US foreign policy has traditionally been the purview of the federal government, but recent actions by states have stealthily challenged this assumption. Over the last decade, US governors have increasingly conducted their own foreign trade policy. Maine sent trade missions to Ireland and the United Kingdom in 2003, to Germany and Italy in 2004, and to France in 2005, generating more than US$30 million for the Maine economy. Other states have followed suit: in October 2005, the governor of New Hampshire brokered trade policy with Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Ukraine, and in February 2007, Ohio and other states sent a joint mission to South Africa.

Such state-led foreign policy remained a tolerable and even welcome novelty until it hit the nerve end of Cuba, which has been under US embargo since the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961. In 2000, however, Congress passed the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act, which exempted certain agricultural and medical goods from sanctions. The intent was benevolent, namely to provide humanitarian aid to those under authoritarian rule, but it made a charade of the US embargo on Cuba. In 2004, a whopping 44 percent of total Cuban imports came from none other than the United States. According to the agricultural publication Capital Press, in the seven years since the Sanctions Reform Act, US agricultural producers have sold approximately US$1.5 billion to Cuba.

Individual states have been crucial in providing this market. Maine, Nebraska, Louisiana, Idaho, Montana, California, South Carolina, and Kansas have all signed trade agreements with Cuba. Maine has been at the forefront; Governor John Baldacci signed a US$10 million farm goods trade deal with Cuba in 2004 and doubled the deal to US$20 million in 2005. The problem is that while gubernatorial agreements with France or Italy might be economically profitable and do not contravene US foreign policy, Cuba is an entirely different situation. States’ deals with Cuba directly counter federal foreign policy goals in the region, and play directly into Cuba’s desire to weaken the embargo. Emory University political scientist Juan del Aguila writes, “From the standpoint of the Cuban government, the purchases serve more than an economic need. They serve a broader, longstanding foreign policy and political goal, which is to recruit American firms on behalf of ending the commercial embargo.”

Regardless of the gains they may accrue from Cuban trade, these states have been rightly excoriated for trading with and thus supporting a repressive communist regime. More importantly, their actions have unacceptably weakened the power of the federal government to conduct foreign policy. If states individually determine trade policy, not only will US strategic goals be jeopardized, but also a coherent national policy cannot emerge. The recent case of US states’ trade with Cuba represents the erosion of the embargo and the contradiction of larger trade policy goals, and also sets a dangerous precedent for future governors.

It must be noted that these states are doing nothing illegal or even unsurprising. The US Congress granted them a trade and business opportunity, and they took it. But while supplying food and medical goods to an impoverished country is acceptable, the sheer amount of Cuban trade conducted by Maine and other states contravenes the embargo and makes a mockery of US foreign policy in the region. The Sanctions Reform Act erodes federal power to make coherent foreign policy—a principle important regardless of whether one believes in the particular policy. Congress must close the loophole and reclaim foreign policy for the federal government.