Easing the Cuban embargo: it's about time

Good news from the Obama administration-to-be. Reversing the embarrassing and harmful trend by the Bush crime syndicate, President Obama will reduce restrictions on travel to and commerce with Cuba. Our stance towards Cuba, which may have had a purpose when it was begun nearly half a century ago, has been maintained purely for political purposes. It's a vestige of a time long past that has served only to punish a nation whose citizens largely weren't even alive when the policies started, or they barely remember the reasons for the policy in the first place.

The thorny relations between America and its nearby neighbor in the Caribbean deteriorated under President Bush, who allied himself with hard-line Cuban exile leaders long opposed to almost all contacts with the island's government.

Bush tightened the embargo, cutting back the number of visits allowed Cuban-Americans from once a year to once every three years, while also curtailing the amount of money exiles can send their Cuban relatives. The embargo, which blocks most travel and trade with Cuba, can only be dismantled by Congress, and Obama campaigned on a promise to keep it intact.

Obama is widely expected to meet his campaign promise to lift the restrictions on family travel and remittances. Obama may also expand "people-to-people" exchanges, a policy pushed by the Clinton administration that allowed American academics, church groups and students to visit Cuba with relative ease.

This is terrific news, and I hope it will silence the vocal minority of Cuban emigrés and Cuban-American citizens (many of whom live here in America's Glans™) who have long memories and short fuses. There's simply no reason anymore -- if there ever was -- to punish the citizens of our neighbor to the south for politics that most of them don't share, and which in any event have little if any impact today anyway. Sure, I wish that the embargo itself would be lifted, but at least we're moving in the right direction.

In short, whatever anti-Communist sentiment that remains in the U.S. is now nothing more than an anachronism, left ever farther back in history as communism itself fades away. Historically, it's a fact that communism as an economic system fails, and fails profoundly, when capitalist principles are introduced, even peripherally. The best way to "defeat" communism in Cuba is to open the country up to America, and to Americans.

It's nice to see the short-sightedness, bigotry, and fear of the current administration come to a well-deserved end.