Karel De Gucht, European commissioner for development and humanitarian aid,

listens during a meeting with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez at Cuba's
foreign ministry in Havana November 2, 2009. REUTERS/Enrique De La Osa

Last week's UN Vote might have given the impression that the world has reached some kind of consensus on Cuba -- at least on how not to deal with Cuba. But this week's visit of the European Union's Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid was something of a tightrope walk.

The problem for Cuba is the EU Common Position, which it considers a major irritant and obstacle to improved relations. But Karel De Gucht stuck to his talking points: "I don't want to talk about conditions, but it is important to make important gestures," he said.

Time will tell whether any "gestures" are forthcoming; but it is hard to see how the EU can climb down from the Common Position, which stipulates Cuban progress toward democracy and human rights in exchange for normalization. With the Spanish taking over the presidency of the EU in January, the bloc seems inclined to get away from the carrot and stick model entirely. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has promised to guide the EU with a commitment to "sustainable development and solidarity" in a multi-polar world.

The EU has been sincere about reaching out to the Cuban people, regardless of larger political goals. They have invested substantially in food security and hurricane recovery efforts already, while indicating that further assistance will be devoted to the environment, science and technology, trade, cultural exchanges and disaster preparedness. Some of these efforts may even encourage the kinds of reforms that the EU and the US have hoped for.

It is not quite so simple for us in the United States; there's been too much trauma. But, as Time reported this week, it is hard to avoid a conclusion that greater majorities of Americans are inclined to reach out to the island and find ways of helping the Cuban people. Cuban Americans -- who know better than anyone that Cuba is more than a market, and more than a tourist destination -- are leading the way.

The House Committee on International Affairs has announced a hearing on travel to Cuba will be held on November 18th.

I took a look at the record of which members of the Committee had received funds from the pro-embargo anti-travel US Cuba Democracy PAC.

The list is not conclusive about votes in the committee. Some people, like Chairman Howard Berman, no doubt receive PAC money with the hope of assuring access. Others receive nothing because they are completely committed, pro or con, and any investment would be redundant or ineffective.

Nevertheless, the amounts given may be suggestive of how important a particular vote is to Miami hard-liners. The first set of figures below the break is donations for the completed 2008 election cycle. Figures preceded by a + are downpayments for the 2010 cycle.

Personally, I think PAC donations, like campaign contributions above a reasonable middle class limit, are inherently corrupting to democracy. Absent prohibition, they must be counteracted by exposure which questions whether loyalty is owed more to voting constituents or to far away donors.

Colleagues tell me I am naive and that until we play the same game our impact is marginal.

While there's been a lot of talk about legislation on US travel to Cuba lately, the Miami Herald reported over the weekend on a substantial -- but quiet -- increase in travelers coming the other way since President Obama came into office. The Department of State reports that in the 11 months from October 2008 to August 2009 16,217 Cubans made the trip to the U.S. In the same period last year, the number of visitors was 10,661.

Herald sources make it sound easy: ask and you shall receive. The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell was able to get a group of Cubans, including a member of the National Assembly, to a recent conference; and the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota will host a visit from the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment this week (more about that visit here). And Professor Rafael M. Hernández Rodríguez, quoted in the Herald story, is to assume a visiting professorship at the excellent Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

And, on the heels of the unsurprising news that Cuba would be buying far less from the United States than it did last year, the Herald Blog cites Mexico's La Jornada indicating that things might be worse than that. The paper reports that Cuba, facing a colossal trade deficit, is in default to hundreds of foreign companies. The Cubans say it is a temporary problem and blame it on difficulties with financing, higher costs of imports, the global financial crisis, and (lest we forget) the American embargo. Times are tough all over, but it probably wasn't the way they wanted to kick off the Havana International Trade Fair.

Poland's Foreign Minister Radoslaw "Radek" Sikorski, husband of Washington Post editorial writer (and Polish cuisine expert) Anne Applebaum, is a compelling, brilliant, eclectic political intellectual who I admire a great deal.

