A specter is haunting the US- the specter of communism. All the old powers of America have entered into an alliance against this specter: wealthy lobbyists and exiles, Clinton and Helms, CIA assassins and counter-revolutionaries.

The face of this specter is Cuba. The US, since 1960, has waged a war on the Cuban people by order of an enclave of wealthy Cuban exiles in Miami and by Cold War era politicians so blindly devoted to the country that they fail to see the successes of Cuba's socialist revolution. The 1959 revolution in Cuba overthrew the brutal US supported dicatorship of Fulgencio Batista and brought into power the charismatic and pragmatic Fidel Castro.

Why do we have an embargo on Cuba? Is it because of reported human rights violations? Why not then embargo China, our most favored trading partner, or Turkey, a NATO member that slaughters Kurds by the thousands. Perhaps because Cuba supports revolution in Latin America.This is no longer a rational justification. Is it a matter of national security? Hardly. Cuba spends in one year on its military what the US spends in twelve hours. The US has an embargo on Cuba because of Castro's insistence that Cuba be independant, because Castro nationalized US holdings on its territory and traded with the Soviet Union. In short, it is because Cuba is a socialist state, and because the US has a fetish with money and with property.

Even with this obsession in the US, many Americans are able to see the harm done by the embargo. Anyone, including the American Association of World Health, can see that the embargo hurts Cuba's people by denying them even food and medicine. The embargo uses food and medicine as a weapon against the people of a sovereign nation. Though the effects of the embargo constitute in themselves more than enough cause for lifting the embargo, which has been tightened in recent years to further attack the people of Cuba after the demise of the USSR (which accounted for over 70% of its trade). It is not however the whole argument.

A common argument for the embargo's end is that to topple Castro, we must let capitalism in. In a recent opinion piece in the NY Times, author and journalist Thomas Friedman promoted lifting the embargo in order to take advantage of Cuba's economy, to make it a puppet of the US economic interests once again. This is an unacceptable path. Friedman claims that Cuba's woes are not a prodect of the US embargo, but are caused by the fact that "ommunism doesn't work". Perhaps then we should define what it means for a political-economic system to "work". Socialist Cuba provides its people with universal health care. Illiteracy has been wiped out. Starvation is nonexistant. Its life expectancy is number 1 in all of Latin America, outranking capitalist countries. Its infant mortality rate is lower than that of Washington DC. Its patient to doctor ratio also tops all other Latin American countries. Cuba's health care program has been called a "model for the world" by the World Health Organization. Cuba has wiped out the infectious diseases which plague other developing countries. Through food rationing, Cuba is the first 'underdeveloped' country in the world to have wiped out malnutrition. They have survived the embargo, yes, but now have little access to new medicines to help the people. Because of the embargo, Cuban doctors must count carefully each pill they prescribe, and the embargo has placed signigicant strain of the system. According to the American Association of World Health, a "humanitarian catastrophe has been averted only because the Cuban government has maintained a high level of budgetary support for a health care system designed to deliver.. care to all of its citizens." Can the US make claims like Cuba's? No, it cannot. And certainly no compatible capitalist nation, such as those elsewhere in Latin America, can make such claims.

So perhaps we must reexamine our beliefs. Does capitalism "work"? Does communism fail? Or is our policy dominated by Cold War era politicians, big businesses and a population of wealthy Batista era dissidents in Miami clamoring for their lost position of financial and social superiority? We Americans need to awaken to the faults of our country and begin working with Cuba. Then perhaps the US can open up our collective minds and let socialism in.