> But I can’t help but wonder if an on/off embargo with, say, four and year eight periods wouldn’t work spectacularly well? Maybe in the case of some other cou

> But I can’t help but wonder if an on/off embargo with, say, four and year eight periods wouldn’t work spectacularly well? Maybe in the case of some other countries, who knows. The Cuban dictatorship has its own "internal embargo". The country runs a command economy and none of its enterprises have been too profitable. In a good year, the aggregate's country output is just survival. 2020 and 2021 have been bad years. The dictatorship have tried to open up to private businesses but they are so scared of the concept that they don't even call it that way. They call it "trabajo por cuenta propia", or "work on your own". To them, it is a huge defeat to even have to admit that much "entrepreneurship". Private business need legal infrastructure. Things like property rights, recognized and well-thought legal persons (ever heard of limited liability?), independent and impartial courts, a sensible tax and levies system, business schools, etc. Cuba has none of that, and far from trying to create that infrastructure, they are working on firewalls to prevent private businesses from being successful. In practice, the government works on a stubborn principle that communism must be proven better than capitalism at any cost, including at the expense of the people, and thus, it's unacceptable to have a private enterprise thriving where the government-owned equivalent failed.