In part, I admire Sikorski because while tenacious and committed to his own analysis and views, he maintains an open mind; he listens; and while tenacious, he debates his intellectual opponents without going into the gutter. And he is occasionally unpredictable in all the right ways.

One way that he surprised me when he was running the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute -- then the institutional beating heart of America's neoconservative movement -- he wrote a piece for National Review that called for an end to the US embargo of Cuba. It was called "Travels in Fidel-Land."

An expert in the illiberalism and despotism of the former Soviet empire, Sikorski had long argued that people to people contact, exchange, free commerce and the like open up a society and make it much more difficult for a dictatorship to remain in power.

Sikorski gets it. The intent of his article then was to focus on altering the internal dynamics of the Cuban state, but to do so not by overt meddling but from the power of the American marketplace and from the constructive collision of American liberal ideas with the hopes and aspirations of Cuban citizens.

From my progressive realist perch, I think that the US has tied itself into self-defeating knots with five decades of a failed embargo and a regime change obsession with Cuba that has gone nowhere.

I don't think that the embargo has produced results that have served the US national interest and have decreased American leverage in Cuba and Latin America. I think that removing restrictions on the freedom of Americans to travel and dropping the emrbargo eventually will have profound consequences on the political realities in Cuba and the United States. Both ways.

I don't share the objective that many neoconservatives, even Radek Sikorski, have of fundamentally altering the internal arrangements of other countries -- but I recognize that with an end to the embargo against Cuba -- what Cubans call "the blockade" -- that possibility exists and may even be probable. But that's not the wave of change that is the American government's right or role to surf -- it is the Cuban people's.

Here is a key clip from Sikorski's "Travels in Fidel Land":

The standoff between the U.S. and Cuba seems ultimately not just political, but also psychological. Cubans seem to think that they get noticed by big brother only when they stick him in the eye. Americans seem determined to put the little one in his place. How else do you explain the silliness of barring your citizens from visiting a country you are not actually at war with, or of imposing fines for importing Cuban cigars? We didn't cease to enjoy caviar even at the height of the Gulag.

The law should not be an ass, and the U.S. can afford to be pragmatic in its policy toward a country that no longer poses a threat. As Mark Falcoff points out in his brilliant Cuba: The Morning After, to keep the embargo while granting Cubans privileges in immigrating to the U.S. is politically self-contradictory: It gives the regime an excuse for failure while simultaneously helping it get rid of its internal opposition. . .

But if neither Old Europe's appeasement nor the U.S. embargo is likely to succeed in changing the regime, perhaps we need a coordinated transatlantic approach that would build on methods that have worked in the past. Human contact across the Iron Curtain was crucial in maintaining the conviction on the other side that democracy and free markets are superior to Communism: Fulbright scholarships that were granted to dissidents and nomenklatura alike helped to create alternative elites and weaned Communists off their zeal.

Sikorski has kept his own government of Poland on this track he articulated five years ago by instructing his Ministry's Ambassador to vote along with 184 other nations against the US Embargo of Cuba in the United Nations a week and a half ago.

-- Steve Clemons

Committee Chair Howard Berman, Ranking Minority Member Ileana Ros Lehtinen

House hearings on Cuba travel next Thursday are provoking a stir in Washington.

The reason may be found in an important Congressional Quarterly cover story which tends toward an optimistic assessment of prospects for travel legislation:

Advocates for maintaining a tight embargo minimize the support that Delahunt and Flake have gathered for their bill. For example, Claver-Carone argues that the avowed supporters of the Delahunt measure are essentially the same lawmakers who supported a 2007 amendment to a five-year reauthorization of farm programs that would have relaxed Bush's restrictions on Cuban payments for U.S. food shipments. That amendment was rejected, 182-245. "All the cosponsors of the Delahunt bill are within that 182," Claver-Carone said. "So there are no new faces."

But a comparison of the names of the supporters of both measures suggests the pro-embargo crowd may be overly optimistic. While the numbers are roughly the same, Claver-Carone's claim doesn't acknowledge a number of freshman lawmakers who have signed on as cosponsors. Moreover, Flake says he has won the support of an unspecified number of lawmakers who had opposed earlier legislative bids to remove the Cuba travel restrictions. Because they don't want to advertise their change of heart, Flake said, they are not signing on as cosponsors and will quietly vote for it when it reaches the floor....

