat Andrew Gillum. But starting in 2020, it became clear that Florida had started to shift more to the right, with Trump carrying it by around 3 points. By 2022, DeSantis won by around 19 points.
It’s clear that Florida’s days as a swing state are numbered. The Republicans are no longer worried that the state will go blue in this presidential election, and the Democrats are spending little time there.
There’s a lot of political incentive for the Republicans to continue to court the South Florida Cuban diaspora to keep the state red. But if the state is increasingly out of reach for the Democrats, there’s little reason to continue a policy that seems to make both the United States and Cuba poorer.
And let’s remember that more and more Cubans are fleeing to the U.S., understandably seeking a better life for their families. This is adding to our own border problems.
By ending the embargo, we can make them richer by making their own work go farther — they’ll have a massive market to trade with and develop alongside. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s a standout failure that President Biden never chose to do it. But if Kamala Harris wins next week’s presidential election, she can rectify his mistake.
I'd love to see Biden lift this wasteful and harmful embargo. For many reasons. If lifting it puts a president Trump in the position of having to reinstate it, to appease Florida Republicans, even that would be a good thing. Americans would see a clear difference between the parties.
In fairness it should be noted that Castro avoided our multiple assassination attempts. That was hardly sporting of him.