STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE | February 22nd 2008

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As el Comandante makes his exit, Stephen Hugh-Jones takes a moment to skewer the American trade embargo on Cuba. Not only does it rank among the longest-lasting geopolicy failures in history, but the EU is making the same mistake with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus ...

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So the wordy old rogue is going at last, is he? Buried somewhere in my files--nay, weighing them down--is a bundle of at least 50 closely typed A4 pages, the verbatim record of an "interview" with Fidel Castro by Cuba's state television during the 1990s. How long it took I don't know; at the end the interviewers, if that was the word, thanked el Comandante for all the time he had given us, and I'd like to think, retreated to light fat cigars with a heartfelt sigh of relief.

Alas, that probably isn't true. The cigars, maybe, but among those Cubans who didn't choose or couldn't manage to flee the country--a large majority, whatever the streets of Miami may suggest to the opposite--most retained a solid affection for their boss even after 40-odd years. And I doubt that tongue-in-cheek journalists lasted long in the fidelista media, the only kind there was.

That widespread affection, I'm told, still survives, even if it is more qualified, and these days Raulified, than it once was. For that, Fidel should thank, not least, successive presidents of the United States. He's faced ten, and not one has had the political nous, or will, or maybe strength, to stop beating Cuba with sticks and try carrots instead. Forget the Bay of Pigs--the American trade embargo on Cuba surely ranks among the longest-lasting geopolicy failures in history.

Yet failure was easily foreseeable, and foresight was swiftly proved right. Surprise, surprise. If the mighty neighbour who used to run your country, and cheerfully backed its previous dictator, first lets loose an amateur invasion, and then for 45 years does its best to impoverish you as a step toward removing the new one--well, how would you feel? And would you have rushed to notice how the Cuban road to socialism was quite capable of impoverishing you by itself?

Answering those questions requires no special knowledge of Latin Americans' bipolar feelings about the United States, only of human nature. And, whatever our governments may or may not say, most European media have been happy to tell the White House (as surely the State Department must have?) that when you're in a hole the first step is to stop digging. The embargo is that hole.

So far, so banal, at least east of the Atlantic. How curious, then, that we Europeans for over 20 years have been applying an equally unsuccessful embargo: to the self-declared "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus". Whether Turkey should have sent its troops into Cyprus in 1974 is disputable. So too whether it should in 1983 have sponsored the birth a breakaway republic in the Turkish-Cypriot part of the island. There were reasons for both, but maybe not good enough reasons. What's certain, though, is that the TRNC has existed, supported by most of its inhabitants, ever since.

The United Nations and the European Union don't think it should. Both were led to that view in the 1970s not only by Greece and the then government of Cyprus, but notably by Britain, the former colonial power, whose views are plainly biased by its "sovereign" base areas in the Greek-Cypriot part of the island. So an EU bar on trade was swiftly clapped on the new would-be republic. Sharpened by an EU Court judgment in 1994, it has been maintained ever since.

The UN and EU accept the myth, justifiable in international law but rubbish in local fact, that the (solely Greek-Cypriot) government of the island still speaks for all of it. And the EU, predictably led astray by the British, with almost childish folly agreed to let that government bring Cyprus into membership in May 2004, supposing it would accept UN proposals for genuine reunification. In April 2004 Turkish-Cypriot voters said yes to the UN plan. The Greek-Cypriot ones, headed by their president, put two fingers up--and got EU membership nonetheless. The plan may yet be revived, thanks to that president's defeat in this month's "national" (de facto, Greek-Cypriot) elections. But the trade ban has lasted for four more years, and remains in force, now with three cynically self-interested EU countries in favour of it, instead of two.

What also remains, however, is the TRNC. The embargo certainly impoverishes it. If a British wholesaler wants to buy fruit or vegetables there, he can't. If British holiday-makers want to fly there--it's the more beautiful part of the island--they can, but only if the plane halts in Turkey on the way. (And, by the way, the biter's bit. If British police want to lay hands on criminals who have taken refuge in the TRNC, they can't: how can you expect extradition from a country which you say doesn't exist? Still, no doubt this does add modestly to wealth in the TRNC). Yet, however poor, the TRNC survives.

In sum, since the 1980s the EU has been trying, like the United States since the 1960s, to get rid of a regime it disapproves of through impoverishment; a regime, moreover, which, unlike Castro's, practises a tolerable version of democracy, and has never posed any threat to the EU's interests, let alone offered to install the nuclear missiles of its enemies. Like the US, the EU has failed. Yet, like the US, it persists.

My objection is in part political. I hold no brief for the TRNC; I've never set foot in northern Cyprus. But if enough people, in a credible area, want independence enough to grab it, I reckon it's reasonable to agree, like the result or not. The EU accepted the break-up of Yugoslavia; indeed most big EU countries have just rushed to recognise the dismemberment of Serbia by Kosovo's Albanians, which--however strong their claims--threatens the peace of Europe far more than does the existence of the TRNC. Nor can one reasonably try to starve a nation into changing its mind, let alone one that threatens nobody. The EU doesn't try that with Iran or North Korea, still less Cuba. It does try with the Turkish-Cypriots.

But there's a wider objection too. What right has any government, facing no risk of war and for no humanitarian end, to forbid its citizens to buy and sell, to borrow or lend, where they choose? To travel as they choose? Putin's Russia is ostentatiously hostile to my country. It sends its thugs to murder British residents. It could wipe out the lot of us in ten minutes. So do we embargo dealings with Russia? Far from it: British and all other EU firms are free to hurl billions into the Russian economy, to import trillions of cubic feet of Russian gas. So who do we embargo? A wretched little would-be friendly would-be state at the far end of the Mediterranean, for wretched little would-be reasons.

And Britain's media, ever happy (and right) to lecture the White House about Cuba, barely even notice.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)