…while the president says he favors leveraging the embargo to push the Castro regime into granting Cubans additional political freedoms, he hasn't threatened to veto any legislation that would relax economic sanctions, including the Delahunt-Flake effort.

Some diplomacy data points I have picked up during my trip to Havana in the last couple of days:

~ There are 65% more non-immigrant visas processed by the US State Department for Cubans wanting to travel into the United States this year than last year.

~ The average non-immigrant visa profile is someone in their 70s going over to see relatives in the US

~ The backlog for non-immigrant visas in the US Interests Section (Embassy-lite) used to be more than 2 years, the longest in the world. The new head of the US Interests Section, Jonathan Farrar, worked with the Cubans who help staff a significant portion of his operation, and they added a "second shift" to process more visas each day. But now the demand is so large that even with the second shift, the backlog for visa interviews is two years and three months

~ The US Interests Section in Havana is restricted in the bilateral agreements between Cuba and the US to 51 employees. The representative of the US Department of State employs about 300 Cuban citizens to help in its consular work -- and these staff are managed and hired by Cuban government authorities.

~ If the travel ban on Americans traveling to Cuba is lifted, there will have to be a structural adjustment in the number of American diplomats permitted into Cuba. Some have suggested moving the number to 60 staff would work -- but given the broad opportunities for social, cultural, political and economic engagement, this writer thinks that an upward adjusted staff target should be about 75 US personnel.

~ Spouses of American diplomats assigned to Cuba can work at the Interests Section and not count against the personnel head count. The same is true of the Cuban Interests Section staff and spouses in Washington, DC.

~ Senior officials at the US Interests Section in Havana report to TWN that there is a marked, highly noticeable change in the attitude and "posture" of the Cuban government towards US State Department and other US officials assigned to the embassy-lite operation in Havana. They state that the Cuban authorities are constructively engaging with US government personnel -- and this just didn't happen before, according to them.

~ American officials were told by the Cuban government, however, that they could not attend an environmental summit in which several leading members of the Environmental Defense Fund from Washington attended. In contrast, there was a major agricultural products/economic fair this week which US government officials stationed at the Interests Section were permitted to attend. According the State Department, this is a welcome change in the climate which is less and less constrained.

~ US officials have also been permitted recently to begin visiting various Cuban-Americans held in Cuban prisons and to visit them as part of the consular duties of the Interests Section. This used to be off the list of what was permitted, but the Cuban government has become supportive of US contact with ten or so prisoners who have dual nationality.

~ The US government has had constructive meetings with Cuban government officials on migration (the first meeting hosted by the New School in New York City) and on direct mail service. Cuban government officials have informed TWN that there are a number of other key areas of "common interest" -- such as narcotics interdiction, alien smuggling, air traffic control, weather analysis and reporting, environmental policy that could be on the agenda as well -- but the Cubans report that the US has not yet responded.

~ On the subject of bilateral discussions on narcotics and drug smuggling, US government officials tell TWN that the US is actually quite interested and is still waiting for the Cuban government's proposal. (i.e., the ball is in Havana's court -- but I'm not sure Havana sees it that way)

For those who have the sense that things are not moving in the atmospherics of US-Cuba relations, that impression is wrong. Things have not stalled, at least from my perspective.

After discussions with both senior Cuban government officials and US officials, there is quite a bit of new opportunity, relaxed posturing, proposals, micro progress on a number of fronts that is not designed to be in the public eye or the media -- that is consistent with two parties who have long not trusted one another trying to construct a different kind of relationship that needs confidence-building steps and healthier interaction than has historically been the case.

There is much that could still take US-Cuba relations back off the rails again, as one diplomat said, but right now there is much that appears promising.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Recently, Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez and US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went at it during a session when 187 Members of the United Nations were about to vote against the United States and two allies on the issue of the US embargo against Cuba.

Rodriguez said "President Obama has a historical opportunity to lead a change of policy toward Cuba and the lifting of the blockade", but also said "the blockade is an uncultured act of arrogance," "an act of genocide", and that the embargo was "ethically unacceptable".

