Instead, U.S. presidents have tried to reverse the revolution with exploding cigars and rowboats filled with ardent but ill-prepared exiles.

Between the Bay of Pigs and stogie-gate, U.S. policy toward Cuba made the scheme hatched by that banana republic in "The Mouse That Roared" sound like enlightened international diplomacy.

Embarrassing is a kind way to describe it. Hypocritical, counter-productive, duplicitous and short-sighted are a few equally apt descriptions.

It is hypocritical in that we claim Castro's communism is different in kind from communism in China, which holds billions of dollars in U.S. debt and defies U.S. policy in Africa and parts of the Middle East without fear of reprisal.

It is duplicitous because it treats Cubans as pariahs while we do a bustling business with Vietnam, where 58,000 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in a fight against a communist regime we trade with now.

It was short-sighted in its expectation that all we had to do was wait for freedom-loving Cubans to rise up and oust the leftist tyrant. Fifty years later, the only thing that has changed is the first name on the Cuban president's door.

But even with all of that, we still could have held ourselves out as a shining beacon on the hill if our Cuban policy hadn't been so counterproductive. The U.S. embargo has done as much to perpetuate poverty in Cuba as the brain-dead, throwback, 1930s-style communism that Castro imposed with an iron fist.

Cuba's masses fell out of love with Fidel Castro years ago. Most Cubans, like the masses in virtually every communist country since the Bolsheviks turned out the czar, have never been party members.

Communism is a paternalistic, elitist ideology imposed by people who sell an old-time religion that even they don't believe in. The only reason it hasn't fallen in Cuba is that, after the Russians propped it up for years, Hugo Chavez, the megalomaniac president of Venezuela, filled the vacuum with his abundant petro-dollars.

That could have been us. We could have been a friend to the Cuban people by simply taking our foot off their neck. But we're more interested in appeasing that Castro-hating Cuban-exile voting bloc in Miami than appealing to his victims in Havana.

We use our base in Guantanamo to "detain" suspected terrorists permanently but expect Cubans to be able to discern the difference between U.S. democracy and Cuban communism.

Travel restrictions, which prevented almost any American from flying into Cuba, were tightened even further four years ago. If an American gets in, as I did on a journalist's visa a few years ago, he cannot bring back more than $100 worth of Cuban goods.

It's easier to import "blood diamonds" from Africa than cigars from Cuba. Under a 1992 U.S. law, a ship that stops in a Cuban port cannot dock in the U.S. for the next five years. So much for tourism.

These people would jump at the chance to do business with us. Cuban cab drivers, for instance, are classic capitalists.

A cabbie pays $25 a day to lease a relatively modern cab from a state-run company. All he earns above that is pure profit.

But you still see almost as many tourists in the backseats of 40- to 50-year-old American rust buckets as you do state-run cabs. Cuban tour guides earn as much as doctors because tourism is the one industry in which they have access to U.S. dollars.

When Nixon launched his constructive-engagement policy with China, his idea was that we could influence them more if we do business with them than if we don't.

It's even more true in Cuba, where the shining beacon on the hill is just 90 miles away.

Fidel Castro's departure was an opening. We can start to fill it by loosening trade restrictions and normalizing relations.

Or, we can wait for Raul Castro and all the little Castros to die off another 50 years from now. *

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith