Obama Calls for Easing Cuba Embargo

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is leaping into the long-running Cuba debate by calling for the U.S. to ease restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island or send money home.

Obama's campaign said Monday that, if elected, the Illinois senator would lift restrictions imposed by the Bush administration and allow Cuban-Americans to visit their relatives more frequently, as well as ease limits on the amount of money they can send to their families.

"Senator Obama feels that the Bush administration has made a humanitarian and a strategic blunder," spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in an e-mail. "His concern is that this has had a profoundly negative impact on the Cuban people, making them more dependent on the Castro regime, thus isolating them from the transformative message carried by Cuban-Americans."

Obama was explaining his position in an op-ed piece Tuesday in The Miami Herald.

While the U.S. embargo has limited who can travel to the communist island and what can be sent there since the early 1960s, restrictions added by the Bush administration in 2004 made visiting and shipping gifts to Cuba more difficult.

Most Cubans in the U.S. can only visit the island once every three years and can only send quarterly remittances of up to $300 per household to immediate family members. Previously, they could visit once a year and send up to $3,000. The U.S. also tightened restrictions on travel for educational and religious groups.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/20/ap4037885.html

I think it's a good start to easing up and fundamentally changing relations with Cuba. It's long overdue.

Obama looks at the world differently. A new way. A better way. I like that.

We won the Cold War by gradually opening up relations with the USSR.

It's refreshing to have a candidate who wants to do the right thing, rather than going for cheap triangulation. (Except for Obama's health care policy, sadly.)