I would have encouraged Cuba's foreign minister to say instead that the embargo was an anachronism of the Cold War, has not achieved the goals the US had for it, harmed both Cuban and US interests, and that the countries should realize its the 21st century and find a way to move forward.

But given the pitch of things that day at the UN, Ambassador Susan Rice threw some tough words back at Foreign Minister Rodriguez calling his remarks "straight out of the Cold War era" and "hostile."

She went on to underscore the more substantively important point that President Obama and the US were prepared to engage Cuba on a number of issues of mutual interest and concern. That at least is good news and really the only statement that mattered.

But theatrics and rhetoric aside, what is astonishingly absent from America's autopilot driven position on the Embargo is that with the end of the Cold War, Cuba is not exporting arms and revolutionaries -- Cuba is exporting doctors.

There are more than 51,000 Cuban doctors and health care professionals working around the world today, primarily in developing nations. Many of these are working collaboratively with US and European NGOs actually in third countries -- particularly in Africa in dealing with AIDS/HIV, river blindness, malaria, and a number of health maladies.

America and Cuba both maintain too much a habit of Cold War era rhetoric, but the facts on the ground are that Cuba is not a threat to the United States or its allies in any fundamental ways that justify the kind of barriers we have erected between Americans and Cubans -- at the government to government as well as at the people to people levels.

The other thing that US diplomats could do to constructively redirect a history of escalating, toxic public exchanges is to commend Bruno Rodriguez for his chapter in Cuba's "soft power" history.

In the Obama administration's roster of foreign policy practitioners today, people like Anne-Marie Slaughter, James Steinberg, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Richard Holbrooke and others have done roll up their sleeves work in developing nations -- but I think all of them would admire the year of humanitarian service Bruno Rodriguez did on the Pakistan/Kashmir border.

To make a long and very fascinating story short, Fidel Castro organized a team of 1,500 doctors into the "Henry Reeves Brigade" and offered them to the US to provide support for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Predictably, the US declined the gesture. Shortly after, a major earthquake hit the heavily Islamic fundamentalist region along the border of Pakistan and Kashmir.

Castro sent the brigade to Pakistan to help earthquake survivors and those suffering long-term shock and other problems related to the earthquake in the months after.

The current Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez -- who was then a deputy foreign minister -- was dispatched along with the Reeves Brigade to oversee the medical operations in the mountainous, difficultly accessed earthquake zone.

Americans and Europeans also sent medical teams -- one major base camp each that stayed about a month each. The Cubans sent seven major base camps and thirty field hospitals, remaining for a year.

Reportedly, the Cubans, American and European medical personnel coordinated well in the field and worked together without incident. In one case, a Cuban doctor had to dress in a full hijab as a female doctor in order to deliver the baby of a local woman -- who would have been subjected to harsh punishment if known that a male doctor did this. But the Cubans did send many female doctors and health professionals as well.

At the time this all occurred, Pakistan and Cuba did not have diplomatic relations -- and today they do. And their are Cuban doctors doing work in Pakistan today -- and Pakistani students studying at the Latin American School of Medicine.

The Henry Reeves Brigade has, since Pakistan, been deployed to help in the great Sichuan Earthquake in China and also to do disaster relief in Latin America. The Brigade now has more than 3,000 health care professionals who are experts in disaster-related medical support.

This is a case of soft power with hard results, a story that anyone can commend despite all of the other warts and problems in a relationship. Americans and Cubans worked together to help others -- and nation to nation opportunities for Cuba and Pakistan grew out of that engagement.

It would be useful to see some of this kind of material make it into our diplomatic posturing as we work to get past the past.

The Cold War should be over, and once we begin to find narratives that can fill up the pages of the present and the future, that were not written as the result of inertia and being on auto-pilot, we can move to the next, more constructive phase in US-Cuba relations.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar (R-IN) and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) have jointly written a compelling case to end the travel ban for all Americans desiring to go to Cuba.

