Proponents, Dynamics, and Challenges of Cuba's Migration Reform - Arturo Levy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arturo-lopez-levy/cuban-migration-reform_b_2897127.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Cuban opposition blogger Yoani Sanchez, who is on an 80-day world tour to receive numerous awards from her international supporters has said that she has two messages to the world: 1) that Cuba is changing because the Cuban people are changing; 2) that that trend does not mean the government is changing its policies. This is nonsense, but unfortunately it has not been properly discussed because her appearances at several American campuses, including my alma mater, Columbia University, has been more an occasion to accolade her than to engage in critical thinking about Cuba and U.S. policy toward the island.

Cuba is changing because the political context of the island has changed with the retirement of Fidel Castro. There is a virtuous cycle in which less vertical relationships between the citizens and the state are emerging. These new types of links are the result of new attitudes among the population, but also of changes in several official policies. Unfortunately those changes have not been reciprocated by a substantial lifting of the U.S. travel ban to Cuba, a policy still anchored in the Cold War. The Obama administration's response to Cuba's restoration of the right to travel has been limited to simply calling it a positive development.

Ms. Sanchez's mere presence in the United States was impossible without some important changes in Cuba's travel policies. On October 16, Raul Castro's government announced a package of changes that included repealing law 989, which was instated in December 1961 and allowed the government to confiscate the "property, rights and shares" of those who "are definitively absent from the national territory," and made substantial changes to the migration law of September 1976. The unpopular exit permits and letters of invitations, which had saddled would-be Cuban travelers with burdensome fees and prevented many Cubans, including Ms. Sanchez from traveling in the past, were eliminated as of January 14.