Can The Embargo Be Broken?

Keating ponders a new poll on the Cuba embargo:

A majority of Americans, and even a majority of Cuban-Americans in Florida (who also supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the last election), may now oppose the embargo, but older voters with visceral personal experience of Castro’s Cuba feel more strongly about it.

The number of people whose votes and donations are determined by their support for the embargo may be dwindling, but it’s probably still greater than the number whose vote and donations are determined by opposition to it. Still, the numbers indicate the downside isn’t as bad as it once was. The reactions to Obama’s handshake with Raúl Castro turned out to be fairly mild. Could something more dramatic be coming?

Greg Weeks doubts it. He argues that it “simply does not matter what a majority of Americans support if they do not really care about it”:

The tiny minority of Americans of oppose normalization care about it very deeply. On a list of priorities it would be high; for some, number one. Therefore they will fight very hard, expend considerable political capital, and spend a lot of money to make sure the embargo and other similar policies remain firmly in place.

Larison chimes in:

The good news is that support for the utterly useless embargo of Cuba has been getting steadily weaker over time, and there is good reason to assume that it will continue to wane until the embargo is finally lifted. Even though this will happen many decades later than it should have, it is encouraging to know that there is some limit to how long such senseless policies can endure. The embargo is a good example of the kind of needlessly harmful policies the U.S. can pursue when it allows its dealings with another country to be shaped almost entirely by ideological and emotional factors. It is also a monument to our government’s remarkable inability to abandon some failed policies decades after their futility has become obvious.