The best way to bury a story in Washington is to announce it late on a Friday before a holiday weekend.

And that is just what the Obama administration did last week when it announced that the U.S. requested, in a letter delivered to the Cuban Interests Section Friday afternoon, the Cuban government join in restarting migration talks.

That we should be talking about migration and many other security issues is a no-brainer. I worked with a number of leading retired senior military officers to send a letter to President Obama urging him to do just that.

What is strange is that we are announcing it in bury mode. One would think that, as my colleagues Peter Kornbluh and Bill Leogrande have documented, secret talks are as available to the Obama administration as they were to almost every past president over the last fifty years and if talks were politically sensitive, that would be the way to conduct them.

Or, one would simply embrace them fully and announce our intention to do so in the context of a regular State Department briefing. We argue here at New America that the strategic thing to do is to capture the hemispheric goodwill and the global symbol of real change that ending the embargo would generate.

That leaves two other explanations that are plausible. One is that the WH communication's team had this at the end of their to-do list before the holiday weekend and they got it out just before heading to the beach. The other is that the WH does not want a lot of attention paid to the talks, is not putting a lot of investment in them, but feels that secrecy would not be sustainable and would ultimately come back to bite them.

What does the announcement itself mean? Well, it means a real, official channel of talks may be starting. Obviously, it is going to be primarily aimed at migration--the boring but important questions of how many visas should be issued to Cubans wanting to emigrate, what to do with Cubans on the high-seas, and whether or not the U.S. will change our wet-foot/dry-foot policy.

It is of course, a strong signal that the Obama administration is willing to make unilateral changes to the policy that has failed to change the Cuban government's human rights record or its political system for more than 50 years. Conditioning our policy on Cuban performance is a recipe for another 50 years of bad human rights conditions.

But it is a slow second step. If two points are determining a straight line, it will be a while before our policy starts making sense for American interests. If it turns out that the Obama administration is willing to let talks go geometric, however, then we could be in for a much more productive ride.

Here's hoping for the latter.