The first thing to understand, Flake stressed during an interview conducted on our trip, is that the travel ban, trade embargo, and other restrictions that were first put into place back during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, “aren’t sanctions on Cubans, these are sanctions on Americans.” When the Cuban government was “exporting revolution around,” he continued, “there was a good case for a trade embargo, but there was never a good case in my view for an outright travel ban. Or having Cuba being really the only country in the world where your government tells you you can’t go.”
That attitude doesn’t sit well with his fellow Republicans or Democrats such as Senator Bob Menendez, who has called Obama’s normalizing of diplomatic ties a vindication of the Castro regime’s “brutal behavior.” That’s simply wrong, says Flake.
“When others who I normally agree with—Marco Rubio and others—say these latest moves by the president are a concession to the Castros or to the regime, they’re wrong. It’s not a concession to allow your own population to travel. That’s an expression of freedom. That’s how I’ve always viewed it,” he said.
Beyond that rights-based libertarian argument, Flake makes a pragmatic case, too. The embargo has been in place for nearly 60 years and what do we have to show for it, he asked rhetorically. Will another 60 years do the trick?
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