This post marks the launch of a new blog as part of the TWN network, The Havana Note, which is now up and running -- but will be tweaked now and then as we gear up with more content and writers.

The Havana Note won't be fancy -- at least not on the front end of it's life -- but it will become a new resource for those interested in yet another dimension of US foreign policy as well as evolving political realities in Cuba.

The Havana Note will be a cluster blog of a number of writers, thinkers and policy practitioners designed to focus on various corners of the cultural, political, military and economic dimensions of the US-Cuba arena.

In my view, US-Cuba relations need a make-over and have been cocooned for too long in a Cold War-fashioned anachronistic straight-jacket that has been detrimental to American interests.

The fact that the Soviet Union, which once threatened American security by attempting to deploy mid-range nuclear missles aimed at the U.S. from Cuba, has disappeared and is no longer a patron of the Cuban political system and economy did not even scratch the durability of a wrong-headed US-Cuba embargo. The fact that Castro's regime now no longer exports arms and revolution but exports doctors -- and trains health care professionals who help serve the poor and sick from around Latin America -- ought to give us some ground to begin reconsidering a relationship that helps rather than punishes average Cubans.

An interesting fact about the current Treasury Department OFAC license restrictions for those academics, researchers and journalists who travel to Cuba is a requirement to disseminate information and perspectives learned while there. I visited Havana earlier this year, and I and others with a journalistic interest in the contours of US-Cuba relations will be conveying much of our thinking and findings here.

More soon -- and welcome to The Havana Note.

-- Steve Clemons