COMMENTARY If we tighten the sanctions screws on Cuba — or loosen them — shouldn't we do the same for Venezuela? And vice versa? In reality it's not that simple — for Biden or the rest of us.
I’ll admit I recently set myself up for being charged with a double standard.
Last month I wrote a commentary arguing that regime hardliners in Havana and exile hardliners in Miami are more focused on Cuban politics than on Cuban people. I certainly decried Cuba’s repressive communist dictatorship. But I just as unabashedly reminded readers that the 62-year-old U.S. economic embargo against Cuba has utterly failed to dislodge that regime.
And I said (as I have before) that the embargo should be loosened — if not lifted — in order to lessen the misery it adds to Cubans’ lives on top of the misery the regime’s already heaped on.
I soon got a call from a colleague I greatly respect who had an elephant-in-the-room question:
Then what about Venezuela, Tim?
READ MORE: Now, as always, Cuban politics matter more than Cuban people
By your reasoning, he suggested, shouldn’t we now urge the Biden Administration not to levy heavy U.S. economic sanctions on an equally repressive socialist dictatorship in Caracas?
Shouldn’t we make the same case that a de facto embargo against Venezuela’s vital oil industry exacts a gratuitous hardship on average venezolanos — the same desperate migrants who are pouring over the U.S. southern border these days?
He raised an apt consideration that will, in fact, be inescapable in the coming days, as the Administration resolves whether to slap — or rather, to re-slap — those oil sanctions on Venezuela as punishment for the regime’s tyrannical strangulation of the free and fair presidential election it said it would hold this year.
It’s a big, difficult decision. But either way, the moment will, or should, make the rest of us have a big, difficult conversation about when and how we should slap these penalties on any country.
And one thing we’ll learn is that it’s easy to fall into what sure look, feel and sound like double standards.
Even so, I won’t deny that in the case of Venezuela — at least at this moment — I’d support the U.S. sanctions plan if President Biden re-imposes it.
My reason: I think it could still work in Venezuela’s case in ways it can’t anymore in Cuba’s.
In Venezuela's case, a de facto U.S. oil embargo still had a window of opportunity to achieve democratic change that long since closed in Cuba.
When, in 2019, former President Trump started building the Venezuelan oil embargo edifice, I was at first uneasy precisely because I feared we were going down the Cuba path. And, frankly, we were. But I also realized there wasn’t much U.S. sanctions could do to cripple Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy that the country’s corrupt and incompetent regime hadn’t already done.
More important, I held out hope we could do the thing right in the early stages this time, without letting people’s suffering drag on and worsen for more than six decades. We still had, in other words, a democratic-change window of opportunity that had long since closed in Cuba.
Escape hatches
That seemed especially true in one key area: diplomacy.
A big reason the Cuba embargo hasn’t achieved regime change the way, say, apartheid fell in South Africa, is that it’s unilateral. The forces in Miami and Washington that champion it have done astonishingly little to bring the rest of the world to their side — in fact, they’ve done their arrogant best to alienate the world — leaving the Havana regime with ample escape hatches.
The Venezuela sanctions, by contrast, haven't seemed so lone wolf; the U.S. has done a more effective job the past five years getting allies like the E.U. and the Lima Group of Latin American nations onboard to exert more pressure.
A lot of people will say, however, that the window of opportunity has now closed for Venezuela. That President-Dictator Nicolás Maduro’s unhinged demolition of the deal he struck last fall to conduct a democratic vote signals Caracas is now as much a lost cause as Havana. They’ll argue that since Venezuelans are now the second largest national group arriving at the U.S. border — and the largest crossing illegally — their misery warrants easing sanctions, too.
They may be right. Which is why media reports say Biden won’t fully restore the de facto oil embargo he lifted last year, when the U.S. thought Maduro might actually keep his now worthless word.
Still, if Biden stays soft on Venezuela, but keeps the screws tight on Cuba, I hope he knows he’s set himself up for being charged with a double standard.
