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Essay On Cuban Embargo

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The Cuban Embargo The key to understanding the foreign policy of a nation state is understanding that state’s national interest. The key to successful foreign policy is, as Henry Kissinger stated in 1998, defining “an achievable objective”. Thus United States policy towards
Cuba fails because it neglects these two key ingredients of foreign policy. The US embargo of Cuba is four decades old and no longer serves the country’s national interest, rather it has proven to be a economic and political hindrance for the US. The embargo also falls short in terms of having an achievable goal, since many of the requests that embargo legislation calls for are simply not within the ability of the Cuban state. By examining the …show more content…

Three years later when the economic sanctions of the Cuban
Democracy Act had failed to oust Castro from power, the US Congress once again increased the standards Cuba most adhere to for the embargo to be lifted. It accomplished this by passing the Helms-Burton Law. Three of the stated purposes of the helms-Burton Law focus on the democratization of the Cuban government, two deal with protecting the US, and the last one is concerned with global sanctions. The law also increases the amount of compensation Cuba most pay before the US will drop the sanctions. The Helms-Burton law, by insisting that Cuba pay compensation to over
400,000 Cuban Americans, makes it literally impossible for the Cuban state to reach the
US’s terms. Embargo supporters claim that sanctions against Cuba must be maintained because Cuba is still a national security threat to the US, however current facts about security reveal this to simply be untrue. Initially, Castro’s socialist platform and alliance with the Soviet Union did indeed pose a threat to American security. The reason for this is that the state of international politics in that era was one of bipolarism between liberalism and communism. This meant that the US felt that its balance of power in its own hemisphere was being threatened by the Soviet’s presence in Cuba. Also the
Soviet’s armament of Cuba posed a severe threat to US security, as was seen during the
Cuban missile crisis. However, with the fall of the

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