Commentary: What Obama needs to see while in Cuba

By Craig Snyder

After normalizing diplomatic relations and opening commercial and people-to-people contacts as much as allowed by current law - which was recently relaxed to allow educational trips and lift limits on the use of U.S. dollars - President Obama is now in the midst of his visit to Cuba.

Thus, the debate about U.S. policy on Cuba has dramatically intensified. Another chapter is being added to the competition among foreign policy paradigms, between advocates of engagement with bad regimes - who argue that such ties mean the best chance of both protecting U.S. interests and creating a better life for the people of tyrannized lands - and those who argue for containment, or even coercion, to achieve our goals.

President Ronald Reagan's administration argued strenuously for a policy of "constructive engagement" with the apartheid regime in South Africa, while its critics, of course, pressed for harsh sanctions. While the ideological roles were reversed in regard to Cuba, the basic arguments about engagement vs. embargo - both their purposes and their predicted results - were almost identical to today's politics about Cuba.

Likewise, Bill Clinton ran for president criticizing George H.W. Bush's policy of engagement with China, arguing that Chinese labor, environmental, and human-rights policies all required a stern American response, not filling the coffers of Chinese rulers through ever-closer economic ties.

Today, on the dramatic occasion of the president's visit to Cuba, these schools of thought, which seem to flip-flop from left to right depending on the specific bilateral relationship at issue, are at it once again.

I recently returned from Cuba, having led a delegation on behalf of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia and cooperating councils from coast to coast. It's not the role of the World Affairs Councils to take a side on this policy debate, but I want to offer some observations about what we saw in Cuba, and on what Cuban reality I wish Obama could engage for himself.

First, he should see the rations stores. There, Cubans, whose average wage equates to $25 per month, take their one coupon a month per family to get five pounds of rice, four pounds of beans, two pounds of pork, and a handful of eggs per family member. It is a truly shocking scene a short flight from the abundance of South Florida.

The president should learn further that even that meager quantity of food has to be substantially imported by Cuba through bartering agreements with countries like Vietnam. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Cuban agriculture - on a lush and sparsely populated tropical island - has returned to the 1800s, with oxen pulling wooden plows.

He should talk to the Cubans who have the great good fortune of having jobs at the new U.S. Embassy, where they're paid far more than they could possibly earn in any position outside the embassy walls. Still, nearly all of them, if allowed to speak and act freely, would leave their country for the United States in a heartbeat.

Indeed, also inside the walls of the embassy, the president could learn how middle-class American Foreign Service officers are able to afford maids and child-care workers who are actually highly trained professionals - Cuban doctors and engineers. They choose to fold laundry and change diapers in the homes of Americans because they are paid 10 times the national average wage to do so.

And if the president could get out of his limousine and take a little stroll through the crumbling streets of Havana at night, he would see something akin to a Hollywood postapocalyptic urban nightmare scene. The buildings and streets, almost all decades old, some many centuries old, are falling apart and yet overflowing, with a population density rivaling Hong Kong's in the central district. And he would see on the streets at night a virtual plague of prostitution, certainly among the most widespread and aggressive in the entire world.

Reasonable Americans can debate whether opening relations with Cuba or maintaining the sanctions in place since the Castros took power is the better approach to changing this regime and improving the quality of life of its energetic, proto-entrepreneurial population. But what all reasonable Americans, including our president, can't help but see in any meaningful consideration of Cuba is the moral urgency of genuine human progress on this essentially captive island.

Craig Snyder is president of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. csnyder@wacphila.org