I recently visited Scotland for the first time. While there, I did something I’ve not done since I was a child: one day during lunch, I enjoyed a crisp, refreshing 7-Up. And the next day I enjoyed a fruity, robust Dr. Pepper.
Mmmm, mmmm good.
What’s that you say? Have I not had a mainstream soda-pop in over a quarter of a century? No, of course I’ve had the occasional 7-Up or Dr. Pepper since childhood. But I’ve never really enjoyed one as an adult. And the reason is simple. More than two decades ago, American beverage producers began using high-fructose corn syrup instead of sugar.
I’m not here to squawk about the supposed health hazards of corn syrup vs. refined sugar, which, quite frankly, I know next to nothing about, though for the record, I can’t imagine that either one of them is actually any good for you. We’re talking about soda, not pomegranate juice.
Rather, I’m merely advocating for good taste. After all, as any Coca-Cola fan worth their weight in saccharine can tell you, sugar just tastes a helluva a lot better than high-fructose corn syrup. That’s why each year the savviest of soda drinkers eagerly await the annual production of Coke made with real sugar, kosher for Passover; look for the cans and bottles with yellow tops.
So why the icky, sticky syrup instead of the clean, crystalline taste of sugar in our “fizzy juice,” as it’s known over in Scotland?
Seriously. They call it “juice.”
There are two reasons: federal farm subsidies that keep corn cheap and plentiful, but more importantly, the long standing U.S. embargo of C
uba, the world’s premier sugar producer.
Cuba was one of America’s most important trading partners during the late 19th century, and an exceptionally close one after the United States seized it from Spain at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898.
Though America had granted Cuba nominal independence with the 1903 Platt Amendment, it remained a de facto American colony for more than thirty years. By 1934, the island nation had attained more self-rule but remained a tight ally and trading partner, part of the Latin American sphere of influence that was under U.S. held sway over.
At the height of the Cold War, Fidel Castro led a successful revolution in Cuba and established a leftist government. After taking over, Castro gravely antagonized the United States by nationalizing a number of U.S.-owned businesses and properties. The United States responded by limiting the amount of brown sugar it would import from Cuba. The U.S. was by far Cuba’s most important trading partner, and sugar was by far its most important export, and the move threatened to cripple the Cuban economy.
The U.S.S.R. espied an opportunity, Castro proved eager to align with them anyway, and Moscow stepped in to make up the difference in Cuban sugar exports. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis were the most dramatic moments of this era, but America’s emerging embargo of Cuba would prove to be the longest lasting.
In February of 1962, President John Kennedy signed an executive order expanding trade limitations with Cuba. Later that year, the United States succeeded in getting Cuba thrown out of the Organization of American States, and many of the member nations levied their own sanctions for more than a decade. In early 1963, JFK imposed travel restrictions. In July, Cuban assets in the United States were frozen, and the trade embargo was cemented.
There has been occ
asional softening and hardening of the details ever since, but the thrust of the embargo has been a constant. The 1992 Torricelli Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act are two of the major bills that have entrenched it.
Helms-Burton, which threatened to “punish” nations that did business with Cuba on the grounds that they were supposedly trafficking in Cuban goods that had been stolen from U.S. companies and individuals, led to serious protests by the European Union
Of course the United States could not enforce all of Helms-Burton without starting a major trade war with virtually all of its most important trading partners, so the U.S. and EU eventually negotiated a settlement. However, the whole affair left a bad taste in Europe’s mouth and was the source of searing criticism worldwide.
Indeed, the Canadian government went so far as to openly and officially mock the United States by passing its own declaration, which demanded the United States offer due compensation to Canadian descendants of British loyalists who had had property illegally seized during the American Revolution.
The U.S. embargo is now more than half-a-century old, the longest such action in modern world history. About half of Americans think it should be repealed. To many, the whole thing seems silly at this point, and mostly driven by a desire to appease large blocs of anti-Castro, Cuban-American voters in the swing states of Florida and New Jersey.
Elsewhere in the world, most think the embargo is pointless and needlessly hostile. Critics note that while the United States has spent more than half-a-century using Castro’s genuinely miserable record on human rights as a justification, the United States has also supported more dictators around the world during that time than anyone can keep track of, ranging from Saddam Hussein to Chile’s August Pinochet. Castro’s no angel to be sure, but we regularly do businesses with worse, making the whole thing seem like a childish grudge.
The United Nations General Assembly has denounced the Cuban embargo every year since 1992. In those annual hearings, almost every single nation in the world has routinely voted to condemn the embargo, the only op
position coming from the United States, Israel, and on a smattering of occasions our de facto colony of Palau.
Yes, Palau.
And me? I’m the son of a North Carolina farm boy. As such, I proudly inherited a Southerner’s love of Dr. Pepper. But I haven’t had a good one since I was a kid and had to go all the way to Scotland to find one. I think you know where I stand.
This essay was originally published March 31, 2011