Raul Castro meets Trinidadian Prime Minister Patrick Manning. Trinidad hosts this month's Summit of the Americas.

There was much speculation in the past weeks about what was driving the major housecleaning of Cuban ministry heads last month. Some saw the move as a paranoid effort to centralize control. Some saw it as a militarization of the Cuban government.

This report from Reuters' Cuba correspondent Marc Frank seems to me to reveal the real reason: bureaucratic efficiency. It is clear that Raul is not yet the Deng Xiao-Ping of Cuba, and is even further from being the Gorbachev. What he is doing, though, is cutting out the sclerosis that has built up over the past few decades and streamlining and decentralizing the communist state. This is what Raul did when his brother handed the military large portions of the Cuban economy during the Special Period after the Soviet Union support disappeared, and this is what he is doing again.

But make no mistake, the Cuban government is and will be a communist state, with all that entails from low productivity, lack of property rights, and the restriction of liberty...but a communist state with a huge sense of national pride, with universal health care and 100 percent literacy.

We need to understand these simple realities for as Congress makes important steps toward lifting the ban on travel for all Americans to Cuba, the rationale cannot be about turning Cuba into a tropical Jeffersonian democracy--any time soon. Rather, a progressive, realistic rationale for changing the policy is three-fold: one, the old strategy of isolation has failed and two, the embargo is a disproportionate and indiscriminate sanction on a non-threatening state, and three, that the real interest of the United States is not about Cuba per se, but that the embargo is an obstacle to full and productive re-engagement with the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

This, as my colleague Phil Peters points out, is what President Obama will hear in spades at the Summit of the Americas later this month.