In fact, their piece, titled "Lift the Ban -- Let Americans Visit Cuba" really calls for ending travel restrictions on Americans going anywhere since Cuba is the only place in the world where America's democratic government restricts the travel freedom of its citizens.

It is a remarkable but true fact that the US government cannot stop regular Americans from traveling to North Korea, Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Congo, or any other complicated place in the world -- except the one spot where the Cold War still freezes time -- Cuba.

The Lugar-Berman piece reflects a sensible bipartisan realism about the fact that five decades of an embargo have dramatically hurt US interests and have only perpetuated a dysfunctional status quo in US-Cuba relations.

President Obama constantly calls for serious bipartisanship in national security matters -- and he can pluck this Lugar-Berman prize off the tree easily if he has the will (and time on his overcrowded calendar). The House bill to end the travel ban to Cuba has been led by Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA) on the Dem side and Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ) who often says that it's supposed to be Communist governments, not Democratic ones, that impose restrictions on their citizen's choices to travel. The House Bill now has 180 cosponsors comprised of both Republicans and Democrats.

The companion Senate bill has 34 Senate cosponsors. Informal whip counts put the House bill at 205 votes -- within striking distance of the 218 needed, and between 61-64 in the Senate.

But thus far Barack Obama's team continues to condition any further openings to Cuba with a requirement that Cuba begin to demonstrate key political reforms on top of the fact that Obama's presidency has done the ironic thing of opening up travel for a "class" of Americans (those with Cuban relatives) while excluding all other Americans from that legal privilege -- I would actually say, "legal right". This exclusion of some but not all is something Obama should not want too long on his legacy sheet.

Lugar and Berman open:

U.S. law lets American citizens travel to any country on earth, friend or foe -- with one exception: Cuba. It's time for us to scrap this anachronistic ban, imposed during one of the chilliest periods of the Cold War.

Legislation to abolish restrictions on travel to Cuba has been introduced in both chambers of Congress. And on Thursday the House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold a hearing examining the rationale for the travel ban.

This ban has prevented contact between Cubans and ordinary Americans, who serve as ambassadors for the democratic values we hold dear. Such contact would help break Havana's chokehold on information about the outside world. And it would contribute to improving the image of the United States, particularly in Latin America, where the U.S. embargo on Cuba remains a centerpiece of anti-Washington grievances.

While opponents argue that repealing the travel ban would indicate approval of the Cuban human rights record, many human rights organizations -- among them Freedom House and Human Rights Watch -- have called for abolishing travel restrictions.

They go on to make the same point, namely " "isolation from outside visitors only strengthens the Castro regime," that former AEI neoconservative staffer and current Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw "Radek" Sikorski made in his own 2005 essay on Cuba in National Review. Bush Institute for Public Policy Director and former G.W. Bush administration Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy James Glassman has also argued that the travel ban and embargo undermine American interests.

It is through people to people exchange that both Cubans and Americans will become exposed to each other's worlds and political realities. They argue that more financial flow inside Cuba will strengthen the underground economy, a source of independence and potential liberalism inside Cuba.

Berman and Lugar state flat out with regard to the notion that restricting US travel to Cuba generates any leverage at all after five decades of failure on this track: "Conditionality is not leverage in this case."

The White House National Security Council staff reading this really should articulate a believable counter-point to Senator Lugar's and Chairman Berman's compelling argument if it is going to continue to 'cling to conditionality' before making further moves. What is the empirical basis for believing that putting Cuban responses before American interests will have any impact or makes sense?

Others who Barack Obama respects -- including former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State and Treasury George P. Shultz -- have said that both the travel ban and the embargo make no sense as foreign policy. Shultz has called the travel ban "lunacy".

There are not many occasions when there is such a large squad of Democrats and Republicans in the same space.

Howard Berman is on board. Richard Lugar is on board. Many others are as well. Call John Kerry -- and I bet he's on board too.

It's the only course that ultimately makes sense. As David Rothkopf said at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting just before this past year's Summit of the Americas, US-Cuba relations are the "Edsel of US foreign policy."

