Original Intent Was to “bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the Castro] government,”
Archive Documents Posted on 60th Anniversary Show
Secret CIA Study Concluded Political Costs of Embargo Outweighed Benefits to U.S.
National Security Archive 60th Anniversary Posting Includes Detailed Historical Chronology
Washington D.C., February 2, 2022 – On the eve of the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s executive order imposing “an embargo on all trade with Cuba,” the National Security Archive today posts a collection of previously declassified documents that record the origins, rationale, and early evolution of punitive economic sanctions against Cuba in the aftermath of the Castro-led revolution. The documents show that the initial concept of U.S. economic pressure was to create “hardship” and “disenchantment” among the Cuban populace and to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, [and] to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.” However, a CIA case study of the embargo, written twenty years after its imposition, concluded that the sanctions “have not met any of their objectives.”
The selected declassified records chart the secret deliberations of both President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who cut sugar imports from Cuba and restricted U.S. exports, and President Kennedy, who imposed a full trade embargo against the island nation on February 3, 1962. They also examine the “lard” scandal that led the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to add food and medicine to the embargo, Henry Kissinger’s considerations of using the embargo as a bargaining chip to potentially normalize relations, and the Jimmy Carter administration’s resistance to congressional efforts to lift restrictions on the trade of food and medicine to maintain leverage in negotiations with the Castro government on engagement. A secret 1982 CIA case study, “US/OAS Sanctions Against Cuba (1962-Present),” concluded that early on the trade sanctions were “significantly damaging to Cuba’s growth and general development,” but that the embargo had failed to meet its objectives and the political costs outweighed its benefits.
In his comprehensive chronology of the 60-year evolution of the embargo, American University Professor William M. LeoGrande describes it as “a complex patchwork of laws, presidential proclamations, and regulations that Fidel Castro once called ‘a tangled ball of yarn.’” According to Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project, “the endless embargo has become an enduring symbol of perpetual hostility in the U.S. posture toward Cuba.”
William M. LeoGrande
The U.S economic embargo against Cuba—or “el bloqueo” (the blockade), as Cubans refer to it-- is not a single law, but a complex patchwork of laws, presidential proclamations, and regulations that Fidel Castro once called “a tangled ball of yarn.” It has evolved over the sixty years since President John F. Kennedy put it in place, loosening and tightening from one administration to the next, depending on the president’s preference for using hard power or soft power in dealing with Cuba.
This 1960 memo, written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lestor Mallory, provided the initial rationale for punitive trade sanctions against Cuba
President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed the first economic sanctions against Cuba’s revolutionary government, though they fell short of a full embargo. When Fidel Castro nationalized U.S. and British oil companies for refusing to refine Soviet oil, Eisenhower retaliated by cutting off Cuban sugar sales to the United States, sales that comprised some 80 percent of Cuban sugar exports. Castro then nationalized most U.S. businesses on the island, and Eisenhower banned all U.S. exports to Cuba except food and medicine. These sanctions were part of a U.S. broader strategy to overthrow Castro, including support for his internal opponents and preparations for an exile invasion.
After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President John F. Kennedy used the authority of the Foreign Assistance Act to impose a complete embargo on all trade with Cuba. The following year, under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, he extended the embargo to cover all financial transactions unless licensed by the Secretary of the Treasury. The Treasury Department developed the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (CACR) to catalogue what transactions were allowed. Kennedy’s sanctions, like Eisenhower’s, were part of a broader program aimed at regime change that included sabotage and paramilitary attacks launched from the United States.
President Lyndon Johnson’s policy of “economic denial” focused on making the embargo multilateral. The United States bribed and strong-armed members of the Organization of American States to join the embargo cutting off diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba. Only Mexico refused. Europeans did not openly join the embargo, but quietly cooperated by cutting back trade with Cuba. Johnson also prohibited food sales to Cuba, which Kennedy exempted from the embargo, and rejected Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s argument that travel should be exempted because prohibiting it was un-American.
