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The resignation of veteran dictator Fidel Castro provides an opportunity for a much-needed shift in U.S. policy, but will anyone seize the moment?
El Jefe's departure from power on his own terms almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the starkest reminder yet of what a dismal failure America's Cuba policy has been. Despite (or more plausibly in part because of) the unremitting hostility of the superpower next door, Castro succeeded in creating the world's most successful Communist regime. New waves of non-Cuban leftists have been growing disillusioned with the dictator for decades, but U.S. policy has allowed the regime to invariably maintain a hefty focus on America's persecution of him and the people he governs, rather than his persecution of the domestic opposition. Meanwhile, substantial portions of U.S. policy remain formally tied not to improvements in the Cuban human rights situation, but the Miami exile Community's quixotic efforts to secure the return of property acquired during the previous dictatorship and confiscated in the late 1950s.
Castro's resignation provides, in principle, an opportunity for a face-saving rethinking of our approach, but the lame duck Bush administration doesn't appear amenable and it seems unlikely that any presidential candidate would advocate major risks on this front in the midst of an election. The danger is that campaign-related posturing will set a continuation of the status quo in stone and leave the destructive Washington-Havana standoff in place for years or decades to come.
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