It's time for Barack Obama to wake up on this and realize that he and his team are the outliers in a hefty and healthy bipartisan move in the Latin America portfolio.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Two old hands at foreign and security policy, Senator Dick Lugar and Congressman Howard Berman, have just published a piece - “Lift the Ban – Let Americans Visit Cuba” - that provides a much-needed breath of fresh air to a U.S. policy so stale that it stinks.

In addition to the policy failure, the two gentlemen point out this salient reality:

…travel restrictions…impede the right of Americans to freedom of speech, association and to travel…nothing about the Cuba situation today justifies such an infringement on our basic liberties.

We might add that to allow a situation in which an ethnic minority in the U.S. - Cuban-Americans - can travel to Cuba while most Americans cannot, is an even more egregious violation of the U.S. Constitution.

On these merits alone, the “full travel to Cuba” legislation, now working its way through both houses of Congress, should pass overwhelmingly - despite the rearguard actions of those in the Congress and elsewhere whose true motivations have been exposed in none other than The Miami Herald.

Exposed a few days ago, on the pages of that paper, were the huge sums of money being paid into the political enterprises of these Congressmen and women by those whose self-interest is in keeping the U.S. isolated from the rest of the world with regard to Cuba.

Most significantly, our isolation in our own hemisphere is becoming downright dangerous. There isn’t a leader in the region, from Brazil’s Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva to Canada’s Stephen Harper, who hasn’t said to President Obama that enough is enough: lift the embargo on Cuba.

While full travel for all Americans is not lifting the embargo nor normalized relations - as the U.S. has with Vietnam, for example - it is an incremental step in the right direction, as Senator Lugar and Congressman Berman intimate.

Every journey requires a first step. It’s high time America took this one.

-- Lawrence Wilkerson

photo source: http://media.photobucket.com/image/cuba%20vintage%20poster/shawcross/CS32Havana-Posters.jpg

It's hard to overstate the significance of today's op-ed in the Miami Herald by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman and Senate Foreign Relations Ranking Member (and former chairman) Richard Lugar calling for an end of the U.S. travel ban on Cuba.

The bipartisan, bicameral commentary comes just ahead of the first full Committee hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives on the Cuba travel ban in years - if not ever. And given the tangle of priority foreign policy challenges facing the United States (Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Israel/Palestine, to name just a few), the fact that Howard Berman is holding this hearing, despite his Ranking Member's passionate opposition, suggests that a Cuba policy reckoning may, at long last, be upon us.

Now, let's be realistic. The embargo is here to stay - for a little while, anyway. But majorities in Congress, opinionmakers, agricultural interests, congressional watchdog groups, Cuban Americans, human rights advocates, national security elites, and - oh yeah - 70% of the American people are all clearly coalescing behind two realities: isolating the Cuban people is no solution to their woes, and isolating ourselves from the Cuban people only harms our own interests.

Chairman Berman is taking a bold stand this week, on an issue he didn't have to. Mr. Berman has long been a champion of cultural contacts and citizen diplomacy. But then, Cuba has long been many a congressman's exception. Cuba is by no means at the top of our foreign policy agenda, but shifting on Cuba would - as Mssrs. Berman and Lugar note in their op-ed - help win us back friends and credibility in the region.

Senator Lugar, a former Foreign Relations Committee chairman whose opinion we know President Obama respects, is a cautious and pragmatic legislator. Twice this year, now, he has stepped forward to point a new, sensible way forward on Cuba. He's clearly opening political space for Republicans who no longer have to cleave to their President's views on Cuba (and here's evidence of that space opening already). But Mr. Lugar no longer holds the gavel in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Which begs the question, what will Chairman Kerry do on Cuba?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alphageek/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Yesterday, the nonprofit watchdog group, Public Campaign, issued a report entitled, "Cold Hard Cash, Cold War Politics." The group analyzed the relationship between Congressional votes on U.S. Cuba policy and donations of a network of pro-embargo donors, led mainly by the U.S. Cuba Democracy PAC (and seemingly coordinated with the PAC of a hardline Cuban American Congressman). The PAC and its allies donated more than $10 million since 2004 to select members of Congress in an effort to hold back the forces of Cuba policy reform at work during the early 2000's. Public Campaign identified 18 members who essentially switched their long-standing position in favor of reforming U.S. Cuba policies after receiving donations from the pro-embargo community.