U.S. officials credited the embargo on food for forcing the Cuban government to purchase "inedible" lard from The Netherlands that the Cuban people "don't like."
Faced with growing resistance in the OAS, the United States joined a majority of members voting to end the mandatory sanctions against Cuba, which led a number of states to restore normal relations. The U.S. vote was part of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s abortive effort to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations. The United States also lifted the embargo on trade between Cuba and the subsidiaries of U.S. companies operating in third countries, and lifted the prohibition on ships trading with Cuba docking in the United States.
President Jimmy Carter also hoped to normalize relations with Cuba, and as a first step he lifted the ban on travel completely and authorized Cuban Americans to send remittances to family on the island. He also considered lifting the embargo on food and medicine, but decided against it because it would allow Cuba to resume sugar sales, giving a major boost to its economy. Later in the year, when Cuba asked to buy several dozen medicines available only from U.S. suppliers, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski convinced Carter to refuse because of Cuba’s military support for Angola and Ethiopia.
President Ronald Reagan imposed new sanctions to punish Cuba for its support of revolutionary movements in Central America. He reimposed the ban on travel for most U.S. residents, banned most Cubans from traveling to the United States, prohibited the import from third countries of any product containing Cuban nickel, and named Cuba to the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of International Terrorism, where it remained until 2015. Most of the sanctions resulting from inclusion on the terrorism list were already part of the Cuba embargo, being listed made international financial institutions more reluctant to do business with Cuba.
An amendment by Representative Howard Berman (D-CA) to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the Enemy Act exempted from U.S. sanctions against any country the import or export of “publications, films, posters, phonograph records, photographs, microfilms, microfiche, tapes, or other informational materials.” This has enabled Cuban artists and writers to sell their work freely in the United States.
As President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated the end of the Cold War, the United States pressured the Soviet Union to cut off economic aid to Cuba, worth some $3 billion annually, as a condition of U.S. aid to the Soviet Union. Gorbachev refused, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the new president of Russa, Boris Yeltsin, agreed to the U.S. demand, sending Cuba into a decade-long depression known as the “Special Period.”
With the Cuban economy reeling, the U.S. Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA) to tighten the embargo in hopes of finally bringing about regime change. Presidential candidate Bill Clinton endorsed the CDA and President Bush signed it into law. The CDA reimposed the ban on trade between Cuba and subsidiaries of U.S. companies in third countries, cutting off some $700 million in trade, mostly in food and medicine. It restored the prohibition on ships trading with Cuba docking in the United States for 180 days and gave the president the authority to cut foreign aid to any country aiding Cuba. The CDA also authorized food donations, the sale of telecommunications services and equipment, and medical sales, but with such strict regulatory requirements that very little trade was realized. Finally, it specified that the embargo should only be lifted when Cuba had become a democracy, and authorized U.S. government support for Cuban dissidents to bring that about.
During the “rafters” migration crisis, President Bill Clinton cut off family remittances and halted air travel between the United States and Cuba to punish Castro for allowing Cubans to leave, and to pacify Cuban Americans angry over Clinton’s policy of interning Cuban migrants rescued at sea in Guantánamo Naval Station rather than admitting them to the United States.
After the Cuban air force shot down two small planes, killing four Cuban Americans from the Brothers to the Rescue exile organization, Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which wrote the embargo into law and specified that it could only be lifted once Cuba became a multi-party, free-market democracy, and compensated U.S. citizens and Cuban Americans for property nationalized after the triumph of the revolution. To discourage foreign investment Cuba, Title III of the law allowed anyone who lost property in Cuba to sue in U.S. federal court anyone “trafficking” (making any beneficial use) of that property, thereby opening foreign investors in Cuba to the risk of litigation. The law allowed the president to waive activation of Title III, so it did not go into effect until President Donald Trump decided not to renew the waiver in 2019.
