MORE THAN A half century after he and 82 companions sailed from Mexico to wage an unlikely overthrow of Cuba's government, Fidel Castro is finally relinquishing power. Within hours of the Tuesday announcement, America's policy makers and presidential hopefuls served up a list of demands for the island. What's needed next, they said, are "free and fair elections" (President Bush), "the prompt release of prisoners of conscience" (Democratic Sen. Barack Obama) and the legalization of "political parties, labor unions and free media" (Republican Sen. John McCain).

The causes are noble enough. But they should not serve as reason to continue, after more than four decades, the failed, foolish policy of trying to better the lives of Cubans by imposing economic hardship on them. America's embargo with Cuba must end.

Since 1996 the embargo has been law. (Before then it was carried out by presidential order.) That year then Sen. Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) and Rep. Dan Burton (R., Ind.) sponsored the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act. It forbids American companies from trading with Cuba, and threatens other countries with economic sanctions for doing the same. That is, it forces the world to choose sides.

The world has chosen. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico and others have passed laws either counteracting the Helms-Burton Act or making it a crime to comply with it. Canada proposed (but didn't pass) a satirical version. It seeks compensation for British loyalists who fled to Canada after America's Revolution. In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly voted 182-4 to condemn America's embargo. (The other three "nay" votes: the Marshall Islands, Palau and Israel.)

Let's not say the embargo is a stand for human rights. Human Rights Watch reports that Cubans are "systematically deprived of their fundamental rights to free expression, privacy, association, assembly, movement, and due process of law." But of China, it says the government denies or restricts "fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of religion." And so where is China's embargo? Last year it passed Canada to become the largest source of goods shipped into the U.S.

Let's not accept, either, that the embargo is just punishment for Fidel Castro's appropriation without pay of U.S.-owned sugar fields, cattle ranches and other assets in the early years of his revolution. A half century prior, American companies gained majority control of Cuba's economy, including three-quarters of its sugar production, by purchasing assets for pennies on the dollar during a deep economic depression in Cuba presided over by an American-appointed leader. This, after offers by four American presidents in the 19th century to buy Cuba from Spain were rejected, and after America declared war against Spain in 1898 over the still-unresolved sinking of a ship in Havana Harbor, and after it occupied Cuba and wrote its constitution in 1902, granting itself a naval base in Guantanamo and unlimited right to intervene militarily on the island to protect American commercial interests. Just who took whose stuff is a matter of perspective. But during the first half of the 20th century, Havana boomed as a Prohibition-era playground for Americans, while in the countryside, workers for most sugar producers Hershey being a notable exception lived in squalor, earning subsistence wages during the growing season and nothing during the other half of the year.

Let's also not say that the embargo is meant to force a change in government. If that's the case, it has certainly failed. As Human Rights Watch wrote Tuesday in urging the U.S. to revisit its policy, "By lifting the embargo, Washington could deprive [likely successor] Raul Castro of the underdog image that his brother exploited so effectively."

Many Cubans express an odd combination of pride in their identity and deep dissatisfaction in their lives. They are tired of inefficiencies and hardships, and having to hustle for illegal wages to afford basic necessities. They resent the inequality of Cubans being denied entry to tourist beaches and facilities, and of tip-receiving service workers earning more than doctors. But they boast of having built a literacy rate and life expectancy on par with those of America, and with far less funds. They say they want change that's orderly and not chaotic. Most say they want Cuban solutions to Cuban problems.

More than being about liberty, the embargo is about winning votes among embittered Cuban exiles in the electorally critical state of Florida. But more of the same policy will do nothing to ease the resentment. On its own, a return to normal trading relations with Cuba (or rather, the start of abnormally fair ones), won't lift that nation's poverty. Cuba already trades freely with the rest of the world, but remains poor because of its own mismanagement. An end to the embargo, though, will deny Cuba's leaders a longstanding excuse for that mismanagement. It will provide American companies with an educated, ambitious manufacturing base just 90 miles from its shore. It will offer Cubans needed jobs. And it will restore the right of Americans to visit Cuba, which, upheld in theory by the Supreme Court's protection of unrestricted travel, is denied in practice under an archaic spending ban, farcically named the Trading With the Enemy Act.

It's time to trade with the enemy. It's time to begin making the enemy a friend. "Freedom is on the march," America's president is fond of saying. But freedom doesn't march. Soldiers march. Freedom rings. It will ring louder in Havana when the divide between Americans and Cubans is torn down.