EDITORIAL - When America goes asinine

A couple of times during the life of the previous People's National Party administration, and since they returned to office, the Jamaican Parliament passed resolutions condemning America's long-enduring trade embargo against Cuba and urging the United States to end it. Annually, for 22 years, the United Nations General Assembly has, with overwhelming majorities, passed similar resolutions.

The United States pays little heed to such calls. If anything, as the events of recent weeks have demonstrated, it is willing to enforce its embargo to the point of infringing the sovereignty of other nations, including this one's, unconcerned about the obvious inefficacy of a policy that, after more than half a century, has failed to achieve its ends: the overthrow of Cuba's communist government.

We must make clear that this newspaper is not enamoured with Cuban system of government, with its absence of competitive politics and a free press and constraints on the rights of individuals. Indeed, we call on the Cuban government to move to a multi-party arrangement, with free and fair elections and a full and open embrace of human rights.

At the same time, we are firm that the 52-year-old embargo is a policy anachronism, which is indiscriminate in its effect and whose application, as in the case of PriceSmart in Jamaica and elsewhere, shows an ugly side of America that embarrasses those of us who admire the values upon which that country was built.

PriceSmart is a US membership retailer, with stores in several Latin American and Caribbean countries, including one in Kingston. Last month, Taro Kisto, the manager of the Jamaica store, wrote to a Kingston-based Cuban diplomat suspending his membership and suggesting that he advise his colleagues that they will be subject to similar treatment. Ms Kisto sought to co-opt the official into doing a job she found unpleasant.

policy illogic

America's maintenance of the embargo is a policy illogic that flies in the face of its normalisation of relations with communist-led China 40 years ago, leading to the thriving trade and financial engagement that helped to transform China into the world's second-largest economy.

But more worrying to us is that extraterritorial application of US domestic laws under the Torricelli and Helms-Burton legislation. The first, formally the Cuban Democracy Act, was passed in 1992. It extended the embargo of the 1960s by prohibiting foreign subsidiaries of US companies from doing business with Cuba and Cuban nationals. That, effectively, is what has been applied by PriceSmart. The second, Helms-Burton, purports to sanction firms doing business with Cuba and supposedly traffic in property that used to be owned by US citizens, but nationalised by the Cubans after their revolution. A Jamaican investor in Cuba would be rightly concerned about this.

The actions of PriceSmart - and Canada's Scotiabank which it was disclosed took similar action against Cuban diplomats last year - appear, on the face of it, to breach the conventions governing the guaranteed delivery of services to diplomats as well as Jamaica's laws guaranteeing non-discrimination against individuals.

Perhaps PriceSmart, and all other US companies in Jamaica, and foreign ones that have interests in America, like Scotiabank, should demand the identity cards of every individual at every transaction, to determine whether the customer is Cuban. Or, an American seeing a doctor in an emergency should ensure the physician's nationality so as not to do business with a Cuban.

Asinine, indeed!

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