In response to the 1998 visit to Cuba by Pope John Paul II, Clinton restored charter air service and family remittances, and eased travel regulations to allow U.S. residents—Cuban American Catholics in particular-- to go to Cuba to see the Pope. A year later, he authorized expanded air service, and “donative” remittances, enabling anyone in the United States to send remittances to Cuba. Most importantly, he inaugurated “people-to-people” travel, allowing U.S. residents to visit Cuba for a wide variety of cultural and educational purposes. People-to-people quickly became the main avenue for non-Cuban American travel. By the end of the Clinton administration, Cuban Americans were sending some $800 million dollars in remittances to Cuba annually, and some 250,000 U.S. residents were visiting the island.
Lobbying by Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba, an alliance of some 600 business organizations and 140 religious and human rights groups organized by the Chamber of Commerce, succeeded in eliminating the embargo on agricultural sales to Cuba in the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act. To mollify Cuban American opponents, Congressional leaders agreed to prohibit any U.S. government or private sector financing of such purchases. They also agreed to ban “tourism,” defined as any travel to Cuba not included in the 12 previously authorized categories of legal travel. Despite the credit restrictions, Cuba began buying food from U.S. producers in 2002, averaging about $300 million in trade annually since.
Cuban Americans played a key role in President George W. Bush’s 2000 election victory in Florida and he was especially responsive to their demands to tighten the embargo. He appointed a Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba to map out how to “bring about an expeditious end of the Castro dictatorship.” Following its recommendations, Bush abolished people-to-people travel and stepped up enforcement targeting people who violated travel regulations, even inadvertently. He restricted academic exchanges so severely that only a handful of study abroad programs between U.S. and Cuban universities survived and Cuban travel to the United States virtually ceased. Cuban American travel to the island was limited to one trip every three years, and the limits on family remittances were reduced significantly. These regulations cut travel to Cuba by half, reduced humanitarian assistance from some $10 million annually to $4 million, and shrank remittances from $1.25 billion annually to about $1 billion.
President Barack Obama ran in 2008 on a platform that declared U.S. hostility toward Cuba a failed policy and promised something different. Just months after inauguration, he lifted all limits on Cuban American travel and remittances. When a Congressional attempt to legalize all travel to Cuba failed in 2010, Obama restored people-to-people travel and reversed Bush’s limits on academic exchanges the following January.
On December 17, 2014, President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro announced their intention to restore diplomatic ties and move toward normal relations. Over the next two years, Obama approved five major packages of reforms to the Cuban Assets Control Regulations, each one loosening the embargo further (January 2015, September 2015, January 2016, March 2016, October 2016):
Donald Trump appealed to Cuban American voters in 2016 by promising to reverse Obama’s opening to Cuba and he kept that promise. In June 2017, he returned to a policy of hostility and regime change. In a new set of regulatory changes he tightened the embargo and ordered stepped-up enforcement. He abolished individual people-to-people travel, limiting it to tours conducted by licensed U.S. tour providers. He also banned most transactions by U.S. residents and companies with Cuban companies managed by the armed forces, including a large number of hotels, tourist services, and retail stores (designated by the State Department on a Restricted Entities list). However, most existing commercial contracts were left undisturbed.
As the 2020 presidential campaign began, Trump took a series of measures to further tighten the embargo (June 2019, September 2019, September 2020, October 2020):
During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden promised to roll-back the Trump sanctions that hurt Cuban families, especially the restrictions on remittances and family travel. Once in office, despite his repeated pledges to restore remittances services, he did nothing, leaving all of Trump’s sanctions in place. In December, the State Department reaffirmed Cuba’s inclusion on the list of State Sponsors of International Terrorism. After July protest demonstrations in Cuba, the Biden administration imposed six sets of new individual sanctions targeting senior officials and units of the Interior Ministry and armed forces, the national police, and the military police for violating human rights. Some were subject to so-called Global Magnitsky sanctions, freezing their assets in the United States and banning their entry. Other targeted individuals were simply excluded from receiving U.S. visas. These sanctions were largely symbolic since none of the people targeted have assets in the United States (if they did, the embargo would freeze them) and none were likely to be applying for visas.
