Fresh thinking on Cuba overdue

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published August 23, 2007

We're not likely to hear any of the leading presidential candidates call for normalizing relations with the Castro government, but at least Barack Obama is not afraid to call America's policy toward Cuba what it is: harmful to U.S. interests and cruel to Cuban families.

Obama, the Illinois senator polling second in the Democratic presidential primary contest, said Tuesday he would remove restrictions on travel and gifts between Cuban-Americans and their families on the island. In 2004, running for re-election, President Bush imposed new restrictions on travel. Cuban-Americans could visit once every third year, instead of the annual visit allowed previously, and Washington would tighten the flow of cash and gifts from Cuban-Americans to the island.

Obama is right. The restrictions are "both a humanitarian and a strategic" mistake. Separating U.S. citizens from their families is indefensible. They are people, not pawns, and their lives matter more than playing games with Fidel Castro's dictatorship. The policy also is counterproductive. Building a wall between families here and back home denies Cubans firsthand knowledge of what the American experience is about.

Cuban-Americans who want to visit their families and help them along are the very ambassadors we should want in Cuba, especially now with Castro in ill health. The "potentially tumultuous changes" on the horizon, as Obama said, make it vital the United States change its failed Cuba policy. It's only too bad he stopped short of calling for an immediate end to the 45-year-old trade embargo. But Obama's words, in an op-ed Tuesday in the Miami Herald, hit the right points in a very public forum. We are forcing even greater sacrifices onto the Cuban-American community, which Republicans and Democrats alike have milked for years, while assisting Castro in keeping his society closed. That is a wrongheaded policy, and Obama deserves credit for saying so, whatever his motivation.

[Last modified August 22, 2007, 21:01:30]