The thing people have to realize is that Cuba already trades with every other country in the world. So the American market for sugar and tobacco and tourism might give them a slight boost, but not much.
There is a global market for sugar, sugar is a commodity, and even if the US dropped our embargo of Cuba they’d have to contend with the sky-high protective tarrifs that we’ve set up to keep out foreign sugar. We prop up domestic corn syrup producers and sugar farmers, this is why US Coke uses corn syrup and Mexican Coke uses sugar. Cuba can sell its sugar in Mexico, Canada, Columbia, Brazil, the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and so on, it’s not going to get a better price from the US. Once you’ve loaded your goods onto a container ship it doesn’t cost much more to ship it around the world as it does to ship it next door.
Cuban tobacco could be a good product for export, but the mystique of Cuban cigars in the US is mostly because we can’t get them. They sell cigars all over the world and the US market would only be a small part of that. But this is a much better prospect than sugar which is dirt cheap around the world. But once Americans can get Cuban cigars regularly they won’t think they’re so special. And besides, the US tobacco market is kind of shrinking.
As for tourism, well, again Cuba takes in tourists from all over the world. It’s not like the place isn’t already overrun with tourists. Except of course the government keeps all the hard currency from those tourists and the only way the tourism industry workers make money is by liberating goods from the government and bootlegging them to tourists.
We Americans somehow have the notion that Cuba is this incredibly isolated regime, and a few extra American dollars would have a profound affect on the place. But they already have a very large tourism sector consisting of Europeans and Canadians and so on. They have tons of foreign visitors, the problem is that the tourism industry is walled off from the Cuban populace so that the Cuban government can keep all the hard currency those tourists bring. And the end of the embargo won’t change that.
Those famous vintage american automobiles aren’t kept running because Cubans can’t buy new cars from the US. The real reason those vintage cars are still running is that it’s illegal for Cubans to own private automobiles, only cars that people owned before the revolution are exempt. If we allowed Cuba to buy cars from the US the effect would be precisely zero, because Cubans today could buy used American cars from Mexico or new Japanese or European cars, if only the government would allow them to and if only they had any money to buy them with, which they don’t.
Only a change in the Cuban regime do anything for the Cuban economy and the Cuban people. Oh sure, the US embargo doesn’t do any good and should be stopped on general principles. But ending it won’t change a thing for the Cuban people.