How Determines US Policy Towards Cuba?

That's what people want to know when I talk to them in places like Canada and India. They're curious how it's possible for the United States, which talks to North Korea about assistance without regime change while keeping a multi-decade embargo against Cuba, to be so out of step with the rest of the world.

The answer is simple. The most adamant opponents of Castro are Cuban expatriates in Miami. They are so vocal and united that they can influence the outcome of national elections in Florida. Florida has enough importance to swing the nation. With so much in the balance, it's much easier to accommodate them than confront them, so the mild wishes of the majority are subordinated to the vocal demands of a minority.

Nowhere could this be plainer than in the fiasco of the international baseball championships, which the Bush administration now intends to prevent Cuba from participating in. As offensives go, it may not compete with the Bay of Pigs, but it to almost everyone except the Miami Cubans and Rupert Murdoch, it must look pretty silly.

How long are we going to continue this farce? There isn't a country in the world of any consequence that supports our embargo. The universal feeling outside the United States, and the majority feeling outside Miami, is that Castro is a doddering dictator in clearly declining health whose regime will probably not survive his death. This will be good news for Cubans, although they are not likely to open their doors to the exiles and return their lost possessions.

Apart from assassination, there is precious little the US can do to hasten that day. We may even be helping to prop him up. Nothing better for someone with domestic problems than to have a foreign adversary to point to.

Republicans frequently deride the roles that "special interests" play in Democratic Party politics. I guess they have granted a special exemption to Miami Cubans.