This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 26, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

50 years is enough.

The US embargo on Cuba has gone on for decades.

Predictions of its demise have met with harsh reality. embargo on Cuba has gone on for decades.

Predictions of its demise have met with harsh reality time and time again.

Ian Vasquez, director of the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity,

suggests that some simple reforms could

hasten the end of a destructive policy.

So far there's been announcements but not really much in the way of reforms but what

we're seeing in Cuba is the slow unraveling of communism

just as has happened everywhere else that has been tried. Essentially, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost access to billions of dollars in subsidies, which is what kept it afloat,

Cuban communism has always been kept afloat by outside aid. And beginning in the late

90s that Soviet aid was essentially replaced by aid money coming from Ugo Chavez as Venezuela. But Venezuela, which is

trying to have a socialist revolution based on the Cuban model, is now running into its own economic difficulties despite the fact

that it's lived a decade of fairly high oil prices.

So even that isn't helping Cuba anymore.

So the government there has, the regime there has announced that it's going to have to lay

off hundreds of thousands of workers.

What lies at the root of the U.S. maintaining this embargo with Cuba for so long?

Well, it's a combination of the history of the embargo and domestic politics here, which make it difficult to lift easily.

But the point of the embargo, or the goal of the embargo or the goal of the embargo has switched or evolved over the years from changing policy to actually changing regime.

...