After Obama win, goodbye to Cuban embargo? Bernd Debusmann

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If votes in the United Nations serve as a gauge of global opinion, 98.9 percent of the world opposes the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, a measure imposed 46 years ago to isolate the communist-ruled island and bring down its leaders.

It failed on both counts. As far as international opinion is concerned, the country that is isolated is the United States, not Cuba. In the latest of 17 successive U.N. General Assembly resolutions on lifting the embargo, Washington mustered only two allies -- Israel and Palau, a Pacific island nation difficult to find on a map. It has a population of 21,000.

The Marshall Islands (pop. 63,000), which had voted with the United States from 2000 to 2007, unexpectedly and without public explanation broke ranks this year and abstained in the vote, a non-binding resolution taken a week before the U.S. presidential election.

The count -- 185 countries in favor of lifting the embargo, three against -- speaks volumes about a bankrupt policy stuck in the Cold War era.

Will that kind of America versus the world line-up change under Barack Obama? Not necessarily. The man who made history on November 4 by becoming the first black to be elected president of the United States has promised to "ease" sanctions if Cuba took "significant steps toward democracy, beginning with freeing all political prisoners."

He has not said what it would take for the United States to end the embargo, kept in place by 10 successive U.S. presidents, both Democrats and Republicans.

During the Cold War, when Cuba was a heavily-armed outpost of the Soviet empire just 90 miles from Florida, a majority of Americans agreed with a hard line on a Communist government that violates human rights and holds political prisoners. That attitude has been changing since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

According to a Zogby poll taken a week before the election, 60 percent of Americans believe that Washington should revise its policies toward Cuba. In particular, 68 percent thought Americans should be allowed to travel to the island and 62 percent said U.S. companies should be allowed to trade with it.