One congressman singled out in Public Campaign's report, Ed Whitfield, a Republican from Kentucky, in part because his anti-reform votes went against agricultural interests in his district, has apparently reserved the right to 'revise and extend his remarks' if you will, and is seeking cover from former President Bush:

"Obviously, U.S.-Cuban relations remain quite fluid and ever changing," said Whitfield's spokesman, Kristin Walker. "The congressman has been supportive of altering some of the agricultural and humanitarian aid restrictions currently in existence, but as the report notes his views have evolved over time, influenced in part by direct conversations with some of his colleagues who are very knowledgeable about these issues as well as by the harder line position advocated by the White House during the period referenced."

The headline here isn't so much that money influences votes in Congress - it's a fact in our political system. The real news here is that things are different now. Just ask Ed Whitfield.

Thursday’s hearing on travel to Cuba by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, as noted by my co-posters, has taken on additional weight with a powerful pro-travel op ed in the Miami Herald co-authored by Chairman Howard Berman and Senator Richard Lugar. (text here)

The hearing will be live streamed. Look for it here or here a few minutes before 10.

Questions that ought to be asked of witnesses:

1) Did you favor or oppose the President authorizing unlimited travel for Cuban Americans? While Congress debates ending all restrictions, should the President use his authority to restore or strengthen pre-2004 policies, extending the same right to all Americans to unlimited travel for educational, cultural, religious, humanitarian, sports and other non-tourist purposes?

2) Restrictions on travel are justified as denying US dollars to the Cuban government. When Cuba hosts 2.4 million tourists annually from Canada, Europe and Latin America, how much of an economic impact would non-tourist travel have? (It peaked at 85,000 Americans in 2003.)

3) Given that in the high season, Cuban hotel rooms are virtually full, how much immediate economic impact will American tourists have? Will Americans simply displace Canadians and Europeans? Will legally registered and brown market casas particulares (private bed and breakfasts) expand to meet the need? Won’t that bring dollars and unsupervised personal contact with Americans directly to more Cubans?

The US Capitol

In a victory for bloggers everywhere, President Obama responded to a series of questions posed by celebrated Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez. Sanchez, who was cited by both sides at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing "Is it Time to Lift the Ban on Travel to Cuba?" asked some direct questions and got some pretty direct answers. (She also posed some questions for President Raul Castro; if he answers, we'll be getting somewhere.) Yoani has infused the debate on Cuba with a new dynamism and relevance, and was held up today by both sides as an inspiration and justification for strongly held views; but it is no mystery which side she is on concerning the issue of Americans' freedom to travel to Cuba: she's for it.

In another interesting development, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared her support for an end to the travel ban. As is plain to all observers of Congress, they have a few things on their plate before they get to a consideration of the legislation, but those who think the decision on whether or not to go to Cuba is best left to the American people should be encouraged that this issue has joined health care and jobs as an issue worth Congress' effort and time.

As readers are well aware by now, yesterday the House Foreign Affairs Committee considered for the first time (I think ever) the United States government's ban on travel to Cuba. Chairman Berman is to be congratulated for shining a light on this anachronistic and hypocritical policy.

But, isn't it just a tad ludicrous that the U.S. Congress has to hold a hearing at all, to decide, 47 years later, whether the last U.S. ban on travel to any country in the world should be lifted? It seems so incongruous that, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world's greatest democracy is still debating whether to continue subjecting its own citizens to a humiliating "travel licensing" process in order to get on a plane and travel ninety miles to Cuba.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee's Ranking Republican - a Cuban American - Ileana Ros-Lehtinen doesn't see it that way. Ros-Lehtinen is convinced that American tourists will breathe new life into a regime that has been teetering on the edge of collapse for twenty years. And yet, it hasn't collapsed. No one else in the world bans travel (or trade) to Cuba. The Castro government is still standing, in spite of unbending U.S. sanctions, and, more importantly, in spite of the economic pain wrought by the world economic downturn, a devasting 2008 hurricane season, and an inefficiently managed command economy.

