Is Cuba Still a National Security Threat?

One of the original purposes of the embargo was to keep our country safe. Cuba posed a national security threat for many years. By restricting trade, our government was ensuring that the United States wasn’t funding a regime that was a possible threat to our homeland. A major question that needs to be addressed is whether or not the Cuban military is still a security threat. 

As Daniel Griswold from the CATO Istitute states, “The embargo had a national security rationale before 1991, when Castro served as the Soviet Union’s proxy in the Western Hemisphere.” Because of the Soviet Union, Cuba was a legitimate concern for the United States. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Griswold believes, “Cuba is only a poor and dysfunctional nation of 11 million that poses no threat to American or regional security.”

Griswold is not the only one that believes that Cuba has been drastically weakened since 1991. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in 1998, “Cuba does not pose a significant military threat to the U.S. or to other countries in the region.” “Residual” and “Defensive” were words used by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to describe the state of the Cuban military. No matter who is running Cuba and what their beliefs are, I do not believe that a weak, residual, defensive military is a military that the United States should worry about.

I realize that national security is not the only purpose of the embargo. There are other purposes for the embargo that I will research, but in terms of national security, the US-Cuba embargo is unnecessary and pointless.

Source: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10921

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