In June 2021, the United Nations General Assembly, for the 29th time since 1992, adopted by a vote of 184 to 2, the annual resolution calling on the United States to lift the embargo. The United States voted no. In its report to the United Nations, Cuba estimated the cumulative cost of the embargo over six decades at $148 billion dollars.
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William M. LeoGrande is Professor of Government at American University in Washington, DC, and co-author with Peter Kornbluh of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
Document 1
National Archives
This memo, written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lestor Mallory, provides the original, unvarnished, policy rationale for imposing trade restrictions on Cuba. Fidel Castro’s revolution is quite popular in Cuba, Mallory points out; since there is no effective opposition against him, the only way to undercut Castro’s support is “through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” Mallory advocates a set of punitive economic actions designed to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”
Document 2
Eisenhower Presidential Library
On October 13, 1960, President Eisenhower meets with Under Secretary of State Douglas Dillon and Secretary of Commerce Frederick Mueller. They recommend that Eisenhower expand trade sanctions on Cuba to prohibit all U.S. exports. According to this memorandum of conversation, the president remains concerned that such action will “disgruntle” Mexico and possibly fracture the OAS. Dillon notes that “he had given a good deal of thought” to the possibility of domestic outcry against the export embargo and suggested “to exempt medicines and foodstuffs” to soften public reaction.
Document 3
The Federal Register
One day after the State Department announces that, under the Export Control Act, the U.S. “is today placing into effect general controls, to prohibit American exports to Cuba,” the Department of Commerce officially adds Cuba to a list of countries — China, North Korea and North Vietnam — denied U.S. exports. The extensive new trade restrictions and regulations, however, exempt food, medicines, and medical supplies.
Document 4
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Only a month after assuming office, President Kennedy’s new administration faces political pressure to expand Eisenhower’s ban on U.S. exports to Cuba to a full trade embargo. This short memo reflects Kennedy’s early consideration of that option. In response to a letter from Senator George Smathers urging the State Department to block Cuban imports, on February 21, 1961, Kennedy directs his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to request advice from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on three questions: would a full trade embargo “save US dollar foreign exchange,” “make things more difficult for Castro,” and “be in the public interest.”
Document 5
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
On February 24, Secretary Rusk provides a response to three questions posed by President Kennedy [see Document 4] on the merits of imposing a full trade embargo against Cuba. Banning Cuban imports of such products as tobacco, molasses, fruits, and vegetables would hurt the Cuban government economically. Also, “the economic disadvantage to Castro,” according to Rusk, “would outweigh any political advantage which he might gain by charging us with economic aggression and unilateral application of economic measures.” Finally, Rusk assures the new president that a full embargo is in the public interest, and would “lend moral support and encouragement to those now engaged in resisting the Castro regime.” A full embargo, according to the memo, “is the most effective measure available” to undercut Castro.
Document 6
Federal Register
President Kennedy issues an executive order to impose a comprehensive embargo on “all trade” with Cuba, expanding the Eisenhower restrictions on exports to include all imports from the island. “[I] hereby proclaim an embargo upon trade between the United States and Cuba,” states the February 3, 1962, directive, “effective 12:01 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, February 7, 1962.”
Document 7
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon provides President Kennedy with a detailed review of problems implementing the new Cuba embargo. The statutory regulations are insufficient to keep Cuban goods, such as tobacco and cigars, from entering the United States through third countries. “These difficulties could be greatly minimized by strengthening the Regulations through an amendment issued under the Trading with the Enemy Act,” Dillon argues. “This would give us ample authority to control imports from third countries of goods manufactured with Cuban components.”
