Embargo: What's at stake?

I was doing a little research on the embargo and the potentiol consquences of removing it and I found a very good column in the Wall Street Journal by Mary Anastasia O'Grady. It was written in 2000 but it may as well have been written yesterday. Here are the choice excerpts:

In the interests of ending the embargo and gaining access to World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank funding, Castro is desperate to put a humane face on his totalitarianism.

Any guesses on who owns the biggest share in the World Bank and who would lose money on a deadbeat castro?

This means that they expect multilateral lending to transform Fidel Inc. from a bad credit risk with a history of default into a going consumer concern with a charge card.

Fidel Inc. I love that I'm going to have to borrow that.

Grasping at its last chance for communist vindication, the American left also lobbies for the regime by droning on about the country's per-capita literacy and medical care. This ridiculous rationalization ignores the gruesome and persistent violence required to produce those results. As former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares has pointed out, if we justify dictatorships because they build schools and hospitals, then Hitler, Stalin and Pinochet would all be justified. "How do you justify that when Cubans find anything that will float, they will leave the island?"

Despite the beating, torture, murder and exile of millions of opponents of Cuban communism, new homegrown varieties--many of them former communists--keep sprouting like kudzu. And so the revolution must continue devouring its own through imprisonment, torture and exile. This offends decent people--particularly in places like the Czech Republic and Poland, where totalitarian tactics are a recent memory--and their condemnation embarrasses the dictator. Castro is prepared for an armed struggle, but not for tenacious non-violent speech.

Yeah this is exactly the kind of government we want to do business with.