But Ros-Lehtinen, confronted with the failure of our policy, insists she's standing in solidarity with the Cuban people. I'm sure there are at least 1000 people in Cuba who staunchly believe starving to death would be better than feeding the Castro government (although, to be fair, there may have been many more that migrated to the United States). But I'd put good money on it that if anyone were conduct an on-island poll today on the U.S. travel ban, the vast majority of Cubans would respond that they are "very supportive" of lifting those restrictions, because tourism - in the formal or informal sector - is the surest way to make ends meet in Cuba today. Perhaps that question will make the cut for the International Republican Institute's next series of Cuba polling?

Yoani Sanchez' counsel yesterday to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs to end travel restrictions was completely ignored by witnesses and Members who cited her accusations of abduction by Cuban security personnel as a big reason to keep the ban.

President Obama was very complimentary to Yoani in his personal response to her questions which she posted on Generation Y.

If the President really takes her seriously, he logically now must authorize general licenses for all non-tourist travel and endorse the Freedom to Travel legislation, or at least publicly announce he will sign it.

Excerpt from message by Yoani Sanchez to Chairman Howard Berman:

Faced with no evolution of our current political and social situation, an opening of travel for Americans could bring more results in the democratization of Cuba than the indecisive performance of Raul Castro. The possible measures that the current Cuban president can implement in our reality are geared toward keeping power in his hands. A gesture that would bring about popular diplomacy – that which isn’t done in protocol lounges or foreign ministries, but person to person, face to face, from the intense interaction between people – would awaken citizen consciousness, and would accelerate the sense of belonging to a world community that Cubans lack so much.

If restrictions on coming to Cuba are lifted, Americans would again enjoy a right that has been infringed in recent years – that of traveling freely to any latitude without penalty. Cuban citizens, for our part, would benefit from the injection of material resources and money that these tourists from the north would spend in alternative services networks. Without a doubt, economic autonomy would then result in ideological and political autonomy, in real empowerment. The natural cultural, historical, and family ties between both peoples could take shape without the shadow of the current regulations and prohibitions.

Photo credit: The White House

Yesterday, three significant statements were made regarding the United States' policy towards Cuba. President Barack Obama, responding to dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, signaled to Congress and Havana his willingness to break the stalemate on Cuba policy. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.) came out forcefully in favor of ending the 50 year old travel ban keeping Americans from traveling to Cuba. And Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi protected President Obama's health care flank by saying Cuba will not interfere with the President's legislative agenda.

It was a great day.

My Grandfather's Zenith Radio

Earlier this year the GAO issued a set of recommendations for the Office of Cuban Broadcasting's efforts, among them that the Board "should conduct an analysis of the relative success and return on investment of broadcasting to Cuba, showing the cost, nature of the audience, and challenges--such as jamming and competition--related to each of OCB's transmission methods." Given that even President Obama is monitoring the results of an announced increase in Cubans' access to the internet through post offices--and looking for ways to "support the free flow of information within, from, and to Cuba--this review is very timely. Even in Cuba, to quote from a song that is almost as old as our embargo, the times they are a'changin'.

But according to Senator Russ Feingold, the verdict is already in. He resurrected his legendary predecessor William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award this week (Sen. Feingold calls his effort Spotlight on Spending). And the inaugural winner of a new generation of projects that fleece the public out of their tax dollars: Radio and TV Marti.

Photo Credit: Frans Persoon

This article by my recent dinner partner Marc Frank, entitled, "Cubans Fear Hard Times Ahead" uncovers where the real conversation is focused in Cuba: getting the Cuban government to fix the bloated bureaucracy and let ordinary Cubans get to work on improving their own lives. Farms need seeds, equipment, and fertilizer. Consumers need more cash and less handouts. Homeowners need the ability to sell their property--at least like they do it in London and China--with long-term leases.

Here's an indicative quote from a Cuban farmer:

Farmers have never wanted the state to give them anything. What we want is that they sell us what we need to work and produce," Evelio, a farmer in central Cuba, said in a telephone interview.