By Dave Lindorff

It’s going to be interesting to see how much longer the vicious
decades-long US embargo of Cuba lasts, whichever person wins the White
House this November.

The main reason the US has stubbornly refused to trade with Cuba,
and has used sanctions to bully other nations into refusing to trade
with Cuba, while enthusiastically trading with and investing in China,
Vietnam and other communist regimes, is that Cuba has had little to
offer the US, either in terms of products or markets.

That’s all about to change dramatically, with word that the
Communist island just 90 miles to the south of Florida may possess oil
reserves equal to or greater than all the oil reserves left in the
United States.

According to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian,
Cuba may be sitting on some 20 billion barrels of oil, located in Cuban
territory under the Gulf of Mexico. If the reports from Cuban, Spanish
and other geologists are correct, Cuba, which currently only produces
60,000 barrels of oil per day (about half the country’s domestic
demand), is on the verge of joining the ranks of the world’s exporting
nations.
20 billion barrels of reserves would place the little country in the top 20 nations in the world in terms of reserves.

The Republican crowds who are greeting presidential candidate John
McCain and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin with rowdy chants of
“Drill Baby, Drill!” my have to start shouting “Perfora Cariño, Perfora!”
while watching Raul Castro joining meetings of OPEC.

After all, most experts say that a lot of the offshore drilling
being planned in US coastal waters is likely to lead to dry holes,
while drilling in Cuban waters by the country’s national oil company
Cubapetroleo, or Cupet, and by a consortium led by Spain’s Repsol,
which is set to begin with punching some test wells early next year,
are likely to produce gushers.

If the oil starts flowing, how long will it be before the US starts
clamoring to buy it? How long will it be, for that matter, before US
oil companies start using their lobbying clout to get the US embargo
lifted, so they can get a chance to join the drilling party? After all,
if the US companies are kept out by vestigial anti-Communist ideology,
the investment opportunities will be left wide open for European,
Middle Eastern and Venezuelan interests.

For the long-suffering Cuban people, who have been forced to eke
out a national economy virtually barred from the global marketplace,
this oil find is an astonishingly lucky break, particularly coming at a
time that existing oil reserves are beginning to run out, and that
prices for crude are soaring.

It’s going to be fun to watch the rationalizations coming out of
Washington, particularly from the hard Right, for whom Fidel Castro’s
Cuba has for several generations served as a prime bogeyman in the Cold
War pantheon of villains. Just as Corporate America has since the 1970s
been hypocritically singing the praises of Communist China, and has
been justifying economic trade and investment with that nation on the
grounds that “economic engagement” will bring democracy (all the while
calling for a boycott of all things Cuban), we will soon be hearing
such songs about virtues of economic engagement with Cuba.

This new oil bonanza may not be great news for the
environment—either the waters of the Gulf or for the carbon-sogged
atmosphere of the earth—but for the Cuban people, at least for the
short term, it’s an amazing turn of events.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net