August 9, 2022
In 1962, the United States Government extended an embargo on trade with Cuba to include food and agricultural products, thus eliminating what was then the No. 1 export market for U.S. rice producers.
Six decades have passed, and with only slight changes the embargo remains in place. Last year, the United States shipped 200 metric tons of rice to Cuba, which imported 450,000 tons of rice from Vietnam and other sources.
The target of the 1960s embargo, Cuban President Fidel Castro, was still nominally in power when he died in November of 2016. His brother, Raul Castro, was president until he retired in 2018, and Miguel Diaz Canel, another member of the regime, became president.
If doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity, as the saying goes, what does that say about U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba? Especially when you consider that Cuba could have been the second or third largest importer of U.S. rice for many of those years.
In 2004, Cuba imported 160,000 tons of rice from the U.S. following the passage of the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Act of 2000, which allowed shipments of food and some medical supplies.
That was the highwater mark in the modern era of U.S. rice shipments to the island. In 2008, the Bush administration tightened restrictions on agricultural exports, and, from 2009 to 2017, U.S. farmers did not ship a single grain of rice to Cuba.
Foreign aid
For most of the 60 years of the embargo Cubans got by, first with aid from Russia and, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved, with tourist dollars and exports of Cuban cigars. At one point, Fidel Castro shipped Cuban doctors to Venezuela in exchange for oil. But the Covid-19 pandemic is now creating a food crisis for Cuba.
For one thing the cost of shipping rice from Vietnam to Cuba has increased exponentially, according to Paul Johnson, chairman of the U.S. Agricultural Coalition for Cuba. Johnson and Rodney Gonzalez, counselor at the Cuban Embassy in Washington, were guests on a recent USA Rice Federation “Rice Stuff” Podcast.