On 6 April 1960, the US diplomat Lester D Mallory wrote a memo advocating an embargo “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Sixty-four years later and the policy that Cubans call el bloqueo (the blockade) is still in force. It hasn’t achieved its stated aim of overturning the Cuban Revolution – but it has fueled years of desperation and justified anger.
Barack Obama came to recognize this by his second term. During a historic 2016 visit to Havana, he said that he had come “to bury the last remnant of the cold war in the Americas” and “to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people”. By then his administration had already made tangible steps in that direction.
