US foreign policy is often criticized by confused liberals for being “self-contradictory.” For instance, they point out that communist Cuba has been subjected to every hostile stratagem, including travel and trade embargoes, sabotage, and expeditionary invasion, while communist China—which has committed numerous human rights violations—has been granted “most favored nation” trading status. US policymakers repeatedly have tried to assure the fundamentalist hawks in Congress that we should not impose a political litmus test on China. But one is regularly imposed on Cuba. This is not a sensibly consistent policy, the liberal critics say.
In fact, it is quite consistent. Behind the apparently contradictory policies toward China and Cuba rests the same underlying commitment to capital accumulation. China has opened itself to private capital and free market “reforms,” including “enterprise zones” wherein western investors can take advantage of the country’s huge labor supply with no worry about occupation standards or other restrictive regulations— although in July 2010, for the first time, wildcat strikes did occur in China against foreign employers. And today the professed goal of the Chinese government is to improve the standard of living of its own population and assist by trade and aid the developing nations of the world. (Indeed, the more successful China proves to be in its internal development and its relations with Third World nations, the more it is again becoming a target of western elites, defamed as a mortal threat to US national security.)
Cuba so far has refused to go down the free market road, although it appears in late 2010 to be moving toward a partially privatized economy in the service sector. When the Cuban government abolishes the social wage that serves the common populace, when it eliminates its totally free public health system, when it privatizes the factories and lands and allows the productive wealth to be pocketed by rich corporate owners, and removes all labor protections for workers, then it will have come full circle, being once more under capitalist vassal-state servitude. And then most surely will Havana be embraced by Washington, as have the ex-communist newly established free market nations in Eastern Europe.