Document 8
The Federal Register
The Treasury Department publishes an amendment to the embargo regulations, expanding the import prohibitions to cover all merchandise “made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce, or manufacture of Cuba.” The new language enables the Office of Assets Control to block imports of goods such as cigars manufactured outside of Cuba, using Cuban tobacco.
Document 9
National Security Archive Cuba collections
A report that a Cuban trade delegation is in Canada seeking to purchase thousands of pounds of lard from a U.S. subsidiary becomes a political issue in Washington, highlighting the exemption of food and medicine in the embargo. In an initial report on the purchase, NSC Latin America specialist Gordon Chase acknowledges the sting of conservative attacks on the Johnson administration but recommends that the administration “live with the deal” because “we have always been rather proud of the fact ‘that we weren’t trying to starve the Cuban people.’”
Document 10
National Security Archive Cuba collections
Gordon Chase, an aide to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, provides an update on the lard scandal that has generated a political debate over whether to end the exemption of food and medicine in the embargo. He provides statistics on the reduced purchases of those goods by the Cuban government since the embargo went into effect. But, Chase points out, the other Communist countries under a U.S. embargo — China, North Korea and North Vietnam — do not have such an exemption. Following the uproar over Cuba’s purchase of lard in Canada, the Johnson administration eventually decides to apply special licensing requirements to those categories of U.S. exports, and end the exemption of food and medicines in the embargo on Cuba.
Document 11
FOIA/National Security Archive Cuba Collections
As the OAS prepares to lift multilateral sanctions against Cuba and the U.S. Congress pushes for lifting the embargo, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman drafts a secret/nodis memo for Henry Kissinger on "Normalizing Relations with Cuba." His report suggests that the U.S. should move quickly to negotiate with Cuba, using lifting the embargo, in stages, as the central bargaining chip. The memo recommends “we reestablish diplomatic and consular relations as part of an initial bargain including a partial lifting of the ‘blockade’ and mutual commitments on nonintervention and negotiations to settle claims.” "Our interest is in getting the Cuba issue behind us, not in prolonging it indefinitely," the memo states. The document lays out a series of steps that would be taken to normalize relations and finally get the "intrinsically trivial issue" of Cuba "off the domestic and inter-American agendas."
Document 12
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
After Senator George McGovern introduces an amendment to the State Department authorization bill to permit the trade of food and medicine between the United States and Cuba, the new Carter administration considers whether to support the legislation. In this memo, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance advises the president on how the administration should respond to the push to ease the embargo. Vance argues that “all the steps” toward normalization “have been on our side,” stating that the Cubans needed to “demonstrate the seriousness of their own interest in improving relations.” To that end, Vance recommends holding back on exempting food and medicines until the Cubans “take some steps to contribute to the process of improving relations.”
Document 13
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski advises President Carter against supporting legislative measures to ease the embargo. Maintaining that he is “not persuaded that the Cuban people need access to U.S. food and medicine,” Brzezinski suggests that Carter keep his promise to Senator McGovern to remain neutral on the Senate bill to exempt those categories from the embargo. However, Brzezinski also recommends that Carter’s “posture be not that of benevolent neutrality but rather that of skeptical neutrality,” fearing that opening the embargo would leave Secretary Vance with “little or no leverage to achieve some of the concessions that will be necessary to make normalization politically palatable to the U.S.”
Document 14
CIA CREST Database
As part of a major analytical study on the impact of U.S. economic sanctions, in October 1982 the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence evaluates the first 20 years of the trade embargo against Cuba. The classified research study states that while the U.S. publicly promotes a goal of “a truly free and independent Cuba,” the ultimate objective has always been “to remove Castro from power,” and make support of Cuba as costly to the Soviets as possible. Early on, the embargo “was significantly damaging to Cuba’s growth and general development,” the CIA analysts concludes, but “the US and OAS sanctions, by themselves or in conjunction with other measures, have not met any of their objectives.”