Robert S. McElvaine: Lift the U.S. Trade Embargo on Cuba

Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College. His most recent book is a 25th anniversary edition of "The Great Depression."

President Obama will have to decide by next week whether to continue, for yet another year, provisions of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Without a presidential extension, these provisions — though not others that were instituted by congressional action — will end this month. The ending of the embargo is long overdue. The current economic crisis provides a useful rationale for doing so.

There is precedent for taking such a step with a communist nation during hard times. In the face of the Depression, prominent American businessmen began arguing that recognition of the Soviet Union would lead to a substantial increase in trade and so provide a much-needed boost to the U.S. economy. In November 1933, after several conservative politicians had joined the push for recognition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the Soviet government.

The roots of the Cuba embargo go back to the Eisenhower administration. Noting in a 1960 memorandum that "the majority of Cubans support Castro," Lester D. Mallory, deputy assistant secretary of State for inter-American affairs, argued that "the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship." The objective, he wrote, was "to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government." A few months later, during the presidential campaign in which John F. Kennedy was lashing at Vice President Richard M. Nixon for being part of an administration that allowed communism to be established 90 miles from American shores, the United States imposed a partial economic embargo on Cuba....