The US has a trade embargo in place with Cuba since 1962, but it made no difference to either Fidel Castro or to successive US Presidents except that it drove up the price of Havana cigars. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US government assumed, that cut off from Soviet aid Cuba would soon follow suit. But that did not happen and Castro continued in power till last year, when he was finally forced to retire due to ill health, after seeing off nine US Presidents. Meanwhile US relations with Cuba also remained unchanged.
Now it seems the US may have to rethink its policy towards Cuba. The reason is Cuba has found oil in the deep waters of the Florida Straits. In 1977 the US and Cuba signed a treaty that equally divided the Florida Straits to safeguard each country's economic rights.This included access to large underwater oil and gas fields, believed to exist on either side. In 2004 the Cuban state oil company,CUPET, found oil in the Florida Straits.The North Cuba Basin is estimated to hold 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.Although by US consumption standards the reserves are small, they are substantial for a country the size of Cuba.Moreover further discoveries are not ruled out. What is of worry to the US is that China is stepping into the void created by the demise of the Soviet Union.Now it may have to reconcile itself to having Red China as a neighbor in place of the Red Soviets. The second problem is somewhat more worrisome. The US has banned drilling for oil in almost the entire Outer Continental Shelf of the country since the early 1980's. The only exceptions being parts of the Gulf of Mexico and some parts off the coast of Alaska. This is due to environmental reasons. The US does not want a repeat of the Santa Barbara spill in 1969, which dumped 3 million gallons of oil in the waters off California, polluting the beaches for miles and damaging the eco-system.Prohibited from accessing top class US technology and short of cash, offshore drilling is expensive, the Cubans have turned to the Chinese and other nations for help in developing these fields. By not helping Cuba the US may precipitate the exact disaster they want to avoid, as Cuba puts in place cheap and unsafe technology to extract the oil and gas.
Given the impact on the US economy of high oil prices, there are many who think that its time that the US has a re-look at its ban on drilling in its coastal waters. It is estimated that the Outer Continental Shelf has recoverable reserves of more than 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Imagine the stabilizing effect that these reserves would have on current runaway oil prices.
Several influential voices are already demanding that the US rethink its policy towards Cuba, not in the least because it seems that the seas around Cuba are rich in oil. Jonathan Benjamin Alvarado, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha says: 'I've always argued that we would keep the Cuban embargo in place until we got to the point where it started to cost us something. Today we're almost there.' He goes on to add: 'Every day the United States puts off making the path into Cuba, the window of opportunity closes a little more. Once Cuba gets to the platform stage of deep-water drilling, the Americans are going to be left out.'